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This was his offering of gratitude to the Creator and Mother Earth for allowing him to
take this life. As he took from the earth, he gave back. It was the Anishinaabe way, as he understood it.
Most importantly, hunting, fishing, and living on the land was Anishinaabe custom, and Evan was trying to live in harmony with the traditional ways.
This place has changed a lot, he thought. It’ll be a lot better for you, my little star.
hat. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in the television on the wall. It had been off for almost two days now. He thought of how much he had paid for both the phone and the TV on a trip to the city back in the spring, and he was annoyed that he currently could use neither.
“Doubt it. Probably just bad receivers. We can never have nice things on the rez!”
Well, at least we still got the radio, he thought. We may as well be going back in time.
The truth is, Evan thought, these things do work better than they used to. High speed internet access had been in the community for barely a year. It was provided by the band, but connected to servers in the South via satellite. Still, the fact that TV, phone, and internet were all down at once made Evan uneasy.
Evan realized he was staring blindly at the computer screen that read Can’t connect to server. He blinked hard and gave his head a little shake.
Somewhere out on the road, a pack of dogs yelped and barked at something in the bush. They knew the storm was coming soon too.
but every unlit window was hard to ignore.
It was supposed to be a dry community. Alcohol had been banished by the band council nearly two decades ago after a snarl of tragedies. Young people had been committing suicide at horrifying rates in the years leading up to the ban, most abetted by alcohol or drugs or gas or other solvents. And for decades, despairing men had gotten drunk and beaten their partners and children, feeding a cycle of abuse that continued when those kids grew up.
It became so normal that everyone forgot about the root of this turmoil: their forced displacement from their homelands and the violent erasure of their culture, language, and ceremonies.
Despite the hardship and tragedy that made up a significant part of this First Nation’s legacy, the Anishinaabe spirit of community generally prevailed.
This protocol had once been forbidden, outlawed by the government and shunned by the church. When the ancestors of these Anishinaabe people were forced to settle in this unfamiliar land, distant from their traditional home near the Great Lakes, their culture withered under the pressure of the incomers’ Christianity. The white authorities displaced them far to the north to make way for towns and cities.
“As the old saying goes,” Evan began sternly, “come in peace or leave in pieces.”
He needs us more than we need him.
“The world isn’t ending,” she went on. “Our world isn’t ending. It already ended. It ended when the Zhaagnaash came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. That was our world. When the Zhaagnaash cut down all the trees and fished all the fish and forced us out of there, that’s when our world ended. They made us come all the way up here.
This is not our homeland! But we had to adapt and luckily we already knew how to hunt and live on the land. We learned to live here.”
“Yes, apocalypse. We’ve had that over and over. But we always survived. We’re still here. And we’ll still be here, even if the power and the radios don’t come back on and we never see any white people ever again.”
