Pretty soon he calls down, “Okay, come up!” And so she goes up, and he’d lit candles all the way up the stairs. I guess he’d already had them prepared, and he lit them with one of those little barbecue lighters. And there were hundreds of Christmas lights set up in his place too. She said it was a lovely home. And it was wide open, like, you could see the futon, you could see his kitchen. It was all clean, and I guess he had pictures of our leaders, you know, taken through the years, that he’d had framed. It turned out he really loved our little town. He was like a little quiet historian. And she said you could hear the rapids really well from there.
And so she says to him, “I love your place. I’m just so pleasantly surprised,” and he says, “Well, do you wanna have more coffee, or do you wanna have, like, some water? I don’t really drink juice or anything.” And she says, “Well, maybe just a glass of water.” And he says, “Why don’t you go have a shower?”
Well, she was shocked. And she says, “Have a shower?” And he goes, “Yeah, why don’t you go have a shower?” And she says, “Well, why don’t you go have a shower, Jimmy?” And he goes, “Oh, I already had a shower, right before our feast.”
I guess she thought for a minute. Then she says, “Okay, so you realize that if I have a shower in your bathroom, we’re not goin’ back from that?” And he goes, “That’s what I’m counting on.”
Then he says, “I love my women all showered up and fresh.” She says, “My women, no less! How many women have you had?” And he says, “Oh, not too many, but I know what I like, and I like you.”
She thought about this, she told me. It was a long time since she’d been with anyone, and every day could be our last with what’s happening now in the world.
“Okay,” she says finally. “I’m gonna go have a shower, and when I come out, I’m gonna be wearing a towel. And what are you gonna be wearing?” And he says, “You’ll find out” and he winked, no less!
So she goes and has a shower, and she’s like, “I can’t believe that I’m having a shower on top of the hardware store in Fort Smith. I’m about to come out, and we’re gonna see what’s gonna happen.” And then she thought, Wait a minute! What if Jimmy’s a pervert and he’s got cameras all set up? And she thought, Ah, forget it. Who cares, right? There’s aliens in the frickin’ sky, so who cares if there’s a recording of me towelling off? So she has a shower, and she gets all gussied up in a towel, and she comes around the corner and he was naked on the bed.
So here’s what happened next: they didn’t actually go to second or third base. That’s what she told us, anyways. They kissed; they held each other; they spooned. She called us early the next morning to prove she had woken up in her own bed, and she said to us, “I need your advice.” We put her on speakerphone: “Oh my God, what?” And she said, “Jimmy’s different.” All us aunties looked at each other with bug eyes, and our perms from ’82 almost popped back. “What do you mean? Was he rough? Was he mean to you?”
And she said, “No, not at all.”
So we said, “Well, what? Tell us. Like, should we call the cops? Do you want us to get Flinch to go over there and beat him up?”
And she said, “No, he’s—he’s beautiful.”
And we said, “Well, like, what do you mean?” We’re trappers’ daughters, so we’re curious about everything, hey?
And so she said, “There are no words for what he is, but he’s so beautiful.”
And one of my sisters said, “Oh, sweetie. Is he really big? You know what, honey? I had one of those once, and you just, you just breathe. You just pick a point on the wall and you just focus and you just breathe. You just … you just breathe and it’s like reverse Lamaze, and you just gotta breathe and push through it. Your body will accommodate.”
“Gross, Aunty!” my niece said. “I’m gonna hang up now, because this is not what I was going for.”
Giggles, nose snorts and squeals lit up our phone lines as we started texting each other, going, “Stagaatz!”, “Mah!” and “Holee!” But the official Aunty message was the same: “Okay, call us back tomorrow when you’ve had a good sleep,” we said.
So she called her best friend, Roberta, I guess. And she said to her, “I need your advice. I really need your help.” And Roberta says, “What happened? What what what?” And she says, “Jimmy is … he’s really different. I’ve never been in this situation before.” And Roberta says, “Oh my god. Jimmy’s hung like a horse? Because if he is, he doesn’t need a little thing like you. He needs a woman like me, okay? I have birthed twins, okay? I can take care of that man. If you’re telling me what I think you’re telling me—not that it’s everything, but it doesn’t hurt. Well, sometimes it kinda hurts … but the key here—”
So, Shandra’s kept it a secret since then. She’s never told us exactly why Jimmy is so beautiful. But in my mind he’s what the Crees say: Aayahkwew, neither man or woman but both. One time I had a dream of them lying together in bed. They were holding each other. In my dream he said the most interesting thing to her. “Do you ever have guests stay at your house?” he said. And she said, “Oh, yeah, all the time. I got cousins, and, you know, my relations. They pass through all the time.” And he said, “Do you always wash the bedding right away?” And she said, “You mean the laundry?” And he went, “Yeah. Do you ever leave it for a couple days?” And she said, “No, I do it as soon as they’re gone. In fact, most of our guests are trained. They’ll bring their wet towels and their bedding to the laundry room and throw it in the wash.”
And then he said to her, “Next time you have someone stay at your house, don’t do the bedding.” And she said, “Why?” He said, “My grandfather was a shaman. And when you went to see him, if you were fighting cancer, or a broken heart, or leukemia, or TB, he would ask you for your favourite piece of clothing. For men it would be a cap, gauntlets, maybe a shirt. For women it might be a scarf, a shirt, a sweater, a jacket that they’d had for years. He would put that piece of clothing in his pillowcase. They said he could see your life: he could dream your life. He would tell you the next day who or what was making you sick or how you were keeping yourself sick.
And then he said to her, “I did leave Fort Smith once for a summer. I helped out my aunty and uncle in High Level, and they had a little motel. I had the run of the place. New guests wouldn’t arrive in until late, and I would always nap in the beds that the previous people had slept in. I would always see their lives.” He said to her, “Try it sometime. Wait ’til you see what kind of dreams you can have. People leave their dreams behind.”
I had that dream myself after she told me how beautiful Jimmy is, and I think that he is a shaman. I think he’s a modern-day shaman living in Fort Smith.
Even though they’re not an official couple, my niece says she’ll never be with anyone else. But she’s fighting marriage, and she’s fighting having children for now, because I think she’s trying to decide if she’s willing to live with a shaman and someone who’s both. What does that mean in our communities right now? It’s easy to be persecuted if you’re two-spirited, or gay, or transgender, or both, or perhaps something we’ve never heard of before or a being we’ve forgotten, even under these new skies.
So that’s the story that’s on my mind these days, about what kind of love they have. And I want laughter for them. I want children for them, if that’s what they want. I want to see them standing together, with me and my sisters, on December 17 at JBT Elementary, rooting for their kids and crying at the same time right along with the rest of us, and with the Star People above helping us all.
Mahsi cho.
Super Indians
Chief Danny has outlasted my dad and popes, prime ministers, premiers. He is old-school down and dirty. And whenever he’s off negotiating land claims for “his” people, he won’t let anyone go with him. He says it’s to save “the beneficiaries” money by travelling alone, but there are rumours he has womens in Ottawa. He’s been fighting for land claims twenty-two years now, all by hims
elf. And any time the Feds get close to signing, he backs away and he says, “No! This counterfeit white-man paper is an infringement on our treaty rights. That’s it—I can’t betray my people!” And then the Band’s gotta start all over.
We have an Elder who sits in the Band office: Percy. He comes first thing in the morning for the free coffee, and he carries a list of promises that Chief Danny’s made over the years. He’ll ask, “Where’s the Youth Centre our so-called Chief promised? Where’s the Old Folks’ Home? Where’s the jobs?” One time he yelled, “Chief Danny is a negotiator, all right. He’s very good at what he does. When you settle your land claims, you negotiate yourself out of a job. He doesn’t want that. He likes the cushy life. He likes hopping on a plane every Tuesday to Ottawa, I guess.”
Chief Danny always comes in the office from the back, and he leaves from the back too. The receptionist, Clora, has codes for him. I can see her texting whenever Chief Danny pulls up in his truck. If Percy’s there, Chief Danny takes off.
And when I think about it, it seems the Band is always in court. I wonder where we get all this money for court fees and lawyers. I’ve seen the stack of bills. They never stop. And now Chief Danny wants a hydroelectric dam on the Slave River.
Everyone’s like, “No! We’ve got pelicans! We’ve got sandhill cranes. We’ve got whooping cranes and arctic lamprey. It’s such a fragile ecosystem. We don’t need a dam.”
But Chief Danny comes from a huge family. Whenever other people or the press raise a stink about his plans, all he has to do is pick up the phone and eighty of his cousins show up, which means he always wins everything. It’s cheap. So he’s revered by some, hated by others, but bottom line he’s like a bulldog wolverine: he’s just frickin’ fearless. Keep in mind that his self-appointed portfolio is Culture and Lands Protection and Environment. He’s the one who decides who “the beneficiaries” are, and if you’re against him, you’re out.
When you go back through the Band archives, it seems like Chief Danny’s always been there, wearing his little moosehide vest and his little black jeans and his little white socks and black running shoes. That’s what they call an Indian tuxedo. And—Wah!—he has this little knife attached to his belt like he’s going to go check his nets sometime soon.
When he travels to these meetings in Ottawa, he goes the extra Native mile with a black leather jacket, moccasin rubbers covering up his moggies that he got in Arizona ’cause they’re certainly not our style, a little white shirt that’s been washed a hundred times, probably from West Edmonton Mall, and a gorgeous turquoise watch. He’s got a mullet, right? Holy, his hair and sideburns practically whistle when they catch the wind while he struts. And he has a truck: a super-modified something that’s just loud. He cruises around with his double mufflers, and he blasts the powwow music, boy. He has two coyote tails that trail off the antennae and—get this—BAD TO THE BONE stencilled on one side of his truck and HOOCHIE COOCHIE MAN on the other.
We’re all like “Take it frickin’ easy!” every time he passes by.
I think you know him or someone like him: traditional but cagey?
Me? I’m Dene Cho: a Tłı̨chǫ daydreamer. I was born here. My late dad was the town mayor and now my mom is. What I love most about Fort Simmer is we’re small enough that anyone can make a difference. I really feel that now. I had a rough patch last year. I did not know what to do with my life as everyone else took off for college or university, work, jobs, sweethearts. Sometimes I’d wake up and pray for the day to fast-forward so I could go back to sleep. It was my mom who got me a summer job at the Band office scanning five thousand photos from the Roman Catholic Diocese, who finally mailed them to us from Yellowknife. I’m digitizing them and entering the info that’s handwritten on the back. It’s incredible. I can see the pride in the families back then. I can feel the dignity and strength and happiness in the portraits of our ancestors. I can see proof of how we used to help one another, though I sure don’t see that anymore. People used to farm here; all the portraits show families together out on the land. Everyone had dogs. Everyone looked so strong.
So I’m organizing the archives and the Band library and uploading scanned images on Facebook and our town website. Each upload gets me two hundred likes in the first hour and at least sixty-three shares every day. There are pictures of baptisms, marriages, visits from prime ministers and the Pope. I also help move the tables the Band office rents out for dances and meetings. That wasn’t in my job description, but it gets me outside and I get to use the Band truck. It’s the little things that are huge for me.
I’m sure it’s raised some eyebrows: the mayor’s son working here as a Tłı̨chǫ when the Chief and the membership are Bush Cree. But the truth is you can make more money fighting fires or picking morels, so that’s what most of the membership does. Smart. I have my own reasons for being here: with access to the archives and computers, I can print up my favourite artwork on the printers we use for maps and signs: like Steven Paul Judd, who does the Hulk with braids, or Ryan Singer’s Diné Star Wars series. I’ve printed them up huge for my office. I’m also trying to find more pictures of my dad from when he was mayor here in the eighties. So far, I’ve found two. People say I walk and stand just like him. Well …
I just can’t help but think that this Band could be doing better. They’ve got departments for Community Programs, Community Services and Corporate Services. Each of these is run by people who Facebook and plan their next vacation all day long. There’s never money for a language retreat or cultural immersion camps, but there’s always money for conferences in Hawaii or staff retreats in Vegas, or hand-games tournaments. It’s a Band-Aids and Bingos approach to what I worry is for a language and way of life that is slowly dying.
Because Chief Danny is always gone, he sometimes forgets that he’s organized these big things, right, and that we have to actually see them through. Like Idle No More. On the day of it, he’s like “’Kay! We’re blockin’ off downtown,” and all the other Indians in town were mad, like, “Okay, I need to get my kids from daycare. I’m going through your barricade.” Other Natives were like, “Ummm, I gotta check the mail. I’m going to check my mail. I’d like to see you try and stop me from checking the mail.” Others were, “Yeah, I gotta get my Nevadas from the Quick Stop,” “I gotta get my pop and chips,” “I gotta get my diabetes,” “I gotta check out the government workers ’cause two of them are recently divorced,” “I gotta …” Chief Danny got mad, and he said, “No! We gotta keep the circle strong!” But, like, there’s some pretty tough Indians in our town going, “I’m getting my kid. You coulda done the barricade somewhere else. There’s only one four-way in our community and you blocked it?”
“Yeah. We blocked it,” Chief Danny said. “And we are blocking it for you.”
“Whatever,” Iron Steve said. “I’m going through—now.” He did, and then everyone drove through honking and, yeah, so that didn’t really work out. And there I was standing with a few of Chief Danny’s staff with signs that said IDLE NO MORE; WATER IS LIFE; and TAKE MY RIGHTS AND GET A BANNOCK SLAP! I was thinking the whole time: This is so dumb. It’s the cheapest anything. This whole town is lame.
“Fuck sakes anyways,” Chief Danny said. “We are a colonized people. Everyone, back to work!”
Anyway, the story I want to gift you is what happened a couple days ago in our community. See, Chief Danny’s had it up to here with the RCMP and the town’s volunteer firefighters. I don’t know why exactly, but something happened with zoning and his log house, apparently. Chief Danny has a property so huge that his house looks like a fortified log castle. They say you can see it from the plane as you approach the airport. He keeps buying more land too. Supposedly, he has motion-sensing lights and a gate all around his property. He has solar panels on the roof and a water fountain and even a garage filled with pinball machines from the old Ray’s Arcade that were repaired on the Band’s dime but suddenly disappeared when Ray’s went under (a.k.a. was raided
for drugs). Our old youth worker is now the prime drug dealer in town, and that’s just sad. Whatever.
“The Chief’s too good to live in town, I guess.” I heard someone say that once. Maybe it was me. Who knows? This town loves to Hawaiian Hotbox. In case you don’t know what that is, it’s when you’re too poor to go to Hawaii, so you sit in the bathroom with your buds and crank the shower and turn it all the way on hot but don’t turn on the fan so the room gets hotter and the humidity index rises and you sit there and pass doobies around and laugh and sweat and your hair gets matted and you can smell the toothpaste and shampoo and it’s actually quite nice. Yeah, they say the truth always comes out in the bush or when you’re in Rehab or when you Hawaiian Hotbox with your cousins.
So, at this recent meeting with the RCMP and the Volunteer Fire Department—and shall I mention this was a meeting where we were supposed to honour them—Chief Danny said, “Okay, on Canada Day, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna have a big tug-o’-war. Okay? And what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna have the Band Council, all twenty-six of us, we’re gonna down your little moonyow RCMP and your little moonyow volunteer firefighters, okay? We’re gonna show you that this is Treaty 8 Territory—unceded and unsurrendered, okay? Signed in 1899—okay? Sovereignty, Cousins! We’re gonna fly you moonyows back to England for free—you hear me? And halfway there, you’re gonna be flying through the air into that big mud pit and you will realize just exactly who the boss is around here. Okay!”
Did I mention that he likes to talk like Scarface when he gets going? What. Ever!
We, the employees of the Fort Simmer Band office, side-eyed each other. We telepathically texted each other, “Holee. No backing down now, hey! What can we do?”
And the Chief kept going: “We’re gonna get one of my favourite beneficiaries, Sheri Blaze, out with the firehose to spray down the track. There’s gonna be gravel and clay and mud in that pit, probably a couple stolen bikes down there, and you guys are going in, okay?” He flipped a table—WWF style—before storming out. He got in his truck, peeled out of the driveway and sped out of town with those two tails flying in the wind along with his mullet, just Tribe Called Red’ing it all the way to his home to go steal my high score in Galaga, I guess. Lame.
Moccasin Square Gardens Page 2