“Talk Indian talk!” I demanded of him. “You will talk it to me now!”
“Sha – Na – Ney,” he told me. “What does that mean?” I demanded of him. “How are you?” he said back to me.
These were the only “Indian words” he remembered. I know he knows “Indian talk” because I heard him when I was a child. This was when our uncles thought I was white, maybe 1970. They “talked Indian talk.” I know because I asked my mom what they were sayin’ and she told me, “They’re talkn’ (sic) Indian talk.”
He did not remember “YA’ AT’ EEH,” (phonetic: Yah – ta – ay) because it is “Navajo talk” and he is Yaqui. He said he never heard of the Navajo talk. But he was the person who taught me the Navajo talk when I was a child. I know the kind of talk they used to talk. I cannot “talk it” now, but I know it when I hear it. I will always be able to recognize it, on my skin. I know I am with “blood” when I hear it “talked” around me.
“Ain’t nobody talk like that no more!” I heard the Cherokee woman yell when I demanded him to “talk Indian talk” to me. She did not like how I was talkin’ (sic) to him. That was the last time I talked to my father before he died, in “Indian talk.”
Julie C. Abril
Bayfield
