I ASK AROUND ABOUT AKWESASNE, but people know little about it. Despite our distance from other destinations of note (80 miles to Ottawa; 115 to Montreal; 350 to New York City), no one seems to visit. Everyone is apologetic about this. A few even express guilt. But aside from recommending Frozen River, no one has much wisdom to impart. Eventually I will meet two St. Lawrence University professors with decades-long ties to Akwesasne who will share invaluable contacts and resources with me: Bob Wells, who founded a master’s program there and helped build its public library, and Celia Nyamweru, who teaches a community-based learning course that takes students there once a week for research and volunteer projects. For now, however, I must forge my own connections. And so I set out.
The road to Akwesasne, northeast from Canton, mostly consists of farms and forest until Massena, a working-class town of 13,000 that drops off at the St. Lawrence River. Hang a right on Route 37 and blaze past a hockey arena and a succession of churches. When Border Patrol vehicles start sprouting like mushrooms, Canada is near. Rather than turn north toward the international bridge, however, keep heading east. Smoke shops will signal your arrival: Twinleaf Express, Mohawk Junction, Akwesasne Cigarette Depot, Bear’s Den Trading Post, Wild Bill’s One Stop, Tree Top Smoke Shop, Smokey’s Tobacco Shop, and so on. Some are specialty stores with neon signs blinking in the windows; others are convenience stores that sell cigarettes on the side. The flashier establishments offer drive-thru services, while the humbler ones—like the camper with the hand-painted sign—require walking up and rapping on a window. The way they line up, one after another, reminds me of border towns back home. Entire city blocks consist solely of drugstores where you can buy anything from acne medication to Viagra super-cheap and prescription-free. Another block mostly sells tequila, some bottles con gusano (with a worm), some without. A third specializes in hand-embroidered dresses; a fourth, in tiny guitars.
Along the Mexico border, however, you can actually see the clientele milling about the street: busloads of senior citizens loading up on cheap meds, college students flocking to bars, couples haggling for tchotchkes for their in-laws back in Omaha, balding men prowling around for blow jobs. Akwesasne seems deserted by comparison. Granted, its casino draws in 1.3 million visitors a year, but it is also located miles away from the main business strip. I don’t see many gamblers as I cruise up and down the highway. I don’t see much of anyone, actually. Who buys all these cigarettes?
I pick a shop at random—Smokin’ Arrows—and park. A woman is tending a garden outside, but no one is working the counter. One sidewall is lined with essential oils and bundles of incense with names like “Bewitching,” “Elemental Enchantment,” “Gambler’s Fast Luck,” and “Cannabis.” Dangling from mounted hooks are herbal medicines sealed into cellophane packets along with manually typed instructions. Bay laurel, a card notes, can either be cooked to aid digestion or placed under a pillow to “induce prophetic dreams.” Nettles relieve urinary tract infections, while sheep sorrel wards off fever, inflammation, scurvy, boils, cysts, and tumors. The opposite sidewall continues the healing theme, with a shelf full of books about cancer-curing and two rows of vitamins in orange-and-white bottles.
The back wall, meanwhile, is stacked with tax-free cigarette cartons from floor to ceiling. Golden Arrows Reds. Smokin’ Arrows Gold. Class A. All Natural Native. Seneca. Each box contains two hundred cigarettes, some for as little as fifteen dollars apiece, significantly cheaper than any of the vitamins. As I consider the implied regimen here—start with the back wall, then return for the sides when problems arise?—the door swings open and a white couple walks in, followed by the gardener I noticed earlier. The man strides over to the back wall and pulls down every carton of Seneca.
“Got any more?” he asks.
The gardener/clerk shakes her head as she rings up the total: $230 for 2,000 cigarettes.
I ask the man where he’s from, and he looks at me suspiciously. “Watertown.” That’s a two-hour drive away. He and his wife trot back to their van with a spring in their step, as if eager to start smoking. Turning to the clerk, I ask for medical advice as a way of initiating conversation. She looks up from her receipt book. In her mid-fifties, she is freckled with moles and wears a watch with a turquoise-studded band. “What’s the problem?”
At the yerberias botanicas along the southern border, the ladies behind the counter ask all matter of questions—medical, personal, spiritual, financial, sexual—before determining your prescription. Here, I am not halfway through my list of symptoms when the woman walks over to the sidewall and thrusts a bottle of tea tree oil into my hands. “It’ll boost your immune system,” she mutters as she heads back to the cash register.
“Are you a healer?” I ask as I pull out a twenty-dollar bill.
She looks me up and down. “I’m a cancer survivor,” she says, then shares how she spent a year driving back and forth to Long Island for treatments before deciding to tackle her illness traditionally. Elders gathered herbs for her, and healers suggested how to take them. She’s been in remission for five years now. The trick, she says, is protecting your autoimmune system and ignoring the government, as none of the “real” cancer-fighting medications have FDA approval. Walking over to the shelf of books, she taps a few spines. This is a lending library, she says, free for any tribal member.
“Isn’t it … ironic, selling cigarettes alongside cancer prevention books?” I ask.
She glances at the back wall and chuckles. “I didn’t get lung cancer,” she says, then walks out the door to resume her gardening.
I drive on to another shop plastered with logos of cigarette brands. Like the first store, this one also melds divergent lifestyles. To the right are racks and stacks of clothes for little girls destined to be divas: satin panties with triple-layer ruffling, dresses with hot-pink boas sewn along the neckline, tutus, fairy wings, tiny top hats draped in netting and tied with bows. To the left is tobacco in every conceivable form. A wall’s worth of cartons of Tomahawk, Nation’s Best, All Natural Native, Signal, and Seneca cigarettes sell for $23 to $28 each. Individual packs swim in a wooden barrel for $1.75 apiece. Dip is sold in tins, rolls, and tubs in flavors ranging from Rum-Cured to Vanilla Cavendish. A glass case displays Zippos fanned out on a swatch of velvet.
I try to picture the customer who would patronize both sides of the shop and decide I’d like to meet her, but the only other person here is standing behind the counter. Nineteen or twenty, she is wearing a black hoodie. I buy a copy of the local weekly, Indian Time, and ask permission to read it at the diner-style booth beneath the window. She glances up from her cell phone long enough to nod. Her eyes are stunning—not jade-green, like the dealer at the casino, but the amber-green of autumn.
Three minutes later, a rusted Buick with a tattered American flag fastened to its antenna pulls up. Two blonde women step out. One is obese; the other has eyeglasses the thickness of ashtrays. They wear flip-flops, tank tops, and tight denim shorts. “What kind did Clarence want?” one asks as she heads toward the shelf of dip.
“Idunno,” the other mumbles, sorting through the barrel. She stacks a tower of packs, does the math, tosses them back, and settles on a freezer bag of logo-less cigarettes. They buy forty-four dollars’ worth of tobacco products before walking out the door. A minute later, one returns.
“Can I have a Band-Aid?” she asks the clerk. “I had my boyfriend pop a blister on my toe yesterday, and now it’s bleeding all over.”
It’s true: her foot is a mess. Upon receiving a bandage, she kicks off her flip-flop, bends over until her tank top reveals her bra, lifts her foot, stumbles, grabs the counter, steadies herself, and tapes her bloody toe. Balling the wrapper, she hands it back to the clerk, who accepts it without expression. As soon as the customer steps out of the store, however, she looks at me and wrinkles her nose. “Thanks for sharing.”
We laugh.
“We get all kinds here.”
“Where do they come from?”
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br /> “Troy. Canada. Vermont. What about you?”
When she learns of my own border origins, she nods. “I hear it’s pretty bad down there. But we got smuggling here, too. Once a girl came in the store and asked if I knew where she could get a boat. She says, ‘I got two guys to transport,’ and I could see them in her car. They had luggage and everything. I didn’t know what to say, I was so shocked. Finally I says to her, ‘My mom works for the police, I can’t help you!’”
Before I can probe, a new customer glides in wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses. She marches to a shelf and swipes two freezer bags and four cartons: 1,000 cigarettes for $100. No sooner has she accepted her receipt than a TransAm pulls up and three white guys spill in. One notes aloud that cartons of Braves cost $23 here. Shaking their heads, they retreat.
“It really comes out the same, when you think about all the gas they are wasting, driving around,” the clerk observes.
“Is it always this busy?”
“This? This isn’t busy. Fridays, we got two people working the same time because we can’t keep all the stock on the shelves. Last Saturday, I got shin splints running back and forth. It’s so busy, you can’t eat lunch. Some people have been coming here for years. They are like family.”
At that, an elder strolls in. “Hi, Princess,” he greets her. Without being asked, she pulls a carton of Tomahawks off a shelf and hands it over, accepting folded bills in return.
“See ya in a couple-a weeks,” he says as he shuffles out the door.
I ask where Tomahawks come from, and she says that—with the exception of Seneca—every cigarette they sell is made right here at Akwesasne. They used to sell name brands like Marlboro and Winston but stopped last summer because of the cost.
“No one has eighty dollars for a carton of cigarettes out here,” she says. “It wasn’t fair to charge our customers that. Besides, they would only buy one pack at a time. When we switched to only selling Native products, no one really said anything.”4
Another customer walks in. As she shifts her attention back to work, I wrestle over what else I can ask. I’m dying to return to the topic of human trafficking, but I can only imagine how many reporters have traipsed through here, notebooks in hand, post–Frozen River. I don’t want to be yet another writer hounding her about the troubling aspects of her nation, but I am also intensely curious about what else our communities have in common. After a few more customers cycle through, I decide that questions related to tobacco are germane, considering we’re surrounded by it.
“So I guess cigarette smuggling is an issue here, too, huh?” I ask after an athletic-looking man tucks two cartons of Nation’s Best beneath his armpits as if they were footballs and then charges out the door.
I thought I had phrased this question diplomatically, but that isn’t how it is received. Her whole body stiffens as she folds her arms across her chest. “It’s not smuggling,” she says firmly. “We have a treaty so we can transfer cigarettes from one reservation to the other.”
She then delivers a history lesson I will hear dozens of times in the year ahead. About how Mohawks have been living in this river valley since time immemorial, long before white men drew arbitrary lines across it. About how tobacco has played a vital role in nearly every aspect of their culture, from praying to ceremonial rituals to medicinal practices, also since time immemorial. About how the United States and Great Britain signed a treaty two centuries ago granting Indians the right to trade with each other and how that is what Mohawks are doing when they transport tobacco from one Indian nation to another across those arbitrary lines. They are trading. Not smuggling.
This rationale works for me, but the Canadian and U.S. governments would beg to differ. The province of Ontario (where part of Akwesasne is based) has a cigarette allocation system allowing smoke shops on Indian reserves enough tax-free cigarettes to cover the needs of “Status Indians” only. Between 2011 and 2012, those shops apparently sold 29 million tax-free packs, which means either that every Indian in Ontario is lighting up seventy cigarettes a day or that non-Status folks are trickling over to help out. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police reported that the Canadian government lost upward of $2 billion in lost tax revenue in 2008 alone due to such “contraband” and that 90 percent of those “illegal” cigarettes originated here on the U.S. side of Akwesasne before being “smuggled” to Mohawk nations in Canada across the St. Lawrence River. In Canada’s eyes, then, this activity is not an ancient cultural rite but a crime. The United States also loses billions in revenue from untaxed cigarettes, yet its policies are a tad more lenient, permitting anyone of legal age to possess up to two cartons of tax-free cigarettes at a time for personal use. Every carton beyond that, though, carries fines—which means I’m witnessing risky behavior from my compatriots.
The door swings open and a Mohawk walks in. He chats up the clerk, asking about her mother and her grandmother and her neighbors down the street before wandering around the store, carefully considering all of the merchandise before selecting a pack from the barrel. Once he leaves, the clerk turns back to me.
“We get a lot of bikers up here. Like, the Hell’s Angels and stuff,” she says. “Once, they found a duffel bag with a body all chopped up inside.”
Violence should never be a contest, but I cannot resist telling her about El Pozolero, the Tijuana “Stew Maker” who disposed of the bodies of his boss’s narco-victims by dissolving them in barrels of lye. Her eyes grow bigger and brighter until she shakes her head in horror. It gets crazy here, she says, but not that crazy. She turns to straighten a few cartons on a shelf. At first, I think she’s stalling for time to think up a story that’s even more outrageous. (As a Texan, that is what I would be doing.) But no. When she turns around, it’s to tell me about prescription drug addiction instead. That’s the worst problem at Akwesasne, she says, at least among her age group. “I have a friend who had a baby in October that weighed only four pounds. She was doing Fentanyl patches at the time, scraping it and snorting it like cocaine.”
We commiserate over the havoc drugs have wreaked in our respective communities, then gravitate to other topics. I ask how she likes working here, and she says she feels lucky. Most smoke shops are family-owned and hire only relatives, but this owner knows her mom, so they made an exception. She makes $10 an hour here, or $2.50 more than when she worked at the nearby trading post, the Bear’s Den. That company mostly hires non-Natives, she says with disdain. In January she’ll start taking classes online so she can apply for a better job in tribal government. That’s the only other employment option besides the casino, she says, and she’d rather not work there. It’s good money, but you always have to pick up other people’s shifts.
I have been sitting in this booth for two hours now, far exceeding whatever rent I might have purchased with the newspaper. I thank her for her hospitality, and she says to come back on a Friday so I can see some “real action.” Her invitation rings in my head for the rest of the afternoon, but I wait a couple of weeks to accept it, so as not to seem overeager. When I ask for her, however, the new clerk—an older woman—says she’s been out a week already. I must look confused, because she adds, “She’s about to pop.”
Pregnancy had neither been mentioned nor observed the entire time we spent together that afternoon. I try to determine if this is happy news.
“Is she … does she … live with the father?”
“No,” she says. “He’s a total loser. As most of them are.”
We stare at each other for an extended moment—she probably awaiting an explanation for my interest, while I hope to extract more information. When none arises, I admit that I am a writer, a profession that tends to be as (un)welcome in Native communities as a government agent, and for a good reason. Even the best-intentioned white writers often perpetuate stereotypes of Indians as being mystical healers, noble sufferers, or drunkards. While I have long been drawn to indigenous issues, guilt-ridden fear has kept me from researching them—fear of di
srespecting a people still reeling from centuries of exploitation; fear of participating in the genre deemed “colonial literature” by Spokane/Coeur d’Alene writer Sherman Alexie;5 fear of spreading injustice while striving for its antithesis. Yet here I am, pen in hand. There are just too many similarities between this particular community and my own to ignore. If anyone understands the existential ramifications of division, it is a people who straddle not only the world’s longest international borderline but the chasm between tradition and modernity as well. Story-addiction trumps fear here. As for guilt, perhaps diligence could be its antidote.
The clerk looks out at my red Hyundai parked outside, then at the notebook sticking out of my bag, and finally at the eager way I lean against her counter before proceeding. “She likes to talk a lot,” she says of her former colleague, then purses her lips.
And she does not, undoubtedly also for a good reason.
NOTES
1. Though many maps, signs, and literatures call it the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation, I will be referring to the nation by its Mohawk name, Akwesasne, which means “the land where the partridge drums.”
2. In October 2014, Misty Upham’s body was found in a ravine on the Muckleshoot Nation located within the city of Auburn, Washington. She had been missing for nearly two weeks, but the Auburn Police Department had not yet opened an investigation, despite requests from her family. They had to organize her search party themselves and later released a statement that the police “had animosity against Misty due to a previous encounter.” A medical examiner determined Upham died of blunt-force injuries to her head and torso and that her blood alcohol level was .33. It remains a mystery whether her death was an accident, a suicide, or a murder. A thirty-two-year-old Blackfoot, Upham was one of Hollywood’s top Native American actors, working alongside Meryl Streep and Benicio del Toro. She was also one of more than 1,000 indigenous women missing in North America during the time her family spent looking for her.
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