Sand Painting, Turquoise, and All I Should Have Asked

At the trading post, Rain is on his knees, sand painting with the earth, a figure he says is a western spirit. I watch his fingers, so steady, put every grain in place, he is silent, focused, maybe on the spirit more than his art. Rain is also a medicine man, he harvests white corn on his farm, he says the pollen is his connection to the deities, the deities his connection to health. He asks me where I'm from. I tell him California. He says that's not what he means. Where am I from?

I don't know much about my grandmother's roots, or her grandfather's tribe. I know he was part of The Blackfeet Nation, his father and his father and his father from the Saskatchewan River Valley. Along the way, they married white women, and my grandmother, who looked, to me, very much like a Native American, married a white man, and gave birth to a white man, my father. I had no idea of the details, until my grandmother passed away and left me her jewelry and papers on the family history, including a packet of poems. There was a poem for each of my grandmother's children, two adopted, and two biological, and little on the tribe. 

I suppose I will never know the history. It remains quite cloudy to me, a mixture of crystal balls, cowboys, turquoise, mixed heritage, and another writer. Much of it, for my father and his siblings, is bitter, though I only have fond memories of my grandmother. This will be the first of the holidays without her, and I have wished and regretted, that I might have asked more questions, about where I came from. Sometimes, I look in the mirror, and see if I can see her. Only occasionally. I keep the picture that they say I look like, saved in a special folder, I think she was the most beautiful.