Four Souls

End of the Story. Nanapush

THE BIRDS are gone, and with them, on their wings, the thunder and the lightning. The skin of ice grows farther out onto the lake and the wind turns the raindrops to dust. The dogs born on the reservation look like Shesheeb’s famous mutt now — all round-headed runts. I take credit for their ugliness. I am at peace. My tracks drag. This is old age, at last. My eyes are weary. My heart is full. My favorite parts of me limp and undemanding. Finally, I can see the shape of all that’s happened and all that is to come. Within me there has always burned an urge to see how things turn out. To know the story.

Now that I know the story, I can rest.

The woman once called Fleur Pillager, and now named Four Souls as well as another name nobody speaks, is now understood by the spirits. Like the spirits, she lives quiet in the woods. No road leads to her place. Hardly even a path. She doesn’t drown men anymore or steal their tongues, she doesn’t gamble. She doesn’t rub her hands with powders of human bones. She doesn’t sing, at least we can’t hear her above the rustle of dollar bills flying from our hands to the government and papers and more legal forms flapping down to cover us in return. Change is chaos and pain. There was no order in our making. This reservation came about in a time of desperation and upon it we will see things occur more desperate yet. When I look at the scope and the drift of our history, I see that we have come out of it with something, at least. This scrap of earth. This ishkonigan. This leftover. We’ve got this and as long as we can hold on to it we will be some sort of people.

Once we were a people who left no tracks. Now we are different. We print ourselves deeply on the earth. We build roads. The ruts and skids of our wheels bite deep and the bush recedes. We make foundations for our buildings and sink wells beside our houses. Our shoes are hard and where we go it is easy to follow. I have left my own tracks, too. I have left behind these words. But even as I write them down I know they are merely footsteps in snow. They will be gone by spring. New growth will cover them, and me. That green in turn will blacken, snow will obscure us all, but, my sons and daughters, sorrow is a useless thing. Much as the grass dies, the wind exhausts its strength, the tree topples in a light breeze, the dead buffalo melt away into the prairie ground or are plowed into newly scratched-out fields, all things familiar dissolve into strangeness. Even our bones nourish change, and even a people who lived so close to the bone and were saved for thousands of generations by a practical philosophy, even such people as we, the Anishinaabeg, can sometimes die, or change, or change and become.