The Tao of Nookomis Read online

  After some time they heard the sound of the cell phone, a country tune straight out of the memory of his father and mother.

  It was the boy’s mother asking what they were doing. Questions.

  “Yup. Ah-huh. Hmmh. Oh, yah?” Ron began chewing on a candy bar and was trying to respond as best he could.

  “Good night. Love you, too. You want to talk to Dad? Here, dad.”

  Then it was the father’s turn.

  “Yup. Really. Geez. I’ll see you tomorrow then, okay? Sure. Okay, then. Bye now.”

  Then she was gone for the evening. They were both glad she had called but did not share it.

  Again just the man and his son.

  “What time is it, Dad?”

  “10:30.”

  “I think I’ll go to bed.”

  INTO THE TENT. No sooner had the boy climbed into his sleeping bag and he drifted off to sleep. And to dream.

  And in the dream he found himself on a river, sitting in the front of a canoe. He didn’t know who was sitting in the rear, only the sense there was someone and that whoever it was did not constitute a threat. It was summer. Paddling to somewhere that was not important to the meaning of the dream. Into tree shadows and out into the sun. Around corners. Then to the right, a large tree with a barren top. And midway up the tree a young eagle, still dark in its colors. Another tree. Another young eagle. Ron noticed that maybe they could not fly away because they were too young.

  Ahead of them. A crane standing in the water. Silent, as cranes are. As they approached, it rose in flight and disappeared down the river.

  In the dream they continued the journey. Another bend in the river, and as they rounded it the crane was standing in the water and they approached within feet of it. But it rose again and flew downriver, around another bend. It was so quiet the only sound was the sound of its wings. This happened again. And again.

  Another bend in the river. Small rapids. The crane in the water. This time as they approached it, the crane flew away from the river. It called out. Rare for cranes because silence was the usual way of the echo makers.

  And it seemed he dreamed this the longest time.

  Then the dream ended.

  Gone. Like breath on a window.

  That night he slept well past first light, and when he awoke his father was already up. The fire was burning and coffee was on. The father asked him how he slept. “Fine,” he said.

  “I had this dream last night. I can’t really describe it. It was just so real.”

  And somewhere deep in the boy, deep in his ancestral memory, deep in the dreams that were passed on to him from the womb, from his grandfathers, a voice told him he was not to share this dream. Here in this place that was so simple and profound. A place whose story transcended time.

  He noticed the way his father looked at him. An acknowledgement there are some dreams that one cannot share because to even to begin to describe them would be to destroy their magic.

  They returned that morning to Red Cliff, a village of pastel-colored government housing, a burgeoning tribal infrastructure and with its new casino hotel that had yet to make any money. Up the hill above the village to a house built from rough lumber and garage sale windows. To a yard filled with modern reservation art and dead vehicles now used as storage sheds. A boy and his father. A father who has been teaching a son to fish and mend nets and tinker.

  A son who has dreamed.

  THE PEOPLE, THE WHOLE of the nation, had lived on the island for several hundred years. It was a bountiful and magical place because their canoes were within easy distance of the wild rice beds, as well as the hunting and berry picking regions of the mainland. The island was a safe place from enemies. It was the place where they had been told to live by their spiritual people, the whole tribe having followed the sacred megis shell inland from the eastern ocean. Here on Moningwanakining (Place of the Yellow-breasted Woodpecker, Madeline Island) generations of families had raised children, fought wars, and survived in this land.

  And for many thousands of years the young of the tribe had sought visions, because visions gave meaning and purpose to living. Visions answered the “why” questions. And this is why in this time long past, a father had prepared his son for his vision. He had been preparing him for this since he was a young baby. First in the giving of his name, because in the giving of a name was conferred the ability to communicate with the spirit world. Because in the giving of a name was the obligation to pursue the ideals of the name.

  Then when the boy was young his parents fostered in him the importance of observation and listening. He would be put outside in his dikinogan (cradleboard) on warm days and there he would observe the dance of life around him. He learned early in life to recognize the various birds and small creatures—squirrels, moles, and frogs. He learned early their languages and mannerisms. He learned the different sounds of trees and leaves, rushes and grasses and wind. He came to recognize the faces and voices of his father and mother, grandparents, uncles and aunties, and cousins.

  And sometimes they would tell him simple stories, or they would sing to him stories. Sometimes the stories would be silent, pantomime about the animals he had come to know and the stories would tell of their purpose in the greater world. Although he did not know it, all of this was to sharpen his imagination, and to instill in him the ability to dream. Because dreams are a child’s first visions.

  As he grew older he would be asked to describe what he saw and heard in the external world. And in winter he would sit with his cousins and listen to the storytellers. There around the fire they would weave deeper meaning about life through parables, allegories, and songs. Some of these stories would be humorous and laughter would carry out of the wigiwams and over the lake. Some stories would instill fear because it is important that all men know fear. Then he would return to his home in the dark of night and it would seem the stars would wrap around him like an alive blanket. He would go to bed and when he grew tired of reliving the stories in his imagination he would fall sleep.

  And dream.

  Now he had reached puberty, and his father had taken him through purification ceremonies, to the lodge where his body became cleansed by vapors. Then he took him to the place of visions, a nearby island whose collective mood and spirit, whose quiet and aloneness was conducive to thought and reflection, and to dreams.

  Before they left they needed to make repairs to the boat. Heated spruce pitch mixed with ashes to fill a small leak in the birch canoe. While they did this, the father told his son stories. He reminded him of the giving of his name and the importance of living the ideals of the name. Then he handed his son a cedar paddle. “You sit in the rear,” he said. “You steer.”

  The journey to the island of visions was done in silence because to speak would have disturbed the beauty of the place. The wind in their hair. The slap of water against the bow of the canoe. Gulls. To the south lay Chequamegon Bay. To the east and north the deep blue and green of the other islands and the open water. Behind them, the smoke from their village on Moningwanikaning. Together these things told the whole story of this place.

  When they reached shore, the father took his son up a steep incline and down a trail to a lodge he had constructed especially for this journey. And he told him, “This is where you are to think about your purpose here on earth. This is where you ask the ‘why’ questions.”

  In this place the boy was left alone for four days, without food. “Feed your spirit with your visions,” his father had told him. “There is purpose in it.”

  For two nights he did not dream. On the third he had his dream:

  He is standing in the water of a river. A canoe approaches. He recognizes himself in the rear of the canoe but does not know who is sitting in front. Another boy, one dressed in the manner of a tribe he does not recognize. In garments he does not recognize as the hides of any animal he knows. A boy who is not wearing moccasins but whose feet are nonetheless covered with a material he doesn’t recognize. A bo
y with short hair. A boy who could be Ojibwe because he has that look.

  Then he considers himself. How can I be in both places at the same time? he asks himself. How can I be both in the water and the canoe? As the canoe comes near him, he rises out of the water in flight, above the trees. Below, he can see the winding of the river and the canoe on its journey.

  He lands in the water downstream. The canoe approaches again. He flies away. This happens again and again. There seems to be a purpose to it.

  Finally, he flies away from the river to the big lake. Before he leaves them, he says something to his other self and the stranger in the canoe. Something in a language he has heard before but does not completely understand. Something about the past and the future. Something about things never changing and always changing.

  To the islands. Below him on the largest island is the village of the people. He flies over it and lands in the water next to the island of visions.

  The water is calm, and he can see his image in it. He turns his head sideways and looks deep into the image of a bird. A bird with a long beak and feathers and the deep and brooding eyes of one who has seen the past and the future. No longer just a boy, but an echo maker.

  And a man.

  ON THE FOLLOWING TUESDAY, Ron returned to school for another year. The first day back seemed to drag on exceedingly slowly, and he counted his way through it hour by hour. Finally the last class of the day, English, and the teacher asked the students to write a paragraph about something they did during the summer. One of those assignments that has been asked for years, maybe hundreds of years. Maybe more.

  There was an orchestrated chorus of voices, “But I can’t think about anything.”

  “You all must have done something this summer. What about something you did this past weekend?” she replied.

  “Summer sucked.” A mumble almost lost beneath a rustle of paper, pencils tapping, squirming bodies, and shuffling feet.

  The boy was quiet and did not join in the bemoaning of a summer lost. But for most of the class period, he sat with a blank piece of paper in front of him. A slouching eleventh grader too large for the desk he occupied. Wearing a Chicago Blackhawks baseball cap on backwards, a pair of imitation Girbaud’s jeans and no-name basketball shoes. Hair cut in a flat top, no tail. Straight as his mother could cut it. Sitting in the back of the room where all the reservation kids sat.

  A boy who had dreamed.

  In boredom he doodled on his paper, drawing a picture of a canoe and a large bird standing in the water. And he wrote a single sentence and turned it in before the echo of the final bell.

  “This weekend I went camping with my dad.”

  Alice Crow Flies High

  I came to Hull High School (Massachusetts) in September of 1984 as the learning disabilities teacher. I had two days to prepare before school was to begin. At that time I knew nothing of the Nantascots, pre-European residents of that part of Massachusetts, who were Lenape-speaking like my Wampanoag ancestors. Nantascot Beach, a long strip of sand and dunes that was Hull, was named after those ancient people. There certainly must have been times in the past when my Wampanoag ancestors and the Nantascot traded with each other, held council together. I wonder now if I would have looked differently at the community of Hull or of that place in general if I had known of those ancient people.

  My first classroom was a small, windowless space in the lower level of the high school, between the boiler room and janitor’s closet. All the real classrooms had long since been assigned to other “regular” classes. The floor of my new workspace was cement, painted a glossy gray, the walls a lumpy, uneven, government green. The room was lit by several caged 100-watt bulbs, and across the ceiling ran a large insulated heating pipe. Maybe the space had once housed the janitor’s school supplies. It surely had never been designed to be a classroom.

  There was a hodgepodge of tables, several mismatched student desks, and a battered teacher’s desk spun around backward in one corner of the room. A chalkboard was anchored to one of the walls with screws of various sizes. Any ordinary person, just by eyeballing it, would notice it wasn’t level. Two boxes of dusty books sat on the teacher’s desk. There was no paper, pencils, chalk, or erasers. I found a yellow magic marker in the desk drawer, without its cap, dry, abandoned.

  The first thing I did was spit on a paper towel and wipe graffiti off one of the student desks near me. It read:

  “Go f--- yourself.”

  I smiled as I wiped it off, thinking that just a few years ago that could have been my writing on a desk somewhere. My, how times have changed, I remember thinking.

  Then I sat on the edge of my new, old desk for several moments and wondered what in the hell I was doing there. But it didn’t take me long to realize there was no turning back. This was where I was supposed to be, for whatever reason. So I got to work cleaning the place. I borrowed a broom and dust rag from the janitor’s closet down the hall. Then I raided the teachers’ supply room and scrounged some English grammar, composition and literature, math, and science books, books discarded years earlier that were awaiting the dumpster. After that I went to the principal’s “first day back to work” luncheon and met my fellow teachers.

  “Where did they put you?” one of my fellow teachers asked. When I told him, he laughed. I think I laughed too, just for the hell of it. I’m just saying. What in the hell else could I do?

  “I think the football team stored some of their equipment there once,” was the reply.

  But the space I was stuck with was all I had, and it was mine, so I cleaned and scrubbed and devised lesson plans, in perfect Madeline Hunter fashion, just as I had learned as a student in the Teacher Education Department at U Mass, and got myself ready to face my first day of students.

  On the first day, I had five students. Two were Hull locals. One was Vietnamese, and he had spent much of his early life in a refugee camp in Thailand and had been brought to California by a host family. His parents and extended families had somehow ended up in the Boston area, and then in Hull. Another student was Hmong, a tribal people from the highlands of Laos whose men had been recruited as fighters working covertly for the Central Intelligence Agency during the Vietnam War. With the fall of Vietnam and end of the war, some Hmong families had escaped certain persecution. The move from the mountains of Laos to America had suddenly thrust them from the Stone Age into the twentieth century.

  And there was a dark, beautiful girl with raven hair. Her name was Alice Crow Flies High. She had moved with her family to Massachusetts from the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota. Her father had gotten a position as a job developer with the Boston Indian Council.

  I was their new teacher, fresh and full of optimism. My five students were eager learners. After my very first day, I knew I was going to have one hell of a great time. In time, I was assigned three more students. And with each one I would smile at them and extend my hand in friendship and respect.

  “I am Mr. Manypenny, but everyone here calls me Mr. D. You may call me Mr.D if you’d like.

  “The ‘D’ is for my first name, Donovan.”

  That is how I would introduce myself to each year’s group of arriving students. Most would remain in my class through their high school years or until they moved away. They would all attend regular classes as well—mathematics, sciences, business, art, and the vocational arts—but it was in my class at least one period a day, many times two periods, that they would all gather as one group. Here they shared camaraderie and all of the compassion and caring they were willing to accept from me, because somewhere deep inside me I remembered what it was like to be seen as different, or knew what it was like to be rejected or orphaned, or knew what it was like to be judged by my heritage rather than who I was as a person. To each I gave my utmost attention and concern.

  “Chee, how are you doing in your other classes? If you bring me your daily work or homework, I’ll do my best to help you when I can.”

  “Cindy, if you can
stay after a bit this week, I’ll work on that pronunciation with you.”

  “Xia, you need to practice speaking English every day. Every day, Xia. Not just here in this class. When you are with Mai and Yang, speak English. Go ahead and use Hmong when talking to Grandmother and Grandfather and Mother, but practice your English out of school with your Hmong friends. That is how you will learn English.”

  And of course I knew that if there was a teacher for English as a second language, some of my students certainly more appropriately belonged there rather than with me. But I did my best with them, taught them English, or at least I tried.

  And Alice Crow Flies High was one of my favorites, I think, because she was, like me, Native.

  “Alice Crow Flies High, you have a beautiful name. Do you know the story of your name? Can you tell me what it means?”

  When I first asked her this, she just smiled shyly and looked down at the floor, and I told her that someday when she was ready she could tell me about her name.

  By the end of my second year at Hull High School, I had started a Minority Student Club as a way of building a social community for some of my students and as a venue to educate the greater student body and community about the students and cultures. Membership was small in number, rarely over ten students in any given year. But as soon as the group became a recognized school club we began regular fundraisers so the club could hold their own social events. The most popular annual event became the ethnic cooking night, when the students would host a cooking clinic open to a public interested in learning how to make spring rolls and the like. A little known fact to the general public was that many of the students themselves didn’t know much about cooking. Their mothers and grandmothers did most of the cooking in their homes. So they would gather up their family’s favorite easy recipes and bring them to school, oftentimes cooking at the food show for the first time. One time one of my students of African-American heritage got the recipe he used out of the Boston Globe.