Thought Portal

For the past 21 years, as a lead operator at the California Institute of Technology’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), Yellowfly’s son, Corey Gray, has helped to run machines that detect gravitational waves. These violent ripples travel through spacetime like waves created by a pebble dropped into a pond. They can be caused by the collision of two black holes or the collapse of supernova, and there are even some still rippling around from the birth of the universe—you know, small things.

Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves over a century ago in his general theory of relativity, but scientists only first observed these ripples in 2015, thanks to LIGO detectors in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, where Gray works. (It seems like we’re always going to be catching up to Einstein). When Gray, who is a member of the Siksika Nation of Alberta, Canada, found out about this major scientific milestone, he began to think about the press releases. They would no doubt be translated into widely spoken languages—French, Japanese, Mandarin. “That’s when I thought it would be freaking cool to get my mom involved and translate this news into Blackfoot,” Gray says, adding that he isn’t quite fluent in the language himself. “This way she would be a poet for Einstein and astrophysics. A code-talker for gravitational waves.”

Though she now lives in southern California, Yellowfly grew up on a reserve in southern Alberta, Canada. In 1957, she enrolled in the Crowfoot Indian Residential School, as was required by Canadian law. These boarding schools were a long and cruel tradition in Canada, where governments and churches pursued a policy of cultural genocide to stamp out the culture of First Nations people, according to a 2015 report from the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Yellowfly remembers that the first French word her mother learned during her own boarding school experience was “sauvage,” the slur the nuns lobbed at their indigenous pupils.

“The school wanted to get rid of everything that made us native,” Yellowfly says. “The language, the religion, the ideology—everything that was Blackfoot.” If the nuns caught children speaking their native language, the children weren’t allowed to return home over the weekend, and could be physically punished. Yellowfly remembers how she and her classmates developed an underground whisper network in which they spoke to each other in Blackfoot whenever the nuns were out of sight. These small acts of rebellion helped Yellowfly cling to her identity and language.