Solar Storms

by Linda Hogan

  The room was already smoky, buzzing.

  I went over to talk to Mrs. Lampier. Aurora’s eyes followed me.

  I saw the young man approach Tulik. “Let me show you their plans,” he said. “Here are the proposed sites for the dam.” He pointed at the map on the wall. Tulik stepped closer to it. Some areas were outlined in blue, other sections were covered with blue stripes that looked as if they could have been the shadows of trees across winter whiteness. The map showed the dried riverbed above us where water had once flowed, where they had diverted the Child River into a bay. Now they wanted to move the Salt River. To do so, they had to create a new riverbed. Then they would narrow the river into the new bed a bit at a time, move it to where, finally, they could control it. The magnitude of their proposed changes was almost beyond imagining.

  It was warm. I removed my sweater and handed it to Dora-Rouge to hold. Auntie circulated the petition and a pen. I watched her. With each person she approached, she would offer a touch of her hand, would explain patiently what it was that she wanted them to sign. A faded square of light was on the thigh of her jeans, on Bush’s, too, I noticed, as if that faded place marked a sisterhood. In a way, it did.

  The hydroelectric proposal was so unbelievable in its conception that everyone thought it must surely have been exaggerated. The people from near Child River hadn’t believed, at first, what the two young men had told them, but they woke one morning to the sound of machines in the distance. They were now worried about what other construction might be in the works. No one trusted the government and corporation officials. And why should they? They were clearly in cahoots and would go to unethical lengths to get what they wanted. And when the officials and attorneys spoke, their language didn’t hold a thought for the life of water, or a regard for the land that sustained people from the beginning of time. They didn’t remember the sacred treaties between humans and animals. Our words were powerless beside their figures, their measurements, and ledgers. For the builders it was easy and clear-cut. They saw it only on the flat, two-dimensional world of paper.

  As I sat thinking about the million-dollar dreams of officials, governments, and businesses, thinking about the lengths to which they would go, my mind drifted off to water, to wetness itself, and how I’d wanted so often to hold my breath and remain inside the water that springs from earth and rains down from the sky. Perhaps it would tell me, speak to me, show me a way around these troubles. Water, I knew, had its own needs, its own speaking and desires. No one had asked the water what it wanted. Except Dora-Rouge, that is, who’d spoken with it directly.

  As the oldest man there, and as a judge, Tulik was the person the dam-building, water-changing men seemed to address. The contractor and project boss, a tall, lanky white man, shook hands with him, but said, as if to excuse himself, “We were hired to do this.” He said this as if he were certain the project would go through, and as if we would understand that he had no choice; this was his job. He wanted us to understand, or perhaps, forgive. He did seem sorry, I thought, but his words made clear that if the corporation and government had their ways, the Indian people had no say on this matter, no power to reverse what had already been decided by men with other ways, men in other rooms and houses of law, men with other skins.

  Auntie stood up to speak. “We’ve been here for thousands of years.” Her hands shook with anger. “We don’t want your dams.” She sounded calmer than she looked and I was proud of her. She sounded just good! But after she spoke her strong words, the man called us remnants of the past and said that he wanted to bring us into the twentieth century. My stomach turned at his words, a sick feeling inside me. He, like the others, believed that we were ignorant. It hadn’t occurred to those men that Tulik knew every plant and its use, knew the tracks of every animal, and was a specialist in justice and peace. Or that Mr. Dinn, a neighbor of Tulik’s, was a knife maker and a weather predictor. Luce was an intellectual, more well-read than they were or even their wives. Auntie a snow-shoe maker, a trapper. To the white men who were new here, we were people who had no history, who lived surrounded by what they saw as nothingness. Their history had been emptied of us, and along with us, of truth.

  Auntie picked up the petition and handed it to him. “This is all of us. Our names. We don’t want your electricity. We got along fine without it.” Then she went over to the lightbulb and pulled the string, shutting off the light. The room faded into dark blue shadows with little squares of outdoor light coming in the windows. The wooden chairs that were set up in the church, even those that held people, suddenly looked lonely, standing at sad, strange angles, the floor dusty and gray. The people were silent for a few moments.

  Soon a buzzing anger filled the room wall-to-wall. “That’s right,” said our former landlady, Mrs. Lampier. She was large and smoking and going to be argumentative. She put the case with her cigarettes and lighter on Dora-Rouge’s lap and stood up to speak. She said, “We want to choose the way we live. I came here because I wanted this life. I don’t want strangers coming in here and telling us what is going to happen to us.”

  The man folded the petition and put it in his pocket. Auntie’s name was at the top of the list. “There aren’t enough names on your petition.” He looked at it, tallying. He was sharp; he didn’t miss an opportunity. “That’s another reason why we need to build the dams. More people than just you need this power. You are just a small portion of the people who will benefit.”

  Auntie, angrier now, placed her bag on Dora-Rouge’s lap.

  “What do I look like, a shelf?” Dora-Rouge said.

  I don’t think anyone else heard her, and I tried not to grin in the midst of such serious business.

  Auntie said to the man, “You’ve already built a road across the spawning grounds of the whitefish. They’ll die from that road. You did it without our permission.” What she didn’t say, and what none of us knew yet, was that there were young men outside who, by Auntie’s ordain, were taking apart the road, shovelful by shovelful, opening the way for the fish to journey toward the future.

  And almost as soon as she spoke, as if she’d conjured them, the group of young Indian men, finished with their work, came into the meeting. They stood in the back of the church. They listened quietly. They smelled of earth. What they were thinking could be read on their faces: they would die to save this land. There were many with that look, Dora-Rouge among them, and Auntie. Me, I was still unfamiliar with history and law. I wondered if maybe my own people weren’t being too headstrong. Wouldn’t it be better to have new schools and a clinic and jobs? Those things, I learned later, had always been promised, seldom delivered.

  When Tulik spoke, he said, “What could be better than what we now have? We have food. We have animals. We grow our own gardens. We have everything. For us, this is better than what you offer.”

  “You can’t keep that petition,” Auntie said to the man. He pretended not to hear her.

  Aurora slept quietly in Dora-Rouge’s warm lap next to Auntie’s bag, my sweater, Bush’s jacket, Mrs. Lampier’s cigarettes, and a tablet with Cree writing on it from a man who thought that if he wrote in English or French, the officials would read it. Hearing Tulik speak, Aurora began to make a fuss and Tulik lifted her from Dora-Rouge’s arms. As always when he held her, she became quiet. But I could see right away that this lost him points in the white men’s book. Tenderness was not a quality of strength to them. It was unmanly, an act they considered soft and unworthy. From that moment on they seemed not to consider Tulik to be a leader of his people. After that, they addressed all the men at the same time. They barely heard when Auntie, who really was the person in charge, said, “Never. Never will we let you do this.”

  Even if the white men didn’t pay attention to Auntie, the young Indian men did. They loved her.

  Walking home that night, I looked toward the direction of Ammah’s Island. I thought about the land. These men would do anything to take it, change it, and make it fit their wants and dreams. A
golf course would break apart the holy ground, a hunting lodge for those few monied men to come for trophies. Above all, they were certain they would win in this game of their creation. And we, the people there, were certain we would do anything to keep the land alive. These were two things that made for a dangerous situation, things that had made the room, though wood, seem to be constructed of thin glass, breakable with any quick movement, any sharp sound.

  On our way home that gray night, the outdoor lights, not yet needed, were glowing from the slanting wooden poles. I knew darkness had its beauty and was, in every respect, less costly.

  In the silence of Tulik’s house that night, while I listened to the others breathe, I wished Tesla were alive, the man Husk had told me about as he read through a book of the inventor’s patents. I’d seen a photo of Tesla in one of Husk’s magazines. The man sat writing in a large room, lightning flying all around him in the background. When Tesla held lightning in his palm, the sound of thunder broke from a false sky. Without wires, Tesla could send power over the world, turn night into day, remove our fears and silences, turn them away with dawn. According to John Husk, Tesla could collapse a building with nothing more than vibration and resonance, could split earth, destroy the Brooklyn Bridge. He knew turbines and force fields and generators. He knew how to do all this at no cost. No one would profit from that kind of power. No one would steal. Tesla had known a force, a cosmic and earthbound power, a stunning light.

  A FEW NIGHTS LATER, one of the BEEVCO bosses arrived to negotiate with the leaders at Two-Town Post. I looked around the room, at the people who had lived there for so long, people with knowledge and with roots deeper than time. To the builders of dams we were dark outsiders whose lives had no relevance to them. They ignored our existence until we resisted their dams, or interrupted their economy, or spoiled their sport. We’d already seen the results of the orange-capped hunters who had no need for meat.

  Auntie yelled at them. “So you can fish for sport! For this! And your golf courses! And electric wires. We won’t do it!” Bush, behind Auntie, put her finger in Auntie’s belt loop and pulled her back into the chair. “Pipe down,” she said, quietly and with a glint in her eye, admiration for Auntie’s fire, because Auntie said what others kept quiet.

  Reversing the truth, they would call us terrorists. If there was evil in the world, this was it, I thought. Reversal. Some of us, less strong than Auntie, thought we should sign the papers, sell the land, accept compensation. I understood this, too, because everything was in short supply there. And some thought so because they believed the government would do what it wanted, anyway. It was inevitable, they said. Maybe they were right.

  “Why don’t you do something about your daughter,” one man said to Tulik that night.

  Then it was Bush, an outsider, who stood and spoke, “Why are only white laws followed? This will kill the world. What is the law if not the earth’s?” This from Bush, the woman I’d always thought so silent. She had a voice, one certain and insistent, true and clear. I was proud of her.

  A FEW NIGHTS LATER, in the dark house filled with breathing and dreams, a night when deep sleep came over me, I floated downward like an animal in mud, held in darkness by something I couldn’t escape. Out of the silence of that sinking, Mika began to bark and run toward the door. There was noise, and then an unnatural light flooded Tulik’s house, a light harsh and white, and the sounds of machines seemed to crash through the very walls. Mika was at the door, barking fiercely.

  I jumped to my feet, my heart pounding. “Tulik!” I shouted. “Something’s wrong!” I felt the pulse in my temples. Auntie, too, flew out of her bed, threw on her robe. In the hard, white light, her shadow was thrown back onto the wall like a large, winged bird, her hair wild, the yellow bathrobe the wings she pulled together.

  Outside Tulik’s house were a bulldozer, two trucks, a backhoe, and a number of men. The little house was surrounded by workers and lights so bright that an unreal glare cast ominous double shadows along the walls.

  Grandson’s face was white and pale. He cried and rubbed his eyes. Aurora screamed.

  Auntie threw the door wide open. She couldn’t see the workers for the light. “What are you doing!” she yelled at them. Her voice was rough. “Get out of here!”

  They stood protected behind the assault and shield of light. Auntie, as she squinted, waved her hand impatiently, as if it had the force to push them back toward town, back into the south, back as far as they would go, even into their own distant past. But she looked vulnerable, hair out of place, the robe wrinkled, one side of the hem still turned up.

  “Shit,” she said, closing the door. “It’s like being poached.” She lighted a cigarette and pulled the curtains over the windows.

  Tulik remained calm. He combed his hair slowly, carefully, and washed his face. He was a smart and dignified man. He knew that they would not tolerate human weakness; he’d observed what his care for Aurora had cost him at the meeting because with Tulik nothing went unnoticed. He had seen how they felt, to them even sleep was weakness, a human failing. Then, slowly, he went to the door and stood a moment as the light spilled in across the floor like a flood. He didn’t squint. Then he walked toward them.

  “Don’t go, Grandpa!” said Grandson.

  But he went toward the idling machines. The smell of exhaust filled the house.

  They were afraid of Auntie, I thought. I looked at her, vulnerable from sleep, the rumpled yellow robe wrapped around her.

  Outside that one door, I understood, were all the cut-down trees and torn-apart land. Starvation and invasions were there, in the shape of yellow machines. The men were shielded inside their machines’ metal armor, certain nothing could touch them, not in any part of themselves, certain that this was progress. They would tear the land apart and break down our lives. It would be done. It would be finished and over. It takes so little, so remarkably little to put an end to a life, even to a people.

  Aurora cried in terror. The air sparked with a volatile tension—the loud machines, the unreal light, the fear and anger that welled up in us in waves so strong it made me sick; I felt the beginning of hate. This was the worst thing, I knew later, learning to hate. I thought I had hated before, families, social workers, people who had hurt me, even my own possessed and damaging mother, but this was another kind of hatred, one that would lay itself down inside me a bit at a time throughout my life, like a poison with no antidote. Some of us would hit and cut ourselves, rage, or swallow their bottled spirits, be fed only bitterness from the dark bowl of history. And I hated what those men could do to us, what they would do, what they did. In their light full with the moving specks of dust, we would all be changed forever.

  I held Mika back. She snarled and strained toward them, barking, her teeth exposed.

  I could just make out the men, hazy as ghosts. They had pulled a wild card and were going to play it all the way through. They knew that if they waited long enough, we would resist. We knew if we fought back, we’d be destroyed. Nothing had changed since the Frenchman, Radisson, passed through and wrote in his journal that there was no one to stop them from taking what they wanted from this land. “We were caesars,” he wrote, “with no one to answer to.”

  We were the no one.

  From the south, someone ran toward us. “Tulik!” It was Bush. She came into the house, looking over her shoulder at the machines and light. “Jesus,” she said. “What’s going on here?”

  She had come to tell us that they were digging, that there were other machines up at the Two Thieves River. The workers labored quickly and through the night to get as much work done as they could before we could find a way to stop them. They had already chained and felled some of the older trees and moved the rock outcroppings with blasts and a bulldozer. And later they would not stop even when ordered by law. What could anyone do? they reasoned. What would happen to them even if they broke the law? A contempt-of-court citation? A small fine? They could afford that. The work would contin
ue. They believed they would win.

  At Tulik’s house, these men were only a small part of a work shift, the part intended to keep us off their backs over at Two Thieves. “This must be a ploy,” Bush said, catching her breath. They knew we wouldn’t leave the house with them there, their threatening presence.

  “Two Thieves is the place where the pelicans nest,” said Luce, as she washed her face with a wet cloth, and then peered out the window into the light.

  Auntie put coffee grounds in the percolator. Agitated, she moved quickly, going to the shelf of folded diapers, grabbing several, and with shaking hands put them into a plastic bag. “Angel, you and Aurora are going fishing today. Get ready.”

  “Fishing?” I watched her toss a bottle into the bag. “What are you talking about?”

  She took some food and formula from the kitchen and set them on the table. “Here, Angel. Put these in the bag.”

  “Fishing?” I was confused. I moved slowly. “Why fishing?”

  “Do what I say!” Auntie yelled. She lit another cigarette. Her hands were shaking.

  Bush said, “Angel, she’s right. Get dressed and leave.”

  I did as I was told. I thought there must be a secret message in this. That’s how it was said, as if I would know by instinct what was meant. All I knew was that they wanted me out of the house. It was only later that I understood: these men were capable of anything. Aurora and I were the future, and above all we were to be protected, sheltered. Grandson, too, but he was from there and he would remain there; he needed to learn and see. This was his past; it was his future.