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One bag is for the king.

One bag is for the queen.

And one bag is for the little boy

Who lives down the lane.

The Cat and the Fiddle

[1] Hey diddle diddle, the cat played the fiddle,

And the cow jumped over the moon.

The little dog laughed to see such a sport.

And the dish ran away with the spoon.

On the Bank of the Tamarack River

[1] This one’s about how we used to do things when we were kids. We lived over there on the shore at The Dam as it’s called, near the river, the Tamarack River as it’s called. And I might be the only one who remembers what it was called long ago. Today the white man calls it the Tamarack River. That’s where we lived. We were over there while my mother was still alive. There was a river there then where we fetched water there, where we got water.

[2] About halfway [to the river] he built a fire there; my father built a fire for my mother where she washed clothes so that she could heat water. She hung it there when she cooked things. They built it. That was that tripod kettle they suspended there where my mother heated things, heated up that water she would use when she wanted to wash clothes. When we were kids my mother made us fill up that kettle, that [three-]legged kettle when she wanted to heat water. Then she really built up the fire around that kettle.

[3] So that’s why we raced after that water. Wherever we lived there, you see now it wasn’t deep at that river there where we fetched the water. So that’s why we made a game of running for that water. The others [did] too, and one of my younger siblings was quite small. And he could hardly walk as he grasped that bucket when he went after water. We tried to haul water for more of my relative’s kettles, whoever [needed help]. So he hauled water. Then they emptied it in, my mother emptied it from the flour and meal bags. You see, they didn’t leak very much. Those bags almost tightened up around the liquid, those sacks.

[4] So that’s what I remember using myself too when I started to fill that old bag. I filled it to no particular level, just what I was capable of managing to bring and pour into that kettle there myself. So that’s what I remember using when I got and hauled that water.

[5] One time we really filled that kettle. I was hauling too. We spent quite a bit of time as we were there working on [hauling] that water. Maybe all too often there one of us would wipe out, spilling that water, and then my mother used to fill it, hauling it herself, so we certainly filled up that kettle. You see, we played around at times, like when I used to get ordered about that hard work because hauling is hard labor, fetching water in order to fill that kettle.

[6] So that’s my recollection of when we lived at The Dam on the banks of the Nenaandago-ziibi (Tamarack River) as it was called. That’s the extent of what I can recall to be told of it. Today nobody knows what that river is called any more, how it’s called in Indian language. I should ask the next time I go over there. No one knows that any more. They only know Tamarack River. Those Indian names are getting lost. The names of many villages as they were called over there are getting lost. Today it is getting lost how things were called in Indian long ago.

Sit Elsewhere

[1] There are some good [puns] in the Ojibwe language, for example that first one I talked about over there—the [meaning] of the name “pants.” There are all kinds of sayings. You see if someone is sitting somewhere and someone wants him to sit somewhere else, he is thus told to go sit in a different place, not to sit there any more, and someone says this, “indaga ikwabin.” That’s what that person is told in order to go sit in a different place, sit elsewhere.

[2] And a long time ago Indians used to get lice. That’s those head lice, body lice. They were called ikwa. And so when someone says “ikwabin,” it’s just like someone is being told to sit however it is that [a] louse sits. It’s easier to explain that in English because it sounds, when you say “ikwabin,” it means, “sit like a louse.” That’s how that sounds