Lacey and the African Grandmothers

by Sue Farrell Holler

  Lacey and the African Grandmothers

  A Kids’ Power Book

  Lacey and the

  African Grandmothers

  Sue Farrell Holler

  Second Story Press

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Holler, Sue Farrell, 1962-

  Lacey and the African grandmothers / by Sue Farrell Holler.

  (The kids’ power series)

  ISBN 978-1-897187-61-6

  1. Siksika Indians—Juvenile fiction. 2. Grandmothers to Grandmothers Campaign—Juvenile fiction. I. Title. II. Series: Kids’ power series

  PS8615.O437L32 2009 jC813’.6 C2009-904794-2

  Copyright © 2009 by Sue Farrell Holler

  Edited by Gena K. Gorrell

  Copyedited by Karen Smart

  Cover and text design by Melissa Kaita

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Photos courtesy of Sequoia Outreach School

  Photos courtesy Sue Farrell Holler

  Cover photos © istockphoto

  Cover photo of grandmothers courtesy of Sequoia Outreach School

  Second Story Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.

  Published by

  SECOND STORY PRESS

  20 Maud Street, Suite 401

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  M5V 2M5

  www.secondstorypress.ca

  To Lisa Jo Sun Walk, with thanks for allowing

  me to tell your story, and to Denise Peterson,

  who first shared this story with me.

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Preface

  Chapter 1 Planting Curled-up Brains

  Chapter 2 Lessons from Kahasi

  Chapter 3 Kelvin the Bully

  Chapter 4 Grannies and Babies

  Chapter 5 “I Was Going to Need a Lot of Help”

  Chapter 6 Angel in Despair

  Chapter 7 Dad’s News

  Chapter 8 White Buffalo Calf Woman

  Chapter 9 A Letter for Lacey

  Chapter 10 Kahasi’s Big Surprise

  Chapter 11 The Lesson

  Chapter 12 The Blow-up

  Chapter 13 Transition

  Chapter 14 Heartbreak

  Chapter 15 Showdown

  Chapter 16 Two Days!

  Chapter 17 Help!

  Chapter 18 Kelvin Speaks Up

  Chapter 19 Florence and Zubeda

  Chapter 20 The Best Day Ever

  Chapter 21 Kitamatsinopowa

  Glossary

  Afterword

  Sources

  “We can do no great things,

  only small things with great love.”

  –Mother Teresa

  Author’s Note

  Lacey and the African Grandmothers is a work of fiction inspired by a remarkable young woman who was not afraid to use her talents to help others. Her real name is Lisa Jo Sun Walk.

  The setting is real, as are the Sequoia Outreach School, Central Bow Valley School, and Blackfoot Crossing. The account of the African grandmothers visiting Lisa Jo and Sequoia is real, as is their visit to Blackfoot Crossing. Much of the conversation between the African women and Lisa Jo is based on their words.

  It is my hope that readers will look at their personal talents and find ways to make the world a better place, whether in their families, their communities, their country, or, like Lisa Jo, in another part of the world.

  Preface

  My name is Lacey Little Bird. I am twelve years old, and I am Blackfoot. The Blackfoot are part of the First Nations – the people who lived in North America long before the Europeans came.

  My family stays at the Siksika First Nation, the second-biggest reserve in Canada, on the prairie in the middle of Alberta. Most of the land here looks as flat as a table, but it is really made up of gentle rolling hills covered with grasses and other plants. In the olden days our ancestors hunted buffalo here, and they could see the buffalo coming from far away. Now you can’t see buffalo, but you can see the houses of the reserve.

  At a place called South Camp, the prairie dips into a coulee. That’s something like a valley, or a canyon. The Bow River winds through the bottom of the coulee, and along the river there are great trees with green leaves in the spring and summer. Berries grow here, especially ookonooki – saskatoon berries – the berries I like best. Other people call this place Blackfoot Crossing because of the new historical center there and because it was there that Chief Crowfoot signed a peace treaty in the 1800s, but we usually just call it South Camp. It is the part of the reserve where my family stays.

  South Camp is a long way from the main part of the Siksika First Nation. A highway connects the two parts – South Camp and the larger part that’s beside Gleichen. The highway runs all the way to the big city of Calgary, which is about an hour away by car. Most families here don’t have cars, so they don’t leave the reserve very often.

  Above: The Siksika Nation is home to about 7,000 people. It is located just east of Calgary, Alberta. Below: A view of South Camp, taken from the marker that commemorates the signing of Treaty 7.

  I don’t know why they would want to leave anyway. Siksika is the most beautiful place in the world. Sweet grass grows here, and sage, which smells so clean when you brush up against it.

  But the very best part is the sky. It looks like the inside of a bowl that’s turned upside down. The sky is much bigger than the land. In the winter, when the sun is waking up, it paints the sky soft blue and pink. In the summer, when the sun goes to sleep beyond the horizon, it streaks the sky dark with orange and pink.

  I’m going to tell you a story about Siksika, and about me. I’m just an ordinary girl with a mother, a father, a sister, and too many brothers. The story is about how someone like me got to meet grandmothers who came all the way from Africa.

  The story starts with some seeds that looked like curled-up brains.

  Chapter 1

  Planting Curled-up Brains

  The smell of simmering herbs made my stomach rumble as I jumped down the stairs to Sequoia. I shook off the winter jacket I’d gotten for Christmas and slowed down when I hit the bottom step. I had run all the way from my own school, but running inside a school wasn’t allowed, even in this school, which was in a church basement.

  It was unusually quiet. No one was talking, and there wasn’t any music. There were calculators, pencils, and erasers scattered on the long tables, and no one was smiling or joking. They all looked serious as they worked out the answers on the tests. I’d forgotten about the exams.

  I crossed the classroom to the kitchen as quietly as an antelope grazing. Lila, who worked as a secretary at Sequoia and liked to feed people, was slowly stirring a large pot on top of the stove. The steam made the kitchen warm and the air smell delicious. It also made Lila’s face all shiny.

  “It smells good in here. What are you making?” I whispered, popping a circle of carrot into my mouth and keeping another one in my hand. Lila doesn’t seem to mind if I sneak carrot slices sometimes.

  “It’s beef minestrone soup. It has beef and beans and lots of vegetables. It tastes good, and it’s good for you, especially if you are studying for exams,” she whispered back. She stressed the word “exams” and held her finger to her lips to signal me to be silent.

  I finished chewing and watched her dump carrots into the pot. “Are all the babies sleeping?” She nodded.

  In total, there are more than seven thousand Blackfoot at Siksika Fir
st Nation, mostly kids. Siksika has three schools now, but I go to school outside of the reserve in a very small place called Gleichen. Gleichen has only about 450 people who stay there, but it has two schools. The best school, Sequoia, is an “outreach” school. It’s for teenagers who have dropped out of school, sometimes because they have children of their own. My sister, Angel, goes to Sequoia

  When my school finishes, I usually head to Sequoia to look after the babies so the parents can study, although it’s really the parents’ responsibility to look after their kids, even when they’re at school. I love to look after babies, and I love being in the kitchen with Lila and watching how her arms jiggle when she shapes dough into biscuits or stirs a pot of soup. I also like eating the things she makes and sampling ingredients when she isn’t looking. It’s better than being at home, where there is hardly ever any extra food. Eleven people live in my house if you count Angel’s baby, and eleven people eat a lot of food. Dad says we could eat a vanload of food every week if he could afford it. Sometimes we do eat that much, and then there is only enough money to buy things like noodles and peanut butter until Dad gets another job playing music at a wedding or a party.

  “OK. Time’s up. Pencils down.” Mrs. Buchanan, the principal, stood up from her desk and spoke loudly. “Time to hand them in.”

  No one looked happy. They scraped their chairs on the floor, gathered their tests, and slumped to her desk, one by one, to give them to her.

  “That was a biter. Guess I’ll be starting math over again next week,” groaned Kelvin as he handed her his papers. I was secretly happy that Kelvin might fail. He was the one person I truly hated.

  “Maybe you’ll surprise yourself. It could be a pass, you know,” suggested Mrs. Buchanan as she gathered the papers together.

  “No way,” he said. “I’m better at failing than passing.” He slow-walked to the stairs, swishing his glossy hair and trying to look cool. Kelvin is my sister’s boyfriend. He is two years older than Angel but, like her, he’s in grade 11. I wish he would go away and never come back, the way his father had, maybe disappear somewhere in the city. There is nothing good about Kelvin except that he can fix things, like the amp for Dad’s guitar, or my uncle’s old van.

  Kelvin likes cars best, though, especially shiny, fast cars. He likes them so much that he stole one so he could go to the city. That one wasn’t shiny or fast, more like rusty and slow. But he took it anyway, even though it wasn’t his and he didn’t have permission. He got in trouble with the police for that, and now he has a criminal record. But the worst thing about Kelvin is the way he treats Angel, my seventeen-year-old sister. He treats her as if she is as dopey as a rock. He makes her feel small and stupid and worthless. I can’t understand why she likes him so much.

  I guess it’s because of his looks. Kelvin is long and lean and has beautiful hair that falls over his eyes to hide what he is thinking. He likes to move his head in a slow circle, then jerk it to toss the hair from his face. You can see his eyes when he does that – angry eyes. He always seems as angry as a buffalo charging across the prairie to fight another buffalo. But today he looks like a troubled buffalo. Passing math is important to him. If he doesn’t pass math, he can’t reach his dream of becoming a mechanic. Still, I don’t care.

  As soon as they handed in their papers, the students scattered. Some went outside to hang out, some went to the bathroom, some went to check their babies, and some stayed to talk. Angel came into the kitchen.

  “How was your exam?” I asked. She had studied nearly every night for two weeks. She needs to pass math, too, in order to get into college for nursing. I really want Angel to pass. She would make such a good nurse.

  “It was hard, but I think I did OK,” she said, pouring a glass of milk. She lifted her head to breathe in the steam from the soup. “Smells good. What’s cooking?” she asked Lila.

  “Beef minestrone soup. It will be ready soon. I thought I better feed those tired brains by filling you up with beans and noodles.” Lila chuckled, then added, “Of course, most of you are already full of beans.”

  When Angel left to check on her baby daughter, Kayden, I noticed two big square bags piled up beside the counter that separated the kitchen from the classroom, and some trays with little compartments and plastic covers. They hadn’t been there yesterday.

  “What are those things for?” I asked, and slipped the second piece of carrot into my mouth.

  “We’re going to plant seeds and grow pots of flowers to make Gleichen look better,” said Lila.

  I lifted my eyebrows way above my glasses. “No one plants flowers here. That’s for rich people in the city,” I said. “Besides, someone would wreck them. Remember how they put nice benches outside the post office, and they were spray-painted with bad words almost the next day?”

  “Yes, and remember how students from Sequoia repainted them to cover up the ugly words?”

  “Yeah, and remember how no one liked doing it? Besides, it wouldn’t be so easy to fix flowers,” I said. “There would be broken pots and dirt everywhere. Gleichen would look uglier with all that mess.”

  “Maybe the flowers wouldn’t be wrecked. But if they were, couldn’t you just clean the mess and start over?” I thought Lila had lost her mind. Repainting benches was one thing, but putting flowers back together?

  Lila must have guessed what I was thinking, because she said, “Right now, if someone came in here and dumped this pot of soup down the drain, do you know what I would do?”

  I shook my head, but I had a pretty good idea what was coming.

  “I’d start peeling more vegetables and getting another pot of soup ready. And do you know why?”

  I shook my head again.

  “Because soup is important. It feeds hungry people, and it makes them feel better. And sometimes the hunger people have isn’t just for food. Sometimes you have to feed people by letting them see beautiful things.” She stopped talking for a few seconds while she ran water in the sink to wash the cutting board and the knife. “So what would we do if someone wrecked all the flowers and broke the pots? Would we give up and let the badness win? Or would we keep giving goodness until the badness gave up?”

  “We’d keep planting, I guess,” I said, as I slid off the stool. “But I’m glad I don’t have to do it.”

  “Ahem, Lacey,” Lila said loudly. I wasn’t far enough away to pretend I hadn’t heard her. “Mrs. B. and I thought you could take on the project. The older kids can help the young ones get the trays ready and plant the seeds, but she wants you to take care of the seedlings. They have to be watered every day, and the students here are just too busy to remember.”

  I can’t believe what she is saying. She wants me to waste my time growing plants and putting them in flowerpots so people could destroy them. “That’s not fair,” I said. “This isn’t even my school.”

  “No, it’s not your school,” said Lila, “but you are part of the community. It is your obligation to help when help is needed.” Her eyes and voice tell me she is serious.

  I looked again at those bags and trays leaning near the kitchen counter, and I groaned. I knew they would make me do it.

  Gleichen is so small that it’s not really a town, but it has a grocery store, a gas station, a post office, a library, and a funny little park near the old water tower where there is a buffalo statue. It’s hard to see the statue because someone planted big spruce trees there. When you are driving into town, you see the park and a big sign that says, “Glorious Past, Greater Future.” The sign is talking about Gleichen, but I think it speaks about everyone. We can all have great futures if we want.

  On the corner of the main street is a small white church called the Gleichen United Church. It has three windows on each side, and at the tops of the windows are squares of colored glass – yellow, blue, and red – that make pretty patterns when the sun shines through them. The upstairs is a regular church where people come for services, and sometimes other things. Downstairs, in the basemen
t, is the Sequoia Outreach School. It’s a special school where kids who’ve dropped out of high school can get a second chance. Mrs. Buchanan believes in second chances. “You can’t change your past, but you can change your future,” she always says. Mostly what she means is that we all have to get an education and learn to look at things differently. She tells everyone they can do anything if they set their mind to it.

  Sequoia Outreach School was located in the basement of the Gleichen United Church.

  Sequoia school takes up the whole church basement, but it’s only one classroom. The kitchen is at one end, and there’s an area filled with playpens and baby carriers. There are boxes of toys and clothes that you can take home if you need them. There aren’t any desks, except one for Mrs. B. and one for Lila. The students work together at long tables. There is also a folding screen that can be moved around when one of the girls has to nurse her baby, and a diaper-changing table in the bathroom that boys or girls can use.

  Most of the First Nations kids go to school on the reserve, but I go to Central Bow Valley School, which is just down the road from Sequoia. My parents wanted my younger brothers and me to go to school off the reserve because they think it’s important for us to learn about the non-native ways. They think that it will create better understanding between our peoples and that understanding each other will help us all get along. Sequoia is also for both First Nations and non-native kids.

  A few days after Lila told me about the flower project, the little kids poked the seeds into the soil. The seeds looked really strange – like tiny curled-up brains. Then I was stuck spraying the dirt with water every day. I like making a fine mist with the spray bottle, but I won’t tell anyone that. Every day, when I lift the clear plastic lids covered on the inside with droplets of water, the dirt looks the same as it did the day before. Growing flowers is even more boring than I imagined. I wish those little curled-up brains would hurry up and do some growing.