A Tub of Arrowheads

One winter when I was a boy, my brother and I found a few arrowheads in the woods near Bonfield, south of Wilmington and west of Kankakee—a town whose name, like half the names out here, is one we took. We brought them to the farmer whose land we were hunting on, and he went into his house and came back with a plastic tub, three gallons or so, full to the top, and handed us the lot. Don’t tell anyone, he said. He didn’t want the federal government deciding his fields were a site and taking them. All I thought, at eight, was: there must have been so many people here.

There were, and there are, everywhere. Spend any time inside the history and you learn that the whole country is like this: a thin skin of soil over an enormous and continuous human presence, arrowheads surfacing in every county, and almost none of it visible. The traces are everywhere and the people are nowhere. I have met people from all over the world; I can count on one hand the ones who have ever told me they belong to a tribe. The rivers and towns around me carry Potawatomi and Miami and Sauk names, and we say them every day without hearing them.

We have a ritual for this now, and it fails in an instructive way. We say: “this is the land of the Potawatomi.” It is well-meant, sometimes asked for, and it misses its own point. The dispossession was carried out through treaties that were, for the people signing under them, ontologically impossible: private property, enclosure, the whole notion that land is a thing one can own and convey, was an import; there was nothing here to sign away in those terms. To say “the land of the Potawatomi” is to reach again for the grammar of ownership that did the dispossessing. “The ancestral lands of” is only marginally better; the genitive still marks possession. We are trying to hand the place back in the language that took it.

So the thing sits unspoken, and a thing that cannot be spoken comes back another way. America is a country of hauntings: the golf course laid over a burial ground, the abduction by lights in the sky, the figure in the tree line, the recurring fantasy of the plague that finally empties the continent. I no longer think these are unrelated to the tub of arrowheads. They are what a disavowed thing does: it returns in a register where you are not required to recognize it. Senegal keeps its griots; Tunisia its djinn; England even kept its fairies. We expelled this land’s spirits along with the people who carried them, and they came back as flying saucers, a haunting in a country that pretends it does not believe in ghosts.

The tub is still in the family, somewhere. I keep returning to a small, stupid, unanswerable fact about it: the arrowheads are not mine. That much I know. What I cannot work out is the clause that should follow: whose, then? Repatriation assumes the very property ontology that was the original wrong; “give them back” reaches, once more, for the genitive. There is no one to return them to in terms that would not repeat the thing that lost them. The honest place this leaves me is neither guilt nor absolution. It is a question I can hold in my hand and cannot phrase. What do I do with these?