Some phones rang and he ignored the noise, as he continued with his little mini-lecture, one I'm sure he had practiced many times before. "So the farther west they went, the white man just kept on doing what he did best. But by the late 1800s, the First People had learned, had resisted, so at least they were able to squeeze some bits of survival, some ways of keeping their tribes intact. But here, in New England? The Micmacs and Passaconaways and the Abenaki, they were like shattered clay pots, scattered across the countryside, and we descendants centuries later, are doing our best to bring the pieces together."
"And what piece of the pot do you think you belong to?" The moment those words left my mouth, I regretted them, for I recalled how Professor Hendricks said that Gagnon hated having his past questioned.
But maybe I had caught him in a good mood, for he smiled and said, "Yeah, eventually that question comes up. Who are you? Who are you? It's like if we don't have a label on the back of our necks, ready to whip out at a moment's notice, then we don't count. We don't exist. Okay, let's flip the question for a moment. Where did your ancestors come from, Mr. Cole?"
"Ireland."
"Both sides of your family?"
"Yes," I said, getting a feeling of where this was going.
"Okay. Prove it."
"Excuse me?"
A brief laugh. "There you go. How do you know you have Irish ancestry? It could be French, could be German. Unless you've done extensive genealogical research, Mr. Cole, I doubt you have any evidence of your Irish background. You're depending on what was told to you by your parents and your grandparents. Now, then, you're still at an advantage over me and my brothers and sisters, since you have records to rely on. Passenger lists on ships. Immigration records. Other records from church parishes and towns in your native Ireland. If you had the desire and the time, you could probably do a fair job in tracing your ancestry back. But me? Like you, I depend on what was told to me, by my mother and father and grandfather. I know I'm not pure First People --- so few of us are. But I know what I am. And to finally answer your question, a branch of the Abenaki. And my job now is to make sure we keep on living."
"By doing what?"
The sound of voices out in the storefront seemed to peak for a bit, as somebody told a joke and there was laughter. Gagnon said, "Two goals, right away. Raise awareness and raise funds. The first part starts with the schools, the media, the historical societies in all these quaint little New Hampshire towns. Most of those towns have historians who believe the damn land was empty when their ancestors rolled in and started up their farms. Once you get your story out, once you get people understanding that the First People lived and continue to live around them, then you need funds. To preserve old documents, old artifacts. To get some of our land back. Perhaps a cultural center, someplace to celebrate our history."
I flipped a page in my notebook. "And to pay for a Washington lobbyist?"
Whoops. His mood suddenly changed, like a switch back there had been flipped, and I could feel those dark eyes of his boring right into my skull. "You've done your research."
"Some."
"I thought you were interested in Jon Ericson."
"I am," I said. "I'm just trying to get some background information, about what's going on here and what Jon's part of it was. Among the facts I learned was that lobbyist. No intent to offend."
He thought about that for a moment, and then the smile reappeared. "Hold on. I'm not the only person you're talking to about Jon Ericson, right?"
"That's right."
"Then you must have talked to Professor Hendricks, over at UNH, before you came here. Jon told me that he had just come from seeing her, before he made his appointment with me. That explains it."
"Explains what?"
"Explains why you know about the lobbyist. You see, Professor Hendricks has a thing about us noble Native Americans. She loves to study our history, our traditions, the way we led our lives. She's participated in digs around the state, looking for fire pits, artifacts, old bones, arrowheads. She's done research on our migration and trading patterns, and how the tribes reacted to the first settlers. Oh, she certainly has a thing about the noble savage, but do you see a pattern in her interest?"
I did. I said, "It looks like she's just interested in what you've done, what you were once."
"Exactly," he said, the look on his face now showing no irritation over my lobbyist question. "You see, she loves everything about us. So long as we're dead and part of the past. She has no interest in our survival, in how we're living, in what we're doing to keep our people alive. Which is why she gets all righteous and mighty over the fact that we've spent some money on a lobbyist in Washington. Tell me, Mr. Cole, if you had to navigate the treachery down there, in going through the different departments, in trying to determine what requirements they needed for federal tribal recognition, and what kind of treaty obligations might exist, wouldn't you want somebody who knew the lay of the land?"
"Makes sense to me," I said, deciding not to raise the question of a possible casino. I still hadn't gotten what I needed yet, and if that meant being on the receiving end of a lengthy lecture, so be it.
"Man," he said, shaking his head. "She's almost as bad as the dreamcatcher thieves."
"The what?"
"Ah," he said, opening up a drawer to his desk, which he had to yank pretty hard to open. A hand went into the drawer and came out with a wooden object, that he tossed on the desk. "Seen these?"
I had, hanging from rearview mirrors of vehicles, in storefronts, and in a few offices I've visited over the months. It was a circular piece of wood, with bits of rawhide woven in the center, and a couple of feathers and other objects hanging from another piece of rawhide. I picked it up and said, "Dreamcatcher. Okay, now I get it. This is an object that's supposed to catch bad dreams, am I right?"
He picked it up and tossed it back in his drawer, slammed the drawer shut. "A simple explanation, but yes, that's what a dreamcatcher is supposed to do. It's a sacred object, prepared by a mother and father, with the aid of a medicine worker. It's supposed to hang over the bed of an infant, to protect him or her from bad dreams. The dreamcatcher catches the bad dreams, the bad spirits, and protects the infant as he or she grows older. That's what a dreamcatcher is. The problem is, well, the problem is that a certain segment of the population, having now exhausted channeling and healing crystals and magnet therapy, has stolen our dreamcatchers."
"Oh," I said. "I understand."
"No," Gagnon said sharply. "No, I'm sorry, you don't understand. Look, you said you were Irish. I'm going to make a leap of faith here and say you were raised Roman Catholic."
"Yes, I was."
"All right," Gagnon said. "Not knowing much about Catholicism, I do know that you folks believe that during the ceremony, whaddya call it, the Eucharist, you believe that the bread and wine that's consumed is the actual flesh and blood of Christ. Right? That somehow, during the Mass, because the priest says certain words and phrases, that the bread and wine are mysteriously transformed into the actual flesh and blood of Christ. Correct?"
I took a breath, feeling uncomfortable under the spotlight.
"Look, I'm no Catholic theologian, but I'd say ---"
He interrupted. "Okay, I understand. But I got the rough concept right, okay?"
"Okay, you've got the rough concept."
"Good. Now, let's say you're a practicing Catholic, go to church every Sunday, think the Pope's a good guy, got his act together. All right? How would you, the good Catholic that you are, react if all of a sudden you saw non-Catholics yukking it up and drinking wine and eating bread, who thought they were receiving communion, getting in touch with an ancient religion, and that through their actions and their actions alone, they were getting what you thought was a holy sacrament? Do you see now?"
"I do."
"Ay, ay, ay," he said, suddenly rubbing his eyes. "No offense, but typical white people. You destroy us and kill us and steal our land, and you think you honor us by naming mountains or lakes after us, or sports teams, or by stealing our religion. Damn white people even make money off our holy relics."
Lecture or no, I was tired of the indirect approach, so I said,
"And Jon, was he like a dreamcatcher thief?"
"In a way, yes."
"Why?"
Gagnon sighed, folded his arms back against his chest. "Look. We get all kinds in here, okay? Most of the time, it's simple curiosity, simple respect. Like those kids out there. For the first time in their lives, somebody’s opened up their little eyes to the real history of this part of the world, that years ago another people and another culture called this home. Those are the kind of visitors I respect."
"And you didn't respect Jon?"
"No, I didn't say that," he said. "He was polite, he was nice, but it was his ideas I didn't respect. Forgive me, Mr. Cole, for being rude here but I could give a shit which white man stumbled onto our land first. Jon Ericson wasn't the first to come here and try to ask me questions, and I'm sure he won't be the last. I've had an old lady in here, convinced that the First People were the actual descendants of the missing tribes of Israel, and she wanted to take skull and bone measurements of friends of mine, and then fly to Israel and compare them with the population there. Jesus, old lady or not, I tossed her out on her ass. And then, last summer, I had some crazed writer from Ireland show up, who had a theory that some Irish monk, some St. Something-or-another, came here before Columbus, before the Vikings, even, and preached the Gospel to the First People. He wanted to know if we had any oral traditions about strange men in boats made of cowhide showing up."
"And what did you tell him?"
Gagnon laughed, and spoke in an awful brogue: "I said, begorra and sure we did, if me name wasn't William Bear O'Gagnon." I had to laugh with him and then Gagnon dropped the accent and said, "Yeah, so he got pissed and left pretty quick."
"The monk."
"What monk?"
"Do you remember the name of the Irish saint who got here first?"
Gagnon shook his head. "I forget. Some strange name. What-ever."
"All right," I said. "And how did your visit go with Jon Ericson?" "Polite, like I said. He made an appointment and asked all the right questions, knew the names of the tribes in the area, what kind of lives they lived. Most of them were migratory in some way, living for a while at the seacoast, collecting shellfish and such, and then moving into the forests at different times of the year. Then, after going round and round for a while, he came right out and told me his theory, that some Vikings had ended up at Tyler Beach, and had established a settlement there."
"What did you say to that?" I asked.
"Hah. He didn't like the answer. I said something like, so? What's your point? He got kind of flustered and said he was looking for information about his ancestors, his ancestors from Scandinavia, and he hoped that I could appreciate where he was coming from. I felt like telling him about how at least his ancestors were still respected and feared, but I let that go. I told him to go on, and he said that he had bits of evidence that a crew of Vikings had made it this far south from a settlement in Newfoundland. I asked him what kind of evidence? He said a Viking coin, found at the beach --- and now conveniently missing --- and an old illustration that showed what appeared to be Viking mounds, on somebody’s land in Tyler. That's it."
Same story, I thought. Jon was telling the same story to three different people. So where had it taken him?
"And he came here to see you because..."
"Because he wanted to know, just like that crazy Irish writer, if the tribes here had any legends, any stories, about white men in long canoes --- man, I hate that phrase, long canoes --- and what might those legends have said. Or, failing that, were there any artifacts we might have, squirreled away someplace, that showed evidence of Viking origin. I sat here and waited until he finished his spiel, and then ... well, I didn't think he liked what I said in return."
I said, "Meaning, you weren't nearly as polite as he had been?"
No emotion in his voice. "I didn't have to be polite. I just had to be true to my people. I told him that no, we didn't have any legends of white trespassers coming here, hundreds of years ago in long boats, to invade us and kill us. And as far as artifacts went, I didn't think any of the people I know, or the collections they have, contained any strange, European artifacts. Then he got a bit flustered and asked whether or not I'd ask around. I said no, I wouldn't."
"I take it things deteriorated from there," I said.
"Oh, yeah, that's a nice term. Deterioration. He started blathering on about history and getting to the bottom of things, and why would I stand in the way of finding out the historical truth. I told him something I just told you, that I didn't give a great crap which thieving white man stumbled on these shores first, and I didn't think it mattered one bit. I also said something like even if we had a Viking longboat, hidden on the shores of Lake Winnepesaukee, I wouldn't tell you, because all you'd want to do with it is use it to steal our birthright, our history. We were here first, we were here first for thousands of years, and we still wish you hadn't come."