Books & Islands In Ojibwe Country (6 page)

Then he's back.

“Did you see me up there?”

“No!” I feel guilty, awful. Here he is about as old as I'll be when Kiizhikok graduates from high school and I didn't take the trouble to film him as he made the dangerous climb to the rock paintings. He hands over the camera. Ashamed of my distracted laziness, I put it away.

“How did you do it?” I ask quietly.

“Oh, jumped.”

“What?”

“Jumped.”

I'm immediately just a little pissed off. “You jumped? You could have broken your leg!”

“It was only six feet.”

“More like fifteen feet.”

“Well, if you hang down, it comes to…”

“Don't ever do that again!”

We travel for a while, heading back for the boat trolley, and I brood on his unlikely stubborn-headed insistence that he's still a young man. How long will it take before he really hurts himself? He's scarred and burnt. Just last winter a red hot stone from a sweat lodge brushed up against his calf and left a deep hole. His back and chest are pitted with sun-dance scars and one of his eyebrows was smashed sideways in a boxing match. He took so many punches to the head while a boxer that he has to take special eyedrops now to relieve the pressure on his optic nerve.

“You've got to quit doing things like this,” I say softly, but I know I will have no effect, and besides, this is one of the reasons I love him. He's a little crazy, in a good way, half teenager and half
akiwenzii.

He doesn't answer, just keeps steering the boat, munching trail mix.

When we get to the boat trolley I am further convinced that animals love the baby because it happens again. This time it is a nice fat
waboose,
a grown rabbit. The rabbit sees us from across the shallow boat channel and behaves just like a friendly little dog. It hops down onto the trolley mechanism while Tobasonakwut is laboriously turning the wheel. The little rabbit crosses the water using a rail as a bridge, and comes curiously up to me. The rabbit looks right at the baby. Just as when the otter came toward us, I'm a bit unnerved. I suddenly imagine that this rabbit will bounce charmingly
close, and then bare vampire teeth. But it merely inspects us, turns, and hops away calmly.

All right, I think, animals
do
love the baby.

Now that we're over the channel and into Lake of the Woods again, I try hard to let go of my agitation about Tobasonakwut's dangerous rock climb. We start talking about the thunderbird pictured in the rock painting that I didn't get to. I did take a movie picture of it and
Tobasonakwut surely snapped some up-close shots, I think, consoling myself. That thunderbird is very graceful, and there is a handprint with it. It is still the most beautiful bird I have ever seen.

Binessiwag

These spirits are particular about what they're called—they prefer
Binessiwag
to
Animikiig.
They're very powerful. Thunder is the beating of their wings. Lightning flashes from their eyes. You don't want to rile the young ones, as they are the most unpredictable. When a storm approaches, traditional Ojibwe cover all the shiny objects—mirror and cooking pans—so as not to attract the attention of the Binessiwag. A feather over the door lets them know Anishinaabeg are at home. They will avoid that house. It is important, when the Binessiwag appear, at any time of the day or night, to offer tobacco.

The only natural enemy of these immensely strong beings are the great snakes, the
Ginebigoog,
who live underwater. These snakes are said to travel from lake to lake via an underground network of watery tunnels that lies beneath northern Minnesota and Ontario. There is an ongoing feud between these two powerful supernatural beings. The young Binessiwag, those that come out in spring, are the most volatile, the most unpredictable.
Anyone who has experienced a violent spring thunderstorm in the north woods can attest to this truth. As we have perfect weather, we don't need to appease the Binessiwag. Day after day the morning sun shines clear. The Earth heats up. The water gleams like metal. The sky by noon is a hot deep blue.

The Eternal Sands

Kaawiikwethawangag, they are called, the Eternal Sands. John Tanner must have approached from the south, for he said, that “this lake is called by the Indians Pub-be-kwaw-waung-gaw Sau-gi-e-gun, ‘the Lake of the Sand Hills.' Why it is called ‘Lake of the Woods' by the whites, I cannot tell, as there is not much wood about it.” And it is true, the lake is very different in character when approached from this direction. Gorgeous and deserted sand beaches stretch around the southeast side of Big Island, the reserve that Tobasonakwut's mother, the original Nenaa'ikiizhikok, came from. The great island is now empty of people, the villages abandoned since shortly after World War II.

Even though Canada's aboriginal people could not vote and were being forced from their lands and educated by force, they fought in both World Wars. One of Tobasonakwut's uncles, a soldier, came home to Big Island much affected by the fighting. He was silent,
withdrawn, and stayed away from his family. Then his little son, a small boy named Wabijiis, came down with an unusual fever.

Such was the terror of disease, at the time, that it was decided that once the boy died the village would break up and the people disperse to Seamo Bay and Niiyaawaangashing. The little boy's grave was dug with paddles—the people wanted to bury him the old way and not use metal. A prayer flag was erected near. The little boy Wabijiis was the last person buried on Big Island, and his grave and all that remains of the village is now grown over with young trees.

Nameh

All of a sudden between our boat and the fringed woods a great fish vaults up into the air. I've seen muskies. I walk around a Minneapolis lake of which signs warn
MUSKELUNGE ARE IN THESE WATERS
. Once, I saw an Uptown Minneapolis type, dressed in tight black jeans and tight black T, wearing a suit jacket, fishing in a very cool way. Cool until he hooked a vast muskie. His screams echoed along the sedate bike paths and the fish he dragged forth was soon surrounded by Rollerbladers, joggers, and awestruck pink- and blue-haired teens. The fish I just saw was not a muskie. It was even bigger. Tobasonakwut sees it from the corner of his eye and slows the boat down.

“Asema,” he says, and puts the tobacco in the water. That fish was the
nameh.
The sturgeon. Tobasonakwut is happy and moved to see it because, he says, “They rarely show themselves like that.”

Once again, I'm sure it is the baby. The sturgeon seemed to take flight above the water, rising in a pale thrust and falling on its back. The sturgeon is a living relic of life before the age of the dinosaurs, and to see one is to obtain a glimpse of life 200 million years ago. I've never seen one of these fish in the wild before, much less grown large. I've only seen tiny, fish hatchery, Pallid Sturgeon that a relative of mine who works for the North Dakota Department of Natural Resources was raising to stock the Missouri River. Nameh,
Acipenser fulvescens Rafinesque,
the Lake Sturgeon, is long-lived and can grow to more than eight feet. The Lake of the Woods record fish was a lake sturgeon weighing 238 pounds. Tobasonakwut says they can grow over twice that large. Males live into their forties. Female sturgeon can live over one hundred years, but they only spawn every four years, and not until they are in their twenties.

The sturgeon up here on Lake of the Woods were the buffalo of the Ojibwe. Greed and overfishing by non-Indians caused their population to crash around the turn of the nineteenth century, when, along with the Great Lakes, Lake of the Woods became one of the world's principal suppliers of caviar. The sturgeon were indiscriminately taken by the non-Indian fisheries for their roe, much as the buffalo hunters took only the buffalo tongues. They were
stacked like cordwood all along the lake and often left to rot. An agonizing sight for the Ojibwe, who revere the sturgeon and who knew its secrets.

Long before fish-farming, the Ojibwe had traditional “sturgeon gardens,” shallow and protected parts of the lake where they mixed eggs and sperm and protected the baby sturgeon from predators. The eggs and sperm were mixed together with an eagle feather in an act both sacred and ordinary. These days, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and tribal communities raise sturgeon. A conservation program begun ninety-nine years ago, in Lake Winnebago near Shawano, Wisconsin, has provided the best example and the best hope. Wisconsin has tightly restricted sturgeon fishing since 1903, and Lake Winnebago now has the only large, self-sustaining sturgeon population in the world. A long-term program there may provide stocks that will rehabilitate sturgeon in the Great Lakes and throughout Canada.

At the base of the very first rock painting that we visited, a great sturgeon floats above a tiny triangular tent. It is a divining tent, a place where Ojibwe people have always gone to learn the wishes of the spirits and to gain comfort from their teachings. Someday perhaps Kiizhikok's children will find the sturgeon vaulting from the water around Big Island a common sight. I hope so. It was a moment out of time.

Waves

On our way to visit the island and the Eternal Sands, we experience a confluence of shifting winds and waves. Tobasonakwut shows me how the waves are creating underwaves and counterwaves. The rough swells from the southeast are bouncing against the rocky shores, which he avoids. The wooded lands and shores will absorb the force of the waves and not send them back out to create confusion. Heading toward open water, we travel behind the farthest island, also a wave cutter. We slice right into the waves when possible. But we are dealing with yesterday's wind, a strong north wind, and swells underneath the waves now proceeding from the wind that shifted, fresh, to the south. I think of what Tobasonakwut's father said, “The creator is the lake and we are the waves on the lake.” The image of complexity and shifting mutability of human nature is very clear today. Eventually, we beach our
boat at the first little bay. Tobasonakwut starts out, at once, to comb for treasures.

I have the same feeling when I come upon a deserted beach as I do when entering a used bookstore with promisingly messy shelves bearing handwritten signs and directions, or a rummage sale run by beaming white haired people who are handing out free coffee and look like they kept all of their forties soapbox glass dishes and their flowered tablecloths in the original plastic. As I look at the beach, strewn with driftwood and interesting rocks, I have the slightly guilty feeling that I get when I visit the gift shop before the museum. Sure enough, as baby and I beachcomb in the opposite direction from Tobasonakwut, we come across three magnificent eagle spikes, those feathers at the ends of wings, the ones used by sun dancers in their sage crowns. But the wind dies suddenly at the margin of the beach and we are edged from the fabulous pickings by biting blackflies and the big droning horseflies that drive moose insane. To avoid the flies, the baby and I take to water just like the moose do.

I plop down and let the waves crash into me at waist height while I nurse the baby. Occasionally her head is spritzed and refreshed. I am wearing a hat, lots of sunblock, dark glasses. The amber-colored water is too rough for leeches to grab onto my legs. I could sit here forever. The pelicans, zhegeg, pass over, twenty or thirty at a time, wheeling in strict formation when up high. Sometimes more casual, they sail down low and I see the boatlike
prows of their breasts and drooping gullets. Crowds of black ducks veer over, too. There is a curtain of birds along this beach. Rising and falling, the flocks constantly change and shift. Then, just before me, about seventy feet out, the great fish rears again. This time it hangs even longer in the air, catching sun on its belly, somehow joyous.

“It's all there,” Tobasonakwut says upon returning, pointing behind me and then out to the open water.

“What?”

“Atisikan.”