Spirits

Spirits

        by Douglas Three-fingers

Pow-wows came slowly into their being in this region. Pow-wows did not used to be pow-wows. They were only what happened after the war party returned victorious from some event of revenge, expansion, protection or assimilation. The liberal consumption by a community at one and the same moment of sweet grass, tobacco, pemmican, dog meat, horseflesh and other "sweet meats" indicated the event as an event. It happened much like other things happened. Stars came into view that had long that year lain underneath the horizon. The sun clouded over from the smoke of forest fires. Beaver gave up thick coats in wintertime. Men grew listless and asexual in springtime. Pow-wows were not one of these knowns. 

          When pow-wows first came into existence they were the continuation of these other events that already were. The same "sweet meats" under use and in exercise faced the event's motions. Males grew listless. Females aspired. Old ones felt the greatness of their years. Nothing seemed different from the old days. But all of it was. None of it was the same. Now the event had a name. Now it was an event to be spoken of. Now it was language and not thing. No war party had returned victorious. No warriors were missing among a returning raiding party. No women wept for lovers or husbands recently sent bravely on their way. No wise man sat speaking or thinking or dreaming, and upon whose spoken judgment death or life for the group would depend.

        The stone rings above the pictographs at Dryberry Lake showed them, the pow-wowers, the very being of the pow-wow's past. The hieroglyphs and pictographs held out to them, like food to a hungry coyote, the real existence of their ancestors and the fact that they were the descendants of a strangely foreign people though coloured like and set like and haired like those who had them preceded. Yet, they were now doing a pow-wow, not a war. They only looked at stones, not hauled huge ones into concentric rings. They spoke the, and wrote the, old codes, not lived them. 

       Do you wish to know who I am, to speak of these things? Do you wish to see where I sit, writing of such matters? And have you a wish for me to clarify my view of these items of thought so that my biases may be named? I am Douglas Three-fingers. I derived that name from my tendency to consume Seagrams or Jack Daniels or Glenfiditch or any  such fine liquors in notable quantities. I sit In a messy room above the Royal Albert Arms where I have been confined these many years. I am without ambulance since my legs were shot off at the Battle of Iwo Jima. I have no more visual view of the world about me than did that pathetic Bartleby, the Scrivener. A brick wall immediately outside my window keeps returning my thoughts to my reflections on love and life more so than on nature. As for my perception of such matters as pow-wows and past realities of First Nations peoples, I am not a clairvoyant, nor do I deem to understand social formations well enough to expect to influence thinkers about the ramifications of meditation on these same formations. I learned what I know and so see what I see as a result of having mostly no one to talk with these sixty years.

        The government through veterans' affairs provides a home service of sorts, and thus I receive the means to live.  Books arrive frequently from a public home reading program. The library willingly provides such materials as I request, if they themselves don't carry them. My drink comes from the government liquor store two blocks east on Main Street. A bottle a day is all that is required to keep up my spirits. (Once, however, when for a period of time my means insufficiently covered my expenses, I made my refreshment at home in the form of wine from kits purchased at a nearby wine-making store.) My hair has remained surprisingly dark. At seventy-eight I look fifty. I know that. My atrophied extremities notwithstanding, I am a man of handsome proportions and features. Though no woman has entered these rooms now for twenty years. The last time that I saw what a woman looked like underneath her apparel I was a fifty-eight year old man (looking forty!) dressed to the nines. Now, that is another story with which I shall regale you some day if you should choose to visit me again, my dear Agatha.