Hunting by Stars

“Story is a home, it’s where we live, it’s where we hold everything we’ll need to truly survive—our languages, our people, our land. And you could say, but we’re out on the land, now more than ever. So why worry about it? Because we are not all one people, and this land that we walk, we are so often guests in these territories. We are different people. Even though now we are one group—Dreamers—we are still also separate nations. Lumping us together makes us easier for the outsiders to catalog, easier to dismiss, to devalue, until we are only single-colored containers for the thing they want the most.”

“That’s what great music does.”

“And what’s that, exactly?”

“Forces you to feel every part of yourself—parts you didn’t know existed—because it’s moving every last piece from the inside, just trying to pull itself back together through muscle and time and the darkest spaces.”

[…]

“They do whatever it takes to be back together, no matter how impossible that might be for tiny notes stranded in an unknown body.”

Derrick watched her face, relaxed into the satisfaction of a remembered love. “Sounds like family,” he finally said.

“Maybe that’s when we noticed there were new places opening up in our bodies, each just big enough to hide a dream.”

[…]

“And then, when they tossed us into boarding schools to kill the Indian in the child…well, then we had to hide them so we wouldn’t just shrivel up. So we’d still fight for the things that made us who we are.”

When Dad told us about the call for healthy Indigenous donors in the early days, before some escaped with the truth, this was what I thought of: slaughterhouses. Now I wondered if the dreams from those who had walked in of their own free will instead of being dragged in by white vans, were better, full of sunshine and wingless flight.

Some days I had questions: most nights I questioned everything. It’s hard to devote yourself completely to logic when you have to face yourself alone at night, knowing where you came from, knowing your own family members had met the same fate as those you helped lay to rest.

But what could we do? Let the whole world crumble into madness and violence? How could we let that happen when there was a chance, a solution, right there in front of us? And how could we, the dreamers, begrudge any of God’s children the opportunity to rebuild and move on? You see, eventually everything would right itself. The world would settle, and the networks and systems would return, and then there would be no need to sacrifice anything.

And then I heard a noise I had no real memory of hearing before. A cacophony of voices mixing and weaving, punctuated by laughter and a few small currents of despair, all joined and set loose from throats with abandon. We turned into the main room, and there they were, about sixty people of different ages and sizes […] I was so happy I could have cried. Here we were taking up space, filling it with our bodies and with our voices. It was more than I ever could have hoped for in any place, let alone this one.

This was me now: bald, weak, caught. I recognized my eyes, but they too were different. I felt tiny. I felt young. […] And then a loud screech filled every molecule of air in the room, so high and so precise I felt it in my throat. I slapped my hands over my ears and dropped to the ground, gasping. After an interminable amount of time, the siren stopped, but I was already hollowed out from it. Gutted. I crawled on hands and knees to the middle of the room. At least the lights were on. Then I realized I didn’t care if the lights were on. Everything had been taken from me. I had nothing left to lose, not even light. They couldn’t reach me, not really, if everything was already gone.

“But no real interaction with the inmates—”

“Residents.”

“Residents? Like, I can’t hang out in the common room with everyone else?”

He chuckled. “Definitely not. Besides, why would you want to? Those people have no hope of moving into the system. They are the rejects, the holdouts, the past. We”—he put a hand on my shoulder—“are the now, the future.”

“Do you not feel that as the chosen people, the ones who have lost nothing important, nothing we can’t find elsewhere, we should help those who are truly without?”

[…] “My dreams are full of lakes and the small islands that skip across them like a heartbeat. They are all that I am. They are my land. Yours are different, I’m sure. If you’re from the north, they are all the colors of freeze, as deep and devastating as their stories. In the south, they are red sand and hills cut from the glass formed under a red sun. Our lands are who we are. That’s not something easily replaced.”

He smirked, and she raised her voice to finish. Despite the subject matter, it felt luxurious to be loud outside for once. “And what have the colonizers lost, exactly? The ability to steal? Their loss is not our responsibility.”

It was difficult getting to sleep that night on top of all those dreams, all those wishes, all that torment. It seemed like there was no room in the bed for my body, certainly not for my own thoughts. Whatever I did next was going to be bigger than me. It had to be, for all of us. And so maybe these messages were gifts after all. Because in a way, they started delivering me back to myself.

“It’s about hope.”

“Hope?”

They placed the cup on the floor and sat on the edge of the mattress. “People can’t dream because their way of life is gone and they can’t accept it. They lived through pandemics, but they didn’t not really. He wants to give them hope that there is a different way.”

“What does that have to do with us?”

“We are the different way.”

I decided sometime that first night that I was going to have to get rid of them and carry them out of here at the same time. I recalled something Mitch had said back in the infirmary about reading the Bible. About how it was ridiculous to think the book was the important thing and not the words themselves that should live inside of you. So, one by one, I slipped the notes out of the mattress, memorized them, and flushed them.

[…]

I spent the rest of the day running laps around the room, whisper-singing each note back to myself. I made up a song to help me remember them—I couldn’t stand to lose even one word.

Out here, I lost my sense of edges, of where I began and ended. Inside the school, I noticed that I smelled: my hair, my skin, my breath—everything carried a scent like meat. It was maddening, inescapable.

[…]

But now that I was home, my scent was diluted, buried and welcomed. Humanity behind walls is highlighted. Humanity in the woods is insignificant. And because of it, I could take deep breaths and think of things other than myself. It was like the relief you get when you remember your thoughts are not facts, not yet, that they’re only just thoughts rolling around in your head. Everything was still possible.

I took him in and tried to remember each nuance of his smell, his skin, the way his hair felt when the breeze blew it suddenly over the back of my neck. The next time I was in a dark room, I would need it. Or I would die. I knew that now. This was oxygen. This was why I breathed.

After a few seconds, he gripped me back, taking handfuls of my clothes in his fists and holding tight. He leaned down and kissed the top of my head, speaking to me in Anishinaabemowin. I felt those words under my ribs. In that moment, everything snapped into clarity. I knew for certain, regardless of the odds or risks, that I would do whatever it took to keep them safe, all of them. Even my asshole brother, who had big dreams of being Supervising Asshole. I would do whatever it took.

“He brought in a family. The day before yesterday. Two people. A woman and a little girl.”

“No. No!” Rose was shouting. “He wouldn’t. He couldn’t!”

Derrick ran to grab her, squeezing her tight, trying to get her to shut up. “Come on, Rose, be quiet. You’re going to get us all taken in.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s true. Seven years old. They’re going through processing now,” Alice finished.

Now Rose was crying for real. She thrashed in Derrick’s grip and broke free.

“He would not, he just—”

“Rose.” Derrick was as gentle as he could be while trying to shush her. “What would you do? What would any of us do, really?”

“Not that!” she screamed. The sound of her own voice echoing in the shadows shocked her to quiet and then to action. She gathered herself and took off into the trees before another word could be spoken.

“I just feel like, I don’t know, like a second-class citizen there.”

“Ummm, I mean, sometimes it’s weird. But they really take you on your own merit, you know? Like, you can work your way up from the bottom. It’s all about pulling yourself up.” He was practically skipping along. “I appreciate that. It means I can get to where I want to be for no other reason than that I earned it.”

“Okay, but aren’t you beginning a hundred yards back from the starting line while everyone else is already at the gate, just because of what they are and what you aren’t?”

He didn’t answer right away. A good sign. I kept going.

“Out here is where you can really prove yourself every day. And nature doesn’t judge anyone before they are called to task—it can’t.”

I thought about what Mitch had told me. Farms. They weren’t ditching the schools; they were repurposing them. How could dreams be transferred in to such poisoned heads? I couldn’t imagine minds capable of making schemes like that also being able to create nighttime cinema of swimming through the stars or losing teeth by the handful. But it didn’t take depth to build cruelty, only a profound lack of hope.

“You don’t seem like the kind of people who would want to harm children.”

“We don’t harm children; we happen to be in the business of saving them. And you? You’re hoarders, keeping all the dreams for yourself. Why even bring up our children?” one woman answered.

Miig was quiet after that, maybe scared for the first time since we’d been hijacked off the train. Once you realized the shapes under the bed were actually monsters and they didn’t speak your language so you couldn’t even reason with them, it was time to panic.

“Ishkode,” he said, his tears striping down his chin like paint.

“Mmmm, a good name for one who’s going to bring change.” Miigwans grinned and spoke a little louder. “I can’t wait until you can tell us who you are, little one, until you can share your coming-to story. Until then, we’ll do our best.”

[…]

“It’s beautiful,” Rania said. “What does it mean?”

Slopper had been studying Anishinaabemowin since Minerva was killed, working to keep us all alive with the words she’d left us, the ones she’d carried forward against all odds, so we could make sure the new kids coming could curve their tongues around those sounds, could rattle the consonants against their baby teeth. He was the one who answered. “Fire. It means fire.”

“Doesn’t it kind of feel like they won? They chased us out of the country, for god’s sake. And now we’re down here.”

“That isn’t our border.” Miig gestured north. “That’s an imaginary line drawn by politicians and land prospectors. The only thing we have to worry about is who the original people are so we can honor the lands we are on. And if we do that, remember to keep doing that, they don’t win. They never win when we remember.”

Rose slunk forward, pulled the bundle from her pocket, and unwrapped the cloth. Minerva’s jingles, the ones she’d carefully crafted from tin cans and discarded lids. […] Minerva, who had known that one day, the people would be loud again.

Rose rewrapped the handful of jingles, already dangerous with potential, and tucked them in beside Ishkode. They were hers now, and one day, Rose would help her make the dress that would hold them. This child would make noise, like shattered glass being put back together. And they needed it, because a new cacophony was breaking in. It was just up ahead. […] This was the girl who would be loud.