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I thought of the old days when the oxen arrived in black train cars from the dark, flat fields of Kansas, diseased beasts that had been yoked together in burden. All the land, even our lost land, was shaped by them and by the hated thing that held them together as rain and sunlight and snow fell on their toiling backs.
I didn’t understand, until it was over, what it was she had to do. I didn’t know what had taken hold of her and to what lengths she must go in order to escape its grip.
They wanted to make its new bed pass between Tulik’s and the post. But wherever they went, we followed, blocked their roads and machines, and protested. At first we were only a small group and still we were able, at least for the time being, to keep them from Tulik’s house.
Bush no longer spent any of her nights at the house. When I did miss her, I assumed she was at the church, or at her hidden-away campsite, or maybe with Charles. She spent much time with him, and as curious as I was, it wasn’t my place to ask her about it.
At first, Orensen resisted our struggle. I think he believed we would hurt him. It was an ancient fear, that we would retaliate for past wrongs. He remembered the old roots of these new events. There was a time when our people had killed the animals, persuaded by the Europeans who would, even then, starve out anyone who didn’t cooperate. Then, when the people were hungry, the Europeans had dumped food into the lake to demonstrate their indifference to the hunger of the Indians.
He took up our cause because the injustice was so blatant that not even one of their own could abide it. He was a fair man, and in spite of my first impression of him, I began to like him.
Mr. Orensen—Joseph, as I began to call him—was on our side. He brought in cots for people to sleep on in the back room of the post.
I could tell he was sweet on Bush. Many of the men were interested in her, but this fact never occurred to her.
THE NOMADIC PEOPLE, the hunters, showed up from time to time in between their trips into the diminishing wilderness. It was a sad thing for them to see a forest turned into rubble and stump, the land stripped of game. Now they traveled longer distances and down to the south and west to find animals; because of this, they too wanted to help us.
But now I know it was a story of people eating, as toothy and sharp and hungry as the cannibal clan was said to be—eating land, eating people, eating tomorrow. And memory is long about these things. It happens that in a crisis, all of the time between one history and another falls away. It disappears and the two times come together, gathered as one. Remembered.
I noticed that the asphalt road was already bending and cracking. The barricade, full of clutter and old oil barrels which the men had filled with sand and dirt, grew quickly. And then we waited. As the first train approached our barricade, I was nervous, my hands sweating. When the train stopped, a cheer went up. I remember the joy of it, seeing the train, honking and impatient, come to a chugging halt, waiting for us to open the way.
in order to protect our blockade, we were forced to arm ourselves and stand guard. How quickly things turned. Our hearts fell as we realized the men were willing to shoot us for these dams.
I remember thinking that there was so much distance between them and this world of my people I had entered; they were boys from the city who had probably, until now, believed we no longer existed.
Miss Nett and Dora-Rouge became an awe-inspiring pair. Short, dark, white-haired, bent over, tight-muscled Miss Nett pushed Dora-Rouge’s chair from place to place, keeping her out of the sun, or putting her in it when Dora-Rouge wanted “real” light and energy and power. Dora-Rouge merely had to point a crooked finger and Miss Nett, as we had done in our canoes, would take her that direction. At the house, they told stories I couldn’t understand, but I knew they were more than a little seamy, judging from the way they laughed. And they gave speeches to us and to the police: Dora-Rouge said to
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And Miss Nett said, “The earth loves our people. Even in a hard place. The water loves us. We live in the place of its birth. This is where rivers are born and we’re going to protect them.”
She found a knife on one of the boys, put it in her pocket, and threw their liquor out, emptying their cups on the ground. One of them cried and wanted to stop her. But she herself was crying. “No,” she said. “No more.” And Bush told them gently to come back sober. “Tomorrow,” she said. “We need you. We really do.” The next day they were there.
Now and then she tried to stare one of them down, as if she could transmit into them her knowledge, the sum of human emotions, as if she could speak her life to them through her eyes or send them away and show them her anger and determination.
One wrong move, a word misspoken, and there would be war. Even now I think of this when I see young men, that they are unshaped and dangerous.
Nett’s territory had already been partly flooded, and now it was all gone: land, human dwellings, the river they lived by. Bush had it on film. When the pictures were developed, they were sad and tragic documents; they showed Miss Nett crying and trying to get the men to stop, her arms held out wide as if she could keep the men from passing through them.
the man turned away from her and looking toward the camera. He was gesturing with his hand for Bush to stop, his sharp, world-eating teeth visible, a pitiful old woman in the foreground.
Arlie was a master strategist. He studied leaders like Sitting Bull, my hero; Geronimo, and Geronimo’s military planner, a woman named Lozen. It was through Geronimo that Arlie said he’d learned to vanish. The Apaches, he told me, had evaded entire armies and million-dollar searches.
Twelve men came along with Arlie. Bush called them the Apostles.
Unlike so many of us who were lost to weapons of the American world, their tools of television, of bottled spirits and other cruelties,
Then one day Lake Tanka to the northeast of us disappeared. The water was cut off, rerouted into a reservoir that had been built to the south of us. As the lake evaporated and sank into earth, we were silent.
And she said she didn’t mind being unable to look up. “I love the ground,” she said. “It’s my God.”
I remember only the strongest of memories: what it felt like to persist that way in the heat and the rain, to be wet and cold, to stand up with my people. We had pride. We were in something together. We no longer allowed others to call us Fat-Eaters. We were again the Beautiful People.
MISSED BUSH. She now spent most of her time with Arlie. One day I saw Arlie put his wide hand on her bony shoulder as he passed by, and my mouth fell open. I remember having three thoughts: that LaRue would be heartbroken; that Bush wouldn’t go home with us; and my last thought was one of childish jealousy, a fear that I would lose this woman who seemed most like a mother to me. “You slept with him,” I said one day, accusing her as if she had betrayed me.
They thought the land would starve them. Maybe it would. It couldn’t have loved them.
The mudflats continued to grow and water fell away from where it had lived as long as anyone remembered. The migration routes of the animals were being flooded. A river disappeared.
The young men who were quickest to accuse her were the ones from the city, the ones of uncertain identity who had names and categories for themselves, who wore braids like those I saw on LaRue the day he walked toward us from the direction of water, limping slightly, as if his shoes pinched his feet.
They were inspired by his aggressive manner, the very thing Bush hated about him. After that, her dark eyes sent him sparks of anger. The conflict between them, the differences of opinion, grew. A wide space opened between them, as far apart as the pieces of land that had split open when Pangaea had separated from itself.
We could all tell Aurora would grow up beautifully, and we called her “Our Future,” as Dora-Rouge had called me. She held a fullness we longed for.
I took Agnes’ coat to the post for her to sleep on, and its closeness seemed to calm her.
All around the house were wolverine tracks. A chill went up my spine. Tulik thought at first it might have been his dog, but looking closer, he said, disheartened, “No, it can only be human mischief. Someone wanted me to think it was a witch come here.”
LUCE SAID there were witches who turned themselves into wolverines. “I saw it once with my own eyes,” she said. Auntie said she’d been going to sleep the afternoon of the fire, but something had told her to get up and go to the church.
Miss Nett agreed with Luce. “Yes, it is true there are witches who turn themselves into wolverines in order to do their work, just like the old people always said. Like Wolverine, they make themselves invisible. They can pass right by you and you’ll only feel a chill or catch the smell of them. Old Wolverine is just a mask. There’s a man or a woman underneath the mask, wearing it, you see. That person can walk on all fours, and has learned to be sly. They move so soft, like a whisper, and all you see is a shadow.”
Wolverine wanted the people to leave, he wanted to starve them out of his territory, his world. Just as quickly, like thunder following the lightning, a plan sprang to my mind: I would starve out the soldiers and police.
Quietly one night, in the brief hours of northern darkness, I slipped out of bed, pretending to be Wolverine, thinking inside myself the way a wolverine might think.
going unseen across the lines of their territory, straight toward their food supply. I knew Wolverine and his destruction perfectly well. Without words, I, like Wolverine, would tell the men to leave our world. Without words, I, like Wolverine, would speak, would destroy their food so they would grow hungry, so they would have to leave. I could hardly breathe for my nervousness and excitement. I knew it would work.
and when I left, with my pockets and the backpack full, I made a trail of white footsteps, the path of a ghost.
Our lives in that place were being taken from us, the people removed from the land, water, animals, trees, all violated, and no one lives with full humanity without these elements.
The lake, at times, looked red as blood.
DECISIONS ARE MADE in a person’s life by small moments of knowing, each moment opening until, like pieces of a quilt, one day everything comes together in a precise, clear knowing.
For my people, the problem has always been this: that the only possibility of survival has been resistance.
ONE RAINY DAY, as if to mirror our division, a piece of land split off from all the rest and moved through the rain down toward the new river. When I see it now, in my dreams, it is noisy, that separation of land from land, but that day it floated away, moving without a sound except for the falling rain.
there was also a kind of defiance in that splitting, one that couldn’t be spoken except in the language of the earth, and it was a sign we couldn’t decipher, a meaning not known to us.
They shot Mr. Orensen’s dogs, afraid they would attack them. It took so little. Within fifteen seconds, perhaps less, the course of things changed forever.
They even shot at the geese, the opening of wings as they rose up, afraid, into the sky. Guns in soldier’s hands, Bush would say, always shoot precious things.
a wolf was standing in the shadows. It was thin. It was silent. “Grandmother,” I said to it. I thought it was Agnes. It stood and watched awhile, then walked toward the soldiers. “Don’t go,” I willed it. I could hardly breathe.
tear-gas canisters were thrown and fired. But the wind, the one we knew so well, changed direction, and some of the police and soldiers were the ones who had to run. We were happy to see that the wind was on our side.