The Essential W. P. Kinsella

by W. P. Kinsella

  To start with some bureaucrat must have ordered a thousand gallons of whitewash. All the sad buildings in this little town, what haven’t even a memory of a coat of paint, have been sloshed with whitewash. Coming down on the airplane, these buildings looked like extra big, white birds scattered across the barren land.

  These same Government people also imported rolls and rolls of fake grass. It is fall and what little grass there is is brown. The town is mostly rock and mud. Now, in all kinds of unlikely places is little blazes of green.

  “What harm do you suppose it would do the Pope to see the land the way it really is?” ask Frank.

  “If he’s got a direct connection to God, then he’ll know what he’s seeing is phony and it won’t matter,” I say.

  Every rock within eyesight of Fort Simpson also been whitewashed.

  “Looks like Limestone City,” says a reporter.

  “I wonder if they bathe the people as they come into town, wouldn’t want the Pope to smell anything bad,” says someone else.

  “Didn’t you hear?” says a CBC cameralady, “night before the visit they’re gonna whitewash us. We’ll all glow like foxfire the day of the big visit.”

  “I wonder what we’re gonna do to kill time,” I say. It is only Saturday. The Pope ain’t due until Tuesday. I been at events where the reporters interview each other they get so desperate for news.

  All along the riverbank for as far as we can see is square little pup tents in a long row.

  “That’s the Press Area,” somebody tells us. “Better grab yourself a tent before they’re all gone.”

  I’m sure glad we brought heavy clothes. There are little propane heaters and portable cookstoves in the tents, but it easy to see the first arrivals been having trouble with them, ’cause about every tenth tent been burned down.

  Frank and that lady TV producer he met on the plane have decided to share a tent. That evening Frank win a fair amount of money in a card game until somebody point out which side of the deck he’s dealing from.

  “Indians always deal from the bottom of the deck,” Frank say in a serious voice, acting as if he is the one been offended. He at least bluff his way out of any broken bones, though after that no one will play cards with him anymore.

  Just as I’m afraid of, since I appear to be the only Indian reporter in town, I get interviewed by other reporters for radio, TV and newspapers. They are all disappointed that I’m not excited about being here. “I’m sure this Pope is a nice man, but as I see it the Church and smallpox have done about equal damage to the Indian people over the years,” I tell them. I don’t think they ever broadcast or print that. Nobody want to say anything negative about anything, especially the Pope.

  The natives, or the Dene, as the Indians call themselves, have got things pretty well organized in spite of having the Government looking over their shoulders.

  “There are over 8,000 visitors here,” a Cree chief from near Yellowknife tell us. Later, I heard there was only 4,000 people all told. When that guy from the news service called me he said to expect 40,000. I notice that a lot of people who have come are really old. They come off the roads in pickup trucks as beat up as the one we drive at home, all dusty, rusty and coughing; they come down the rivers in all kinds of boats powered by stuttering outboards.

  Out on the flats is a tent city, not the new canvas of the press tents, but canvas stitched and repaired and patched, sun faded to the color of the hills in late fall. Lived-in tents with smoke blackening around the tops where north winds pushed smoke down against the canvas. That field of tents look exactly like pictures and paintings of old-time Indian settlements I’ve seen at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary.

  The women have set up racks of spruce logs for the curing of moose meat, deer, caribou, whitefish and speckled trout.

  In the huge tepee that been built to honor the Pope, drums been throbbing day and night, and dancers dance old-time circle dances. A few, but not many of the dancers are in costume. This is real dancing by men in denim and deerskins, women in long skirts and saggy sweaters—real people, not people dressed in plastic beads and feathers made in Korea who practise their dancing on a government grant.

  The people here call the Pope Yahtitah; it mean priest-father, as near as I can translate.

  Lots of the reporters and many of the Indians have transistor radios, listen to what happen in the outside world.

  “He’s taking off from Edmonton Airport any minute now,” someone report on Tuesday morning, his hand holding the tiny black radio close to his ear. “He’ll be here right on schedule.”

  Then about 10 minutes later, “Take-off ’s been delayed for 15 minutes.”

  The circle dancing continues. Smoke the same color of the sky drift in the cool, damp air of morning.

  “His plane’s developed engine trouble,” someone say. “Departure from Edmonton is delayed by 45 minutes.”

  Nobody’s worried yet. But I imagine I can hear Etta rumbling in her room in that hotel in Yellowknife. If she got anything to cook on I bet she boiling up mysterious stuff.

  After the delay stretch to over two hours people start to get nervous.

  “He’s gonna change planes,” a reporter cry.

  Everyone cheer and clap. The drums in the compound get louder, like they applauding too.

  “They’re switching to a back-up plane; take-off ’s in 20 minutes.”

  Frank busy taking bets on the Pope’s arrival time. He sit behind a table, in front of a sign he printed himself read, Frank Bank. He offers to bet money that the Pope don’t arrive at all, give 2–1 odds. Indians take him up on that and the pile of money in front of him grow.

  “He’s takin’ off!” and a cheer rise over the settlement like slow thunder. First time I ever hear a whole town make, as Pastor Orkin back home would say, “a joyful noise.”

  The weather been perfect Indian Summer ever since we arrived. That morning it was foggy first thing, but, as it supposed to do, the sun burn that fog off, and it was clear with a high sky when the take-off finally announced.

  Over the next few hours, as the Pope fly through the air toward us, the clouds roll in, filmy and white as smoke tendrils at first, then it is like the sky develop a low roof, won’t let the campfire smoke out. Fog all of a sudden rise off the river, twist around our ankles like a cat rubbing. For a while the sun look like a red balloon, then get dull as an orange, fade to the color of a grapefruit, disappear altogether.

  The drum slow down as if people’s hearts beating slower.

  “He’s due in five minutes,” someone shout. The drums stop and those thousands and thousands of people stare up into the fog. It is so thick I have to strain my eyes to see the top of that 55-foot tepee out on the flats. If I get more than a hundred yards away it look like a shadow of a tepee, the real thing hid from me by a gray blanket.

  The long drone of an airplane fill the air, but it is very high and going right past us, not landing.

  “Too foggy,” call the people with the radios attached to their ears. “Pilot gonna try again.”

  A whisper pass through the crowd like a shiver. The word “pray” is whispered from a few thousand mouths. People all around me bow their heads and move their lips silently. The fog is cold and a mean breeze cut through my clothes like a razor blade.

  The plane make another pass over us.

  The fog doesn’t budge an inch.

  There is a kind of keening sound rise from the enclosure of tents. I feel sorry for the old people who come hundreds of miles down river or cross-country to see this man. I’m sorry too that these people have abandoned their own religion out of fear, for something the white man force on them. If it wasn’t for guns there wouldn’t be but a handful of Indian Christians.

  “There’s only enough fuel for one more pass,” someone say.

  “If there was anything to their religion don’t you figure their god could move aside a few clouds?” I say to no one in particular, though I got Mad Etta in mind.
/>   The plane make its final pass and buzz away until it is less than a mosquito sound. People are actually weeping.

  “We just wanted him to touch us,” say an old woman in a sky-blue parka that glazed with dirt.

  “They say he’s gonna land in Yellowknife instead. He might come here tomorrow if it’s clear.”

  People who come from the Yellowknife area groan with disbelief.

  “Why Yellowknife? It’s not on his schedule.”

  “They say the Pope feel a call to stop at Yellowknife and deliver a message.”

  At the news that he may come to Fort Simpson tomorrow, some people give a small cheer. The drums start up again and people go back to their dancing and hoping.

  “That bit about him coming tomorrow is a lie,” say a producer from Best North American News Service. “They’re gonna wait until late tonight to announce he’s not coming. Some bureaucrat in Yellowknife is afraid of a riot.”

  Frank have to wait hours and hours to collect his bets. But now, people who like lost causes are putting down money that the Pope will show. It is kind of like by betting on the Pope they are showing off their faith.

  “I was hoping I’d feel something,” a girl about my age say to me, just after she place a five dollar bet. “The old people believed he could change things. I want to believe like them, but I just don’t know . . .” and her voice fade away.

  Somebody sum it up good when they say, “Same as the church always do; they promise a whole lot and deliver nothing.”

  Nobody seems very mad, except the press people, who put in four ugly, cold days and now have nothing to write about. Some of them scared up a legend or two, about a church that was burned down, or that a great leader would die at a place where two rivers meet. And somebody else get an old medicine man to say the animals been behaving strangely for the last few days.

  But the Chief of the Slaveys state the believers’ attitude the next morning when he say, “The Dene understand weather,” and after long pause, “better than most.”

  During the Pope’s unexpected stop in Yellowknife he record a radio message for all the people in Fort Simpson. He speak strong words about Native Rights and independence. The Yellowknife TV station was there, and early next morning their tape run on the CBC and we get to see it in Fort Simpson.

  “There ain’t nowhere in the world you can escape from the CBC,” is what Frank says, and I guess it is true.

  Just like the producer say, at 11:00 P.M. that night they announce that the Pope’s visit to Fort Simpson is cancelled forever. The Pope will fly to Ottawa as planned. “Serious consideration was given to a Fort Simp-son visit,” they say, “but it would have ruined the Ottawa program.”

  “We all know they wouldn’t want to ruin anything for the fat cats in Ottawa,” laugh one of the reporters. “Even the Pope can’t pass up the bureaucrats. I wonder how many of them came a thousand miles in a canoe down dangerous rivers to see him?”

  The words of the cancellation announcement ain’t cold in the air before the fog lift like it was being vacuumed, in ten minutes a butter-yellow moon and stars like tinsel light up the night.

  The big surprise on the TV show from Yellowknife is that on the balcony of the hotel, where the Pope speak to about 20 microphones, right beside him, the purple circle on the front of her dress pulsing like a strobe light, was Mad Etta. Etta smiling like she know more secrets than the Pope, and, as he wave to his friends, she wave to hers.

  Beef

  Sometimes being cheated ain’t as bad as it made out to be. Back over a hundred years ago when the Government take the prairies away from the Indians and give us back these little reservations, our Chief Three Eagles make his mark to an agreement that, to help us Indians become farmers, the Government going to give every family two to four cows depend on its size.

  But Three Eagles wouldn’t accept the gift. I seen picture of Three Eagles wearing a breastplate, decked out in buckskin, feathers, and beaded wampum. He have the proud face of a hunter and warrior, and he wasn’t about to be a farmer.

  “I am not a tree,” is what Three Eagles said. “My people do not root themselves to the land; we are traveling people. Indians soar like the birds. Just as the white man is a pale ghost of the Indian, so cattle are weak ghosts of buffalo. Farms are prisons. You do not put an eagle in a square cage.”

  It lucky Three Eagles died young.

  We didn’t know any of this history until I read in a magazine about how some Blackfoot Indians down south of Calgary just last year hit up the Government for the cattle they was supposed to have got in 1877. They got a priest to do the research that prove their Chief Crowfoot refused the cattle, but that the Indians was still entitled.

  Biggest surprise though was that it being an election year, the Government coughed up, not cattle but money.

  The magazine explain it this way. “Both sides agreed early on that it would be foolish for the government to drive that big a herd onto the reserve: sorting, distributing, branding and fencing would have been virtually impossible.”

  Instead, every person on the reserve got $25 in cash money, and another 1.6 million dollars went to the tribe’s bank account.

  I showed the article to Bedelia Coyote.

  “If it happened to the Blackfoot, I bet it happen to us Cree, too,” I say. “I sure wouldn’t mind that $25.”

  “You think small,” says Bedelia. “You should be looking at the 1.6 million. Oh, what I could do with that . . .”

  Bedelia is one of a group of young people has started a Back To The Land Movement. They think they can go back in the hills, hunt, trap, and live off the land like the old-time Indians did.

  Myself, I’m kind of fond of electricity, cars and televisions. But if that’s what they want to do . . .

  Bedelia take the case to a priest of our own, Fr. Alphonse up at Blue Quills School. He head right off to Edmonton to check over papers at the Parliament building and Provincial Museum. Guess he’s happy to have something to make him feel useful. He don’t have much success turning Indians into Christians, and spend most of his time read books in his office and say Mass for two or three old women in babushkas.

  To shorten up the story, it turn out we got the same claim as the Blackfoot, only there more people on Hobbema Reserve, so we have more cattle and money due us.

  I lose interest after a while, but Bedelia and Fr. Alphonse push right on, even get the story and their pictures in Alberta Report magazine one time.

  It take two years but the Government offer up something called Treaty 11, which offer the Ermineskin Reserve 4,000 cows and 40 bulls.

  “What about the money?” say Bedelia.

  “That’s just another part of the process,” say Fr. Alphonse. “We formally refuse the cattle and ask for money instead. We have to put it all in writing and it will take another year or two to resolve. We’ll ask for the value of the cattle, plus compound interest for the last hundred years . . .”

  “I’d rather have the cattle,” says my friend Frank Fencepost. “If the tribe got a million dollars, you figure Chief Tom and his friends gonna let us get our hands on any of it?”

  Frank and his girlfriend Connie Bigcharles has joined this here Back To The Land Movement though I’m not sure why. Only tool Frank really capable with is a bottle opener. As for Connie, she like tight sweaters, white lipstick and her “Powwow Blaster” radio, that all silver, big as a suitcase and can shake leaves off trees when the volume is up. Connie ain’t never farmed in her life. She don’t even grow houseplants.

  I never thought I’d say this, but I think maybe it was a mistake for Frank Fencepost to learn to read and write. Ever since he done that, it open up to him about a hundred more ways to get into trouble.

  Frank has learned to read upside down, so just by standing across Fr. Alphonse’s desk he can read the name and address of the bureaucrat in Ottawa that the Ermineskin Nation Back To The Land Movement deals with.

  Frank he grin like a Japanese general while he wri
te to the Government say we happy to accept their offer of cattle and could they ship 400 a month until we get all of them. And he sign the letter Fr. Alphonse Fencepost, Instrument of God. “Fr. could stand for Frank, couldn’t it,” say Frank. I suggest he send it to the Department of Graft, Patronage and Corruption, but Frank copy out the real return address from the envelope.

  “Don’t mess with your spiritual adviser,” he tell me.

  The Government write direct to Frank agree to send us the stock 400 at a time. And it coming in the name of the Ermineskin Nation Back To The Land Movement, Ms. Bedelia Coyote Executive Director. So there’s no way Chief Tom can get his greedy hands on the cattle or the money they going to make for us.

  “No problems,” say Frank. “We just put the cattle to graze in the hills. The bulls make the cows pregnant. Our herd grows. We sell off the calves and yearlings—invest the money in real estate . . .”

  “What about Back To The Land?”

  “Hey, land is land. I’m gonna build my ranchhouse in Wetaskiwin; it have a three-storey, twelve-suite apartment block attached to it.”

  But first we have to do a lot of work. We build a corral between Ben Stonebreaker’s store and our row of cabins on the hill. We will put the first 400 cattle there, herd them in little groups to the pasture land. When we get the first 400 settled, we order 400 more.

  The Bank of Montreal in Wetaskiwin after we show them the letter actually loan us some money to buy fence posts and log poles to make a corral. Out of that money Frank he buy himself a silk western shirt, cowboy boots, a ten-gallon white hat and a string tie.

  “Just call me J. ‘Tex’ Fencepost,” he says, and walk around with his chest pushed out, supervise the rest of us as we dig post holes and nail the poles into place with 6” blue spikes.

  Fr. Alphonse sure is surprised when he get a letter from the Department of Indian Affairs say they can’t honor his refusal of the cattle because they is already on their way to us, and we should try to get our records in order.