A Dream Like Mine: (Exile Classics Series Number 16)
176
A Dream Like Mine: (Exile Classics Series Number 16)
176eBook
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Overview
Considering whether it is moral to use radical and violent solutions to stop the destruction of the environment, this dark novel portrays a succession of fights over land rights and pollution in northern Ontario. As tensions increase, a local Canadian Native man decides to follow his vision of revenge by kidnapping the manager of the paper mill and a reporter who arrives on the scene.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781550962727 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Exile Editions |
| Publication date: | 08/24/2018 |
| Series: | Exile Classics Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 943 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"The spider is the darkness in the night sky where there are no stars." Wilf Redwing sat hunched in an aluminum-tube chair that had no back. His legs looked frail, long-boned as he crossed them, so lost in the folds of his sweatpants as to seem non-existent. He went on. "The spider comes from the West; it's not an Ojibway spirit."
I was listening to the lonely, defiant voice of an old Indian at the Heron Portage Reserve, twenty miles outside Kenora in northwestern Ontario. What Wilf Redwing told me reminded me of legends I'd read and it took me back to a trip I'd made to Ireland years before. In County Sligo I'd been told in a shout that the current political troubles would be "resolved in the Valley of the Black Pig." That two-thousand-year-old prediction was made as an old man swirled Guinness at me; here in Canada, another old man was speaking living myth, but under a night sky so clear and without humidity it would be utterly foreign to any European. The air was so pure and cold, the rocky landspace so alive and blue. I forgot the temperature.
I had come to this place to attend a sweat ceremony. I'm a reporter, and I'd had an idea for a story on traditional native healers. These shamen had apparently had success in treating alcoholics in Kenora, a town blighted with the effects of Indian drinking. A story about drunken Indians and a new treatment was familiar enough not to challenge anyone and I easily got two days to fly to Kenora and interview some of the medicine men. "It's a heavy enough subject," I was told. "Make it a mini-feature; serious, but light, tight and bright."
The medicine men, it turned out, were funded by the Ontario Government, Ministry of Health. An ex-girlfriend who worked in the ministry put me on to the funding. Maybe there'd be a story in that, I'd thought. Yet, when I met the elders whose names I'd been given I found them sympathetic and legitimate. No story about them would ever be light, tight and bright. They were also astonishingly political. Wilf said he could see the headlines: Government Funds Witchdoctors. "It doesn't get out the right way," he said, and asked me not to write about them and their religion.
Maybe I have a soft spot for old men because my dad died when I was a kid and he would have been around Wilf's age if he'd lived; or maybe I was tired and just didn't want to interview a bunch of Indians, balance them by quoting a bunch of "experts," and do another chronicle about drunks and child abuse and suicide and jails that explained nothing and led nowhere. What I did want was to find out more about traditional beliefs and Wilf promised me this sweat ceremony for my cooperation. I also think he liked me.
"Do you know about the spider?" Wilf asked.
"No. Yes, I think I've heard ..."
"The spider is sacred to the Sioux, enemies of our people from away back, from the West. The 'Mighty Sioux.'" He shrugged with good-natured contempt. "You can still see the rivalry when we play hockey."
The word "hockey" was familiar enough that I tuned out for a moment, staring at the fire, feeling again where I was, not listening, enjoying my nervousness, and the fire did make me nervous. The rocks in it were white-hot. Split slabs of wood burned, bark out, around this white-hot core. The burning wood came up in a cone like a tipi, and there was something touching about the fire's neatness amongst the, well, squalor was too strong a word, but amongst the mess I could see around me: the house off to my left lit with bare light bulbs, the broken chairs, the barren ground. Above the aurora suddenly began, and Wilf stopped talking. At first I thought spotlights in town were sweeping up to announce the opening of a new car dealership. But the town didn't throw up the lights of a city, and town was far away. A huge moon, an hysterical shaman moon, framed by spruce trees, seemed too big. The night again felt cold.
"There's blood on it tonight," Wilf said. "Blood and the moon. Don't worry," he laughed.
I worried, and Wilf didn't make things any better when he said, "You know, two people recently drowned in the Lake of the Woods." Wilf used the full name deliberately. "At night. Maybe the spider took them." Then he spoke lightly. "Maybe they told things they shouldn't have told. They'd been interviewed by a newspaper. By a reporter from Toronto."
"I told you I wouldn't write about this," I said defensively, adding, because I was a little afraid, "Are you trying to scare me?" Talk of psychosis and bearwalking on isolated reserves, stories of intrigue and violent death were recalled.
"No, it's not that. I think more people should know what Indian people think. Sometimes we are too quiet." He laughed. "Not me, though. No," he continued, "I just want you to know it happened. It's not a joke, the spider. Mr. Spider." Wilf added the term "Mr." reflectively, as if trying to convey, in terms I would understand, respect.
"Could I meet the spider in this ceremony?" I asked. "I mean a sweat ceremony is supposed to be a time for visions."
"No, no," he reassured. "You won't meet him. It's not like that. Nothing like that. It's not for that."
A woman named Isabell asked if we were ready. She'd been busy setting up a kind of altar on the ground: little piles of herbs, a bowl, two deer antlers, some pouches of tanned leather. Isabell's small daughter kept getting in her way, nearly stepping on the various objects, resolutely ignoring the stranger but showing how aware she was of him in her very clumsiness.
"Tina." Isabell shoved the child away with great affectation, imitating in her movement the attention-getting pushing of the little girl.
The sweat lodge looked black and ramshackle, waiting, and sensory deprivation is sensory deprivation, but watching mother and child I was more at ease. Besides, I knew nothing could happen with the three other old men who sat silently around Wilf; these people were as far from being a cult as the Moonies were from a real god of mercy and love. As if he was reading my thoughts, Wilf said: "We're not here to brainwash you."
"Are you going in?" The little girl, six I was told, though she didn't look more than four, went up and leaned her body against Wilf.
"I'm a bad old man," Wilf teased the smiling child, then looked up at Isabell. "They always ask questions, don't they?" Wilf spoke happily.
"So, are we ready for you?" Isabell addressed the company. Her husband got up and was busy with a pitchfork, rearranging the rocks. "Stay out of that, Tina!" Laughing, Isabell got off her knees and chased her daughter, who'd dodged out of Wilf's arms, run back and kicked one of the piles of herbs which rested in front of the sweat lodge.
The men rose and moved silently over to a mildewed plywood box that had compartments in it for clothes. They stripped, and someone named Moses crawled into the lodge, wearing long red trunks like an 1890s bathing costume.
"He's on all fours, eh," Wilf said, "to remind us of our brothers the animals."
"Right," I said.
"You go in that way," Wilf made a circling arc with his hand, "because it's a sacred direction."
The sacred direction was clockwise, and as I got down to follow Wilf I noticed cedar boughs on the floor. They seemed thin, threadbare, if cedar boughs can be threadbare. Dirt caked to my knees.
They started to bring rocks in. Isabell carried them ladled in the pitchfork to the entrance of the lodge, where her husband picked them up in the deer antlers and put them in a pit. The two of them gasped, and talked excitedly in Ojibway, and Isabell kept saying "no, no, no" in English when the little girl got too close. We had all settled down cross-legged, and the atmosphere seemed quite casual until I was told, rather sharply, to shift and get exactly across from Moses. Everything was gold and dark without my glasses: I could smell cedar, and feel a chill on my skin like a tonic.
The pit filled, and the rocks had cooled enough to admit only a glow from their centre. They seemed transparent now, and frightened me, as if they were radioactive. From the gasps and grunts that accompanied their disposition I took it they were meant to impress everyone.
Isabell's husband started to sprinkle dried plants – sweetgrass, sage, cedar, I wasn't sure – onto the rocks. Each piece ignited instantly, small and quickly bright. Ah, those are the spirits my friend at the Ministry of Health had told me about. She'd also been honoured with a sweat ceremony, and said the spirits she'd seen looked like fireflies. They were too red for fireflies. My main reaction was pleasure at seeing something I'd expected.
The door, blankets across the entranceway, was shut. Water hissed.
"It's dark in here to remind you that you are in the darkness of your mother earth," someone said. "The womb."
"Oh yes." What colour there was before me, the dying red core of rock, could have been blood seen through a membrane. All I noticed was smoke.
The temperature hadn't changed, and what was burned was pleasant, certainly acrid, but thick and strangely new. I had never sensed smoke like that before. The lodge was absolutely black.
Prayers started, murmured in Ojibway; I began to sweat. The prayers were long, different ones going on simultaneously, then individually. The ends of phrases, pauses, were accompanied by encouraging "Ho's and "Huh's.
It got very hot. Sweat beads collected on my chest. My back was wet. How wonderful this was, I thought, reminding me of Champlain's description of a shaking tent ceremony, almost seeing it: the night by the lake, water whose darkness would not have changed in four hundred years. Forms, shadows, moved outside a circle of fire. That world; those men. Was this reverie a vision? Swaying, I felt overcome with happiness and delight, and started to chant a little to accompany the other sounds.
The joy didn't last long. My body began to feel overweight, as if my torso was blooming into something white below me. Blindness enabled me to see. Then all I could focus on was my blood pressure, and I was even ready to get angry, aware how violently my mood had swung. Don't they realize what heat like this can do to you? Now my swaying became a technique of endurance. Lying down helped a bit, and as chips of cedar clung to my skin, and my nose touched the earth – was it burgundy, or brown? the ox-blood, ochre earth – I realized that the prayers in the sacred circle were coming around in my direction. Sitting up trying hard for a trance, I kept on participating. "Yes, I, yes ... good ... yes." Part of this was to keep myself going, and I didn't want to let the others down. Finally, though, I had to say it; I didn't think they'd ever get around to me. "Wilf, I, Wilf ... Wilf, you're going to have to open the door."
That was my sacred prayer, and it seemed to be ignored, though soon enough Isabell's husband beat on the blankets and they were lifted. Smoke and steam streamed out; a great light entered. The bronze atmosphere made me think of 19th-century paintings of Indiana, canvases by George Catlin or Paul Kane, though there was nothing varnished or sombre about the radiance which suffused the entrance to the lodge. I had a tingle of the authentic, a sense of something which was rare and lost, but which still existed and had been found again. It will never get any more real than this, I thought. You've found what you came to see. Part of the feeling may have been relief as we propped ourselves on our elbows and relaxed. The cool air was a great blessing. The men smoked, I couldn't believe it, after inhaling all we had. They offered me a cigarette. "No," I said. Then came an oblique lecture.
"You know, you're carrying a lot around you have to get rid of," Wilf said.
"I'm not impure."
"You're carrying it around, eh, and this'll help you. If you have any injuries it'll help you. Put your legs near the fire."
One of the old men then told a story of having been burned by a rock on his foot, just before a sweat ceremony. The burn was completely cured and healed by the end of it. "That's good medicine," he concluded.
"All of this is good medicine," Wilf said, meaning the galvanized tin pail with water and cedar in it, the sage and sweetgrass, the sweat and fire. "You'll sleep well tonight."
"You can't think about the heat," Isabell's husband kept on. I was beginning to think him rather garrulous, though he wasn't. He was simply gentle. "The spirits can't speak to you."
Medicine, spirits, this was the first time I'd actually heard the words and I wasn't sure how to react. They sounded ridiculous, as did the smug grunt, "a good sweat, a good sweat," accompanied by head-nodding and a tone of voice that congratulated itself for the obvious. Yet all around was refreshment and beauty and joy.
Isabell stuck her head in. "Did you tell him to lay down if it gets too hot?" she said. "You can lay down," she addressed me.
"I know all about that," I laughed.
"We had the psychiatrist from the hospital here," Wilf said. He never quite looked across at me, but kept glancing aside. "The first time we sweated him he stayed for the whole thing, but the next time he ran out after just two rounds."
The anecdote had its effect. I wouldn't let any psychiatrist beat me, though I was not without sympathy, picturing the shrink getting so desperate he'd tried to run through the side of the lodge – something I'd contemplated, though the walls felt too thick and rubbery to break through. That had scared me.
"How many times, that is, how many rounds are there? Usually."
"That depends on how many people you have," Wilf said.
"Uh huh."
The old man started up. "One night we were packed in there side by side, with Blackfoot people, and it lasted ..."
"It wasn't any hotter than this," Isabell cut him off.
"So the time doesn't matter," I surmised. No one contradicted me. No one said anything for a minute. Then Wilf, to be friendly, said it would depend. This was the same answer he'd given earlier. "A couple of hours," Wilf'd waved his hand. "Depends on how many people you have."
"Who else lasted the whole thing?" I pressed.
"Your friend lasted," Isabell said. She still had her head stuck in the entranceway. Then she changed the subject. "The baby doesn't want to go to bed." Isabell talked to her husband. "I took her to Grandma's but she's back here."
"How are you?" The little girl squeezed in and ran her hands through dad's brush cut.
"Good," he said.
"You mean Susan, my friend from the ministry?" I engaged Isabell. She seemed to know what I'd gone through. "Do they fund the program in Kenora, or is it all from Toronto?"
There was silence, and I ran my hands over the frame inside the tent. It was cunningly lashed, a phrase frequently used in the journals of those who'd first made contact with native people to describe their deft, efficient woodwork. "Is this sacred too?" I shook the pole a little, wondering if I should have mentioned funding in the middle of a religious ceremony.
"Okay, let's try it again." Wilf ignored my question.
Was he judging me? Did he think I'd been thinking about the shamen's budget while I was getting roasted.
"Wilf ..." I said.
"No, no," he said. "We'll talk after."
"Tina, get out of that." Isabell too retreated, yelling at her daughter, who'd disappeared outside. We started once more.
I did endure. This time it was easier, though I had to lie down, especially in the last round. If the spirits didn't visit me, if I lacked visions, I could claim an interior journey, a kind of precious lonely reverie that may have been like memories at death. I concentrated on what I had seen: a kingfisher, a bear that day on the road, a soaring raptor. In the darkness I saw cold daylight, the impersonal brilliant light of the north. Sure, during my last session I was ignominiously down on the floor, giddy I guess from loss of electrolytes, having a sexual fantasy, a kind of TV commercial. But so what? That's part of me too and mainly I was alone and strange and close to love.
Afterward all of us felt giddy and talkative, like a team after a game, canoeists after a rapid, like runners after a race.
Still, I was worried I had ruined it somehow, especially at the end, moaning with my face in the dirt more for women than wisdom.
"Don't worry about that," Wilf said. "A sweat is no cure."
"I thought it was a curing ceremony."
"Sure. It is. But you don't need a cure for women, do you?"
"Sometimes I think I do."
"Don't worry," he said. "I've been trying to purify myself all my life, but that has nothing to do with women. We see things, eh, we come close, they speak to us, we try again."
"But ..."
"No," he said. "You got to remake yourself all your life. You guys worry too much. You'll sleep tonight." Suddenly he looked very tired, and sad, distant, a stranger to me.
"Thank you," I said.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Dream Like Mine"
by .
Copyright © 2009 M.T. Kelly.
Excerpted by permission of Exile Editions Ltd.
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