Doors addendum/Barry Bonds story: a quick thought about Oliver Stone's Indians

Editing some typos in the Doors essay I wrote yesterday, I realized I had a perfect story to relate the way Oliver Stone uses Native Americans in that movie. I don't think I'm going to get a better time to share it, so here it is. Apologies if I've told it to you before. I think about it a lot. And then I'll share a completely unrelated story about seeing Barry Bonds in suburbia, because that's also been on my mind.

In 1994 or 1995, when I was in kindergarten, we studied Native American culture, to the extent a kindergarten class can study anything. I would love to get hold of that textbook today. This culminated in a kind of Indian Day (I don't think it was called that), where the two kindergarten classes came together to do things like wear animal hide vests (crumpled brown paper grocery bags) and hunt buffalo (eat cold hot dogs straight from the pack). None of this is a joke.

My uncle, Jimi Simmons, was an Indian. It's not like he became Chinese when he died, he's still Muckleshoot, but he did die and I don't know how else to write that sentence. At some point in this Native American unit, I must have told the teacher about Jimi, and he ended up coming to our class to talk to kids about his life.

As I make a concerted effort to use this word less, I need to drop it in here: It's fucking insane this happened. The one question I remember: A 5- or 6-year-old classmate asked Jimi how Indians communicated with each other, "like if they use pictures." No, he said politely, we talk and write.

Later that day, after he left, we drew up individual cards to thank Jimi for coming and speaking. He never complained about any of this to me. But I got my uncle to listen to a bunch of children ask questions about what they thought was his Neanderthal society, and then however many days later, he got a package containing 30 racist drawings of dreamcatchers and tepees.

I didn't know any of this at the time, but later Jimi would tell stories and he participated in a documentary I learned a lot from, and his earlier life was not good. Like so many Indians, we was raised in shameful state-run schools. As an adult, he went to prison and almost got the death penalty after being accused of murdering a guard. I don't know what he would have said if one of the mostly white kids in my kindergarten class asked about his childhood. I don't know if he was open to telling tiny children he'd grown up trying to escape boarding schools that might as well have been jails.

At the murder trial, he was defended by the great lawyer Leonard Weinglass. A decade ago, Seth Tobocman released Len, a graphic biography of Weinglass, and my dad, who helped with the case, shows up in a few panels in a stretch about Jimi. Tobocman accurately captured Dad, who was at the time suffering from Pac-Man's Disease of the Hand.

So that's Oliver Stone, in my mind: A kid, only a year or two removed from shitting in her pants, asking an Indian how he managed to say 'hello' to his neighbors. The Doors is a movie featuring this mystical druid race who may as well only exist on the fringes of Jim Morrison's field of vision. They do magic and dance for him. Nobody knows how they gathered groceries and we can only theorize how befuddled they would be if they learned of "motion pictures."

The unrelated Barry Bonds story. This happened in the early 90s and I'm not sure if it happened before or after the kindergarten thing.

One time, my mom took me to the Discovery Zone in our suburb, Redwood City. Mom noticed and pointed out Barry Bonds, also at the Discovery Zone with his kids. I didn’t know anything about Bonds, but Mom explained he was a huge baseball player. Later, in one of the big jungle gyms, I ran into his daughter and, I guess thinking this would be news to her like it was to me, I told her “Your dad’s a famous baseball player.”

“I know,” she said.