Keeper'n Me (2 page)

But the further and further you get into this country the more and more the feeling of mystery starts to surround you. Kinda like that cliff is the signpost to another world and I guess maybe this is another world. Not Another World like the soap opera my ma watches every time we hit Winnipeg, although there's been a few episodes around here'd be good watchin' sometime, but another world where things like time and moving and
living itself are diff'rent. It's a feeling more than anything. Nothing you can reach out and put your finger on, but if you spend any time at all up here wandering around you can feel it start to work on your bones. Pay attention and you feel it slipping through your car windows driving up here. People that live here get used to that feeling of mystery and magic but not many outside people visit White Dog unless they got business and frankly, we like it that way. Maybe it's just the pure wild spirit of this land seeping through, I don't know, but it sure beats the hell out anything I ever saw or felt before. Every now and again you'll see moose way off in the marshes or bears skipping outta view in the berry patches and Keeper'n me seen a cougar one time too. Just a flash like a well-tanned deer hide through the trees and gone. No wonder Ojibways called cougars bush ghosts. They're a part of the mystery too.

There's a small band of Ojibways that call White Dog home and have for a few hundred years now accordin' to my ma. It's home to me too now but I was gone for a long, long time, kinda lost in the outside world. Most people never hearda the Ojibway. Probably because we never raided wagon trains or got shot offa horses by John Wayne. The Ojibways' big claim to fame is a few centuries back when we chased the Sioux outta Minnesota. Had some kinda squabble over territory and we ended up putting them to rout and chased them out onto the plains where they raided wagon trains and got shot off their horses by The Duke. Yeah, right outta the
backwoods and into the movies. You'd think they'd be grateful but they're still pissed about that. Every now and then at a pow-wow some Ojibway will tell a Sioux that the only way they can recognize them is from behind. Or they'll be sharing deer hunting stories around a campfire one night and an Ojibway will describe a deer running through the bush faster'n the east end of a westbound Sioux. It's all in fun and nobody gets offended but them Sioux take a lotta pride in their warrior tradition and they don't talk too much about their bush days anymore. Nobody ever hearda that tussle on accounta it all happened before the whiteman got here. Funny thing about them white historians is they always figure North American history started when Columbus landed here. Us we know better. The Ojibway people have been bush Indians forever and kinda settled into northern Ontario long before Columbus even hearda Columbus.

Sociologists call us hunting and gathering Indians. Or else northern woodlands people or something like that. Us we just call ourselves Anishanabe. Means the good people in Ojibway. Most of our history's about fishing, hunting and trapping on accounta that's what we do. Or at least that's what we did before “the settlement of North America” as the books say. Nowadays there's still a lotta that happening but no one's making a living off it anymore. Most of the time there's just welfare. Every once in a while the government will surprise the hell outta everyone and give us work cutting scrub
timber or something. A few jobs are created by the band council once in a while too and the American tourists fly in to hire guides, but it's mostly a poor reserve with not lots to do for people used to the fast pace of the outside world. Took me a long time to get used to walking down to the dock behind my ma's place on winter mornings, chopping a hole in the ice and hauling up the day's water in a five-gallon lard pail. Or even hanging my wool socks up to dry on the pipes of the pot-bellied stove that heats the place or worse yet, making the forty-yard dash to the outhouse through the pourin' rain. Things like that are just facts of life around here and you get used to it and pretty soon you discover that you'd really rather live like this anyway. Ma says she's seen too many families get split apart by the “electircal invasion” as she puts it. It's true. I've been here five years and I learned more about things than I woulda if we had electricity and TV. You get to know each other pretty good when all you got is each other for entertainment. Guess that's the strongest point about this reserve and the people here. Even though we're poor we still got spirit and heart and we look out for each other. Lotsa other places can't say that.

My name's Garnet Raven. The Raven family's been a fixture on the White Dog Reserve ever since they signed Treaty Three across the northern part of Ontario in the 1870s. Raven's also the name of one of our people's messengers in the animal world, so I guess old Keeper telling me I was supposed to be some kind of a storyteller's gotta make some sense. I don't know. But ever since I've
been here I've been listening to what that old guy's been telling me and pretty much trying to do what he says and it's all worked out fine. So who am I to argue?

I live here with my ma. We've got a small cabin on the west end of the townsite. This reserve's built on the shore of White Dog Lake and it's the kind of rocky, bushy territory you'd expect. So the houses are all spread apart and built on top of rocky little hills. They're not houses like city folk are used to. They're just small one-story jobbies with maybe four rooms that all empty into the main room where the stove is. Not much insulation, and some of the poorer people here still use clear plastic instead of glass on their windows. The townsite's called that on accounta the band office, school, medical building, store and garage are all clustered around the only clear, flat place around. There's about half a dozen houses down there where the only electricity and telephones are. That's where the chief and a few band councillors live along with the white teachers from the school and Doc Tacknyk and Mrs. Tacknyk, our Ukrainian medical team. There's a ball diamond that doubles as the pow-wow grounds four days every summer, a boarded hockey rink with a couple of rickety light poles, and a small aluminum trailer where the Ontario Provincial Police sit drinking coffee the few times they get out this way. Ma's cabin sits above the end of the dirt track that serves as the main drag out here. Beyond us is just bush trails leading to other houses deeper in the woods near Shotgun Bay.

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.