Bear Heart Woman is dancing alone. She swings her black hair that isn’t
there around her swaying shoulders. She tells her sister to get the camera.
The blues are in her Anishnabe bones. Her feet stamp it on the cold, hard
floor.

Nada is the name the outside world knows: Nada Joseph. Her family nicknamed
her “Chief Joseph” because he was a warrior and so is she. All eight of her
brothers and sisters watch her dance, startled by her sensuous movement in
the middle of an otherwise mundane family gathering.

It’s the first since her bilateral mastectomy for breast cancer.

They watch in disbelief as she unhooks her bib overalls and lets them
collapse on the floor. With one hand she pulls her tank top over head, and
swings it in the air as if in a strip tease.

Revealed is her chest, smooth like a little girl’s.

Her brothers dart out the door. Her sisters stare at Nada’s still moving
feet. One sister, Bonnie Wallace, a decade her senior and the family
photographer, steps into the dance. Soon the other women follow, holding
their youngest sister against their full bosoms.

Bonnie has been with Nada since the day she was born. She always knew that
the girl who set track records in high school and worked as a tribal cop,
fire fighter and community college instructor was a star child. She even
knew when Nada turned 15 and discovered girls, rather than boys.

Bonnie, the wife of a pipe carrier and director of Fond du Lac’s
scholarship program, decided early that it wasn’t her place to question who
her sister loved.

Although there were snide comments and innuendo from time to time, the
women’s mother settled the matter by saying, “That’s just the way Nada is.”
Besides, Nada’s batting record on the local softball team had a way of
quieting any critics.

One night in April 1997, Nada surprised Bonnie with a call to say she
thought she had a medical problem. Bonnie jumped in her car for the
five-hour drive from her northern Minnesota home to her 38-year-old
sister’s home in Marquette, Mich.

Trying not to show panic on her face, Bonnie found Nada sitting in her
kitchen with her life partner, Brenda. Nada was wearing a tank top that let
Bonnie see the foreign lump resting on her chest, just under the skin above
her right breast.

“This thing was drawing me in,” Bonnie said. “I want to embrace Nada, my
arms are reaching out to her and my eyes are on this demon.”

American Indian cancer patients have the lowest five-year survival rate in
the country because we lack access to adequate medical care. Lesbians are
similarly diagnosed late, leaving them with lower chances of survival —
though for slightly different reasons than Native women.

They are likely to be diagnosed with late-stage cancers of the breast,
ovaries and uterus because there is a perception that they don’t need
gynecological care as much as straight women who are on birth control and,
perhaps, more likely to bear children, said Jessica Halem, director of the
Lesbian Community Cancer Project in Chicago.

What mattered to Bonnie was that Nada was in double jeopardy for falling
through the cracks as an Ojibwe and a lesbian. At 38, she was also younger
(as I am) than the medical establishment expects to see breast cancer,
though Native health advocates say we are getting the disease younger than
most women nationally.

To this day Bonnie rages with an anger not befitting a spiritual man’s wife
and a student of Quakerism. She cries to the sky, hoping someone will hear:
“Why her?”

But Nada wasn’t interested. She said, “Bon, I don’t have time. I am in the
fight of my life. I don’t care how I got it, but I got it and it’s bad.”

Within months of the first round of chemotherapy and mastectomy, cancer
reoccurred in Nada’s lymph nodes. Doctors ordered a bone marrow transplant
at Wayne State University.

During bone marrow transplants, doctors extract a patient’s healthy stem
cells and freeze them. Then they give the patient enough chemotherapy to
kill every cancer cell, even though the therapy will bring the patient to
the brink of death.

Bonnie spent every moment by Nada’s bedside. She sensed Nada walking
through the coma. When Nada woke, a nurse prepared to infuse her with her
stem cells, which were frozen to the consistency of a Slurpie.

As the nurse leaned over her, Nada got a good look at the woman’s face and
her name tag.

“You’re ‘shnabe,” she said, abbreviating Anishnabe. “What rez?”

Bonnie remembers praying that this Ojibwe nurse could pour the life back
into her sister.

During the long weeks Nada spent in the hospital recovering, she didn’t
stay still.

When the nurses weren’t looking, Nada would slide out of bed, grab her
guitar and go sing songs with the kids in the children’s cancer ward.
Imagine: a bald-headed woman leading a dozen bald seven- and
eight-year-olds in song.

At night Nada would take to the halls with her “stickman,” which is what
she called her IV, and sing her all-time favorite song, “Walkin’ After
Midnight.” Nada gave the Patsy Cline song her own pathos, as she strolled
around the cancer ward singing it repeatedly because the drugs she was on
made her forget that she’d just sung it.

A month after her release from the hospital, Nada went home to Fond du Lac
to play in a softball tournament. She hit home runs, one after another. The
hometown crowd, knowing of her battle, gave her standing ovations every
time.

The reprieve would be short. By the fall of 1998 cancer reared in the lymph
nodes of Nada’s neck. It was literally choking her. Doctors ordered
Herceptin, a chemotherapy drug that made headlines earlier this year for
its success in combating late-stage cancers. But quickly cancer came back
for a third and fourth time.

It was too late.

The hospice workers rolled a hospital bed into Nada’s home. For a long
time, Nada would only walk around the foreign object.

On the evening of Jan. 28, 1999 she donned her ribbon shirt and her beaded
choker. She asked Bonnie to put Keb’ Mo’ on the stereo.

The blues for Nada were something like a prayer, one that let her dance to
ancient beats carried over the ocean from Africa, imbued with the Native
rhythms of the Americas, washed in the blood of 500 years.

No question, she was tired. But if she could move she could find her way.
It took time for her to feel deep below the melody for that ancestral
groove. She had to feel it pulsating in her blood before her feet could
step. She made her heart match the drum beat. Time stopped mattering as she
danced around that sacred bed.

But her older sister was watching the hours pass.

Finally, Nada lay down because even a bear has to hibernate; even an
athlete needs to rest. Nada lay down. In 40 minutes, she was gone.

Kara Briggs is a Yakama journalist from Portland, Ore., where she is
currently on medical leave from her job at The Oregonian. She chronicles
her battle with breast cancer in this biweekly series. She is a former
president of the Native American Journalists Association and winner of the
2004 Award for Investigative Journalism. Contact her by e-mail at
briggskm@gmail.com.