Synopsis

In Roots Tree Totem, Carlton tells the life story of his Tlingit mother, Eileen See Tlein Matthews, beginning with the loss of her mother to tuberculosis a few weeks after she was born in Skagway, Alaska, in 1929. See Tlein’s grandmother, Florence Kxa-Gis-ooh Matthews, a Tlingit speaker and matriarch who still follows the seasonal food gathering cycle she learned as a child growing up in the village of Klukwan in the late-1800s, steps in to care for her granddaughter. Eileen later describes for Carlton and his brother in vivid detail the first nine years of her life spent with the loving old woman she calls “Mommy,” learning how to catch and smoke fish, gather and preserve berries and other plants, sew skins, and conduct herself according to Tlingit values.

After Kxa-Gis-ooh suddenly falls ill and dies in 1938, See Tlein is placed in a Presbyterian boarding school in nearby Haines, where, alongside Native children from across Alaska who have been forcibly removed from their family homes, she is called Eileen, forced to speak English only, and re-educated under a sign proclaiming the school’s mission: “Kill the Indian, Save the Child.” As an adolescent, she is sent to Seattle, where her sexually abusive uncles assume her guardianship. At age 17, she meets Norman Smith at church, and they soon marry and have two sons, Carlton and Norm Jr.

When Carlton is two, his father is stricken with Polio. While he is lying incapacitated in a rehab hospital, Eileen has two affairs—one with a neighbor and another with her cousin. At the prompting of a friend, she confesses her infidelities to her husband, and he falls into what will become years of physically abusing her, as she descends into worsening psychoses. He eventually has Eileen involuntarily committed to Western Washington Hospital for the Insane, where she is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. After several months, she is released, somewhat stabilized on Thorazine-class medications, and she comes home determined to be a better wife.

Permanently disabled, Carlton’s father has just completed his teaching certificate when Eileen returns. They decide to make a fresh start by moving to Haines, where Eileen, in the company of her Native relatives and an old friend she knew in Haines House who is now a Chilkat weaver and living across the alley, begins to recover her language and the Tlingit ways she learned from her grandmother. The old boarding school, long since closed, lies fallen down in ruins just up the street.

Entering his high school years, Carlton begins to explore his Alaska Native heritage, joining a Tlingit dance group, learning the language, and assisting with the carving of the world’s tallest totem pole. He contemplates the changes taking place inside him in the context of his mother’s experiences at the hands of the missionaries:  “’Killing the Indian’ is like trying to get the salmonberries out of your yard,” he writes. “You had better make sure you’ve pulled everything, all the way down to that tiniest seed pod. They might not show up for a year, and you might think you’ve killed them all, but then here they come. By the time my mom returned to Haines, the boarding school was little more than moss and weeds. Meanwhile, just up the road, like a stubborn salmonberry, the Tlingit in her son was breaking through the surface.”

With no access to mental health services, Eileen’s reprieve from the torments of schizophrenia is short-lived. Her husband sends her back to Seattle, and Carlton and his brother choose to go with her. Heavily drugged, she is nearly incapable of caring for her sons, while, back in Haines, her husband begins a new relationship and files for divorce.

Carlton returns to Haines to finish high school. On a trip through Seattle to attend Boys Nation in Washington, D.C., he stops to visit his mother and finds her in her Section 8 apartment on Capitol Hill in the dark with her blinds pulled down, medicated and hiding from her delusions and state social workers. Carlton’s father and an uncle have her involuntarily committed two more times during this period, and, on one later occasion, she takes a bus to the hospital and checks herself in.

Eileen’s mental illness is graphically documented in her own words quoted in excerpts of hospital records Carlton procures in the process of writing her story. These records and her unedited letters to him are filled with hallucinations, confusion, shame, and self-admonition, often stoked by the preachings of the Christian evangelists she follows. The documents give readers a rare view into the everyday struggles of a mentally ill woman who is trying to build a normal life around her fears and hallucinations. They also illuminate the trail leading from her childhood experiences of forced assimilation in the Indian boarding school and later sexual abuse to full-blown schizophrenia in adulthood.

In the 1970s, Carlton moves his mother back to Alaska, where they begin the last chapter of their lives together with him in the role of caregiver.

Through his mother’s and great-grandmother’s stories, spanning over a century of dramatic change, the author weaves rarely reported moments in Tlingit history, like Secretary of State William Henry Seward’s visit to the village of Klukwan to observe a solar eclipse in 1869, when Kxa-Gis-ooh was a child, and Carlton’s namesake’s loss of livelihood to fish traps in the 1920s. The story intersects with and explains episodes in the history of Alaska Native sovereignty and takes readers inside ancient rituals like the multi-day koo.éex’, a central Tlingit ceremony never before described in real-time detail by a Native writer.

The book closes with Carlton’s reflections on the role writing his mother’s story has played in his own healing. He traces his success in life to his mother’s consistent attention and affection, even in her darkest and most confused times, and relates his family’s story to the widespread trauma experienced by Southeast Alaska’s Native people during the 20th century. “This memoir may be a totem carved of one family tree,” he concludes, “but it stands in a forest of countless descendants of my mother’s era, all our roots tightly intertwined.”