Chapter 5: Gaster’s Backstory
Sarah's young adult novel, "Peacekeepers/Truthbringers," continues
Sarah has written a young adult novel, “Peacekeepers/Truthbringers,” and we’re excited to share it with you. As a holiday gift, we’ll be serializing the book—releasing a new chapter every week. We’ll also continue to post occasional non-fiction reflections as inspiration and news arise.
This is what Gaster thinks about as he sits in his dad’s pickup, heading for home.
He has always known that he doesn’t quite fit in.
He is Native, as in Native American, but not the kind that comes from here. He doesn’t have grandparents and elders here – his ancestors did not come from this soil. Although his umbilical cord is buried under the willow in the front pasture, as his mother told him over and over when he was small and as his father still reminds him from time to time, Gaster is the first person on the Native side of his family to be born here. He may look like an ordinary Native to the white farmers who make up a large percentage of residents on the reservation, but not to the Yakama, the First People of this land. His mother had been a Tewa from New Mexico, but now she is dead. She hadn’t fit in either, anyway.
His dad is white. In the pioneer graveyard out Wenas Valley way, there are five generations of Gaster’s white ancestors. But this is nothing to brag about to tribal people he knows.
His mother was separated from her family at birth, so although her cape of black hair and raven black eyes, her warm brown skin and high round cheekbones told one story, her words and ways were practically white. She grew up in foster homes in Albuquerque and started trying to understand her culture as a young woman traveling the powwow circuit. She didn’t belong here, and the people around let her know it. Although this is where she ended up. Where she died.
The families he has grown up with, the boys he has gone to school with, are basically cool but distant – suspicious. Gaster doesn’t attend the longhouse on Sundays, doesn’t speak Sahaptin. His white dad raises cattle on the reservation. Gaster’s face may be brown, but he is not the same.
“What kind of a name is Gaster?” the kids at school quit asking by about fifth grade. He would just stare at the ground resentfully during these taunts, fists tight, chin tilted at a dangerous angle. Although he knocked down more than one smart-ass for pushing the issue, Gaster truthfully has no idea. His dad doesn’t seem to know either, or, if he does, he won’t say.
Gaster has always been a bit apart.
And now this. What the hell?
He is still wearing the clothes he put on this morning but is strangely barefoot. For a moment, he can’t remember why he doesn’t have his backpack, but then he remembers he’d dumped it in the school parking lot.