Sins of Our Fathers (9781571319128)

by Otto, Shawn Lawrence

  It was dark when he fired up the wild rice truck and she came down from her house, and he felt almost as if he were going on a date in high school.

  “Hi,” she said as she got into the truck. She had on a beaded leather jacket, and she wore boots over her skinny jeans. Her diamond stud earrings glittered in the dashboard lights. She gave him a smile and swiped her hair off her cheek. “You ready for this?” She raised an eyebrow—she was wearing dark eyeliner—and her smile was skeptical, as if she thought he was in for something that he might not be able to handle.

  “Yeah,” he said, shifting into reverse. “New experience.”

  “You’ve been getting a lot of them lately.” She turned the Clapton on and cranked up the volume. “Let’s rock it white-man style,” she said, holding up two fists and snapping her fingers.

  “You think that’s white-man style?”

  “Oh love,” she sang along with Clapton, but even more sentimentally.

  “Shut up,” he said, and turned it off. “You’re spoiling it.”

  She laughed and clapped her hands in delight. He knew how to be teased. She was ready for a fun evening. JW followed Mona’s instructions and headed up over the hill past her house, a direction he’d taken only once before.

  Ten miles down the dark winding road, the community center sat on a hill overlooking Waterfowl Lake. He parked the truck in a close-cropped field just east of the center. As they stepped out of the truck, JW looked up to see stars so thick and a sky so black that his balance left him and he grabbed the truck bed for support. The whole field seemed to lose its earth and sail like a ship through the heavens. He felt sewn into things, a part of the firmament. He passed the tailgate, came together with Mona, and felt her warm dry hand slip into his.

  “It’s pretty awesome, huh?” She said.

  “Yeah.”

  They flowed together through the ether. Stars had always had the power to do that to him, but tonight, out here with Mona, the effect was somehow enhanced. A warm breeze lifted his hair and washed his cheeks. Beat-up old Toyotas and Buicks rumbled and bumped into the hayfield, their headlights casting yellow beams that bobbed around them as if they were at a drive-in movie.

  The building looked like a giant spaceship from a science fiction double feature, or a sculpture of some sort in Minneapolis. Ground-set floodlights lit a long architectural wing of stacked flagstone and glass that shot northward like an arrow toward Waterfowl Lake. On the south end was a large round structure in the shape of a gigantic drum. Jutting out from it was a corner of stone and glass that reached toward a wetland and the distant tribal fire station a hundred yards beyond. JW recognized the fire truck and tanker from a week ago, glowing in the yellow light that emanated from open garage doors.

  The entry reached out toward them with a long thick wood portico and a walkway of enormous stone tiles. As they walked in through the new glass doors to a sweeping atrium, JW could hear drums. The room had high clerestory windows that glistened with stars. Hidden lights wrapped gently over the red-hued wooden posts and beams, and the blue and maroon and ochre of the artwork. Stacked gray flagstones made up some of the walls, and he felt as though he were a frog on the bottom of a great pond.

  They turned down a smaller hallway that was lined with wide walls of wood panels hung with the tanned pelts of moose and deer and wolf. Old black-and-white photos of Indians were interspersed among the pelts, and display cases contained beaded leather jackets and feathered memorabilia. A well-lit wall farther down was completely covered with hundreds of framed eight-by-ten photos of tribal members who had served in the various branches of the United States Armed Forces since World War II. JW looked at the names, but there was no apparent order.

  “People are encouraged to move them around,” Mona said. “They put them by other relatives. The whole wall slowly organizes itself according to our living clans. That way we can see how we are all connected, and we don’t forget the ones who died or are missing.”

  JW nodded and she led him on. The drums were louder here, and people were passing them from behind. They turned a corner and she pulled him toward double doors opening into a loud and crowded gymnasium.

  The bleachers were full and buzzing. The yellow painted concrete block wall was emblazoned with a single word in blue letters: Perseverance. Near the center of the room, four men beat a traditional moose-hide drum that was about three feet in diameter. They wore ribbon shirts, which looked like Western-style golf shirts with ribbons hanging from the shoulder yokes and buttons that only went down partway. The drumhead was held taut with leather thongs. Four leather pouches, equally spaced around the drum, held four staffs that faced the four directions, each dangling an eagle feather.

  JW and Mona made their way across the gym floor, to an open spot on the far bleachers. As they picked their way up through the crowd there were points and giggles. Zaagizi’, JW heard someone say. Mona blushed and squeezed his hand, pulling him onward.

  “What are they saying?”

  “They think you’re my boyfriend,” she replied.

  As they sat, other men stepped up to the drummers and began to sing a Grand Entry song. Some of them wore ribbon shirts and jeans, others wore street clothes. One wore a suit and others wore traditional garb in the old style, one with horn-rimmed glasses. A few of them began to dance clockwise around the drum. The men’s mixed clothing reminded JW of their yards: he could discern no rules of order. Mona leaned in and lifted a finger toward them as she talked warm and humid by his cheek.

  “Those are some elders and tribal council members and other leaders.”

  He nodded. The music suddenly stopped and the dancers filed off and sat down. The room quieted. It was hot, and smelled of bodies and sweetgrass. JW looked around for Eagle and Jacob, but couldn’t see them.

  “Where are they?”

  “Somewhere in the crowd.”

  An elder stood and made his way toward the drum, holding an eagle feather that trailed a red horsehair tie. He waved it to the east. “Wabanung!”

  He turned to the south. “Zhouwanoong!”

  He turned west and waved it there. “Ningabianoong!”

  Finally he waved it in the general direction of JW and Mona. “Giwedinoong!”

  Mona leaned in close and put a hand on JW’s forearm. “Wow, they’re really going all out. This is like a powwow.”

  “Migizi!” the elder called out to the crowd, and after a moment a man stood. It was Johnny Eagle. There was smoke in the air, a fine scrim of it. He was wearing a ribbon shirt, with jeans and fancy cowboy boots.

  The elder began to speak in Ojibwe. “It is not every day,” he said, “that we honor one of our sons or daughters with a bald eagle feather.”

  Mona leaned in close and translated. Her breath smelled of spruce gum. He could feel the warmth of her forearm against his, and the curve of her breast where it pressed against his biceps.

  “It is illegal for anyone in the United States to possess these feathers except in this rare honor,” the elder said in English for the benefit of the children and the few non-Native visitors he saw in the audience. His high reedy voice carried clearly across the gymnasium.

  “Our brother Johnny Eagle is being given this highest honor for his selfless efforts on behalf of the band,” the elder continued, “from his wild rice business, which has offered a livelihood to many, to the new bank, whereby we may support ourselves and take care of our own people with our own businesses. This is a good vision! And it is a vision not just for those of us in this room, but for our children and our children’s children, on down through seven or more generations.”

  Eagle looked awkward and uncomfortable in the ribbon shirt, yet regal in presence and bearing, as if he were somehow above these strange Ojibwe ways, but was humoring them and humbling himself nonetheless. He towered over the people seated around him in the audience. The elder moved next to the drum and then motioned Eagle in with a wave.

  The drummers began beating the drum
and a singer stepped up next to them to sing a traditional eagle-feather honor song.

  Eagle stepped off the last bleacher and down onto the gym floor. He seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then he stepped into a dance, moving slowly over the painted court stripes toward the center of the gym floor, dancing clockwise, or sunwise, around the drum, tall and awkward in his cowboy boots. When he passed the elder, the elder handed the eagle feather to him. Eagle took it and kept dancing clockwise around the drum, and then the whole drum group joined the singing, taking the whole thing very seriously despite Eagle’s lack of grace.

  Eagle made another clockwise circle, dancing around the singing drummers and holding the eagle feather aloft to the four directions. Then Jacob stood up in the bleachers. JW saw that he, too, was wearing a ribbon shirt, and he looked even more awkward and stiff than his father. JW shifted in his seat, suppressing an urge to wave to him.

  Jacob looked at the bleacher steps, and began taking them one by one down onto the floor. He glanced toward JW without making eye contact, then started dancing.

  “God, I feel bad for him,” JW said.

  Mona squeezed his arm. “Don’t.”

  Jacob danced his way in and followed his father around the singing dancers. As he did, people began to stand. By the time he had made a circuit, the whole crowd was up and moving with the rhythm of the drums, dancing down onto the gym floor.

  “Come on,” Mona said, pulling at his hand.

  The people already on the floor began following Jacob and Johnny in a huge clockwise wake around the drum, dancing to the beat. People were flowing around JW and Mona from upper levels of the bleachers, and hopping down onto the floor. She pulled harder.

  “Come on!” she said.

  He followed her down onto the floor. He did a little one-legged hop, trying to dance, but now it was his turn to feel horribly awkward and self-conscious. People laughed and some pointed, enjoying his white gawkiness. Mona leaned in and yelled to him.

  “If Jacob can do it alone, you can do it in a crowd!”

  She turned away and danced on, keeping hold of his hand. It felt more awkward for JW to walk, so eventually he tried first one step, then another, and pretty soon he was dancing, trying to keep up with her, and then he was just a part of the dance, and the whole room was heaving and circling in a shaggy mass.

  The music ended with four powerful drumbeats, and the room fell mostly quiet. People were sweating and smiling. JW found himself grinning at strangers.

  Johnny Eagle mounted a short dais so he could be seen. He held the eagle feather aloft and the crowd began to applaud.

  “Good evening, Anishinaabeg!” he said in a booming voice, and the crowd went wild.

  “Thank you so very much. Thank you!” His powerful voice echoed over the sustained roar.

  “Thank you! Thank you.” Still, the applause continued. “Thank you.” He held up a hand again and the room finally grew quiet. He laughed.

  “You guys are great,” he said, and they applauded again. He stood, taking it in, and JW had the sense that he was watching some sort of transformation. When the crowd finally began to settle, Eagle began in a speaking tone and they quieted to hear him.

  “What is a bank?” He looked around at them with confidence. “To its shareholders, it’s a way to make money off your money. To its depositors, it’s a safe place to store their money. But to its borrowers—to them it’s a precious resource, allowing them to attain the American dream of home ownership and a college education, or even a basic car with four wheels that are all the same size and color.” The audience laughed and he took in their response for a moment before becoming serious again. He used his hand, his fist, and he pointed for emphasis, but always with passion and a smile, as if he had been speaking for years.

  “That resource is called opportunity. Opportunity. A bank is where we can come together as a community in order to pool our resources, to help one another prosper in good times and get by in bad. But too often we see credit denied, not on the basis of risk, but by greedy profiteering, masked as concerns over tribal sovereignty. This happens to our brothers and sisters all across this great country, denying them the opportunities others in our shared nation take for granted. Now, we cannot blame our white brethren.”

  Here there were scattered boos from a few young men, but Eagle held a hand up to quiet them, shaking his head.

  “No, we can’t. No, we can’t. It is too easy to chalk this all up to race. Especially in times like these, when tensions run high. Both whites and Indi’ns do it. We are both trapped by the sins of our fathers, all those poisoned waters, all those hard feelings and justifiable suspicions that make the present and the future so hard to see. But if we are truthful, we must admit that we all have a share of the responsibility. We cannot expect a white banker in North Lake, Minnesota to lend to a homeowner on a reservation if he cannot secure the loan. And we cannot blame a white banker in Detroit Lakes for worrying about stable property values in Native areas, where addiction and crime run at higher than normal rates. These are just the economic realities. And even if we could blame them, where would it get us?

  “But neither, neither can we accept the lack of capital that helps create that poverty in the first place. If we can’t borrow from the white man, then we must open our own banks, with our own money, and create our own opportunities!”

  The crowd thundered with applause. Mona leaned over. “We don’t normally clap like this,” she yelled.

  “Now,” Eagle continued, “we all know what happened down at the construction site. Maybe it was an accident, and maybe it wasn’t. But what I can tell you for sure is that it’s not going to slow us down.”

  The crowd applauded again and some of the young men whooped.

  “Let me be clear. I do not condone the kind of cowardly act that resulted in someone trying to set fire to the North Lake Bank, nor shooting at a good police officer. That may not have been one of us, we don’t know, but the deputy says he saw Indians running away from the scene of the crime. I like to think we are better than that, and I hope those involved are brought swiftly to justice.”

  More applause, led mostly by women, with a few men joining in. JW noticed Jacob was looking at the floor.

  “Today I met with the tribal council, and they voted to dedicate part of this gorgeous new community center to house our new bank. It’s not as close to North Lake, but it’s still on a main road, and it has one great advantage I hadn’t considered: it’s next door to the tribal fire department.”

  The crowd laughed and applauded again.

  “So. What is a bank? A bank is community. A bank is all of us pulling together, and becoming more that the sum of our parts. A bank is hope, and a vision for a brighter, more prosperous tomorrow. Thank you for this great honor. It means more to me than you can imagine. Thank you Anishinaabeg!”

  Eagle waved and stepped back as the crowd gave him a huge ovation. JW glanced at Mona as they applauded. He was stunned by the sense of greatness in Eagle’s transformation, the effortlessness of it, and the sense of unity and vision he had created in the audience. He felt the hair standing on his neck. The gym was getting hot and stuffy. People were gathering around Eagle in a big crush, seeking to congratulate him.

  “Do you want to stay?” Mona shouted over the din.

  JW shook his head.

  “I don’t want to spoil his night.”

  She laughed. “You wouldn’t. There’s a rule that everyone has to leave animosity outside when they enter a powwow.”

  But JW shook his head. Rule or no rule, he was too intimately connected with everything Eagle had spoken about. And then there was the fact that he still had to find a way to stop him, or he would lose everything. Congratulating him now would only make it harder. “We can talk to him later,” he said.

  As they walked back through the great entry hall, the colors of the artwork seemed even more vivid, the piled flagstone walls even more palpable and the soaring wood columns even rich
er. JW wanted to run his hands over everything. He wondered at his heightened senses. Some white people he had known sought this sort of thing out. They clothed themselves in Native traditions like spiritual outfits, traveling to powwows and sweat lodges and pipe ceremonies as if they were horse shows, with more dedication than many Indians. JW had always thought of this as a sort of cultural gentrification, and he found it annoying. People should just be who they were, and he knew that most Indians didn’t like such skinwalkers either. But there was something about the sense of connectedness he felt after dancing with everyone, and nobody really caring or judging him, that was undeniable. He felt light, which was making everything more difficult.

  They pushed out through the glass doors into the warm dark night and Mona slipped her small hand into his. The sky pulsed down at them, fat stars throbbing with the beat of the drums echoing in his mind. Mona gave his hand a little squeeze at the tailgate and they parted and walked up either side of the truck to their respective doors.

  32

  JW drove back along the dirt road to Mona’s house. She slid over next to him on the fur and stubbed out her cigarette, leaving only the peach and tobacco smell of her hair behind.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know. Just bringing me. Being a good sport with our Indi’n ways.”

  “I should be thanking you. Imagine me trying to dance alone.”

  She laughed. “It was good to see him honored,” she said. Her face and dark hair were lit softly by the dashboard. “People haven’t been too accepting of him until now,” she said.

  “Well, it looks like he’s overcome that.”

  She nodded. “Johnny is a force of nature. He always has been.”

  She tilted her head onto his shoulder and put a hand on his knee. Her hair licked at his face, then fell away in the buffeting breeze from the window. He suddenly realized how long it had been since he’d had anybody put a head on his shoulder, or a hand on his knee, and the scents drew a well of emotion up inside him. He turned his face into her hair for a brief moment, letting the smell and the feel of her feed him.