The Tao of Nookomis Page 7

  So anyway, after we sat in Phil’s office and declared Pine Bend a sovereign nation, we marched on over to see our district rep. On the tribal council, and got her all fired up. That afternoon she led the charge at the council meeting and put that housing board in their place.

  WHEN WE WAS WATCHING Angry Birds I tolt ’Livia and Niibs that Davey says they said I can’t be a teacher to the little ones. But that I can still be his teacher.

  I SPENT THE NEXT COUPLE of weeks lobbying the other parent committee members, behind Carolyn’s back, to change their minds about Deacon. And I thought I got a majority convinced to give him a go. Well, it turns out I didn’t even need to do that.

  See, at the meeting the other night we were going through our regular business. Like, should we send a member to the National Indian Education Conference in Greensboro, North Carolina, or should we spend the $2,000 that would cost to buy hats and mittens for the kids? I mean, as far as I’m concerned we shouldn’t even discuss that. Of course we should buy hats and mittens. But that’s the parent committee. Anyway, Carolyn had put my request to reconsider hiring Deacon as the last agenda item, and it was getting close to the time we would be discussing that.

  So, about that time in the door comes, of all persons, ’Livia, a respected elder in our community, and Carolyn’s auntie. You should have seen everyone’s heads spin around when she came through that door. I was as surprised as they were because I had no idea she was coming there that evening. She sat quietly in the corner, not uttering a peep. Then when Carolyn said, “The last item on our agenda tonight is to reconsider the hiring of Deacon Kingfisher as Ojibwe language teacher aide.”

  ’Livia stood then.

  “I’d like to address the committee,” she said.

  Then she spoke to us in the language.

  And her voice was at once so strong and forceful and gentle and sincere, and her message carried in it all the dreams of our ancestors who had walked on through the ages. She talked for a long time and then she sat down.

  Then I told them what she said.

  ME AND ’LIVIA AND DAVEY’S teachers, Niibish. We teach that tongue to the little ones.

  Soft Wind

  This little man came to my doorstep some time back. He obviously had walked to my place, or maybe somebody dropped him off down the road because I didn’t see a car anywhere in sight. He seemed real nervous and talkative, and he looked Native in a messed-up sort of way. I was adopted out to a white family way back, he says, and now I want to find out my Indian ways like eagle feathers and trees having spirits and brotherhood with all creation. I want to make my own Indian costume, too, so I’ll fit in, ’cause I want to move here to be with my Native brothers and sisters. Oh, I’m sorry, my name is Scottie, he said.

  Who sent you to me, I asked, and he told me someone from the tribal center, and I asked who and he said some fat lady and that didn’t help because there must be a hundred of them working there. So I just smiled because it seemed all the fat women in the village appeared in my mind all at once and they were all telling this little stranger to come see Eddie, that’s me, and then, as he walked away from them, I could see them giggling like the joke’s on me.

  Like I say, he was Native, you could see that just by looking at him. And judging by the way he started jabbering away at me right away, maybe he was a little different. So I panned him up and down with my beady little eyes. Then I let him in and told him to have a seat, and he found a tiny corner of the couch in the living room where he took up as little space as possible and sat there with his hands folded in his lap and looking around at everything on the walls.

  You want some coffee, I asked, and he said no thanks, I just drink Coke, so I dug way back in the fridge and found a half-empty bottle of flat soda that had lost its fizz because some nephew forgot to put the cap on tight and I put it in a coffee cup and brought it in to him. I topped off my coffee while I was at it and returned to the living room and we just sat and stared at each other for a few nervous moments. And during that silence, I was wondering why it was people always sent me these lost souls and every new age white person type who wants an Indian name or had a dream they want deciphered.

  So you want to learn how to dance like a real Indi’n? I asked. I was just teasing, but he didn’t figure it out. He smiled back at me and asked if it was okay if he smoked. Before I could say a peep he had one in his mouth and was digging for matches.

  I already know how to sing Indian, he said, and he started with one of those hi how are you’s and tapping his feet with his eyes closed and while his eyes were closed, I took a closer look at him and wondered if I should have let him in. He was a wiry little guy for sure. Harmless, a child’s mind, I concluded.

  So when he finished singing for me, I asked where he’d been all these years and he told me his story. That went on for a couple of hours over the bologna sandwiches and Kool-Aid I made up for lunch for the both of us. Turns out he had been raised by a white family somewhere down by Milwaukee, that he was twenty-seven years old. I know I’m from Red Cliff, this place, he told me at least five times. My ma, well my adoptive ma anyway, she told me that, he said. Anyway, he said, I been living with them until last year but then I met my wife, well, she wasn’t my wife then, and we got married and we have a baby but she stayed back in Milwaukee because she has a job. But I want her to quit as soon as I find a place back here so we can raise a family here with all of you, my relatives. I’m staying down at Buffalo Bay Campground, he said, I got my own firewood and everything.

  Will you teach me to be a medicine man like you? I seen an eagle out the bus window on my way here yesterday.

  OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS this odd little fellow visited me almost daily. He was becoming a regular fixture in Red Cliff as well, walking everywhere he went, smiling and waving at complete strangers. I heard one of those damn Petersons sicced their dog after him just to be funny.

  Your name will be Bungi Boogat (little fart), I said when he wouldn’t stop bugging me for his Indian name.

  What does that mean, he asked, and I said it means Soft Wind. Show me how it’s spelled, he asked, so I wrote it down. When he came to visit me a day later it was written in magic marker on an old wrinkled t-shirt, just above Shaq slam dunking a basketball through the hoop.

  Most of the time when he was at my place, he would just come to watch my TV. SpongeBob SquarePants was his favorite. After a while I noticed he didn’t have a change in clothes so I took him down to the road to St. Mary’s Catholic Church to dig through the boxes of freebies, and he came up with a whole new wardrobe of wrinkled, stretched-out t-shirts and baggy-ass jeans, and a pair of flat-bottom tennies that probably cost two dollars new. At the same time we went over to the campground, and I talked my nephew who managed the place into giving Scottie a job being an all-around do anything in the campground, and after that day Scottie was the official haul firewood, cut it, put trash in the dumpster, clean out smelly shitters guy.

  I see you have a new friend, one of the fat ladies in the tribal center smiled and winked at me the day I brought Scottie in to find out if he was indeed a Red Cliff tribal member. I gave her that look my crabby auntie was famous for and she almost burst out laughing. Turned out he really was a member of the tribe, so I told them he needed an emergency food voucher. A few days later I went there again with him to sign up for emergency housing.

  Christ sakes, he’s living in the campground, I said. Anyplace would be better than that. It’s going to be getting cold soon. They got back to him in record time, two weeks, and told him he could move into an abandoned trailer house about a mile down on Blueberry Road.

  I can call my wife, Jennifer, now and tell her I have a place, he said. I borrowed him my cell phone, and we went outside and stood on top of the septic mound where I get a decent signal, and dialed the numbers for him as well. When he called her I overheard a woman hollering at him on the other end of the line about why in hell she hadn’t heard from him in over two weeks. I got us a plac
e, is all he could say, over and over, get up here. Get the bus money from your ma. And of course I was thinking, well, if Scottie is different, what is this Jennifer woman going to be like? It turned out his wife and baby would not show up for a month or more because she couldn’t raise enough money for two bus tickets.

  He’d been living in Red Cliff for about a month and coming up to visit me almost daily, and I wasn’t getting sick of him, really. He was certainly a pleasant little fellow. Teach me the Indian word for this. Teach me the Indian word for that. It didn’t matter. He’d forget it all before the end of the day.

  Well, a few weeks back he didn’t show when he said he’d be stopping by, and I almost missed him being there and all. The next day he didn’t show, either, so I got in my pickup and drove on down to his new, old, formerly abandoned trailer to check on him only to find him hidden under a pile of tattered blankets and winter coats he’d rummaged somewhere. I’m sick, he said. So I hauled his ass out of bed and drove him over to the clinic.

  They gave him a bottle of something or other and sent him on his way and told him to drink plenty of liquids and other nonsense like that he wouldn’t remember, and we were soon on our way. However, they were on the ball enough to make a call to Milwaukee and have them fax important information from his medical file.

  My niece works in medical records and, of course, she’s bound by some secret pledge not to say anything, but she called me anyway when the records arrived and told me we needed to get his wife, Jennifer, up soon because Scottie was dying. There are no secrets here on the rez. Those of us who live here know that.

  SCOTTIE, TELL ME WHAT you know about you being sick, I asked him the day after my niece called me.

  I got lead poisoning when I was a baby. Paint chips, he said. I ate it like candy. He started laughing. That was pretty dumb wasn’t it, he said. Eddie, I know I’m dumb. I been dumb forever. And I’m going to be dumb even longer. They tole me that lead made me dumb. Then when I got sick last spring they tole me I had some cancer, they’re like little bugs that eat you up from the inside out the doctor says, and that mine has gone too far.

  That’s why I came to find you, he says. I need to know how to be an Indian before I go to the happy hunting ground.

  And when he said that, I heard the traveling song we sing when we send a person’s spirit off on their westward journey. Them spirits telling me my little friend wasn’t long for this world.

  Does your wife know? I asked.

  No, he said. She doesn’t need to know. I don’t want her to worry.

  But she will find out anyway, I say.

  How’s that if I don’t tell, he says.

  She’ll find out anyway, I say. You need to tell her.

  He says, okay, Eddie, and he’s smiling all the while but I don’t know how he can smile through all of this.

  SCOTTIE CALLED HIS WIFE, Jennifer, the next morning and told her she needed to come right away and to be sure to bring the baby, Genevieve Mary. Get a bus ticket to Bayfield, he said. He’d walk into town and meet them. They needed to talk, he said. It was important.

  His wife and daughter came just several days later. Jennifer, like Scottie, was like a child. Like two young ones playing house, only now they just had an old formerly abandoned trailer with saggy floors. He must have told her on the way from Bayfield because by the time they arrived at my place it looked like there had been a lot of tears shed. And that night Scottie and Jennifer were both on my cell standing up on top of the septic mound talking to his adoptive parents. They had listened to me when I told them they needed to tell all their loved ones. I watched their baby while they were on the phone, and later took her and my dog Chief for a walk, so Scottie and his wife could have some time alone. It was dark and cool and the air was filled with the sounds of frogs and crickets. The sky was filled with stars, and they wrapped around us like an alive blanket. We walked all the way down to the highway and back.

  Many people have come to me to ask questions about their identity, their culture, over the years. And I’ve worked with them as they try to figure all of that out. None, however, have been like Scottie.

  For all of them I leave a common message: If you want to learn, you will need to watch in a new way, a deeper way, I say. And you’ll need to listen to more than just people’s words, listen with all of your senses, and especially with your heart.

  “Thank you, Uncle,” many of them say to me. And maybe as a result I have many new, beautiful nephews and nieces now.

  I asked Scottie if he and his family would stay with me a few days. It got pretty crazy in my little house, especially with the three of them there. We ate good, though, with Jennifer cooking up a storm and making trips to town for sweets. Chief was in his glory because he got plenty of table scraps and lots of attention. I haven’t seen him run around and wag his tail like that in years.

  After a few days, though, they moved to Scottie’s place down on Blueberry Road. I went to see them every day, though, and to work with Scottie.

  He’s almost ready.

  I take him with me when I do my work.

  Like a couple of weeks ago I did a naming. One of the families in Red Cliff had asked if I would name their new daughter. It’s a lot of work to do that, you know, because I have to really think about it hard, and dream about it. Those names come to me that way, in dreams. And there is a lot of responsibility in giving the name. In a way, I become a second guardian for the child. So, anyway, the family had prepared their house for a feast that day I named that little baby, with venison and wild rice and fresh baked lugulate—that’s this pan bread we Ojibwe eat. I told Scottie he would be my helper at these things.

  It’s a long story, you know, the naming. But, anyway, I told the father and mother to take the baby from her dikinagan (cradleboard) and hand her to me. I took the little baby and held her close to my chest for a long time. In that way, it was like I was giving her a part of myself. That dream name I had for her passed over into her then. Then I held the baby out, and I spoke to her by her name, and held her out to her parents and introduced the new name to them.

  This is Mino-nodin-ikwezens, I said, Good Wind Girl.

  Sara and I, my wife, she’s dead now, we never had children of our own. But I have daughters and sons all over Ojibwe country by having that gift from the Creator to give names to other people’s children. They are like my own children, each of them.

  Scottie came to me a day after we did the naming, and he offered me that tobacco and asked if I would name his baby, Genevieve Mary. I told him I had already dreamed her name.

  When I go see him we talk about a lot of things. I have him tell me more about his life. He’s trying to make sense of it, I can tell, and I feel that his sharing his life experiences with me will help him unravel it and put it together in a way that will make more sense to him.

  But I can see we don’t have much time now when I look in his eyes. Already, he’s had to switch to stronger pain medication, and he is getting weaker and losing more weight.

  I went to Lac Court oreilles to see my friend Mizaun (Thistle), to ask him if he would come and do a sweat for my family. He said he would, and that my nephew Ronnie on my brother’s side could be his helper, the fire keeper. That Ronnie is learning these things early on, you know. Someday it will be his turn. The circle will continue that way.

  The night we had the sweat, that’s when Scottie got the answers to all of his questions, I think. Because when we were sitting in the lodge, and passing the drum around, he said he still had questions about the why of his life.

  Thank you, Mr. Creator, for bringing me here to Red Cliff to meet my Uncle Eddie so he could teach me how to be an Indian. See, I’m an Indian now. Ain’t I so? Scottie said when it came his turn.

  You sure are, we all said, almost in unison.

  I reminded Scottie and the others who attended the sweat that evening that we humans are not perfect beings, and that we all stray from the Good Path. Then I told them in our languag
e about what the Creator had intended for us in following that path.

  I said the same thing I had told my nephew Ronnie just a few years ago when he was having trouble and trying to figure out his own place here on earth: There is a path to follow. It’s hard, I know. I have failed many times myself. There is a certain way to live.

  That we honor the Creator; that we honor our elders; that we honor our elder brothers, the plant and animal beings; that we honor women; that we keep our promises; that we be kind to everyone; that we be peaceful; that we be courageous; and that we be moderate in the way we walk through life.

  The spirits of our family members who have passed on came in strong through that eastern doorway of the lodge that night. You could feel them all around us.

  The Creator, you see, listens to all of us and watches over all of us. Even individuals like Scottie, and maybe even more so. We are all special in the eyes of the Creator. Each of us, including Scottie and all those like him, has our own unique gifts we bring into this world. Each of us has a purpose, a reason for being.