The Tao of Nookomis Read online

  It isn’t that any of us from the community hasn’t tried to learn the traditional knowledge so we can pass it down to the young. Several of us in the thirty- to forty-year-old range have taken university courses in Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) history, culture, and language. My cousin Doris, in fact, is teaching Ojibwe history at one of the neighboring tribal community colleges. My friend Jerry, who I graduated from high school with, just got a new job at Lake Superior State teaching Native art classes. Me, I went all out like I’ve always done. Majored in American Indian studies from the U of Minnesota. Took three years of Anishinaabe language. I go to ceremonies on some of the other reservations to be around traditional people and to hear the language spoken and sung. When I have the time I drive the fifty or so miles down the road to Ogema, the next rez over, and sit in on their Thursday evening language table. Why? Because I know I will be an elder some day and young people will come to me for that knowledge. And when they do, I’d better know what I’m doing and what I’m talking about.

  So I practice my Ojibwe every night while my wife is reading her mysteries, trying to nail down the language’s complex verb structure, and all its inherent rules. It’s such a complex language, more complex, at least that’s what I’ve heard, than English. I wish I would have learned it as a kid, but neither of my parents spoke it. They had it beat out of them in boarding school. I told my wife I’m able to count to a thousand now in Ojibwe. She laughed when I said that, looking up over her book. But then that just got me thinking, what good is that? I need to know so much more than counting.

  When the elder Kingfishers were alive, they mentored me in the language. Joe especially. Sometimes before and after their classes he would just speak the language to me, no English, and I would have to try to figure out what he was saying, or I would be shit out of luck. I would try to respond the best I could in the language, and I know that my pronunciation and enunciation weren’t always right, but he never shamed me for not knowing the right way. He would never have done that. I remember once I was so frustrated with myself because I studied for so long and hard and I still just wasn’t getting what he was saying to me. And I finally said to him, in English, “Joe, I’m so sorry, I can’t understand what you are saying. I feel so damn bad about it. I want to know the language, you know.”

  I just stood there with my head down. I felt just bad then. But he was so patient with me, and he understood.

  “This is not your fault, David. You have nothing to be ashamed of. You shouldn’t blame yourself because you weren’t brought up around the language. If there is anybody to blame it’s that BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs), when they outlawed the speaking of the language and forbid us practicing our ceremonies. So don’t blame yourself. Give yourself credit for trying, for working to become a speaker. Most of all, give yourself time. Someday, and I think that day isn’t too far off, you’re going to answer me when I speak to you, and it’ll be in our language. And when that day comes, David, oh, your gramma and grampa and all those old people who have walked on, they are going to be smiling. Oh, they will be smiling. They will be so proud.”

  So that day two months ago when I was sitting in my office at Pine Bend School and the phone rang and it was my mom, and she said that she heard on the scanner there was a bad accident at Roy’s Point and that it was the elder Kingfishers, I just froze, because things like that aren’t suppose to happen to such beautiful people like them.

  “Mom,” I said, and she must have been able to tell by the tone of my voice just how devastated I was. “Mom … No …”

  She must have called my wife, because Liz was down in my office about five minutes later.

  After the accident, I took the elder Kingfishers’ places in the classroom as the children’s teacher. I feel so inadequate there because I know just a small fraction of what those two elders knew. And the young ones know, they do, how important that language is because they remind me all the time. The other day one of the little ones came up to me after class, and he asked me something.

  “David,” he said (they call me David), “could you give me my Ojibwe name?”

  “I would be honored to do that if I could,” I said, “but I don’t have that gift. Maybe when I get older I will. But right now, I can’t do that.”

  The little boy walked away from me so disappointed, and the look on his face just said it all as far as I am concerned.

  Now it’s like a race, you know, to learn the language.

  I been learning Niibish to speak and now he knows, too.

  “Umbe, Niibish!” (Come, Niibish!)

  “Niibish, namadabi.” (Niibish, sit.)

  My Grampa Nimishoo and Gramma Nooko always talked it to me. When I see them in my head they talk it to me.

  I LIVE NEXT TO ELDERLY HOUSING, which sits just off a ways from the main rez housing project. I grew up right around there, in that same area. We lived in an old rez house in the middle of a field that was turned into a sprawling HUD neighborhood once the tribe had a building boom about twenty or so years ago. Now my old haunts are filled with fifty or more pastel green, blue, and yellow HUD houses, all looking alike. I remember when I was little I would go and hide in the deep grass of the field that was there, and I would pick daisies and buttercups and bring them to my mother. We were all poor then, all us Indi’ns. But we all got along and there was no fighting or crime or the alienation we see now. Now, it seems even our neighbors are strangers. Now in that field where I used to run there are houses, a couple of messy garbage racks, about a hundred rez dogs of all sizes, pedigrees, and colors, and a couple of old war ponies (cars) in every drive.

  Sometimes I wonder if we didn’t lose something in the process of modernization, something more important than indoor plumbing and forced-air furnaces and refrigerators.

  Anyway, lately I’ve been seeing a lot of Deacon Kingfisher, walking up and down the road. Since his grandparents walked on he’s been spending a lot of time with my dog, Niibish. I named Niibish for the Ojibwe word for tea, anibishaboo. See, when he was a little fellow, I picked him out at the pound and took him home for the first time, and I dunked him in a tub of sudsy water and scrubbed him up. The water was so dirty it was almost like I had dipped a tea bag in it. Just in case you wondered about that name. Us rez folks get our nicknames that way, too. There’s a story behind every one of them—No Neck, Catfish Lips, Auk, Johnny Slippery. Every one of us, including our dogs, has a rez name. We have dogs named Cat, and cats named Dog, and dogs named Soup, and some are named after that crabby auntie everyone seems to have.

  But Deacon has always been known simply as Deac. We’re about the same age, so I really got to know him when we were little kids. Like I said, he was raised by his grandparents. I don’t know what happened to his mom. When we were old enough for school we all rode that old orange bus to Pine Bend, where we had to endure twelve years of being told we were worthless by those teachers. I’d see Deacon on the bus every day with the rest of us, and out on the playground before and after school sometimes. But in school, he would disappear into the special classroom with five or six other kids with disabilities, and we’d never see each other all day. The bell would ring and their door would remain closed. They must have eaten lunch at a different time as well because we never saw them in the lunchroom. And of course, we never saw them at recess.

  Every once in a while, of course, some jerk would pick on him and call him a retard.

  “I’m no retard,” he’d say. He would try to fight back with words, but the instigator would just mock him for it, and it seemed that fighting back would only make it worse.

  For most of elementary school I put up with what the teasers were doing to him. Then in eighth grade or so, I just couldn’t stand it anymore. Maybe by then I’d grown physically strong enough to have some confidence. That day there was some kid teasing Deacon on the school bus as usual.

  “Leave him alone, eh?” I told the kid.

  But the guy wouldn’t quit. He wasn’t even listening to me. />
  So I spoke a little louder and more in his face, like, “Leave him alone, I said.”

  He wouldn’t quit, of course, so after we got off the bus I peppered his face with my fists and sent him home with his nose packed tight with toilet paper.

  I was Deacon’s hero after that.

  Of course, not everything I did was worthy of a medal.

  When I was a young warrior, my buddies and I used to have a lot of fun with Deacon. One time when we were about sixteen years old or so, we were driving around drinking beer and saw Deacon playing out in his grandparents’ yard so we decided to stop.

  “Hey, Deacon,” I remember yelling out to him. “Wanna come out with us and drink some beers?”

  We were all laughing and shiny then, just getting a buzz on ourselves. And I suppose we were a bit bored and looking for some entertainment.

  You see, back then we all had Deacon typed as the village idiot.

  “Oh, no,” Deacon said to me. “Gramma and Grampa would be real mad at me.”

  “Oh, come on,” we egged him on.

  I don’t remember exactly what transpired to get him to come along but before you know it he was sitting in the back seat, packed between our girlfriends Judy, Luella, and Charlene, and off we roared out into the boonies to party.

  It only took a couple of beers before Deacon was shit-faced drunk. By that time we boys in the front seat were trying to talk Judy into letting Deacon get some from her. She screwed just about anything that moved, and we figured she wouldn’t mind giving some to Deacon.

  She wasn’t drunk enough the first time we asked her, but as the evening wore on, she took us up on the offer and went off in the bushes with Deacon. I don’t know if they ever did anything or not. Later on, I asked Deacon, of course.

  “Hey, Deac, did you get any from Judy?” “Secret,” is all he said. He had a big smile on his face, and I still have no idea what did or didn’t happen.

  We dropped Deacon off in his yard just before sunrise. I often wonder what his grandparents thought when he came stumbling in their front door. And I wonder what they would have thought of me if they’d known it was me who took and got him loaded that night so many years ago.

  Now, of course, I wouldn’t even think of doing anything like that. Myself, I quit drinking years ago. My wife, Liz, has been sober for twenty years, and has a sobriety pin to prove it. And now I know more about my traditional beliefs, that our ancestors regarded people like Deacon as sacred beings, just as all of us humans are sacred in the eyes of the Creator.

  Just because Deacon has Down syndrome doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a soul spirit. The Creator listens to him just as he does all of us, and the Creator watches over him as well, maybe even more than he would the rest of us. And Deacon has the same gifts from the Creator, the Creator’s very essence, those values we were all born with.

  I know that now.

  So now when I see him with Niibish, I always make a point of stopping and talking with him.

  “Hey, Deac,” I say. I still call him that.

  “Hey, Davey,” he always says back.

  I ask him how things are going and he’d talk forever if I let him. On and on he goes about what Niibish and him are up to, and about ’livia, his grandmother’s friend. Lately, he’s been finding agates alongside the road. He gave me one of his favorites, giving it a big lick just before he handed it over to me.

  I think what our tribal council is doing in allowing Deacon to live in elder housing is commendable. He needs to be cared for, like our elders. Like them, he has special needs. The fact the council is assuring he is eating regularly, and has assigned people to check on him every week, speaks well for all of us in the community. Deacon represents something to us, maybe standing as a symbol of how we Ojibwe should treat each other and care for each other.

  I GOED OVER to ’Livia’s lots, me and Niibish, so we can watch her TV. I told her I been learning Niibish the language. And she says she’s knowed it since before she was born but now with Gramma Nooko gone there hasn’t been no one to talk it to. So I started talking and pretty soon now she’s talking with me that way. She says it’s coming back inside her.

  I WENT TO A CEREMONY last fall over near Crandon, and we were all sitting there in the teaching lodge. The speaker was talking in the language, of course, and he had a young man from Canada doing interpreting for him. Anyway, through the interpreter, the speaker told those of us who couldn’t speak Ojibwe that we were born with all of that knowledge already inside us—the language, and those values for following that path, mino-bimaadiziwin (the Good Path). We just need to bring it out, he said. We need to want it real bad, and we need to go deep inside where it is and find it and bring it out.

  Ever since I heard that I’ve been praying a lot. And one night I had this dream, in Ojibwe. In the dream I was speaking the tongue, and I could understand what the others were saying, and they understood me. When I awoke in the morning, I didn’t want to get out of bed. I wanted to stay there in the dream. I didn’t want it to end.

  I don’t know, but maybe something is happening now that is going to make that dream come true, and it’s coming from someone I would have never dreamed of. See, one night my wife sent me to the store to get some change for the kids’ school lunch tickets, and I saw Deacon and my dog out walking down the road. So I pulled over alongside them and rolled down the window. Anyway, Deacon was really concentrating on talking to Niibish about something and maybe he didn’t see or hear me pull up by him. So I got to listen to him speak.

  He was speaking in the language.

  It was almost surreal. I was so stunned I pulled away and honked the horn and just waved at him, and he smiled and waved back to me.

  It took me a while to settle down, but eventually I did. Later that evening I went over to elderly housing to visit him. I brought that sacred asema with me. He was in a pair of Tigger pajamas when he answered his door.

  “Aniin ezhi a ya yan?” I said. How are you doing?

  “Nimino aya, geendush?” he replied. I’m fine, and you?

  “Nimino aya,” I said back to him. I’m fine as well.

  “Nimiwendum wabaminan,” He replied. I’m happy to see you.

  “Gidojibwem, ina?” he asked. Do you speak Ojibwe?

  “Eya, baangi nindojibwem.” Yes, a little Ojibwe I speak.

  I asked him that night if he would be my teacher. And when he said he would, I gave him that sacred asema, tobacco, and he accepted it.

  I’ve known Deacon nearly my entire life and for most of it I just thought he was a gentle and happy-go-lucky person who happened to have special needs. I never thought he would possess the knowledge and ability I have spent much of my adult life trying to get. Until now, I’d always measured him by his limitations.

  September 30, 2015

  TO: Pine Bend local Indian Parent Committee

  FROM: David Turner, M.ed.

  Director of Indian Education

  RE: Ojibwe language program

  Your permission is requested to retain the services of Deacon Kingfisher as Ojibwe language teacher aide for ten (10) hours a week, $8.00 per hour beginning immediately through the reminder of the school term.

  Deacon will work with me in the elementary and secondary Ojibwe language classes. He will be an excellent resource in the classroom given his fluency.

  I WENT TO THE INDIAN parent committee meeting last night figuring my request to put Deacon on as a classroom aide would sail right through, no problem. So when my cousin Carolyn, chair of the committee, started raising all kinds of questions about whether Deacon should be working with the children, it really hit me sideways because I just had no idea she harbored that kind of ignorance.

  I still can hear her whiney little voice now.

  “Now, David, I just wonder if Deacon won’t frighten the little ones. I mean, if you didn’t know him that well, he could be kind of scary, don’t you think? And don’t we have to worry about the possibility of him doing something
inappropriate? Do you remember when we were in catechism and Deacon was always doing the most inappropriate things—burping and boogeting (Ojibwe/English slang for farting). And as he got older he still did things like that every so often. And to be frank with you, I worry about his behavior around the little girls. Just because he’s challenged doesn’t mean he doesn’t have urges. We would regret it for the rest of our lives if we allowed him to work with our children and something should happen.”

  My cousin Carolyn was never the brightest bulb on the tree. She did manage, however, to convince a majority of the parent committee to table my request. I tell you, I was so pissed I wanted to quit then and there. I have not been so angry in a long, long time. And it didn’t matter what I said to counter her arguments. It was fifteen years ago when Deacon was doing those things in summer catechism, I said. He doesn’t do that anymore. Everyone who works in the school, or drives a bus, has to have a background check. Deacon doesn’t have a police record. He’s never been in trouble with the law. He’s never been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior directed toward children, or anyone for that matter.

  “But David, don’t you remember when we in the first grade, and a teacher was trying to teach Deacon how to use the drinking fountain and he got water all over himself? He was lapping at the water and laughing, and telling the teacher that he was a dog. Do you remember what he did? He took off every stitch of his wet clothes and put them in a big pile right there in the hallway next to the fountain. Now, is that the kind of person you want teaching our children?”

  I had forgotten that Carolyn was one of the people on the tribal housing board who had voted against Deacon living independently in elderly housing. They said he should be in a group home setting. At least, that was their excuse. I think the other housing board members voted along with her simply because they felt they would get in trouble with HUD, who could come down on the rez for violating the federal age guidelines on who gets to live in elderly units. Apparently, you’ve got to be sixty-two years old to be considered an elder by HUD. I remember the day after the housing board had met and voted against Deacon, I went to visit Phil Larson, one of my old school buddies from the U, and he told me what happened. Phil is a white guy who married one of my other cousins, but he still has his head screwed on sort of right. We sat in his office and got just militant. What kind of Indians are going to let HUD, a federal agency, tell a tribe what to do? We’re a sovereign nation, aren’t we? When are we going to start behaving like one? If we want one of our tribal members to live in an elderly unit, we should be able to do it. We should be telling them (HUD) what to do. My buddy Phil is acting like a member of the tribe now, aaayyy.