Clearwater Clarity

 

I don’t know why I had to go

I had the time that day

That much I can say

I would make an offering

Place tobacco on the ice before the break

Before solid becomes liquid on Clearwater Lake

 

It is two days after spring

The transformation begins

Today I can walk on the water

Soon I will swim

 

It is my wife’s teaching

Anishinaabe ways

I carry all those good things

With me to this day

 

Tobacco on ice

Not clear crystalline

Prayers giving thanks

For my life, my wife and all our children

 

Asking strength for the sick

Sick from affliction

Sick from confliction

Sick from addiction

 

 

Still Frozen Clearwater Lake

I did what I was told

I made my offering and prayer

Now it was time to drive home

*

 

Standing on frozen sand and a sudden wave of memory

6 years old sitting in a wooden Adirondack deck chair for the first time it comes to me  

Metis families and new friends laughing and mingling about in bright colors and sunshine and the clearest water in the world and laughter and laughter

It was some kind of Metis thing.

Some kind of Metis thing.

It wasn’t just us.

Just our family.

 

It was the first time I knew that the Metis Nation was bigger than us.

It was my parents work and others in the early days of the MMF

An expression of the dreams of a dozen or so people not so many years ago

That brought us together and created that moment of sun speckled unity in a glorious pastel rainbow

I knew that I would be applying for membership

To go and speak about a Federation

That is for all of us

 

*

Without Historic Metis Communities we will have no rights

Without Land there is no Homeland

No Land No Nation.

 

*

 

That is where you are from

Said My Mom

After the hospital in The Pas

That is where we went

We were living in that unheated cabin

With ice coming through the walls

On Clearwater Lake

 

Where in our poverty

She broke from the contemporary colonial orthodoxy

That formula is best for babies

They made people believe that powder produced in the factory is the future and proper path

Mom breastfed me out of desperation like John Steinbeck’s Rose O’Sharon in Grapes of Wrath

 

I was breast fed rebellion

On Clearwater Lake

It has been half a century

I am finally awake

 

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