Braids are Sacred
The evolution of my criss-crossed hair.
When my little sister and I were young, probably up to about 10 years old, my mom would put the tiniest braids into our hair. Every few months we’d take an evening out of the weekend and she’d sit us down in front of the TV with a couple of movies lined up — on plenty of occasions the movie selection consisted of either Harry Potter or Spirited Away. She’d make us a big batch of her buttery popcorn that we all loved so much, in that blue plastic bowl with the wiggly rim. When it got to the bottom half we always shook the popcorn around in the bowl to get all the salt that had fallen to the bottom.
We’d sit there for hours as she tugged away at our hairs, sometimes painfully, but it was worth it. One of us would go first, then the other. Sometimes we got too tired before we were done and one of us would go to bed with half of a braided head, to be finished in the morning. Then we’d both go to school on Monday with each as many braids on our heads as there were minutes in an hour. A week or so later, when the braids got frizzy beyond repair and we took them out to reveal a kinky mane, I was ecstatic to look in the mirror and pretend I was Hermione Granger.
In jail, some of the most loving, wholesome moments shared with another inmate were those in which one was braiding the other’s hair. French braids, box braids, Dutch braids, cornrows. Braids in numbers that represented affiliation, braids that were done absolutely perfectly in order to appear neat and tidy while going before the judge. One time someone put my hair in braids that ran across the top of my head in the shape of a heart so it sat like a crown.
The first question the braider would always ask, when sitting down with someone they hadn’t braided before, “Are you tender-headed?”
I would always answer “No, I’m used to it,” as I thought back to those Saturdays of tiny black rubber bands and butter-soaked fingertips.
After I got sober, someone named Jena moved into the same sober living as I. She was hugely fundamental in encouraging and embracing reconnection to my Comanche lineage, so she taught me a lot of things. Almost all of the healing songs I know, I know because she sang them to me until I could sing them myself. She demonstrated how to gather those around you to pray and cleanse at the end of the day. She taught me so much, but if I had to pick which teaching has shown to be most instrumental in my life today, it is that she taught me to braid.
Our rooms were right next to each other and the walls were so thin that we could talk to each other through them without any effort. We visited each other regularly, sometimes so she could braid my hair. Again, these hair-braiding sessions were ones of love and tenderness. I remember her playfully saying that she got jealous when I braided my own hair — even though at that point they were nothing but a couple of horsetails hidden under a beanie. I had tried and tried to do them myself before, the fancy, in-and-out braids that hugged your scalp before trickling over your shoulders, but my fingers only ever cooperated enough to do a simple braid. But I started paying attention to the fluid criss-crossing movements when Jena braided my hair, and one day I found myself looking at a tiny, messy little french braid I’d put in my friend’s hair when I was playing around with it.
Jena moved back to her home on the rez up north to be with her kids when covid hit. It was a terrifying time and I was full of heartache at the thought of not being able to talk shit to her through the wall anymore, but a few days after she left I sat down with myself and a big wet mop of hair and started braiding. The same way she’d usually do for me, two big inside-out braids, split right down the middle. They weren’t nearly as tight and neat as the ones Jena would do, but that didn’t matter too much.
I braided my hair probably every week for a while, perfecting the craft on both myself and the hair of my other roommates. I learned more about the meaning behind braids, the practice of putting a prayer into each tie of the braid or the way that the three different strands represented the mind, body, and spirit. I learned just how much medicine our hair holds, and then it made sense why all these hair braiding sessions always felt so intimate. Now it’s my mom that requests for me to braid her hair the way I do mine, because her fingers only let her do French style while I do Dutch. Then I watched my mom cut off my older sister’s braid when she was diagnosed with cancer, and now I’m getting to watch it slowly but surely grow back now that she’s cancer-free. A single braid straight down my back connects me to the earth beneath me, and two braids split down the middle opens me up to my ancestors above.
