Anung's Journey Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  The Story of Blue Sky

  The Village Chief Tells the Oldest Story

  The Journey Begins

  Turtle Tells His Story

  Anung Meets Fisher and Trout

  Winter Approaches

  The First Snow Arrives

  The Waters that Stretch the Sky

  Anung Sings for the People of the City

  Anung Crosses the First Waters

  The Land of the First Sun

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  The Museum of Ojibwa Culture

  Anung on Stage

  The Magic of Brita Wolf

  The Author

  Title Page

  Anung’s Journey

  Based on an ancient Ojibway legend

  as told by Steve Fobister

  Carl Nordgren

  Illustrations by Brita Wolf

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2014, by Carl Nordgren

  Anung’s Journey

  Carl Nordgren

  cnordgren.lightmessages.com

  [email protected]

  Illustrations by Brita Wolf

  britanordgren.com

  Cover design by Giorgibel

  [email protected]

  Published 2014, by Light Messages Publishing

  www.lightmessages.com

  Durham, NC 27713 USA

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61153-117-6

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61153-118-3

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 International Copyright Act, without the prior written permission except in brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Dedication

  To Marie and her love.

  To Steve Fobister and his magic.

  Other Books by Carl Nordgren

  The River of Lakes Series:

  The 53rd Parallel

  Worlds Between (Summer 2015)

  Prologue

  My hands were freezing from digging in the snow. But I could not stop. I was too embarrassed to give up. I would not admit I had been so wrong.

  I was just ten years old.

  The day before, on Christmas Eve morn, I snowshoed back into the forest to chop down a small spruce sapling to be our first Christmas tree. I built a base for it with some stones and it stood next to the cabin where I lived during the winters with my grandfather and my grandmother. The cabin was on the English River, on the Grassy Narrows Reserve in northwestern Ontario.

  It snowed heavily on Christmas Eve. Overnight there were another couple of feet of white powder on top of a foot of settled snow from the weeks before. When I looked out the window on Christmas morning I saw the tree was half buried by the great drift at its base.

  Hidden under all that snow around the base of the tree, I knew there was a great pile of Christmas presents for me and the other children of Grassy Narrows. So I pulled my boots on and slipped into my coat as I dashed outdoors. My grandmother called to me to take my gloves but I did not return for them.

  I was eager to see the presents Santa Claus brought. Ah gee, I can still remember how excited I was as I dug and I dug in the snow, calling out to the nearby cabins, promising presents for everyone, even as my hands began to burn with cold.

  I am Steve Fobister. I am Anishinaabe. The French who settled in Canada called us Ojibway. The English called us Chippewa.

  I was once Chief of the First Nations Grassy Narrows Ojibway.

  I was born in a wigwam on the banks of the English River, where the river opens into many lakes. When I was born my family’s village was on the shore of Kee Ta chee won. That means “the lake where the shores burned with fires of great mourning.”

  Until I was 13 my family traveled the river’s chain of lakes in a family clan that once grew so large it filled five big freight canoes with uncles and aunts and cousins and all who were members of the Loon clan. We only lived on the Reserve in the winter in those days.

  My people call those days the frontier times. In the frontier times my grandfather and my uncles hunted moose and deer with their rifles and taught me and my cousins how to hunt with rifles too, for they were most effective, and we hunted to feed ourselves.

  But first they showed us how to make bows and arrows and how to hunt the old ways.

  When I was still a young boy they taught us to hunt partridge and ducks with a sling. And to catch rabbits in a snare. We learned to make our contributions early to the meat we ate.

  They also taught us how to fish with gillnets, for walleye and lake trout. And to fish at night with the light of a torch to attract bugs that would attract small fish so we could spear the big pike when they would come close to feed on the bait fish.

  We worked the trap lines with our fathers and uncles and grandfathers to learn to trap muskrat and beaver—and mink and fisher and fox. To preserve the meat and fish for a long cold winter the women smoked some of it. And they dried some of it.

  With the youngest children helping, the women also collected blackberries, gooseberries, and we were rich with blueberries in those frontier days.

  Everyone harvested manoomin in August and September. That is what you call wild rice. We call the times of the manoomin harvest Manoominike-Giizi. That means the Manoomin Moon.

  My cousins and I worked with the men and the women every day. We learned from watching them, then while helping them. We learned how to build shelters. The Nokomis taught us where to find the herbs that restore health, how to prepare them, what to say as you apply them so you call on their full healing powers.

  We learned to birth babies by watching our midwives. And we heard what they said, and what the elders said, to call the spirits to protect a new life, and to thank the Great Creator for that new life.

  We learned how to live in these forests as our grandfathers taught our fathers, as our grandmothers taught our mothers. When we were taught the old ways we were told it had always been this way. As I grew up I met many who lived their lives on the Reserve in all the seasons, and I believed it was my clan’s good fortune to live the old ways on the river. I thanked Grandfather for staying true to the ancestors.

  Sometimes we would sleep in the heavy canvas miner tents we pitched on a quiet bit of shore but in the frontier times we still built birch-bark wigwams to sleep in. We camped one place early in the season. We moved to a new spot as the season’s patterns of abundance shifted. Or when it was Manoominike-Giizi.

  We would dress in traditional clothes when other family clans gathered together for pow-wows or tribal councils or for clan celebrations. Otherwise we dressed in clothes we traded furs for at the Hudson Bay Post.

  We left the Reserve to travel the river as soon as the ice melted at the time we call Iskigamizige-Giizi, the Maple Sap Boiling Moon. We made our way living on the river until Gashkadino-Giizi, the Freezing Moon, forced us back to our winter camp at Grassy Narrows Reserve. The wood burning stoves in the cabins kept them warm even on the nights the temperature was -20.

  In those frontier times we had no electricity. Just oil lamps.

  The Reserve has been moved closer to Kenora now and today it has electricity but in the frontier times it was even further out in the wilderness, and even in the winters we lived on the Reserve, my grandfather tended to his trap lines and hunted, unless the worst winter storms and the coldest weather kept him in. Then we ate the food we’d helped the wome
n preserve in the fall.

  The winter before the big drift of snow covered the Christmas tree, the winter I was nine, that was the first winter we lived in a cabin on the Reserve. When we settled in I found an Eaton’s mail order catalog lying in the corner of the cabin we were given.

  I discovered Santa Claus in the catalog’s pictures. When I asked my grandfather and grandmother who this man was in these pictures they said they did not know him. But our people have told many stories using simple pictographs and so I studied the pictures of him in the catalog, the different scenes of him in his workshop surrounded by tiny magical spirits and in his sleigh being pulled by flying caribou and then mysteriously sneaking into the houses of the white man at night to leave presents for everyone in the house under their tree.

  I found a story in those pictures. This story told me that if I decorated a fir tree at Christmas this big bearded white man and his spirit helpers will make toys for me to play with, and put them in colorful boxes, and place them under the tree for me and all of the boys and girls of Grassy Narrows.

  This white man and his sleigh filled with presents and pulled by flying caribou somehow was part of the white man’s celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus, for there were pictures of the Christ child in the manager as well.

  I went out into the forest and found a young fir that looked like the one in the pictures. The first year I brought the tree into the cabin and set it up there. I didn’t have anything to put on the first tree that looked like the bright lights and colorful balls in the pictures. It filled much of the open space of the cabin, but it was a pretty tree.

  Before I went to bed on Christmas Eve we stood around it and sang the songs about the baby Jesus the Jesuit’s had translated into our language. Before I knew what the words meant I liked the soft peaceful sound of Christmas music. Sometimes I hummed Christmas melodies when I was walking a trap line or fishing for walleye.

  When we finished our songs I climbed the ladder to the loft where my bed of furs and blankets waited for me.

  I was excited about what the bearded white spirit would bring. That night I dreamed there were many presents under our tree for me and my grandparents and the other children.

  When I awoke Christmas morning my grandparents were already awake, for we show the Great Creator how happy we are to spend another day in His Creation by rising to welcome the sun. In the winter, this far north, that is not too hard as the sun rises much later.

  Our people call the Great Creator Gitche Manitou.

  I wondered if my grandparents had seen the presents under the tree but I saw no sign of it on their faces. I was halfway down the ladder when I saw the floor under the tree was bare.

  I was very sad for much of the day. My grandparents must have left me alone with my disappointment, for I can not remember anything they said or did. But before that day ended, I decided that I would do two things differently for next Christmas Eve.

  I would figure out how to decorate the tree with colorful shapes, for all the pictures of the trees in the catalog were covered with decorations. And I would place the tree outside. This great bearded white spirit must not have seen it inside our cabin.

  On our next trip to sell furs at the Hudson Bay Post I began collecting every colorful piece of paper I could find. When I traveled there with my uncle he would get me a candy bar and I carefully opened the wrapping so I could save it. I even retrieved candy wrappers and other colorful bits and pieces of paper from the dust bin.

  By the time Christmas Eve came again and I chopped down a larger and even prettier spruce, I had a box filled with bright ornaments for my tree. I had folded some papers into animals. Some were stars. Some were flowers. I tied or stuck them all over my tree.

  I remember that the people who lived in the closest cabins came to watch me prepare the tree. We sang Christmas songs and my friends and my cousins wondered what sort of presents we might get.

  On Christmas morning I was climbing down from the ladder from my loft when my grandfather told me of the great snow during the night. I pulled back the blanket from the window and saw the tree was half covered in snow. I knew that high drift of snow hid a great collection of presents that the Santa Claus spirit had left. I ran out and began to dig furiously.

  I imagined the toys were at the base of the fir where a small mound of stones held the tree in place. I had to dig through two or three feet of snow to get to it.

  First my fingers burned from the cold. Then they grew numb. When I hit the stone base with nearly deadened fingers they barely felt anything but there was pain growing in my heart. By then I was already afraid there were no presents.

  I pushed the tree with my shoulder to expose the ground behind it. There were no presents.

  I kicked over the last mounds of snow. There were no presents.

  Now I was not only very cold, I saw I was very foolish. As I was digging I saw my grandmother was watching me from the window. When I saw her I felt as if all our people were watching. I felt everyone knew I was a foolish little boy whose cries of delight were now filled with disappointment.

  I ran back to the cabin to grab the ax. I found my gloves where I left them near the stove. I did not look at my grandfather or grandmother. If they said anything, I did not hear it. I went back outside with the ax.

  I tried to chop the tree into pieces. First I was just swinging at it with the ax because my hands were still stiff and so numb I could not hold the handle properly. When my hands warmed up and I gained control of the ax, the tree quickly became a pile of pieces that I covered up in the snow.

  I returned to the cabin, crying. My grandfather was sitting on a stool repairing a snowshoe. My grandmother was sitting on the floor at his feet, mending a blanket. My grandfather told me to sit down next to my grandmother, close to the stove. She draped the blanket over my shoulders.

  My grandfather told me that he did not understand this white man spirit. He had never heard stories of his powers or his purpose. Then he reminded me that the white man has not been given all the gifts Gitche Manitou has given to our people. He said maybe it is a good thing that this spirit is sent to the white man to give some gifts to their children but we did not need these gifts for we have been given so much from the Great Creator.

  Then he said it was time for me to hear one of the oldest stories of our people, one he was told by his grandfather when he was a boy. It was a story about a boy who was given many gifts from Gitche Manitou. He told me to listen carefully so I could tell it to my grandchildren.

  There are many stories our people can only tell in the deepest of winter, the season we call Biboon. Many of the stories about animals and their spirits can only be told when the earth is frozen hard beneath a thick blanket of snow. This is one of those stories.

  This story he told me that Christmas morning I have told so many winter nights to my children and to my grandchildren. And to my nieces and nephews who I have raised as my children.

  Maybe the story has changed in some places over the years.

  Yes, I am sure this is so.

  But when I tell it I can still hear my grandfather telling it to me for the first time that Christmas morning so long ago.

  The Story of Blue Sky

  In an Anishinaabe village, there lived an orphan boy. This poor child’s father died before he was even born, and then his mother passed from this world for the next soon after his birth.

  The first name given to this baby boy by the women of his village was Blue Sky. The villagers agreed to call him Blue Sky to show the Great Creator that everyone living in this village will care for this orphan child. He was called Blue Sky by the women as their promise he would know the happiness a blue sky brings all the days of his life. The men called him Blue Sky as their promise they would teach him everything a man needs to know where ever he is found.

  They called him Blue Sky to show the Great Creator that each one of the women of the village and each one of the men of this village would care for Blue Sky a
s if he was their own child each and every day.

  This orphan boy lived long, long ago. It was before our ancestors first arrived in this place where our people have lived now for many generations. Blue Sky lived in the lands of our oldest ancestors to the East, in the days when our people were following the prophecy of the Great Megis.

  This was so long ago the white man had not come and disturbed our life on Turtle Island.

  The village where Blue Sky was born was very small. And the women who named him with their love bestowed it on him every day. Blue Sky would sleep next to the fire in one family’s wigwam for many nights. Then another family would invite him to share their wigwam and food and fire.

  As he grew from a baby to a child he heard all of the stories told at all of the night fires.

  As he grew to be a boy the men of the village taught him what a man must know. The men took him to the bay when they fished with torches blazing at night and stood in the shallows and speared the pike that came too close.

  One of the men taught him how to use a sling to hunt small game. He showed Blue Sky the small rapids where the smooth round stones were found that made the most accurate shot.

  Another man taught him how to make a bow and arrows and how to shoot straight and true.

  Another man gave Blue Sky the drum his father had played at the clan fires and told him to listen to the sounds about him and Blue Sky tried to play them on his drum.

  Because Blue Sky was an orphan he learned each skill and craft from the man in the village who knew it best. He grew to be a skillful hunter. When he went out fishing he always brought home a pike or a walleye.

  There were nights where Blue Sky felt very lonely. When he heard a mother singing her songs gently to a crying baby, on those nights he wished he knew his mother. On those nights he wished he had his own father. On those nights he might leave his bed by the night fire and search for a place to be alone. He would take his father’s drum with him and play it softly so only his mother and father’s spirits could hear it.