Just a Story of the Family

By around third grade the schools in Arundel had consolidated into a six-room building, and I heard the jokes aimed at the Indian all the time. When kids started making a game of running from me on the playground proclaiming that I was going to scalp them, I responded on many levels. First, they were making fun of me. I was not fitting in, but standing out as a butt of their joke. What could I do now? I joined in and chased them in an attempt to be part of the joke. I accepted that “scalping” was an Indian thing even though I’d never so much as heard mention of it as part of my family’s story. The kids were labeling me and I didn’t know enough about anything to not internalize it. Much later, I learned that scalping was practiced by the English; they put a price on the head of all men, women, and children of Native American, or Indian, blood and descent.

One girl I hung around with was Linda, from a Mi’kmaq family down the road are distant cousins of ours. Her father, Allie Labrador, watched my father leave town on the bus at the Four Corners in Arundel the day he never came back. Allie was going to teach us to walk in the woods silently. He liked to tell how he did it. “So Mary Rose (Allie’s wife) sat on the stump with her eyes closed and I circled around her plenty times. There was the dry leaves and twigs all around, and she never heared me. She liked to make me do that all the time, all the time.” Allie told me once, “I don’t like the woods. That woman makes me live out there. I tell her I’m gonna stay on the reserve; she can go live in the woods. But she won’t hear of it, so I’m here. So I just stay out on the roads and hitchhike with some folks and go up to town to see what’s going on. Used to be I took my bike and my boy went, too, but the the rheumatism took my legs and I can’t no more.”

Our family land in Arundel eventually covered 100 acres that went up and down Route One from the Four Corners and down Campground and Log Cabin Roads. Ma and Pa built houses for all of my great aunts along with their husbands. My mother’s brother helped, too. A lot of them started out being log cabins. Some got moved from their original locations to other land nearby as everybody in the family moved around that small section of town at the Four Corners. When Ma and Pa first came to Arundel, it was called North Kennebunkport, and the Campground Road was The Camp Meeting Road, a name the Indians used to describe where they gathered.

There were Micmacs living out on Old King's Highway, which is called Route 1A now. They told my great grandparents, James Bartlett and Mary Rose Bartlett, that they should come and move there, so they did. My grandmother, Frances Viola Bush, who was almost deaf, and was known for her gentle nature, passed away when my mother was seventeen, so she never knew me. As I grew up the great aunts, whose presence I had taken for granted, died one by one until they were all gone. Back before my mother passed away, my stepfather, Ken, bought a ’69 Travlo Trailor for me. I hauled trees off the site for the placement of the trailer, and pick-axed through the ledge for the laying of the wires to the place, and otherwise cleared that land to put it on, with the help of my great lifelong friend, Bill. I loved that home, but one day the roof just couldn’t hold any longer.

When mom was gone, I felt like the ancestors left with her. I had always been able to feel the spirits of Gigu and my great aunts out on the land, but now it was empty, so I left it to the ATVs and the skidoos that trespassed our homeland. When I was young, though, and the midsummer afternoon air inside the house blew hot through the open windows, my mother would take us out on the path past the shed that housed our two-holer outhouse, and into the deep coolness of the woods. Just beyond a thick grove where my brother and his friends built a tree house twenty feet up the tallest pine, our path curved down to the swamp that ran along the Campground Road, amid oak trees and a plush forest floor of dancing ferns. My mother had a favorite spot where she built small peaks of dry pine needles and lit a fire to them, smoked her cigarettes and read her magazines, while my sister and I played on a moss-covered fallen pine returning to the earth. I drank in the scent of its pried-up roots and was delighted to play there for all of those long afternoons.

There are Old Cultures and there are new cultures. Old cultures are the indigenous peoples of the earth. Old culture groups live lightly on the earth; their cultures are characterized by having a way of life that enables the culture to be sustainable. The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight is a well-written book that explains that when all people lived in small groups, their beliefs reinforced a way of life that kept their numbers small. An example would be the Mi’kmaq of the Maritime Canada region in the 14th century. Their spiritual beliefs instructed them to respect all life, and the stories that came down to them from their ancestors and were told to them by their elders carried those instructions. The earth is our mother: would you hurt your mother? Everything has a spirit: would you take life meaninglessly? Other beliefs and practices kept them from growing or dying out. New cultures are those that have acquisition and conquest as their primary goal. New Cultures will grow unchecked until they become top heavy and unmanageable and eventually meet their demise. Examples of New Cultures are the Romans, the Mayans, the Aztecs, and almost all the societies on the earth today. New Cultures are in the business of destroying Old Cultures through detention, absorption, theft of resources or forthright genocide.

“Be proud of your Indian blood”.  She moved the fire with her hands on the fire pit between our houses where we ate breakfast in the summer mornings. She told me that Gigu, my great grandmother, used to do that, too, out at the Gravel Pit – the gathering place out on the land where all the Mi’kmaqs came to stay. Ma lived out there for awhile, then Aunty Lou and my mother for a winter. We’d spend nights falling to sleep to the sound of the stories of our elders out under the stars. She made the rain - made it if we needed it. How? By putting a chunk of ice on the fire. That’s all I know. I asked her, “Do you make rain, Aunty Lou?” “Yes.” “How do you?” She told me only one person knows that secret, and someday it will be told to another woman, maybe me. In September of 1959 I was next door visiting Aunty Lou. I was going to begin first grade and Aunty Lou told me, as I had heard so many times before, to be proud of my Indian blood. Then she told me not to talk about it at school. She didn’t say anything else about it. “You start school today. Don’t talk about being Indian.” “Why”, I asked, “I thought I should be proud?” “Yes, you should be proud. Now go to school.”

My time at school began much like my schoolmates'. School was in a two-room building with a wood stove and an outhouse that housed grades one through four. Grades five and six went to school miles away across Arundel, with seven and eight in still another part of town. My brother and half-sister attended the other schools. The Boston Maine Railroad passed close by the backyard of my schoolhouse, and I remember being “captured” by the boys and taken out near the tracks while the girls tried to capture me back. It was later that year that I began hearing the terms “dirty Indian”, “lazy Indian”, “drunken Indian”, “tomahawk”, and “scalping”. About the second year of school, a few of the girls I played with told me they weren’t allowed to stay at my house because we were dirty Indians. As I look upon those first school years now, I realize that I never once asked anybody why. I just gradually came into accepting these things that were said of my family. There was truth in it, but I never questioned why the same things were not said about another classmates whose houses were as much, if more, of a mess. I never questioned it – never even thought about it – because I was buying into the dominant culture’s view.

That land meant so much to me; I loved everything about every part of the land I grew up on, and I would never have left it if it had not grown up so noisy and busy. My uncles tell me that when I was just a baby Gigu would carry me around on her hip. My Uncle Bob told me that she used to tie me up between trees when she was out in the woods picking medicines with him, but I know that can’t be right because Uncle Bob was just a kid when she was trying to get him to learn the medicines, and he is twenty-four years older than I am. My grandmother passed away when my mother was seventeen, so she never knew me. As I grew up the great aunts, whose presence I had taken for granted, died one by one until they were all gone. Back before my mother passed away my stepfather, Ken, bought me a ’69 Travlo Trailor for two thousand dollars and we cleared some land to put it on. I loved it, but one day the roof just couldn’t hold any longer. When mom was gone, I felt like the ancestors left with her. I had always been able to feel the spirits of Gigu and my great aunts out on the land, but now it was empty, so I left it to the ATVs and the skidoos.

When I was young, though, and the midsummer afternoon air inside the house blew hot through the open windows, my mother would take us out on the path past the shed that included our two-holer outhouse, and into the deep coolness of the woods. Just beyond a thick grove of pines, where my brother and his friends built a tree house twenty feet up the biggest tree, our path curved down to the swamp that ran along the Campground Road, down amid oak trees and a plush forest floor of ferns. My mother had a favorite spot where she built small peaks of dry pine needles and lit a fire to them, smoked her cigarettes and read her magazines, while my sister and I played on a great fallen pine. I took in the earthy scent of it’s exposed roots and was content to play there for hours. Years later, when I was twelve and fourteen and so, I would go out to that spot over and over again to try to pinpoint where, exactly, we had been during those days playing on the pine tree. I just wanted to remember. Then when I was older and had gone away for a week to stay with my aunt and uncle and all my cousins, my stepfather razed that whole section of woods. He forged a road into the woods, obliterating any sign of the path that led to that place. When he told me, I ran out back, past the shed and the tallest pine and on through churned earth and splintered rock to where tall trees lay fallen and half buried. I wanted to tear my eyes out at the sight of the earth – and my world – turned inside out and broken all the way down to the swamp. The path and the ferns were gone, ground and rotted into dirt. The roots of several old oak trees lay exposed and trailing toward the sky. Lush moss beds and silky pine needles were ground up and flattened into a muddy grave that swam in my grieving eyes. My search for the fallen pine was over. I knew there was all the rest of the land to roam, other ferns, other trees, but I lost something in that instant, and took something new away with me. I knew that the whole earth was being razed, memory by fading memory, and that something was being lost here that was going to be gone for a long, long time. My people had once taken care of this neck of the woods – New England and the Maritime - but a newer culture had moved in and did not.