Looks Like Daylight

by Deborah Ellis

  We sing that history every time we perform. I feel it, probably because we have studied with some of the elders of Métis music, like Lawrence “Teddy Boy” Houle and James Flett. They showed us tunes, told us stories. Because of people like them, we know our history and can be proud of it.

  It wasn’t so easy for my grandmother, my mother’s mother. She lived in a little French community in Manitoba and they were really poor. After the Métis rebellion was crushed, the government redistributed Métis land and the Métis got the less fertile bits. So generations had to deal with poverty. Then the government put Métis children into residential schools and you’ve heard about what a mess that was.

  When my grandmother was a child it was against the law for her to speak French. English only was the rule. They had to hide their French books. It was a case of wanting to be proud of their heritage but also wanting to blend in.

  We are so lucky to be alive at a time when we are encouraged to be proud of who we are and where we’ve come from. We don’t have to hide anything. We can celebrate it!

  We’ve played our music in a lot of places. We performed on TV, at the National Aboriginal Achievement Awards. And we played during the opening ceremonies at the Vancouver Winter Olympics, as part of the Indigenous Youth Gathering. That was amazing, being on such a big stage at such a huge event. And we’re recording an album soon. I’m nervous about that. It’s a big deal, at the best recording studio in Toronto.

  Today’s event is a lot smaller. We’re at the Mississauga Waterfront Festival. Small events are good too because you can see the faces of the people. You can see that they are enjoying the music. One of the songs I love to play is a really fast jig from Nunavut. The elder who taught it to us said, “It’s cold up there! People have to dance fast to keep warm!”

  I attend a Francophone school. So many cultures come to my school, so many dialects of French, from Haiti, Somalia, Niger, all over. There are so many of us “different” ones at the school that there’s no time for racism. We’re all too busy just trying to get to know each other.

  My brother had to deal with racism in university. You know, dumb kids making fun of him, making lame jokes. He never let it get to him. He kept playing his music and doing what he was meant to do. None of those idiots got to play at the Olympics!

  * * *

  The Quartet’s debut album, North West Voyage Nord Ouest, is available through www.metisfiddlerquartet.com.

  My people will sleep for one hundred years, but when they awake, it will be the artists who give them their spirit back.

  — Louis Riel

  Seneca, 11, and

  Ian, 14

  The Gathering of Nations is North America’s largest powwow. Three thousand dancers from more than one hundred nations all over the continent compete for prizes and honors. Held at a stadium called The Pit at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, the Gathering has been coming together for over thirty years. In addition to the dancing there is a music stage showcasing Indigenous talent like the hip-hop group Red Power Squad, Miracle Dolls, the Cellicion Zuni dancers, Leanne Goose and the Navajo/Osage/Apache metal band Ethnic De Generation. There are Native foods, a massive arts and crafts market and the crowning of Miss Indian World.

  Seneca and Ian are two young people attending the Gathering.

  Seneca

  I’m a Fancy Shawl dancer and my sister, Jade, does the Jingle Dance. She’s in fourth grade and her best subject is printing. I’m in fifth and reading is the thing I like most.

  We’ve been coming to the Gathering of Nations since we were little. Our family is from the Laguna Pueblo, but we’re spread out all over now. Some are in Gallup. Some are in Grants, some in Albuquerque. But we all get together at my grandmother’s house in Casa Blanca on the pueblo.

  I love it at the pueblo. It’s not busy and crowded like the city. My grandmother has swings in her yard. We play soccer and tag — all kinds of games.

  Me and my sister are Christian but we do Pueblo dancing too. Pueblo dancing is different from the dancing we’re doing here at the Gathering. Fancy Shawl and Jingle dancing are more from the Plains nations. The Plains people like to share their traditional ways. That’s one of the ways they keep their culture alive.

  Pueblo culture is more just for us. We don’t usually do it off the pueblo and there we just do it on feast and ceremony days. Pueblo clothes are different from the clothes we wear at powwows too.

  Our grandmother is Cordelia Dempsey-Chee. She makes ceremonial masks out of clay. All the designs and colors have traditional meanings, but I don’t know what all of them are. Our uncle is Arlan Dempsey. He makes sculptures of Pueblo dancers. Sometimes my sister and I get to help them. What I like best to do is make necklaces.

  Our grandmother is a good storyteller. She tells us a lot of stories about when her great-great-grandfather was alive. Her great-great-grandfather is our great-great-great-grandfather. He lived in Tsiama village on the pueblo. Back then everyone lived like in old times, before modern things. I think I would like that, but I would miss some things too.

  Grandma’s father — our great-grandfather — went to the Carlisle Indian School back east. The government made him, even though he wanted to stay at home. But I think it’s good that he went because he got to be there at the same time as Jim Thorpe, the famous Native runner. But he wasn’t famous yet.

  Grandma’s family used to be sort of rich when she was a little girl. They had a ranch and they had seven kids and so much work to do they hired two African American families to help them. The men worked on the ranch and the women helped with the children. Grandma says they had so many eggs from their chickens that she and her sister used to throw eggs at each other as a game. And they had a big garden full of squash, corn and beans. Grandma said they lived by the railway tracks and lots of men would sneak onto trains because they couldn’t afford a ticket, and they’d go from place to place looking for a job. My great-grandmother would give them food.

  I’m not nervous anymore before dancing in a powwow. I used to be. I used to be scared that I’d do it wrong, but I’m not now. I just do my best. The judges look to see if you can keep the beat and if you are paying attention to the drum so that you stop dancing when the drumming stops.

  The best part about being here is meeting kids from all over. You make a lot of new friends and celebrate your culture. And have fun!

  Ian

  I’m from Santo Domingo Pueblo. My family has been there for — I don’t know. A long time. The pueblo used to be beside the Galisteo River, but the river flooded and destroyed all the homes, so the people moved to where the pueblo is now. That was over four hundred years ago, and I guess some of my ancestors go at least that far back. I don’t think about it a lot. It’s just where we’re from.

  A lot of people there still lead a very traditional life. Lots speak the language — Keresan. Children too.

  It’s a big place for art. Lots of people there make jewelry or pottery. It’s right by an old turquoise mine, so people there have been making jewelry and things from turquoise forever. There’s a big crafts market every Labor Day and people sell things from stalls along the road all the time.

  August fourth is our big feast day. It’s to honor St. Dominic. The pueblo is named after him, but that’s the old way. The new way is to call it by its old name, which is Kewa. So we are from Kewa Pueblo.

  On August fourth we have a big feast and a Corn Dance. Dancers come from other places to be a part of it. Thousands come. I’m not a dancer, but I do drumming at these special occasions and dances.

  Something really bad happened there a year and a half ago. There was a big storm with lots of hail, hail the size of golf balls. It was really scary. It came down so heavy it put holes in people’s cars and the roofs of their houses. Some of the homes were really old. People had lived in them for a long time, but they got flooded and destroyed, so people had to
move out. And when the water dried up, it made everything moldy. You can’t live in mold because it’s too hard to breathe.

  My dad started a foundation to help get money for the tribe to rebuild. Most people didn’t have insurance. They lost everything. People were even staying in offices, just to have somewhere to stay. Dad helped do some of the actual building too.

  Dad’s done a lot of building in his life. He used to have a business but he lost it a couple of years ago when a fire burned up his truck and his tools. Now he and my mother make jewelry. They’re good at it. They’ve done museum shows and other shows.

  This is my first time at the Gathering of Nations. I didn’t really get how big it was until I got here. There are people here from everywhere! Lots have been stopping by the booth, asking about the jewelry, just saying hello.

  I don’t generally see my parents during the week, so it’s good to spend time with them. I go to the Santa Fe Indian School. It’s a charter school, a boarding school. I’m in my second year there. I like it. The school looks good. It’s not ugly. I stay in a dormitory and come home on weekends. Reading is what I like to do best. Math is sometimes a challenge.

  It’s a good school now because it’s run by Native Americans. It used to be a boarding school run by the government. In the 1800s, kids would be taken from their families and forced to go. They’d cut the kids’ hair, dress them up in military uniforms and make them march everywhere like little soldiers. And if any of them disobeyed or spoke any language that wasn’t English, they got put in a jail at the back of the school and just left there.

  I like being at home because we live on a ranch. We have a few horses and I like being around them.

  It’s a little overwhelming being here. So many people from so many places. It’s really something to experience.

  Nena, 16

  Western science is beginning to have an appreciation for Indigenous knowledge, and there is a blending of the two approaches. NASA, for instance, has been working with the American Indian Higher Education Consortium and other organizations. Indigenous knowledge is proving to be particularly valuable when looking at environmental problems and deciding how to correct the damage that has been done to this planet.

  In 1889, Susan La Flesche graduated from the Women’s Medical College in Pennsylvania with the top marks in her class and became the first female Native American physician, going on to build the first Native American hospital. Just like Susan, Nena is exploring the world through science. She is from the Seminole Nation and lives in Clewiston, Florida, near the Big Cypress Reservation.

  Clewiston is a little town. We have stores like Walmart, convenience stores, usual things — a library, a place to get fried frogs legs. Clewiston’s nickname is America’s Sweetest Town because of the sugar refinery. Lots of times there is a sweet smell in the air, and there are sugar cane farms all around. When they burn the cane the air gets all smoky and it stinks. But it’s generally a nice town. Some of the whites act like jerks, but I try to avoid them.

  I go to a private school called Ahfachkee School. It’s a Seminole-run school. I like it because it reflects who I am as a Seminole, my history and culture. And we can learn our language. We’ll do things like talk about animals using our language, and the more we learn, the more we can use it. It takes time to learn it. It’s not hard. Well, yeah, it is kind of hard.

  Seminoles are one of those nations that got split up during the Indian removals. A lot of our people were forced to go to Oklahoma, and there is now a Seminole Nation of Oklahoma too. But many Seminoles hid in the Everglades when the US Army came to get them, so they ended up staying. Can you imagine? You have to be tough to live in a swamp. So most of us living here now are descendants of those people.

  There’s Black Seminoles too. Slaves would escape and come to us — my ancestors — and we’d hide them and they became part of us. And some of the people alive today are their great-great-great-great-grandchildren.

  The teachers here at this school expect us to work hard and take our work seriously. They teach us how to study, and they mix cultural practices in with our lessons, like language, basket-weaving, carving, traditional cooking, and about traditional ceremonies like the Green Corn Dance. People can visit the reservation and see displays of things like alligator wrestling, which some Seminoles in history became good at as a way to make money. Whites would pay to watch them wrestle an alligator.

  I was a winner of our local science fair, which meant I got to go with a few others from our school to the National Science Fair put on by the American Indian Science and Engineering Society. My project is on color fastness — how cloth holds color. I used blueberry juice as my base and tried water with salt and other substances to see what would hold the color best. Then I did several washes with each formula, charting out what was happening.

  Traditional Seminole structures,

  Okeechobee Seminole Reservation

  I was really excited to go to the national competition because it was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I’d never been anywhere before! I’d never been on a plane. I don’t mind saying that I was scared, and the security stuff at the airport was so serious that it made me even more scared! But I got over it.

  I loved Albuquerque. It was great, really beautiful with the mountains all around and the way they changed color as the day changed. We spent most of the time at the competition, but we still had some time to look around. We went to the science museum, went shopping at the Old Town market, we took the tramway up the mountain to see the view. And we went to the Pueblo Cultural Center, which was terrific. We learned a lot about the Pueblo people.

  Before the competition we were busy. We had to check on our tables, make sure we knew which space was assigned to us, set up our projects, fix anything that had been damaged during the trip, and have everything checked over to be sure it was safe to be judged and that all the rules had been met.

  Another scary thing for me was when I had to explain my project to the judges. I get really nervous when I have to talk to people I don’t know. I don’t often have to do it because I live and go to school where everybody knows everybody. And here were important people standing right in front of me, people who knew a lot more than me about science.

  But that’s why I was there. I had to explain the research methods and the conclusions. Then I got asked a lot of questions. Some I knew the answers to, some were kind of tricky, but I got through it.

  Afterwards I was over-excited! I didn’t know how I did so I felt really nervous about what the result would be.

  Then the awards got handed out. I got a first place for chemistry!

  And then I won a special award from the American Chemical Society for excellence in a project featuring chemistry!

  It felt so good. The Seminole Tribune did a special article about us. It was really great.

  But the best thing about the competition was being with so many other Native people from all over the country. All sorts of tribes — Blood, Ho-Chunk, Sauk and Fox, Kiowa, Hopi. All sorts.

  Being with so many other Native kids — everywhere I looked, there were more Native kids! And we all had different backgrounds and stories, but we were all smart and into science and it was so cool.

  There was an opening ceremony. People gave speeches about how proud they were of all of us, there was drumming, and one of the Native guys gave a welcoming speech in his own language, a language I hadn’t heard before.

  Before the national competition I was thinking about being a lawyer, but now I’m thinking I’ll continue on in science. Lots of people at the science fair said I should. And there are so many areas of scientific study — botany, medicine, chemistry, lots of them.

  So it was worth being nervous and scared and not giving in to it. I could have just said, No, I’m afraid to fly, I’ll just stay home, and look at what I would have missed!

  I’m sure there
will be other things in my life that will make me afraid. But I won’t let it get in the way.

  José, 18

  The US government referred to the Choctaw Nation as one of the Five Civilized Tribes, along with the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw and Seminole. They were called civilized because many had begun to adopt European ways — living in log cabins, wearing European-style clothing and attending school. But in 1829, President Andrew Jackson decided that assimilation wasn’t good enough. He launched a plan to remove all Native Americans from the US South to places west of the Mississippi River. The idea was to move 60,000 Native Americans who had been living in the Eastern Woodlands since time immemorial and put them in an area vastly unsuited to their traditional way of life. The bulk of the Five Tribes were rounded up at gunpoint and then forced to walk, leaving behind farms and homes. One out of four died along the way.

  Some of the Choctaw resettled in Oklahoma. Those who managed to remain behind became the Choctaw Nation of Mississippi. José is one of their descendants.

  I was born in Dallas, Texas, but my parents thought it would be good for me to get away from the more negative influences of the city. So when I was twelve they sent me to the Choctaw reservation here in Mississippi to live with my grandparents. My grandparents have done so much to make me into who I am, and I’ll always be grateful to my parents for sending me here.

  The robot entry from José’s school

  My Dallas grandparents are retired. My grandfather made flags and my grandmother worked for the Bank of America. My mom works at Lowe’s and my dad is a welder.

  In Dallas, I struggled in school. I couldn’t take the classes seriously. It all just seemed so unimportant. I was more interested in hanging out with friends, or with guys who weren’t real friends — just other guys who liked to get into trouble. My school back in Texas had a few other Native kids, but not many. It had a mix of a lot of different kinds of kids. I knew some who were in gangs already, and others who were not yet in gangs but you could tell they were headed that way.