I’d been assuming we’d wait until Canada to start biking, but after parking in the empty lot of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Betsy reaches for her helmet.
“Wait. We’re going to bike across the border?” I ask.
Every land-crossing I have made into or out of the United States has been a traffic-clogged, migraine-inducing mess—particularly along the northern border. Once, while I was taking a Greyhound from Seattle to Vancouver, an agent picked me out of the queue, confiscated my box of tampons, and pulled each one apart as he interrogated certain stamps in my passport. Cycling up to a checkpoint seems absurdly suspicious, but Betsy is already smoothing out the map she ripped from her atlas. Tall, lean, and dirty-blonde, she alights her bike the European way by standing on one side and pushing off with her inner foot while the external works the pedal. I mount mine like a horse. There are no cars in sight, so we ride side-by-side. New York’s northernmost roads are hedged with abandoned farmhouses, dilapidated barns, and occupied double-wides and trailers. The few standing houses are wrapped in shredded insulation, their overgrown yards dotted with oil drums.
“We are Mexico out here, compared to Canada,” Betsy says. “We are the poor, impoverished community. We are the bedraggled farmers.”
These are certainly some of the toughest living conditions I have seen in the rural United States. They might even be harsher than the colonias of South Texas, given the brutality of winter up here. We pass by campers with holes in their doors. Mobile homes with drooping ceilings. Rotting cars and rusting ATVs. Copious amounts of hoarding. Nothing has seen a lick of paint in a quarter century, but every other pole bears a NO TRESPASSING sign in prime condition.
Eventually, we reach a placard reading CANADA UNITED STATES BOUNDARY 1,000 FEET. Betsy says that U.S. border posts used to be housed in “rinky-dink shacks” out here but got upgraded to multimillion-dollar complexes after 9/11. Sure enough, the checkpoint ahead seems fortified for battle. One vehicle is before us and none are behind us. With barely a glance, the Border Patrol agent waves us through. A minute’s ride away, Canada’s post consists of a mobile home with an awning. Beneath it stands a smiling Canada Border Services agent wearing a bulletproof vest lined with ballpoint pens. After shuffling through our passports, he wishes us a pleasant stay in a lilting French accent.
Cycling forth into Quebec, I experience the same shock of inequality I always do when crossing the bridge from the United States into Mexico—only in reverse. In place of signs warning VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED, there are now fleurs-de-lis. People mill about, calling out, “Bonjour, hello!” as we ride past. Their houses are hewn of stone. Their yards are immaculately landscaped. Their general stores specialize in cheese. We pass by apple orchards and strawberry fields. Dairy farms and maple sugar groves. Blueberries growing along meandering brooks. Because it has no interior provinces, some scholars argue that Canada is wholly borderland, with the 49th parallel1 serving as its identity shield. Yet if it’s true that “borderlands exist when shared characteristics within the region set it apart from the country that contains it,” as Lauren McKinsey and Victor Konrad have posited, the term doesn’t seem very applicable to this juncture between New York and Quebec. The only obvious influences cast in either direction are the menus offering poutine.2
A couple of hours into our tour, we notice a billboard for a vineyard and ride its seductive path to a country home with a bar out back. The young attendant runs for her mother, who speaks only French and so runs for her son. His English is impeccable, but he keeps apologizing for it as he pours us generous tastings of four white wines and a late-harvest ice wine. He urges us to enjoy their property afterward, and so, in a tipsy glow, we eat cheese sandwiches from the porch swing beneath the shade tree overlooking the vineyard. A herd of goats amble by, the kids jumping over the lawn chairs.
Eventually we make our way back toward the signs reading FRONTIERE U.S.A. This next border-crossing point caused a mild uproar in 2011 when the United States decided to give its post a $6.8 million renovation, even though Canada closed its sister facility that same year, citing the lack of traffic. It is now one of an increasing number of stations along the northern border where you can only exit Canada but not re-enter. As we approach on our bicycles, two U.S. Border Patrol agents step out of the station. One is thin and tattooed; the other appears to be in training. Flipping through my passport, the first agent starts the litany: Why did I fly all the way to Singapore for two days? What was I doing for a month in Mozambique, and why do I visit Mexico so often? He hands my passport over to the second agent, who asks the hardest question: Where do I live? As I fumble an answer—“Uh, here, but only for another week, and then I move to North Carolina, but originally I’m from Texas”—they step back into their station and click around on the computer. Time stretches in that special you-know-you’re-innocent-but-could-totally-be-perceived-otherwise kind of way before they relinquish my passport and wave us through. Total crossing time: eight minutes. Total traffic pileup: one.
Back in Betsy’s Subaru, we decide to take Route 37 toward Canton. As we approach Akwesasne, Betsy remembers hearing about a bar in the area that straddles the international borderline. If so, it wouldn’t be the only such establishment: Akwesasne’s media outlets—the radio station CKON and Indian Time—inhabit a building that is located in all three nations at once.3 Near the Fort Covington, New York / Dundee, Quebec, crossing, we park and stride up to the nearest agent to ask if he’s heard of the bar. A thickset man with a shaved head, he has a jovial demeanor.
“You mean, the Halfway House?” he asks. “When I was a kid, I used to go drink there. They had a line right down the middle of the bar, and if you were eighteen, you could drink if you stayed on the Canadian side. Wild place. But it closed down years ago.”
He points out its former locale. We walk along the river toward the abandoned three-story building adjacent to the U.S. border post. The words CANADA US are engraved along the concrete siding, with WAS BUILT IN 1820 scrawled beneath it in black spray paint. As I pull out my camera, a mustachioed man steps off the last porch in the United States and hurries over. At first I think he’s addressing me in French, but no: he’s swallowing every other syllable. Naked but for his denim shorts, he has red eyes, chipped teeth, and a second-trimester beer gut.
“The Canadian Customs, they are bad news,” he slurs. “They took me down. They slammed me on the floor. They took my car. My left side’s all numb. I can’t even hold my arms behind my back anymore. Why did they do this to me? I told them I live right next door. Why don’t they let me go home?”
While he rages on about the injustice of being arrested for driving while obliterated, I make photos of the otherwise tranquil neighborhood bisected by borderlines. After a time, two young men pull up in an Explorer, ready to cross.
“Are you Mohawk?” the man shouts at the passenger, then hurries over to his window. “You need to watch out for Customs. They will fuck you up. You tell everybody that. We been here one hundred years.”
Trying my best to channel Audre Lorde—there is no hierarchy of oppression, there is no hierarchy of oppression, there is no hierarchy …—I await the Mohawks’ response. A complete verbal dismantling would be justified in my book, but they choose to refrain, allowing the man to finish his tirade before continuing on their way. Betsy and I follow suit. As we cut through Akwesasne en route to Canton, she asks my opinion about Frozen River. My (lengthy) assessment revolves around the fact that every Mohawk I’ve asked dismisses the film outright.
“Because of the smuggling?”
“That, and it went too far in its depiction of strife. Most Mohawks are doing much better than the movie implied. Like their casino,” I say, tapping the window as we drive by it. “The one in the movie is a dump, but look how chichi it is.”
I could go on, but it occurs to me that Betsy’s family has lived in the North Country for several generations, too. What did she think of the film’s representation of her neighbors, as
portrayed by the actor Melissa Leo?
“It didn’t go far enough,” she says. “The double-wides were too nice. They didn’t show all the add-ons, or the ceilings caving in, or the junk piled in the yards. It made us seem like we are in better shape than is true.”
We drive on in silence past HUD houses that are indeed nicer than most of the other U.S. residences we have seen today. Several Mohawks I’ve met this year have described the tension they feel from nearby white working-class communities. One woman said that when she shows her tax-exempt card in cities like Syracuse, all of the businesses honor it, but in neighboring Massena, “they just wrinkle their nose, so I just leave my groceries or whatever I was going to buy right there on the counter.” This especially bothered her considering that 25 percent of the casino’s profits funnel straight into the coffers of the state, which evenly splits the money between the adjacent counties of St. Lawrence and Franklin (two of the state’s poorest).
I ask Betsy what she learned about the Mohawks as a child growing up in the area.
She pauses to reflect. “I think I thought that Indians only lived out west.”
She doesn’t remember any of her teachers mentioning Akwesasne—and if they did, they probably called it “Hogansburg,” which is the name of a nearby hamlet. Neither Betsy nor her sons ever took a field trip there in school or benefited from any Mohawk speakers visiting their classrooms. Although her father later taught English at Akwesasne via his professorship at St. Lawrence University, she personally didn’t realize the nation’s existence until it made international headlines during the 1979 standoff at Raquette Point. These days, she says, whenever she hears about Akwesasne, it is generally in reference to the casino or the abundance of cheap gas and cigarettes.
“We do a really poor job of cultural and historical awareness in our schools and homes up here,” she says with a sigh.
Ditto down in South Texas. Though our schools are getting better at promoting Tejano heritage now,4 the only thing I remember learning about my mother’s homeland in school was that its army slayed Davy Crockett at the Alamo. Until the drug war, our border towns were mostly regarded for prurient sex shows and cheap tequila and pharmaceuticals. But while it is indeed noteworthy that communities on both borders have managed to exploit the economic system that nearly decimated our ancestors through even more exploitation, it hurts that we are known for little else.
DAYS BEFORE MY DEPARTURE from the North Country, Keetah calls. The first berries of the season have ripened. On Sunday, her Longhouse will celebrate this sign of summer with a ceremony. Want to come?
Few invitations have moved me like this. Of course I want to accept. Yet, of course, there are ethics to consider. For nearly three-quarters of a century, Canada and the United States outlawed many Native ceremonies. The traditions that survived did so because they were conducted in secret by practitioners willing to risk imprisonment. After the bans were finally lifted in the 1950s and traditions were slowly restored, some tribes started getting inundated by spiritual seekers hoping to try out their sweat lodges, vision quests, pipe ceremonies, and dances. Believing themselves thus enlightened, a few proceeded to call themselves “shamans” afterward and charge other non-Indians hefty fees for participating in distorted versions of rituals and healings. The National Congress of American Indians responded with a “declaration of war” against “non-Indian ‘wannabes’” in 1993, accusing New Agers of cultural robbery. A decade later, Arvol Looking Horse, a spiritual leader of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people, issued a proclamation banning non-Indians from ceremonies like the Sundance to protect “the survival of our future generations.”
Once you’ve learned such terrible history, it’s hard to justify participating in it—out of fear not only of saying or doing something wrong but also of literally being wrong. So. Should I take what my guilt-laden inner liberal perceives to be the higher moral ground and say no? Stay true to my writerly pathos and proceed into the ethical minefield ahead? Or embrace the humanity my friend has extended by stopping this mental flagellation and simply saying yes, thank you, I would love to?
“Are you sure it’s okay?”
Yes, Keetah says. No one will be wearing a False Face mask.5 No medicine society will be making an appearance. The Strawberry Ceremony is as outsider-friendly as Longhouse ceremonies get. Some Mohawks, like the Kanatsiohareke near Fonda, New York, have even turned it into a festival open to the general public. Keetah already asked the elders, and they welcome my attendance on Sunday, provided I take no photos or (gulp) notes.
This isn’t the first time I’ve been asked to leave behind my notebook. To secure permission to work as an editor for a state-run newspaper in China in the late 1990s, I had to pledge to refrain from writing there, too. In retrospect, that was like a heroin addict signing up to volunteer at a methadone clinic. I spent much of that year locked in the bathroom, frantically transcribing what I had just witnessed. Notes are how I process the world. Abstaining felt almost self-annihilating. Yet when I wrote a book about that experience years later, I wound up cutting the best “material.” I had formed close ties with my Chinese colleagues and didn’t want to betray their trust.
Compromising is rarely a good artistic decision. When documenting worlds not your own, however, it might be the only conscionable one. At the very least, it helps you avoid the sort of troubles Edmund Wilson brewed in the late 1950s, when he visited the Haudenosaunee nations to research the attacks on their sovereignty by the St. Lawrence Seaway, Niagara Power Authority, and other capitalist ventures. While there, the ethnologist William Fenton invited him along to several Longhouse ceremonies that did feature False Face masks and medicine societies. Wilson then detailed these sacred rituals so explicitly for the New Yorker, he unleashed what scholar Dean Snow has called “a storm of indignation, not all of it from the Iroquois.” Wilson’s subsequent book was aptly titled Apologies to the Iroquois, but as Snow wryly noted, “His apologies apparently did not extend to any regret at having published what both Fenton and the Iroquois thought was a confidence.”
After much internal debate, I resolve that Saturday to bring along a notebook but keep it inside my car. Then I settle into my final drive toward Route 37. Unlike the vast openness of South Texas byways, North Country roads are so woodsy-labyrinthine, you cannot see where you’re going or where you’ve been—only where you are in the moment. And this moment reveals Adirondack chairs lounging on a deck. Muddy boots by the front step. A meadow smeared golden with dandelions. A poplar releasing puffs of white fluff. A murder of crows overhead. And finally: an Amish woman selling strawberries from a horse-drawn buggy. I pull over to buy a few baskets. Harvested only hours ago, their skins are still warm from the sun. Their meat is powerfully sweet.
I arrive to find Keetah at her kitchen counter, opening a bag of Maseca. Dropping the baskets beside her, I announce that corn flour is the key ingredient of Mexican cuisine, too. We could make tortillas, I say. Tamales, atoles, empanadas, gorditas!
Keetah smiles. “I had a gordita once. At Taco Bell.”
But tonight we’ll be making corn bread, she says. Into a giant blue bowl she sifts the corn flour, eyeballs in some Quick Oats, then mixes them together with the back of her hand. Into a vat of boiling water, she squirts a quarter bottle of Great Value Pancake Syrup, imbuing the kitchen with a delicious warmth. The strawberries are hulled and tumbled into another bowl, where they get mashed into compote, drizzled with syrup, and then folded into the blue bowl. Pushing the mixture to one side, Keetah pours in boiling water from a kettle and forms a hot dough ball that she rolls into a patty. The trick, she says, is to wet it just enough so there are no cracks. Otherwise, the corn bread will break when you boil it.
Dipping my hands into the flour bowl, I think of the other women who have taught me dough-making over the years. First were my tías Benita and Mary Lou, who showed me the formidable ratio of lard to masa as we made tamales around the table one Christmas. Next came my Russian friend E
lena, who demonstrated how to bake the perfect potato pierogi at her dacha near Nizhni Novgorod, and my Chinese friends Liu and Yuer, who taught me ten different ways to seal a jiaozi dumpling in my Beijing apartment. One of my best memories from grad school was the afternoon my friend Maggie held a bread-baking lesson in her Iowa City kitchen while her daughter, T-Bone, played underfoot. There is something inherently joyful about dough-foods. How the recipes get passed down through the generations; how they are best prepared communally, with each woman assigned her own task. The way your hands wind up sticky and your floor gets good and gritty. The pleasure of transforming something raw into nourishment.
Keetah says there is a special song for corn bread–making, as it is one of the Mohawk’s most revered foods. She sings a few rounds as we roll out the patties. The melody undulates, as if mimicking kneading hands in motion, and caresses, like a lullaby. One by one, we drop the patties into the vat of fragrantly boiling water and wait for them to surface.
IT’S NOT EASY CAJOLING KEETAH’S little girls out of bed the next morning. However exciting a Longhouse ceremony might be for me, to them it is an impediment to sleeping in and watching cartoons (in other words, church). Keetah dresses them in ribbon shirts and then packs a basket of bowls and spoons. I grab the pot of corn bread as we dash out the door and into her truck. Keetah’s eldest slides in a CD. Adele blasts forth, crooning “Someone Like You.” This awakens the girls considerably. We sing along at the top of our lungs as we charge down Route 37 toward the Longhouse. The ceremony started at 9, but we don’t arrive until nearly 9:30. Indian time, Keetah jokes. If so, we’re not the only ones keeping it. There are barely a dozen cars in the lot.
Gender dictates that we enter the Longhouse through the western door while males walk around the rectangular cabin to enter via the eastern door. Inside is a single sweeping room constructed entirely of wood, from the polished floors to the bleachers along the walls to the high ceiling dotted with fans. Rattles made of turtle shells dangle beside a triangular window. Hanging pedestals are topped with feathered-and-antlered kastowa. There are two wood-burning stoves, one at each end. Beyond that, the Longhouse feels almost Quaker in its sparse aesthetic. The Bear Clan sits on the southern side of the Longhouse, while Wolves and Turtles occupy the northern. With their kastowa and ribbon shirts, many of the men are dressed traditionally from the waist up, and—with their cell phones clipped to their cargo shorts and their name-brand puffy sneakers—millennially from the hips down. The women wear skirts or jeans beneath their ribbon shirts and fan themselves with turkey feathers. Tattoos are prominently displayed: feathers, dream catchers, Haudenosaunee flags, clan insignias.
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