Up in Smoke Read Free

Communicating with the spirit world?”
    He poured the now boiling water over the Maxwell House. “All I know is the British Museum has almost a hundred pipes more or less like him. A menagerie of stone-carved effigies — sparrows, frogs, a cat, an otter. But no loons.”
    â€œExtraordinary! How did they acquire them?”
    â€œDug them up.”
    â€œWhere?”
    â€œOhio.”
    â€œShipped them from Ohio to London? From some punter’s back garden in Cleveland all the way to Bloomsbury?” Ever the professional private investigator Colleen was intrigued by the outlandish. And had a natural sense of the absurd; you didn’t survive childhood in apartheid South Africa — ride inside the cushy cab of your father’s truck while your Black playmates rode behind in the unprotected flatbed — without a keen awareness of life’s ironies.
    â€œA long drive south of Cleveland,” he told her. “Almost at the Ohio River. In two aboriginal burial mounds.”
    â€œAnd that’s where you found yours? Outback Ohio? Then smuggled it over the border?”
    He shook his head, then explained.
    He’d found the loon pipe buried in a corner of his family’s tobacco farm. He’d been about twenty years old at the time, playing around with his dad’s metal detector. Dad used the homemade gadget to find old coins and such along the shores of Lake Erie. Zol had never taken much interest in the hobby, but one Saturday afternoon, when he was home from chef school for the weekend, he found himself with nothing to do. It was the end of the tobacco season and he’d exhausted the list of farm chores Dad always had waiting for him. Zol was goofing around with the detector when it screeched over a patch of dirt. He got a shovel from the barn and unearthed what turned out to be a rusty strong box. He forced it open and found the loon wrapped in a rag. He had no idea what it was, but his high school history teacher at Simcoe Composite understood its significance immediately and put Zol in touch with the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto.
    â€œThe Brits have dozens of stone pipes, similar to that one?” Colleen said, pointing at the newspaper photo. “And they’re all two thousand years old?”
    He’d never figured out how the English had managed to scoop up a cache of priceless artifacts and speed them off to London without the Americans making an epic fuss.
    â€œAnd carved from a type of rock called pipestone,” he explained. The ancient workmanship was as fine as the best modern Inuit carvings he’d seen for sale in the classiest art shops. “The pipe fits in the palm of your hand. Nose to nose, eyes boring into yours when you take a toke through a hole in the base.”
    â€œDid you ever try it out?”
    â€œA couple of times.”
    She studied the photo again, then said, “Amazing to think of the Indians smoking tobacco for the past two thousand years.”
    He flinched at the sound of that word, even voiced in her musical accent. He avoided it,
Indian
, especially now that he was a public official, representing the interests of a multi-ethnic society, and under constant public scrutiny. Only the federal government clung to the outdated term and used it in its legislation pertaining to Canada’s indigenous people. The feds still called the land set aside for the country’s original inhabitants
Indian Reserves
.
    On the street, everyday Canadians were so caught up with the shameful plight of the country’s Native people that no one knew what to call them. Political correctness inhibited constructive dialogue and strangled common sense. In the end, they were labelled Indigenous, Native, Aboriginal, First Peoples, First Nations, Status Indians, Band Members, Metis, Inuit, Mohawk, Algonquin, Ojibwa, Anishinaabeg, Cree, Dene, Haida, or any of a host of other tribal designations. And did it really matter, as long as