• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 418 0

Well maybe there’s nobody [to blame] but myself because I might not have done things when they were small to talk to them properly. And maybe them too, they know this now. But no. I did not see the importance of speaking only Ojibwe to them, as I spoke English when they were little and growing up. And it is almost in vain that I talk to Indians now, how the old men and my parents used to do things for me. It is truly in a good way that I properly talk to my children, my daughters, so they can understand and maybe know what the Indian people have been given. Often, I always feel just bad about my children not knowing that. But they certainly know things like how to make a tobacco offering when certain things will happen, when it is thundering they put out tobacco. They know a certain amount about talking to the [Spirits] over there. I’ve seen them over there where we lived. They know about when there will be a tornado as it was called, when tornadoes will form and the weather will turn really bad and the Spirits do certain things.

[47] One time over there towards the west I saw them [thunderbirds], and since they looked that way I made a tobacco offering and my son was there with me. “Hey. Look up there,” he says, talking to me in English. “Those ones and this bald eagle,” he says. He was soaring here when I came to see him. He went up in the sky after we saw that eagle. Over that way I held out my hand to him and that eagle took [the offering] with him. It didn’t touch down here, here on the Indian lands. I was answered. I was answered again when I made the offering and he traveled across the lake. Where the white people live, that’s where they went to release [their fury] and the Spirits tore everything up over there on the other side of the lake. We listened as they told the story of its falling. Nothing came down here. You see, I asked that one Naawigiizisookwe and also that one Zhaawanaasang as he was called. “Yes,” she said. “That’s a thunderbird you saw,” she said. “We burn medicine there when you make an offering, and he’ll take it further up in the sky to sound out and leave us alone and not unleash himself here,” she says. Wherever your Drums are at, nothing will be bothered. It truly turns right around and goes up there in the sky again.

[48] It’s those Drums, our grandfathers, where they make offerings, where we make offerings to them in a good way as we carry them. And properly, it is the thunderbirds who are the protectors. The Indian people are protected in these things, he is blessed in what he asks, what requests he makes of the Spirits when he goes over to make an offering. That is why the Indian people are protected in these things. And that’s how I came to know about it. That’s why I know what the old men came to tell me about things.

Belonging

[49] Everything that I’m telling you, these things weren’t just told to me by those elder men. I wouldn’t be able to tell you, and I wouldn’t even have been able to meet you if I hadn’t been commissioned to help those [people] at White Earth when they came to ask me about the Drum. “Yes. I will help you,” I told them. Then they came here, those boys who wanted to come ask me. “I can help you when you get started with that Drum which has been sitting over there for so long. They told me what had happened and what they say today about how the Drum used to be heard there sounding out there all by himself. The [Drum] should not, it cannot, be inside a church. And those Spirits were sad there, which is why the Drum members were trying to free our grandfather to enable him to leave there. Then they truly did enable him to leave over there. Then I told him that. “Yes. I will help you,” I came to tell them, that’s these boys who’ve come to carry that Drum today. Those chiefs came to ask me and again that head singer came to ask me. “Sure. I will help you,” I tell them. “Go ask that medicine man over there about this. They know these Drums,” the [elders] told me. “No,” they say. “Well all right. Ask that medicine man,” they say. So that’s what they were told. “Get him