New Yorker article and mystery word

[Jeffrey Kopp]

Well, when I returned home I found the latest issue of the New Yorker
had arrived; it's yet another fiction issue (June 21-28).  I don't
usually read these, but the featured short story in this one is "The
Toughest Indian in the World," by Sherman Alexie, told from the point
of view of an off-the-rez Spokane who works as a newspaper writer.

"Once in a while, I used to fill in for the obituaries writer when
she was sick.  Then she died, and I had to write her obituary."

"He offered me more deer jerky, but I was too thirsty from the salty
meat, so I offered him a Pepsi instead.  It's a little-known fact
that Indians can be broken up into two distinct groups:  Pepsi tribes
and Coke tribes."

"When I was a boy, I leaned over the edge of one dam or
another--perhaps Long Lake or Little Falls or the great grey dragon
known as the Grand Coulee--and watched the ghosts of salmon rise from
the water to the sky and become constellations.  Believe me, for most
Indians stars are nothing more than white tombstones scattered across
a dark graveyard."

This is kind of a weird story; it includes a homosexual encounter
with a hitchhiking Lummi prizefighter (this is the New Yorker, after
all).   But what prompts me to write is to ask about the word which
punctuates his conversations with other natives, apparently the
Eastern Washington native version of "Eh?", as in:

"'Geez,' the fighter said.  'Close one, enit?'"

Regards,

Jeff