Keeper'n Me Read online

  We like to sit out back where the trail leads down to the dock where I keep my boat. My uncle Archie got me that boat with money he won at the big blackout bingo in Winnipeg two summers ago. It’s a fourteen-foot aluminum with a thirty-five-horsepower motor, nice waterproof cushions and a built-in cooler for the fish. Ma and I take lotsa rides in that boat in the evenings and she’s always pointing out places on the shore where big things happened either to our family or our people. When I think about my life these days the thing I think about most is my ma’s wrinkled brown face in the front of that boat, all squinty-eyed into the wind, smiling, pointing and gabbing away, her voice rising and falling through the sound of loons and ducks and wind. But we also sit out back late into the evening watching the land. If you sit there long enough while the sun’s going down behind the hills you’d swear you can see those hills move. Like they’re breathing. It’s a trick of the light really. Something caused by distance and time and a quiet yearning of magic we all carry around inside us. That’s what Ma says. Says that magic’s born of the land and the ones who go places in life are the ones who take the time to let that magic seep inside them. Sitting there, all quiet and watching, listening, learning. That’s how the magic seeps in. Anishanabe are pretty big on magic, she says. Not so much the pullin’ rabbits outta hats kinda of magic but more the pullin’ learning outta everything around ’em. A common magic that teaches you how to live with each other. Seeing them hills breathe, and believing it, is making yourself available to that magic. Like leaving the door to your insides unlocked, she says.

  So we watch that land through the twilight and wait for the first shakings of the northern lights before we’ll head on inside to sleep with our heads fulla dreams about this land, our people, a place called White Dog and a certain common magic born of all of it that brought us all together.

  When I was three I disappeared. Disappeared into foster homes and never made it back until I was twenty-five. I’m thirty now, been here five years but it feels like longer so much has happened.

  See, when I was born my family still lived the old way. There was a small clan of us Ravens that lived across Shotgun Bay in a few canvas army tents on what was my grampa’s trapline. My ma, pa, two brothers and sister all lived together with my grandparents and a few aunts, uncles and cousins. We trapped, hunted and fished and pretty much lived off the land like our people had for centuries, and according to everyone we were a pretty happy clan. The first words I spoke were Ojibway words and the first sounds I heard when I was born were the sound of the wind in the trees, water and the gentle murmur of Ojibway voices all around me.

  According to Ma, they got an idea I was gonna be one of the wandering kind real early. I guess I was a rambunctious little kid and got to crawling around real good. In fact, I got so good at it that I’d crawl right on outta the tent and be heading off towards the woods to look for my pa and grampa when my ma or granny would have to charge out and put the scoop on me. Guess it happened so many times that my granny finally got tired of chasing me around and made me a little harness out of moose hide, which they tied to a tree with about a ten-foot lead for me to crawl around on. Kept me out of trouble but I disappeared anyway.

  What happened was a couple of guys from the Ontario Hydro showed up one day with a big sheaf of papers. They told my family they were planning on building a big dam downriver and that the reservoir behind it would be flooding right back over our traditional trapline. Even though the Ravens had trapped that area for generations no one had ever told them anything about ownership or title. It was outside the reserve lands that were ours by treaty and was actually owned by the Hydro company. So my family had to move, and since there was no work or even houses available on White Dog at the time their only choice was to head for Minaki, the nearest town.

  Now according to Ma, learning to live by the clock sure was a hell of a lot tougher than living by the sun and the seasons the way they’d been used to. Finding work was tough. You gotta understand that northern Ontario around the middle 1950s was a pretty uptight racist community and Ojibways weren’t exactly the toast of the towns then. So Ma and Pa spent lotsa time away from the small shack we lived in at the edge of town and we kids were left in the care of our granny who would have been about sixty-five then.

  Now, Indians got a whole different way of looking at things like family. When you’re a kid around here everyone’s always picking you up, feeding you and generally taking good care of you. Sociologists call it the extended family concept. When you’re born you got a whole built-in family consisting of ev’ryone around. So it was natural in my parents’ eyes to leave us with the old lady while they were out trying to make a living. But the Ontario Children’s Aid Society had a different set of eyes and all they seen was a bunch of rowdy little Indian kids terrorizing a bent-up old lady. Now anybody who knows anything about Indians knows that if there was any terrorizin’ being done at all it was being done by the old lady. We were being raised just fine, but it wasn’t long before they showed up with a plan for all of us.

  According to my sister, Jane, who’s the oldest of us and the one who remembers the most from those days, they showed up one afternoon, a young woman and an older white-haired man. They pulled up while we kids were playin’ tag and swinging from an old tire hung from a tree in the front yard. My granny was out back doin’ something or other. Anyway, they called us over to this big green station wagon and handed out chocolates all around. Well, for some wild little bush Indians raised on bannock and beaver, chocolate was pretty close to heaven, so when they offered us more if we hopped into their car, well, we all piled in.

  We wound up in a group home on a farm outside of Kenora, in the custody of Children’s Aid.

  About a year later I was taken away from my brothers and sister and put in another home by myself. Jane tells it like this. See, the foster home we had on that farm had about six other kids in their care. We all stayed in a kind of dormitory on the third floor of their farmhouse in bunkbeds and we had to help out with the work around the farm too. Anyway, these people didn’t exactly go out of their way to show us any kind of real welcome. At Christmastime while their kids were whooping it up in the living room the foster kids were made to sit at a long table in the porch. There weren’t any gifts for us either. But my brothers and sisters had somehow managed to scrape up a little cash and bought me a toy truck for Christmas. They wrapped it up in plain brown paper and put it beside my pillow so I’d find it come Christmas morning.

  It was just a little toy truck, nothing like the big Tonka trucks kids get these days that they can ride around, just a little blue and red truck with one wheel missing. Well, according to Jane I loved that little truck. I slept with it and carried it with me wherever I went. It never seemed to matter that it had one wheel missing. I’d be plowing roads, chasing bad guys and building cities all over the yard with that little truck.

  Well, one morning I was sitting in the sandbox playing with my truck when the schoolbus came to pick up the other kids. I guess my brothers and sister had been told the night before that I was getting sent away and Jane said they all figured it was better to just let it happen rather than let me know about it. So, I’m out there playing that morning and Jane came and grabbed me up in a big, warm hug and just held on for a long, long time. I guess I got a little irritated and pushed her away finally and got back to my play.

  “Jane, jeez,” was all I said.

  She says those were the last words she heard, and the last sight she had of me for twenty years was from the back window of that schoolbus. A little Ojibway boy all hunched over in the sandbox with a little red truck with one wheel missing, growin’ smaller’n smaller, till it looked like the land just swallowed me up. When she got home that night the sandbox was empty except for that little blue and red truck, the wind already busy burying it in the sand. When we met again twenty years later she grabbed me in that same big, warm hug and just held on for a long, long time.

  By the time
I made it back here I was lost. At twenty-five years old I never figured on bein’ no Indian. I didn’t remember a thing about my earlier life and when I disappeared alone into the foster homes I disappeared completely from the Indian world. Everywhere they moved me I was the only Indian and no one ever took the time to tell me who I was, where I came from or even what the hell was going on. I mean, being from a nomadic culture is one thing but keeping a kid on the move for twelve years is ridiculous. I was in and out of more homes than your average cat burglar.

  Anyway, I lost touch with who I was pretty quick. Growing up in all-white homes, going to all-white schools, playing with all-white kids can get a guy to thinking and reacting all-white himself after a while. With no one pitching in any information I just figured I was a brown white guy.

  Because around about the early sixties there was only a couple of ways for anybody to get to know about Indians, unless you knew a few of course, which I didn’t. It was the same for white people as for those of us trying to be white. The most popular way of learning about Indians was television. Man, I remember Saturday mornings watching them Westerns and cheering like crazy for the cowboys like everyone else and getting all squirmy inside when the savages were threatening and feelin’ the dread we were all supposed to feel when their drums would sound late at night. Injuns. Scary devils. Heathens. All of a sudden popping up at the top of a hill, taking scalps, stealin’ horses, talking stupid English and always, always riding right into the guns of the pioneers. We tumbled off horses better’n anybody and that was about all the good you could say. It was embarrassing stuff to be watching.

  Then there was books. Indians never got mentioned in any of the schoolbooks except for being the guides for the brave explorers busy discovering the country. I could never ever figure out how you could say you were out discovering something when you needed a guide to help you find it. But Indians were always second to the explorers who were creating the real history of North America. Comic books and novels were just carbon copies of the textbook and TV and movie Indians. We were either heathen devils running around killing people or just simple savages who desperately needed the help of the missionaries in order to get straightened out and live like real people. There weren’t any other kind of stories.

  Of course, everyone was buying into these messages and I started hearing the usual stuff. Indians were lazy, no account, drunken bums, living on welfare, mooching change on street corners and really needing some direction. If white people hadn’t got here when they did we’d have all died.

  I remember one time after doing something against the rules in one home I was in, the man of the house drove me into the Indian section of town. He drove real slow, pointing out drunks and dirty-looking people reeling around on the sidewalks or sleeping crumpled up in alleys.

  Then he said, “See. Those are Indians. Look at them. If you don’t start shaping up and doing what you’re told around here, that’s what you’re going to become!”

  And the kids I played with were kinda the same—kids bein’ kids and all. They were always on me with the usual “ugh, how, Tonto” stuff they learned from TV, their parents or both. Always asking me stuff like what’s your tribe, how do you say such-and-such in Indian, what does dog taste like, you know, run-of-the-mill kid stuff.

  One time we’re busy getting up a neighborhood game of cowboys and Indians. Except back then it was “cowboys and itchybums”—kids bein’ kids and all. Naturally being the only itchybum in the crowd my role was easily cast. No one could understand why I broke into tears that day. No one could understand why I dropped my little guns and holster and ran indoors and up to my room, and I, in turn, couldn’t understand why everyone at the suppertable that night broke into uncontrollable laughter when I was asked about it and I explained, “ ’Cause I don’t know how to be an Indian!”

  And that’s how it was for me growing up. I was embarrassed about being an Indian and I was afraid that if I ever met a real one I wouldn’t know what to do or say. So I started trying to fit into that white world as best I could. I decided that I would try to learn to be anything other than what I was. I didn’t want to be compared to any of the images I had of my own people, of myself. But this brown skin of mine was always a pretty good clue to most people that there must have been a redskin or two creeping around my mama’s woodpile.

  So at various times I was Hawaiian, Polynesian, Mexican or Chinese. Anything but Indian. Those people on the street that day still haunted me. Of course, if I got cornered on evidence then I’d become any one of four famous kinds of Indian. I was either Apache, Sioux, Cherokee or Commanche. Everyone had heard of those Indians. I mean, if you absolutely had to be an Indian, at least be one that everyone had heard of. Embarrassed as I was at the time I sure didn’t want to be no Passamaquoddy, Flathead, Dogrib or Ojibway. Aiming for the romantic was my game plan.

  I fell in love with the blues when I was twenty. Something in the music sorta bumped up against something deep inside me and made it move. Maybe it was the built-in lonely that got me, or the moving, searching, losing and fightin’ for a living that good blues singers gotta do before they can really put it out there. I don’t know for sure what it was, but the first time I heard it I was hooked. Still love the sound of the blues late at night. Kinda fits in with the sounds of the north. All that moanin’ and cryin’ goes real good with a dark, dark night, the wind howling through the trees and a fire going real good in the cabin. There’s even a few White Dog folks starting to like it too now. Mostly folks up here like the old-time fiddle tunes like “The Red River Jig” and “Maple Sugar” or the pow-wow songs they tape during pow-wow season, but some have taken a liking to dropping by late at night and sitting on the porch listening to the blues on our battery tape player. Guess maybe us Indians have a lot in common with our black brothers and sisters when it comes to bein’ blue about things.

  Wally Red Sky pooh-poohs it all though. Wally’s bound and determined to be known as the best Indian country-and-western singer ever. Spent too much time listening to his daddy’s old country records and now he walks around with his hair all Brylcreemed up and swept back, wearing tasseled western shirts and smellin’ of Old Spice. Says Indians are more tuned in to the country on accounta they’re closer to the land and that things like wide-open spaces and riding horses are more Indian than gettin’ drunk and crying over lost women. I tried to point out to him that most country songs are about those very same things, but he just grins and walks away shaking his shiny head all sad like.

  “Catch on one o’ these days, Garnet,” he says. “One o’ these days you’ll be singin’ ‘I Saw the Light’ ’steada ‘Goin’ Down That Road Feelin’ Bad.’ ”

  I spent a lotta time going down a lotta roads feelin’ bad actually. When I heard the blues they just kinda fit right into my head and that was actually the first step in my getting back here. Funny how those insignificant little moments wind up being the biggest things in your life after you live some. Who’da ever thought that some black blues band in a tavern in downtown Toronto would be the first step on my road back to White Dog. Funny, but that’s what happened.

  See, I split the foster homes at sixteen and went wandering everywhere. I hitchhiked all over looking for something to do or just somewhere to be. Got around pretty good and saw a lotta country over the next four years but just couldn’t find it in me to settle down anywhere. My friend Keeper calls it “havin’ the old slidey foot.” Well I had that old slidey foot thing going real good in my life until I hit T.O. in ’77.

  Back then I was running a lotta games past people. Reason I was moving around so much was because my games were pretty easy to see through actually and I’d always split just before I got called on my bull. I still didn’t wanna be known as an Indian. Mostly on accounta the Indians I saw those years were pretty much the same kind my foster father’d shown me in the car that day. Scary-looking, dirty, drunk, fightin’ in the street or passed out in the alley, and I sure didn’t wanna be connected t
o them in any way. So I’d hit town and be anybody from anywhere when I’d meet up with folks.

  I was a homeless Hawaiian for a while there in Niagara Falls. Had these flowered shirts I found at the Sally Ann, mirrored sunglasses on a rope around my neck, brushcut, and even got a beat up old ukulele at a pawnshop. We’d be drinkin’ wine in the park and I’d be teaching people how to say things in fictitious Hawaiian and singing these dumb songs on that ukulele. Touching stuff like “KahmonIwannalayya,” “Nookienookienow” or “The Best Leis Are Hawaiian” for the ladies present. Still don’t know how that dumb stuff passed, probably the wine more’n anything, but I was a Hawaiian refugee there for a while.

  Another time after seeing a couple of episodes of “Kung Fu” on TV I became a half-Chinese guy looking for my father all across North America. He was supposed to be some Canadian businessman knocked up my ma, little Wing Fey, while on a trip to the East. He left me’n Ma in desperate poverty in Shanghai. I was gonna use my considerable kung fu skills on him when I found him and avenge the death of Wing Fey, who’d succumbed to malaria finally after putting me through some monk temple in the mountains. That one ran pretty good in a few towns until I got too drunk in Sudbury and gave a traditional Chinese name to a big biker named Cow Pie. Guess he didn’t like being referred to as Sum Dum Fuk. My kung fu skills failed me utterly.