All the Agents and Saints, Paperback Edition

by Stephanie Elizondo Griest

  19

  The River

  AFTER NEARLY A YEAR OF VISITING AKWESASNE ONCE OR TWICE A week, I finally find what has thus far eluded me: not a “contact” or a “source” but a friend. For reasons that will become apparent, I have changed her name and altered certain details. The following, however, are true: she’s single, pushing forty, and writing a book. Given the existentially isolating nature of each of these endeavors, we instantly bond when we discover having all three in common. Though I originally reached out to her for a formal interview about other matters, we wind up gabbing about our personal lives the entire time. Admittedly, this feels unprofessional, yet, for better or worse, I am not a journalist or scholar bound to prescribed codes of conduct. I am a writer struggling to make art out of the messiness of life. Forging friendships with my “characters” is one of the many ethical minefields I negotiate.

  So when “Keetah” invites me to her home a few days later, I accept with my usual cautious excitement. She lives on a rural road lined with HUD houses and trailers not far from the river. Her front door opens to blue walls and piles of laundry, with lacrosse sticks and juice pouches scattered about. A makeshift writing office has been carved into the kitchen area, complete with a printer topped by a Crock-Pot. We have just settled onto the couch when a kid-whirl swoops in, fresh off the school bus. Three are Keetah’s and the rest belong to her sister Kai. The living room erupts in chaos, but they soon break for the backyard, where a sprinkler awaits. It is seventy-eight degrees. For a Tejana, this necessitates a long-sleeve shirt and a scarf in your purse. For a Mohawk child, it means stripping to your chonies before you melt.

  “Don’t forget to water the puppy!” Keetah calls after them. His name is Thunder.

  With kid-shrieking as our soundtrack, I ask Keetah what sense they make of the border. “I show them a map and tell them our government was here first. But then people came from the East and they were from different countries and they decided to draw a line right through Akwesasne,” she says. “I tell them, you are not U.S. citizens and you are not Canadians. You are Haudenosaunee. You don’t belong to this government or that government. You belong to the earth. That’s where you come from, and that’s where you will go.”

  The front door swings open and her sister Kai walks in, eyes affixed to cell phone. A text session with a new beau is under way. She pays us no mind as we discuss the bridge situation—until Keetah mentions its impact on contraband.

  “The bad thing about smuggling is it made our people lazy,” Kai announces.

  “Lazy?” I ask. Of the many adjectives smugglers bring to my mind—reckless, opportunistic, ethically compromised, desperate—lazy isn’t among them.

  But Keetah concurs. “They are so used to fast money, to making thousands a week. They aren’t up for doing what we do, making $400 a week at $10 an hour. People in their thirties have it rough, because for fifteen years they could make fast, easy money, and now they can’t.”

  This was supposed to be a social visit, but there is no stifling my inner reporter. “Do you know anyone who does it?”

  “My ex,” Kai says, running her fingers through her hair. “We built our house with the money.”

  “What was his product?”

  “Cigarettes and other things, but I didn’t know about the other things. He left me for a woman with a riverfront property who did it too. He wasn’t happy with my $400 contribution. I never went on runs. I never packed a car.”

  “Nuh-uh,” Keetah laughs. “Our mom used to pack a car with us in it!”

  The sisters crack up at the memory.

  “Wait, what?” I ask. “Your mom?”

  Oh yes. After divorcing their father, she used to stuff cartons of cigarettes beneath the back seat of their station wagon, plunk all the kids on top, and drive to Kahnawake whenever she needed extra cash. I must seem shocked because Keetah turns serious. “It is our right to trade tobacco. Those are our traditional trade routes.”

  Which is why, twenty years later, she and another sister started trading, too. At $36,000 a load, Keetah profited enough to finance her college education in just four months. Her sister bought a new car. “Ontario shouldn’t regulate my trade with my cousins in Kahnawake. No. I am an indigenous woman and I’m taking it to another indigenous person in a First Nations community,” she says, twisting the drawstring of her Old Navy hoodie.

  Then came the 2009 fiasco. Of all the industries affected when Canada moved its border post from Akwesasne to its mainland, tobacco was hardest hit. Back when the checkpoint was still located between the international bridges, Mohawks simply had to transport their product across the river by boat or snowmobile, discreetly pack it into a truck waiting at an island dock, and then drive it into Canada via the northern bridge. Nowadays, however, there is no avoiding the Canada Border Services Agency. That’s a big reason why Keetah quit the trade that year. Another is that her sister got caught. Although the penalty was minimal—$2,000 in fines, plus a year of house arrest—it remains on her record, which prevents her from ever working for an official tribal enterprise, including the casino. That, of course, leaves her little choice but to continue working in contraband.

  “I would say there is a one-degree separation from it, for everybody on the rez,” Keetah says.

  “I never did it,” Kai clarifies. “But it’s what I bought groceries with.”

  Dripping children appear at the back door. Two options, Keetah says: Campbell’s soup or bologna sandwiches. They opt for the latter, which Keetah cuts into triangles. As they race back out to the sprinklers, the front door swings open again. This time it’s an old family friend—middle-aged, pockmarked, effusive—and she’s on a mission.

  “Gotta check in!” she sings, making a beeline for the computer.

  We gather around as she logs onto a dating website. She clicks on a message that is so bold, I blush. The other ladies cheer. As Kai narrates a colorful response, Keetah walks me out to my car, as I have another meeting lined up. What a shame: I’m debating trying online dating myself, and there is clearly much to be learned here. Keetah is juggling multiple suitors as well, and she has a few pointers.

  “Men always tell me, you’re so strong. But I keep my heart right here.” She thumps her fist against her chest. “I keep it for myself.”

  BORDERLANDS HAVE LONG BEEN (REDUCTIVELY) synonymous with smuggling, but it is hard to decipher the volume at Akwesasne. According to a 2013 report by the conservative think tank the MacDonald-Laurier Institute, Cornwall is the “contraband capital of Canada,” with guns, cocaine, and heroin funneling north while people, ecstasy, and weed travel south. Although the report cites U.S. statistics of $1 billion worth of illegal drugs getting exported through Akwesasne/Cornwall, the authors claim to have found “little evidence of extensive smuggling” within the Mohawk nation in recent years. Considering that neither the United States nor Canada even has a proper population count of Akwesasne (as so many Mohawks refuse to participate in census surveys), I regard such reports with skepticism, but few better resources present themselves. There is Indian Time, which seems to feature another bust every couple of issues (albeit a modest one, by Texas standards). And there are people’s stories, which tend toward the outrageous. My favorite comes the morning I chat up the man whom St. Lawrence University dispatched to the Victorian to wage war on its centipedes. As he squirts poison in a corner, he says he can hardly wait to go fishing this weekend.

  “Isn’t that kind of risky?” I ask, thinking about PCB contamination.

  “Oh yeah,” he says, “I seen a lot of things.”

  Once, he was having lunch at a dock when a thirty-foot boat pulled up, manned by “a big guy built like a Viking in a Speedo” and his girlfriend, wearing a bikini. She stepped off the boat, walked over to a van idling by, opened its door, and crouched on the ground.

  “I thought to myself, she’s going to pee, but she pulled a plastic bag out instead.”

  “A bag?”

  “Yeah,
yeah, she pulled it right out of her,” he says, shaking his head in disgust. She handed it through the van’s window and got a thick envelope in return. Then she climbed aboard the boat and the couple sped off to Canada.

  Granted, this reeks of urban legend. No matter: I am inspired to spend the rest of the morning calling the region’s Border Patrol stations for their take on smuggling. Though I’ve been granted interviews and even ride-arounds in South Texas with just a day or two of advance notice, the North Country stations balk at my requests. Weeks of e-mails and phone calls go nowhere, until a sympathetic colleague mentions that one of her neighbors is an agent. We persuade him to join me for a beer. Hearing I’m from Texas, he says he worked in Laredo for four years before moving up here.

  “Oh?” I say, squeezing a lime into my Corona. “How was that?”

  “A hellhole,” he says, taking a swig of Canadian Pilsner. “Being white and six-foot-one, they know what you do, and they don’t like you. They know you are either a Border Patrol agent or a truck driver, and I didn’t look like a truck driver. They keep their distance.”

  I ask about the biggest difference between patrolling borders north and south.

  “Here, it’s not nearly as busy, but it’s just as dangerous. Maybe even more dangerous, because you don’t know who you are dealing with. There, it’s mostly Latino. Here, it could be anyone: Irish, Russian, Sri Lankan, anyone,” he says.

  “Down there, we’d apprehend a hundred people a day. Here, we might not apprehend one person a month. Down there, the people you chase in the brush are just people trying to find work. Here, the people you chase are smugglers doing something illegal. Sure, down there in the brush, someone may have a pocketknife on them, but most don’t even have two nickels. Out here, anything can happen. Down there, you go to work and you apprehend someone. It’s just a given, and it’s gratifying. Out here, you go out and you work and work and work, and you don’t have anything to show for it.”

  “What about Akwesasne?” I ask.

  He stares down his beer. “That’s the weak point of the border. Nine times out of ten, the people we deal with come from there—either they are from there, or they are working with people there.”

  He doesn’t care to elaborate beyond that, however.

  Next, I try outfits like the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, which has been trying to impose taxes on Akwesasne’s tobacco for decades. No one will talk to me there, either. Finally, I call Brian David, the Mohawk chief who spent the summer of 2009 shuttling community members across the river after the New York State Police barricaded the bridge. Not only does he agree to a meeting, but he also invites me aboard his walleye boat one afternoon to conduct it. A retired ironworker, Chief David has a thick gray moustache, a slender ponytail, a big laugh, and the mettle to answer whatever you ask. Settling down between a fishing pole and a coil of rope, I start with how smuggling got to be so sensitive around here.

  “Well, 9/11, of course,” he says, steering us into the indigo.

  As they searched for answers in the immediate aftermath, some local media outlets speculated that the terrorists entered the United States through Akwesasne. It took years to correct that misperception, he says. Mohawks did in fact play a crucial role that day, but not at the border. “Our steelworkers climbed right off the buildings and down into the rubble. They pulled bodies out that day, and they wore no masks for protection.”

  Human trafficking hit its zenith at Akwesasne in the late 1990s, when a crime ring sneaked some 3,600 Chinese across the river over a two-year period for an estimated $170 million. The St. Regis Mohawk Tribal Police assisted the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police with the arrests. News reports indicate that the volume lowered from there, until the U.S. State Department announced that Akwesasne was no longer a major point of entry in 2012. Chief David concurs with this. “There was an incident here four or five years ago where a boat overturned and two [undocumented] people drowned. They didn’t have life jackets, and it was cold. That is where our people put their foot down. There is a hierarchy of taboos here, and people who smuggle people are on top.”

  Drug smugglers are several rungs lower, since a number of community members empathize with—and even respect—their reasons for doing it. What with the destruction of traditional economies like hunting, fishing, trapping, and farming and the waning of high steel,1 there simply aren’t many employment options for Mohawks in their nation. The better jobs in tribal government usually require either a college degree or the right connection (and often both). Many young people just have the casino, gas stations, or smoke shops to choose from.

  “People are into smuggling because they don’t have jobs,” Chief David says. “If they have survived, it is because they have good management skills. They are constantly making master plans and contingency plans that they must change at a moment’s notice. It would be a waste to condemn that portion of the population. You can say they are bad, or you can say they are resourceful. Their job is risky and very high stress. I don’t know if I could do it.”

  Whether tobacco traders rate a rung on the hierarchy of taboo is debatable. Few Mohawks consider the practice illegal, but it does have critics. Doug George-Kanentiio, the former editor of Akwesasne Notes who moved away from the nation after the casino war, speaks and writes eloquently about the detriment of basing a community’s economic well-being not just on a single product but on “one that kills.” He has also noted that working conditions at Native tobacco factories tend to be poor, with minimal health and safety precautions and no labor protections.2 Yet because they refuse to acknowledge the borderline, the majority of Mohawks I’ve asked view this form of trading as a perfectly legitimate business.

  “It has been done for hundreds of years. If we are not trading sugar, we are trading gasoline. These days the product is cigarettes,” Chief David says. “And the bulk of the tobacco manufactured here is sold to the domestic market. Why do they go after the traffickers who are just trying to make a living and feed their families? Why not go after the biker gangs in Ottawa, or the Oriental gangs in Toronto?”

  He has cut the engine by this point. As we drift about, our conversation does too. This is the swath of river where he spends his happiest moments, he says, fishing for muskie, walleye, and the occasional sturgeon. He likes to go late at night when the only light is the moon. That’s when the water is fast, he says, when it has its own spirit. When there is an uncertainty about what is in front of you.

  “But isn’t fishing risky?” I ask, thinking again of PCBs.

  “I have caught fish that have partial gills,” he says. “I have caught fish that are deformed. When I do, I take them to be inspected.”

  “But you eat the ones that seem okay?”

  He nods. “That is a risk I am willing to take now. There was a twenty-year period where I didn’t eat it, but now, I could eat fish every day and by the time it catches up to me, I’ll already be gone. But I would not feed it to my grandchildren.”

  A U.S. Coast Guard boat materializes in the distance. Chief David scoots over to the engine and fires it up.

  “It’s okay, I’ve got my passport,” I shout above the roar.

  “I don’t,” he laughs. “I don’t have my boater permit either.”

  We zip across the glassy water. “We’re going to check out the Canadian fish now!” he calls out.

  Once we’ve crossed the aqua-border, he cuts the engine again. We are floating in blue: water and sky and faraway mountain.

  “You are at a place that is not like any other in the world. New York, Quebec, and Ontario all meet here. I want to put a barge right here and hold a Mohawk court in it,” he says, folding his arms across his chest with a grin. “Then we could say, ‘What jurisdiction are you in now?’”

  KEETAH’S FRIEND IS THROWING a pool party, and I can tag along if I want. “It will be interesting,” she promises.

  Everything is interesting to me, so I forget
this remark until I enter her friend’s two-story colonial and behold its sumptuous leather furniture, its gargantuan flat-screen TVs, its array of electronic equipment, and the region’s rarest luxury: central air-conditioning. Interesting, indeed. Knowing no one besides Keetah—who promptly disappears—I try to make myself useful by cutting up the watermelons and pineapples atop the granite counter and arranging them in a bowl. By the time I’m done, the house has emptied. The kids have jumped in the pool, which is decked with a spiral slide and crammed with inflatable toys. I watch them splash about, then wander off in search of the adults. Adjacent to the backyard is a warehouse. I peek through its door and ogle at its contents. A sports car that looks like it could levitate. An impossibly ornate Harley Davidson. A pair of snowmobiles and a pair of Jet Skis. Slot machines. An ATV and a speedboat. A bar with a crowded liquor cabinet, a mountain of Budweiser beer, and a sound system that could blast us clear to Cornwall.

  Keetah is sitting with the other moms at a picnic table nearby. As I slip in beside her, she laughs at my expression. “You should talk to him,” she says, nodding in the direction of her friend’s husband, who is flipping burgers at the six-burner gas grill. A stripe of hair, from his forehead to his nape, ends in a long, thin braid. He is covered in tattoos.

  Swilling a Bud for courage, I walk over. He doesn’t look up. I stutter about the weather. He grunts in return. I marvel about the party. He plops a raw patty on the grill. Grasping at topics, I notice a flag hanging behind the bar—the one with the Indian wearing a single-feathered headdress inside a sun.

  “So! What’s the story behind that flag?” I ask. “Louis Hall designed it, right?”

  He squints at it. “The yellow? That’s the sun. And the red, that’s … Well. You know.”

  I glance back at Keetah. She nods encouragingly. I’ve told her how embarrassing it’s been, failing to find a compelling drug runner in Texas. Here she is, nice enough to bring me to one’s pool party. The least I can do is ask him a damn question.