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  101 THINGS TO DO WITH AN INDIAN CHIEF

  DISCLAIMER

  The author has never been nor probably ever will be in the employ of the Indian Motorcycle Company. While confessing to being an “Indian” (the feathered, not the dot kind), the author reluctantly admits it is unlikely he will ever own an Indian (the internal combustion variety, the feathered or the dot kind).

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother,

  Fritzie Taylor, who always had time for my stories.

  “Heart breaker, Soul shaker.

  I’ve been told about you.

  Steam roller, midnight stroller.

  What they been sayin’ must be true…

  Now you’re messin’ with a son of a bitch.”

  “Hair of the Dog,”

  Nazareth

  PROLOGUE

  Hey, wanna hear a good story? Supposedly it’s a true one. It’s a long story but it goes something like this…

  Somewhere out there, on a Reserve that is closer than you think but still a bit too far to walk to, lived a young Ojibway boy. Though this is not his story, he is part of it.

  As all good tales do, this one begins far in the past, but not so far back that you would have forgotten about it.

  There was much too much splashing on the lake. It was inconsiderate and downright unfriendly. The minnows were not happy. Same with the perch, the rockfish, and especially the lone sunfish that called the water near the two sunken cedar trees his home. The other fish were just passing through, but for the sunfish this was a serious intrusion of privacy. Those creatures from above the waterline had been there all afternoon creating havoc. And the sunfish hated havoc. It was counter-productive to a sunfish’s life.

  For unfathomable reasons, these large, rude, scaleless air-breathing things had jumped off his half-buried trees, creating a lingering cloud of silt. The other fish had left, looking for quieter spots to contemplate the age-old aquatic question, whether the lake was half full, or half empty. But this was the sunfish’s home, and he watched from a distance as the creatures splashed and dove as if they owned the place. There was nothing he could do. He was just a sunfish and they were people. And occasionally, people ate sunfish. It’s hard to lodge a complaint given that balance of power.

  Besides, there was something familiar about the man. The sunfish was sure he had come across him, but where, the sunfish couldn’t say.

  The woman, barely into the second half of her teens, swam naked through the water. As the man, a tad older but also naked, watched her, he thought about who had made this creature. Certain cultures believed the Creator made man in His own image—but the Anishnawbe language was not hung up on gender. If the Creator had made this woman in Her own image She was an astonishingly beautiful five-foot-six, lean, Anishnawbe woman. The dappled sunlight, the smell of pine and cedar, the tingling feel of the cool clear lake. It doesn’t get much better than this, he thought. And he’d been around. Wherever around was, he’d been there. Twice. And had long ago lost the T-shirt.

  The two had been there all afternoon, and if either could have had their way, they would have been there forever. But that was not to be.

  “What are you thinking?” came the female voice across the water, speaking in an ancient language.

  He just smiled.

  “No. Tell me. What are you thinking?”

  The man pondered for a moment, but, just as he was about to speak, he dove into the water quick as a dragonfly. Treading water, hair spread, she scanned the surface of the lake in all directions. Becoming anxious, she called out to him. “Stop that. Come back.” But the only response was a nearby loon’s call. She began to panic. No one could hold their breath that long. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a hawk make its way across the sky. The loon, mirroring her concern, called again.

  “Hey!” she yelled, and then, “Hey, where…?” Suddenly she was gone. Silence returned, and the hawk eyed the bubbles rising to the surface.

  Two human bodies came crashing through the surface, gasping for air, and then exploding with laughter.

  “I scared you, didn’t I?” the man asked roguishly. The light cutting through the forest canopy dappled on the man’s face and danced in his brown eyes.

  The girl, wiping the hair back from her face, muttered, “I hate it when you do things like that. What are you, half fish?”

  “On occasion.”

  The girl back-paddled a metre or so away from the man. “Say you’re sorry.”

  “What?”

  “Say you’re sorry. Now.”

  The man was perplexed. “Or what?”

  “Oh, nothing. I just want you to say you’re sorry.”

  “All right, if it will make you happy. I am sorry. I am so sorry.” The man was now yelling. “I AM SO INCREDIBLY SORRY! How’s that?” His voice echoed across the water and back again, gradually growing more distant. “Hear that? That makes me three times as sorry.”

  The girl smiled. “Thank you. It’s not often you find a man who takes orders so easily.”

  Swimming closer, the man rolled over onto his back. “You’ll find I’m a little different from most men… You know, this is how sea otters eat. They put clams and crabs and things like that on their stomach, and crack them open with a rock, using their bellies like a big wooden kitchen table.”

  “What are sea otters?”

  “Oh, they live way out west, in the ocean. You know what an ocean is?” The girl nodded. “They are kind of like the otters around here, only different. And have funny moustaches.”

  “Otters have moustaches? Like White people?” The girl watched the man float lazily around her. “You’re lying. You have to be. The things you’ve told me. But I love your story about squirrels that can fly. You’ve travelled a lot, haven’t you?”

  “A bit. Here and there, and they don’t fly, silly, they glide.”

  “This is going to be my first trip anywhere. I’ve never been more than a few hours’ walk from home,” she said.

  The man started treading. His eyes forced their way into hers. “Then don’t go.”

  The girl looked away. “I don’t have a choice.”

  “Everybody has a choice.”

  The secluded bay grew a little chillier and the girl trembled in the water. “You don’t know White people. They don’t take no for an answer. My parents tried but…”

  The man wasn’t listening. “There’s supposed to be a thunderstorm tomorrow. A big one.”

  “There is? How do you know?”

  “I just do. I know how much you love thunderstorms, with the lightning criss-crossing the sky, and the booming thunder shaking the cups in your mother’s cupboard.”

  “It’s like the sky is waking everybody up.”

  “Well, this one is supposed to be the biggest of the summer.”

  “How do you…”

  “I just do. I had to call in a few favours, though. There’s that place up at the top of Bear Hill, where we can sit and watch. The lightning will leave us alone. We have an agreement, the lightning and I.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  He took her hand. “I’m not being silly. We can sit there all night, watching it. It will be our storm.”

  The girl struggled to answer the man. “I can’t. You know that.”

  The man, now silent and brooding, looked away. His eyes were on the far shore, and yet they weren’t. “If you loved me…”

  “I do, but…”

  Now the girl was getting anxious. This was not how she wanted to spend their final day together. Tomorrow she would be sent away to be educated in one of those big places White people liked to build. Older than most of the local kids sent off, she’d managed to remain hid
den from the White man’s so-called education. But her father had died, and her mother had seven other kids to feed, and she worked all the time. So, being the oldest, she was a prime candidate for the school. The local on-Reserve school had taught her to read and speak English. But it could only take kids so far, which is why the Canadian government had built these other schools where their welfare would be better maintained than on a Reserve.

  Manifest Destiny, as the White people to the south believed, dictated that this little Anishnawbe girl be removed from her home and sent away to be taught about the Battle of Hastings, dangling participles, and how to draw a pie chart. For a year or two anyway. Starting tomorrow. And this man, who’d come into her life a few months ago, was about to be left behind.

  “It’s your new boyfriend, isn’t it. What do women see in him?” the man asked.

  “He’s not my new boyfriend. He’s just some guy. Don’t be angry. With me or him.”

  The man was silent. Then he hauled himself out of the water and sat on the log running perpendicular to the shore. He looked troubled, and frustrated.

  The girl continued. “Everybody says he’s great, and really smart. He can do all sorts of fancy tricks and things.”

  “So can I.”

  Slowly, the girl swam toward the man. She reached out and caressed his leg, trying to restore his playful mood. “I know. But this guy has lots and lots of friends in high places, all over the world. He’s one of the reasons we’re being sent off to this place. Everybody talks about him.”

  Growing glummer, the man moved his leg away from the young girl’s caresses.

  “Everybody used to talk about me. Now they talk about him. I don’t understand. What’s he got that I don’t. He’s so depressing. What’s his name again?”

  “… Jesus.”

  “What kind of name is that?” The man shook his head.

  “He comes from far away and he’s very nice. You should meet him.”

  The man had been hearing of this guy for quite some time. He kept getting more and more popular, and the man couldn’t figure out why.

  “I don’t play well with other children,” he countered.

  “Don’t be like that—”

  “I thought you’d stay here. With me. But you don’t care. Nobody cares. Choose that guy then. I don’t care.”

  Once again, the man dove deep into the water, a fair distance from the girl. Far beneath the surface, the sunfish saw him disappear into the weeds, swimming like he’d been born under water.

  “Don’t go!” cried the girl as she swam to the spot where the man had disappeared.

  This time, he didn’t reappear. The girl dove under the water, her eyes frantically searching for him. Finally, her lungs bursting, she crawled ashore.

  “Come back! Don’t leave!” The girl cried out and her voice bounced across the lake, only to echo back. “I don’t want to go…” She wiped her eyes.

  The next day the girl went to school.

  And the man… now that’s an interesting story too. But later.

  ONE

  The first day she arrived she knew she wouldn’t like it. The place was cold and drafty. The clothes they made her wear were hot and itchy. They didn’t fit well at all, and all the girls had to wear the exact same thing. The boys, situated at the opposite end of the building, were not allowed to talk to the girls. Brothers weren’t allowed to interact with sisters, cousins and so on. Only the People in Black, otherwise known as the Nuns and the Priests, were allowed to talk to each other. To the young girl, these people had nothing interesting to say. And what they did say was usually not very nice. And what they did was sometimes even worse.

  Those with darker skin who were not yet adults and free of this mandatory education called it the Angry Place. Still, she put up with it. It had taken a long time to get here and she instinctively knew it would take her a much longer time to get home. Wherever that was—she had no idea if it was north, south, east or west. It was just far away. As soon as she arrived, she was told stories of one of the girls trying to run away. She wasn’t the type to break the rules like that. Instead, she decided to deal with the present by concentrating on the past and the future: remembering the family she had just left, and imagining the family that she would someday have.

  Sister Agnes had christened the girl Lillian. As soon as she had arrived, they told her that her Anishnawbe name was not to be uttered anymore. Her old name became her secret that she kept close to her—so close, she would seldom speak it aloud. Her grandmother had given it to her a decade and a half ago. In this place, words other than English or Latin were unchristian and those who used them were punished severely. So, she became Lillian.

  The girl worked hard to learn their language better. She was an average student, but critical, often wondering to herself why she should care about a train leaving Toronto, travelling at eighty kilometres an hour. She outwardly learned to respect this place— but was suspicious of it. An incident just before bed on her second day there had planted that seed. In fact, it made her doubt the whole enterprise. She and Betty, a newly made friend, had discovered that their mothers had the same name—and they had found this hilarious, falling into an uncontrollable fit of the giggles. Out of nowhere, Sister Agnes appeared. She scolded, “Stop that this second.”

  The girls looked at each other, uncertain. Betty, who had always kept on the sister’s good side, asked meekly, “What is it, Sister?”

  “Stop that laughing—it is rude and not acceptable in a house of God such as this.”

  This, of course, made the girls laugh all the harder. What kind of a place was this? Not a day, or more like it, an hour went by at home when Lillian didn’t hear her mother break into loud guffaws. It was what Lillian loved best about her. Oftentimes (more often than not) these White people made no sense at all.

  “Did you hear about Sam?” whispered Rose, one night, about a year after Lillian had arrived. Rose was the only one of them who had managed to pick up a smattering of Latin during the many church services they were forced to attend. As a result, most considered her the People in Black’s pet. All the girls were kneeling by their cots saying their prayers. In an attempt to curry favour with her fellow inmates—though she maintained that she didn’t know that much Latin—Rose would often tell them what was going on.

  “No,” said Lillian. “What about Sam?” Sam Aandeg was from her community, one of the only familiar faces here, though they spoke only about once a month. She was related to Sam through her mother’s first cousin—and he had a rebellious streak. When he arrived he’d bitten a Nun attempting to shave his head. That was seven years ago, and time and repeated punishments had not managed to subdue him.

  “He’s in trouble again!”

  “Why?” Lillian asked, kneeling by the cot next to Rose’s.

  The girl whispered, “The usual. Being mouthy. He’s in the shed. And Father McKenzie won’t let him leave until he can memorize all the monologues in that stupid play. He’ll probably be there overnight.”

  “Again!” she said. Lillian had taken to caring for her way ward cousin, knowing his nature was instinctively to wade against the current of any river. But one did not wade against the current of the Angry Place. “Well, it’s a good thing the mosquitoes are gone,” she told Rose. “Like sitting in that shed is going to change anything. He should know better.” Secretly, though, she admired his resistance. Indian boys and girls who misbehaved spent a lot of time in the shed, Sam more than most. Some people might not see the connection between placing defenceless children in confined spaces for prolonged periods of time and any particular passages in the Bible. Perhaps the People in Black reasoned that Christ had spent those couple of weeks in the desert, trying to figure things out and come up with a life plan. It had worked for Him. It should, in theory, work for these savages too. It was, they believed, a win-win situation.

  So there sat Sam, a copy of a four-hundred-year-old play, which he struggled to read, on his lap. For most
of the day in October, the shed was way too dark to read in. Still, boredom made unwitting readers of the most stubborn students. On clear nights when the moon was waxing, a narrow diagonal strip of light fell across the dirt floor. If the resourceful penitent placed the book just right, he could sometimes make out passages in the moonlight.

  Memorizing sections of this play was no problem. He came by it naturally. Though consensus in the big brick building was that Sam was unintelligent and a problem student/child/Indian, he was actually very smart. And he wilfully refused to give Father McKenzie and the rest the satisfaction of knowing this. “To be or not to be, that is the question,” he read aloud.

  Sam liked this question. He, and practically every student in the building, could understand the quandary. Many wrestled with it every day. Some won. Some lost—but there were always more arriving to fill their places.

  It was too cold to sleep, and the growling from his stomach kept him awake. Gradually he dragged the book across the dirt floor, struggling to read in the shifting patterns of moonlight.

  His lone voice broke the silence. One line, after the monologue in Act 1, Scene iv, caught his eye. “‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.’”

  Boy, he thought, I don’t know what or where the hell this Denmark is but it can’t smell nearly as bad as this place. Denmark would have to be an improvement.

  “Sam! Wake up! Sam Aandeg! Hurry and wake up!”

  Amazingly, Sam had managed to fall asleep sometime before dawn, worn down by the cold and strain of trying to read in the darkness. The book had been his pillow. It was a few moments before he could manage a response to his cousin’s tense knocking on the shed’s splintered wall.

  “What!” he snapped groggily. He tried to unroll from a fetal position, but couldn’t. Waking up in this place was painful. He longed for his bed back home.

  “It’s me, Lillian. You okay?”

  All he could make out was one brown eye peering through a gap, and a bit of the plain grey dress she, like all the girls, wore.