THE DANCE BOOTS
THE DANCE BOOTS
LINDA LEGARDE GROVER
© 2010 by Linda LeGarde Grover
Athens, Georgia 30602
www.ugapress.org
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Grover, Linda LeGarde.
The dance boots / Linda LeGarde Grover.
p. cm.— (Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-3580-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8203-3580-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Ojibwa Indians—Fiction. 2. Minnesota—Fiction. I. Title. PS3607.R6777D36 2010
813’.6—dc22 2009051211
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
ISBN for this digital edition:978-0-8203-3748-7
TO ALL THE LEGARDES
AND DROUILLARDS
BY BLOOD,
BY NAME,
BY MARRIAGE,
BY SPIRIT
HERE AND AANDAKII
CONTENTS
Preface
The Dance Boots
Three Seasons
Maggie and Louis, 1914
Refugees Living and Dying in the West End of Duluth
Shonnud’s Girl
Ojibwe Boys
Four Indians in the Mirror
Bingo Night
PREFACE
The mythical Mozhay Point Indian Reservation and allotment lands of the Ojibwe extended families in these stories are in the heart of the six reservations of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, a few hours’ drive north of Duluth, Minnesota, which is a hill city on the shores of Lake Superior.
The Ojibwe are of the Woodland cultures. Half a millennium ago our ancestors made the journey we call the Great Migration in a route along the Great Lakes from the east coast of North America, near Newfoundland, to our home today. We have maintained and when necessary revitalized our language, history, and customs by way of our oral tradition as well as the determination and sacrifices of those we call the Grandfathers.
Our families are large and extended; we have many relatives. Sometimes we address each other not by name but by relationship (for example, Auntie or Cousin), as a term of affection or unity. At times we do not differentiate between degrees of relationship: all cousins, first-degree and beyond, as well as other relatives of the same generation might be addressed as Cousin; relatives of one older generation might all be addressed as Auntie or Uncle, though they might technically be cousins; some whom we address as relatives may not be actual relatives but are honored with that title. We are all related.
Ojibwe names at times combine English and Ojibwe spelling and pronunciation. The Ojibwe language does not differentiate between the letters p and f; the letters l and n can be interchangeable when English language is spoken, as can the letters l and y and the letters r and n. Examples of this can be found in some of the names of characters in these stories: Charlotte is called Shonnud, and Helen is called Henen. In every day that passes, this speech pattern is heard less frequently, as elders who spoke both the old Ojibwe dialects and English in the old Ojibwe way pass on to the next world. I remember their way of speaking in these stories to commemorate, honor, and thank them.
THE DANCE BOOTS
THE DANCE BOOTS
We Ojibwe believe that God the Creator has put each of us in the living world with a gift or talent, something that we are supposed to search for in ourselves, thank Him for, and contribute to those we share the world with. We are each born for a purpose, each with tasks to accomplish. My aunt Shirley’s was to remember by heart and teach by rote, mine to learn by rote and remember by heart. With Shirley gone, one of these days the time will be right for me to become the teacher. I will choose someone who, like me, might not know, at first, why.
When my daughters were still little girls and we lived in Mesabi, just about an hour from my cousins who lived at Mozhay Point Reservation, my aunt Shirley began to call me long-distance from Duluth, sometimes every couple of weeks, sometimes every couple of months, not much before the ten o’clock news, and after the kids had gone to bed. This was during the years that Stan thought I was the stupidest woman in the world, and so I worked at a series of jobs, sometimes at the hospital switchboard, sometimes at the drugstore, sometimes at the concession stand at the movies, and started to take classes at the community college, too, all to try to show him that I was not a complete zero, except for my drinking, and that wasn’t too bad most of the time. When I realized that my drinking was the one thing he liked about me because it proved everything he thought, I pulled myself together and cut down. That was in the middle of Shirley’s story, and it made listening harder because without that thick white ground fog of liquor I could hear it so clearly.
When the phone rang I would have dishes to wash, or a load of laundry ready to fold, or a pair of girls’ jeans to mend or to hem, and always a reading assignment or a paper to write. My days and nights were spent on the run; I thought sometimes about not picking up the telephone, but I always did because it might be Shirley. She was my aunt; she had something to tell me.
“H’lo?”
“Artense. How are you tonight, my dear?”
“Hi, Shirley. Oh, I’m good. How about you; what are you up to?”
She had bought a pair of knee-high fringed boots to wear with her powwow dress. Oh, that would look nice, I said, with her dark blue skirt and dark red blouse. She wondered, did I want her leggings, since because the boots covered her legs she wouldn’t need them? They would go nice with my ribbon shirt, and she thought I could make myself a skirt and we could dance together. Embarrassed that I didn’t know how to dance, I told her I thought she should keep them; she might want them in the summer, when her legs might get pretty hot in suede boots.
She had talked to her sister and told her that it was time to stop hanging around the house and start getting out again. Time to get out and see some people. “Says she misses the Russian. Why would she ever miss that old cheapskate, anyway? I told her, ‘Well, he’s dead, now. Find somebody else!’ She was way too young for him, anyway, I told her. ‘Find yourself somebody younger this time,’ I said! ‘Get yourself a boy-toy!’” She found this so funny that she repeated it several times. It took a few minutes for her to stop laughing.
She had driven the Indian Health Services van all the way to West Duluth to give her ladyfriend Mrs. Minogeezhik a ride to the clinic for an appointment. “Mrs. Minogeezhik, you remember her, she was at the Home Improvement Showcase down at the hockey arena, the lady in the wheelchair?”
I was sorting through the pile of newspapers by the back door, looking for the Sunday grocery coupons. “Yes, she was in front of the Mary Kay counter, right? She asked me who my mother and father are.” The Mary Kay lady had given Shirley a lipstick sample and looked nervously at Mrs. Minogeezhik’s son, Punkin, that grinning charcoal drawing of a jack-o’-lantern shaded and contoured by ground-in grime from his job at the garage and so massive in his size triple-extra-large Carhartt jacket that he blocked one half of the perfumed and cluttered, pristine and pink display counter and shadowed the rest. “Punkin was there, too.”
“Remember that time when your Uncle John picked up Punkin’s jacket off the back of t
he chair at your mom’s house and said, ‘Hey, Punkin, looks like your jacket could use an oil change!’ Gawd, we laughed! Everybody always has such a good time at your mom’s. An oil change—that John. Anyway, she remembered you.”
Where were the cereal coupons? I dug through the Sunday paper. “Who did?”
“Wegonen, my girl? Who did what—oh, remembered you? Mrs. Minogeezhik. She said you have beautiful manners. She thinks you have a handsome husband. Ay-y-y-y.”
“Oh my.” We giggled. “Now, don’t tell him that; he doesn’t need to hear it!”
The night the story really started, she called to say that she was having a glass of wine and thinking of me and how I was doing.
“How is everything at college? What is it you’re taking there?”
“History. And biology. It’s just a couple of nights a week. After work I make supper and feed Stan and the girls and then go right to class.”
“White Man history, right?”
“It’s called the Age of Exploration.”
“It must be hard, eh? But those are all things you need to know. And you’re smart; you’ll study hard and do good.”
“Well, the book is good, and I got an A on a test.” I was the only Indian student in the class and over thirty, the oldest person in the room except for the professor. I wanted to graduate, to be an associate of arts, whatever that might be, and with some practice was learning to eat whatever Dr. Morcomb put on the plate. Just that day it had been a lunch of Indian-European relations. Indians had infected early explorers to this continent with venereal disease, which was then brought back to Europe on return voyages and became epidemic, he told us. I snorted, which startled the young man who sat next to me drawing a picture of a pickup truck. Fire and Ice, he had written below the drawing. He had drawn decals of snow and Old Man North Wind on the hood and box, flames on the fenders.
“Is that really true?” I asked.
The young man looked at me with respect inspired by fear. I had the power of the clap. Indian Power.
Dr. Morcomb said, “This is actual documented history, researched by scholars. There is documented proof in the form of diaries, and also reports written by physicians themselves.”
Being no scholar myself, I took a big spoonful, opened my mouth and held my nose, and swallowed. In the margin of my notebook I wrote, From the diaries of Cartier: What the hell is this? CLAP? I must of got it from that damn Indian!
The scratching of a match against a strip of roughened cardboard; the nearly invisible sound of flame struck from a red-tipped match; the pf-f-f-ft of Shirley inhaling ignited tobacco and paper into her lungs. “Oh, wuh! An A!” A dry cough; a sigh.
“But, my mom says it’s no wonder I got an A; it’s because I’m so old, I was there when things we’re studying happened, she says, and the kids in class weren’t even born yet!”
“That Patsy!” She laughed. “But you probably know lots of things those professors don’t know! You just tell them if they need educating!”
“Biology’s hard, though. They say that almost half the people in the class fail it.” It was my second try; did that mean that the mathematical odds were against me, or were they in my favor?
“Don’t you let them chase you out of there; that’s just what they want. We don’t let them do that to us anymore. And do you know why, my dear?” She hiccupped. “It’s because we’re strong.” She paused, sipped, thought. “No, my dear, you’re not gonna let yourself get chased out of there. And do you know why?”
“Because we’re strong?”
“That’s right; because we’re strong. You just keep on going; we’re all proud of you. Me and your uncle Jimmy, and your dad, he’s real proud of you. You just keep on.” My dad had been smart in school, she said, smart like me. He was a good speller, the best one in the class, and he used to read all the time. “Does your dad still do that? Does he still read all the time?” He could have gone to college or something like that; things were different then, though. “We were in Catholic school together, your dad and me and your uncle Jimmy, and my sisters, too. They were mean to us there, the nuns; they treated us bad, used to pick on us. They even had the other kids making fun of us; can you believe nuns would do that? Oh, they were mean. But you know? That was nothing compared to what my mother went through, and your grandma Maggie. And Louis, your grandpa, too, there at that Indian school in Harrod. But you know what? They never let that beat them, and you know why?” She yawned. Waited.
“Because we’re strong?”
“Because we’re strong.” The silvery tinkle of a sand-filled beanbag ashtray lifted and set down again; the metallic tap-tap of cigarette against the small aluminum bowl set into the Campbell plaid fabric of the ashtray.
Because I was cutting grocery coupons out of the newspaper while she talked, it took a second for her story to register. “They all went to the Harrod school?”
“Sure, they did; they all did. Didn’t you know that?”
“I thought my grandma went to some mission school.”
“Yes, the girls all did, your grandma and my mother and Auntie Helen; they went to that mission school, St. Veronique’s, way up near Canada, when they were just little girls. Some of those girls went through a lot there, some terrible things. My mother told me. And then for some reason I don’t know, after a while they all left there and moved back to Mozhay Point, and then the girls went to the school in Harrod. That’s where your grandma met your grandpa, there at Indian school. Didn’t you know that? Didn’t you? Well, they did, and if it wasn’t for that Harrod school, you wouldn’t be here! Your grandma Maggie was older than Louis, you know, and she used to work there after she was done with school, and take care of him, when he was a little boy. These are some things you should know.” She yawned again, sleepy from the wine. “My dear, I’ll let you go to bed.”
“Well, you have a good sleep.”
“You do the same, my dear.” Then she said, “but I’ll call you back. I want you to know these things. I want to tell you these things.”
That’s where the story started. Why she chose me I don’t know.
When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, how and where my relatives had been schooled was rarely mentioned and never discussed. Instead, the education of American Indians prior to my generation was a topic to be avoided, a source of secrecy and loss, with an undercurrent of shame. My uncle George told me, when I was a little girl, that he had gone away from home to go to school. This was a “different kind of school” that he didn’t like. He advised me that it wasn’t good to think much about the past, that we didn’t need anybody to feel sorry for us. I thought that he must have done something wrong, and that he must have been sent to reform school. What could he have done, I asked my mother. She told me that he didn’t do anything wrong, that in the time before I was born most Indian children were removed from their homes by the government and sent away to boarding schools. Don’t ask him about it anymore, she said; the story made him sad and would make me sad, too, if I knew it, so don’t bother him about it; just be thankful for the life I had.
I spent my childhood and teen years protected from the sorrows of the past by its invisible swaddling. School involved more than learning to read and count, more than recess and gym; school also involved trying to walk with dignity through the annual “Indian unit” during Thanksgiving week, trying to play the clown through thoughtless children’s jokes about scalpings, trying to displace myself into another dimension when a boy imitated the staggering walk and slurred speech of an Indian man he saw going into a liquor store. I was the oldest child, the Indian scout for my family’s foray into public school education; I had a responsibility. I owed it to the past to survive in the present, to the mysterious and heartbreaking experiences of my elders to count coup on formalized schooling: get close, tap it on the shoulder, and run in triumph. I almost did it, but that’s another story.
I don’t know why she chose me. Maybe she thought I could survive to tell the t
ale. What I do know is that my aunt Shirley had watched and listened to what was going on around her all of her life, that she had saved and cared for what she had received of others’ lives, and that she didn’t want the story buried with her when she died. When she began the story, I was in community college and Shirley was driving for Indian Health Services; the last day of the story, that day my dad and I visited her in her trailer, I was in graduate school and Shirley had retired and was dying. Over the last decade or so of her life, she would call, sometimes every few weeks, sometimes after several months, to tell me another part of the story. Eventually, having heard the rhythm and pattern of repeating and echoing, re-echoing and returning, I felt the story taking root in my brain and in my heart and saw that the day was coming that I would continue Shirley’s task of listening and watching, remembering, and then doing my part to pass on and continue the story. When she started I was a young mother; when she finished, a grandmother.
In the meantime, Shirley went into treatment twice; to keep her company during her second thirty days of absence, I practiced controlling my thirst and sorrow. The next year, her first year of sobriety, I began to dance. My dress, dark blue with red ribbons, was sent to me by Aunt Shirley in a dream.
The story she told me is a multigenerational one of Indian boarding schools, homesickness and cruelty, racism, and most of all, the hopes broken and revived in the survival of an extended family. From the beginning of her story, when my grandmother was sent to a Catholic mission school in Canada, to the heyday of boarding schools in the 1910s and 1920s, through the 1930s when the Indian Reorganization Act provided money incentives for local school districts to admit Indian children, I experienced through Shirley my family’s role as participants in and witnesses to a vast experiment in the breaking of a culture through the education of its young. She would talk for an hour or so, until she had shared enough of our story to become tired and until I had absorbed enough to become sleepless. Drained by the tale and honored with the burden, I lay awake for hours, knowing how hard it was going to be to get up in the morning to get ready for work. To pass the time, I would repeat the story to myself, silently, to the rhythm and drone of Stan’s and the girls’ snores and sleep sighs. I was learning by rote but not yet by heart.
The Dance Boots Page 1