Notes of a Translator’s Son by Joseph Bruchac
About the Author
Joseph Bruchac, whose tribal affiliation is Abenaki, was born in 1942 in Saratoga Springs, New York. A storyteller
and poet, he has published many books. An important theme for Bruchac, as a Native American writer, is finding a
self-identity between two cultures. Carrying on the tribal tradition of his ancestors who told their stories orally, he
shares his stories in writing. One of his stories was a PEN syndicated Fiction Award Winner. A volume of interviews
with Native American poets call Survival This Way was funded in part by a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities
Fellowship. Bruchac’s work has been translated into many languages.
Who am I? My name is Joseph Bruchac. The given name is that of a Christian
saint—in the best Catholic tradition. The surname is from my father’s people. It
was shortened from Bruchacek—“big belly” in Slovak. Yet my identity has been
affected by that small part of my blood which is American Indian and that comes
to me from a grandfather who raised me.
I was a small child, often alone and often bullied. I was different—raised by old
people who babied me, bookish, writing poetry in grade school, talking about
animals as if they were people. My grandfather joked when he called ma a
“mongrel,” a mixture of English and Slovak and “French,” but others said such
things without joking. When I was seven, I decided I would grow up to be so big
and strong that no one would ever beat me up again. It took me nine years to do
it. That winter of my junior year my grandmother died. My grandfather and I were
left alone in the old house. That summer I grew six inches in height. In my senior
year, though clothing and social graces showed little evolution, I became a
championship wrestler, won a Regents’ scholarship, and was accepted by Cornell
University to study wildlife conservation.
How can I now, in only a few pages, cover the next twenty-five years? I can only
go onward by going back to where my memories begin. The memory of me
climbing the ladder, unafraid and right behind the old man, all the way to the roof
forty feet up when I was only two, was my grandfather’s. But it was recited about
me so often that it became inseparably associated with my thoughts of my
childhood. I still love high places, cliffs and trees, and resounding waterfalls. I
inherited that fearlessness about high placed and dying from my grandfather. I
was always close to my grandfather. He delighted in telling how I was his shadow,
how I carried my stick just like a spear and followed him everywhere. But, close as
I was, he would never speak of the Indian blood that showed so strongly in him.
There are many people who could claim and learn from their Indian ancestry, but
because of the fear their parents and grandparents knew, because of past and
present prejudice against Indian people, that part of their heritage is clouded or
denied. Had I been raised on the other soil or by other people, my Indian ancestry
might have been less important, less shaping. But I was not raised in
Czechoslovakia or England. I was raised in the foothills of the Adirondack
Mountains near a town who spring waters were regarded as sacred and healing
by the Iroquois and Abenaki alike.
I’ve avoided calling my “Indian” most of my life, even when I have felt that
identification most strongly, even when people have called man an “Indian.”
Unlike my grandfather, I have never seen that name as an insult, but there is
another term I like to use. I heard it first in Lakota, and it refers to a person of
mixed blood, a metis. In English it becomes “Translator’s Son.” It is not an insult,
like half-breed. It means that you are able to understand the language of both
sides, to help them understand each other.
The most widely anthologized of my poems describes on lesson I was taught in the
way most good lessons come to you—when you least expect them. Let it represent
that part of my life that has come from continual contact with Native American
people of more than two decades.
Birdfoot’s Grampa
The old man
must have stopped our car
two dozen times to climb out and gather into his hands
the small toads blinded
by our lights and leaping, live drops of rain.
The rain was falling, a mist about his white hair and I kept saying you
can’t save them all accept it, get back in we’ve got places to go.
But, leathery hands full
of wet brown life
knee deep in the summer
roadside grass,
he just smiled and said
they have places to go to
too
Short story: From Narrative Onward by D. Fitton & B. Warner, 2000, Houghton Mifflin