Keeper'n Me Read Free Page A

teaches you how to live with each other. Seeing them hills breathe, andbelieving it, is making yourself available to that magic. Like leaving the door to your insides unlocked, she says.
    So we watch that land through the twilight and wait for the first shakings of the northern lights before we’ll head on inside to sleep with our heads fulla dreams about this land, our people, a place called White Dog and a certain common magic born of all of it that brought us all together.
    When I was three I disappeared. Disappeared into foster homes and never made it back until I was twenty-five. I’m thirty now, been here five years but it feels like longer so much has happened.
    See, when I was born my family still lived the old way. There was a small clan of us Ravens that lived across Shotgun Bay in a few canvas army tents on what was my grampa’s trapline. My ma, pa, two brothers and sister all lived together with my grandparents and a few aunts, uncles and cousins. We trapped, hunted and fished and pretty much lived off the land like our people had for centuries, and according to everyone we were a pretty happy clan. The first words I spoke were Ojibway words and the first sounds I heard when I was born were the sound of the wind in the trees, water and the gentle murmur of Ojibway voices all around me.
    According to Ma, they got an idea I was gonna be one of the wandering kind real early. I guess I was a rambunctious little kid and got to crawling around real good. In fact, I got so good at it that I’d crawl right onoutta the tent and be heading off towards the woods to look for my pa and grampa when my ma or granny would have to charge out and put the scoop on me. Guess it happened so many times that my granny finally got tired of chasing me around and made me a little harness out of moose hide, which they tied to a tree with about a ten-foot lead for me to crawl around on. Kept me out of trouble but I disappeared anyway.
    What happened was a couple of guys from the Ontario Hydro showed up one day with a big sheaf of papers. They told my family they were planning on building a big dam downriver and that the reservoir behind it would be flooding right back over our traditional trapline. Even though the Ravens had trapped that area for generations no one had ever told them anything about ownership or title. It was outside the reserve lands that were ours by treaty and was actually owned by the Hydro company. So my family had to move, and since there was no work or even houses available on White Dog at the time their only choice was to head for Minaki, the nearest town.
    Now according to Ma, learning to live by the clock sure was a hell of a lot tougher than living by the sun and the seasons the way they’d been used to. Finding work was tough. You gotta understand that northern Ontario around the middle 1950s was a pretty uptight racist community and Ojibways weren’t exactly the toast of the towns then. So Ma and Pa spent lotsa time away from the small shack we lived in at the edge of town andwe kids were left in the care of our granny who would have been about sixty-five then.
    Now, Indians got a whole different way of looking at things like family. When you’re a kid around here everyone’s always picking you up, feeding you and generally taking good care of you. Sociologists call it the extended family concept. When you’re born you got a whole built-in family consisting of ev’ryone around. So it was natural in my parents’ eyes to leave us with the old lady while they were out trying to make a living. But the Ontario Children’s Aid Society had a different set of eyes and all they seen was a bunch of rowdy little Indian kids terrorizing a bent-up old lady. Now anybody who knows anything about Indians knows that if there was any terrorizin’ being done at all it was being done by the old lady. We were being raised just fine, but it wasn’t long before they showed up with