Runaway Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page B

with us whether you believe
    in them or not. The Old Ones. The ancestors. Spirit Beings
    who have travelled onward, outward into the Spirit World
    bearing with them the memories, the recollections and the
    love they found here in this world, on this land, hovered over
    you, telling you by the gift of intuition that they are here and
    always will be. Can you not feel the truth of that? We are the
    story of our time here they have come to say, and in the end
    it is all we carry forward and all we leave behind. Our story.
    Everything we own. Spin a grand tale then. Separately but
    together leave the greatest story that you can for those who
    come behind you. This is what they say and this is what they
    wish. Nothing is truly separate. Every one and every thing
    carries within it the spark of Creation and exists on the sacred
    breath of that Creation. So that we are all related, we are
    family, we are kin. Every story carries within it the seed of a
    thousand others and it is only in the coming together that
    we discover the truth of that and know that we are home.

Elder 1
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    At night he’d sit and smoke an old cob pipe
    the glow of it in the dark throwing
    his face into orange cliffs and dark canyons
    of knowing with each drawn breath
    like how a September wind can
    freeze a man’s face in the channel
    between Minaki and Gun Lake or how
    a cattail root can keep a man alive
    when there’s nothing else
    or how to boil a cedar root
    to fashion rope and waterproof the seams
    of a tent or a canoe with the residue
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    sometimes he just talked
    and the roll of it would carry me
    beyond this world into the places
    where stories are born
    and a culture sprang from what
    a storyteller saw in the shape and form
    of a rock, say, or the shadow thrown
    by the lean of a tree
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    it wasn’t teaching
    not in the strictest sense
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    he offered his experience
    a canvas tent set among the trees
    overlooking a cove at One Man Lake
    where a fire burned in a pot-bellied stove
    and the smell of cedar boughs and spruce
    wafted through the aroma
    of hard black tea and sweet grass
    and the aged ones sat on stump chairs
    grinning at you all awkward in the doorway
    saying “ peendigaen, peendigaen ”
    come in, come in
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    he’d talk for hours sometimes
    and when he was finished
    he’d take one last draw on the old cob pipe
    and the light would flare like a tribal fire on a distant hill
    then I’d hear him thunk it on a log and rise
    to shuffle off to his tent
    and allow the night to fall

Grandfather Talking — Whitedog Dam
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    them they didn’t know
    how much they come to hurt us with that dam
    never seen how it could be
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    they just come and built their concrete wall
    and stopped that water, pushed it back into a lake
    where Creator never intended no lake to be
    and them they never knew it was our blood, our life
    was just a river to them, just a thing they could use
    and they watched as the land got swallowed up by it
    all the trees, all the rocks that marked
    the end of one family’s trapline from another
    and the teachin’ stones where our grandfathers painted
    visions and prayer songs there
    all drowned and covered up from our view
    so that a part of us was drowned forever too
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    but them they never seen that
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    all them sacred places got washed away
    not the big ceremonial places I mean
    I mean them places where the hearts of our people
    come to live forever
    the bend above the rapids where I stretched my nets
    when I was young and where I kissed your Gokum
    that first time, oh that was a good one that one
    so good, my boy, I felt that river inside me then
    deep an’ cool it was and me I felt like
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    I was never gonna be thirsty no more on accounta that kiss
    and that bend in the river there
    that’s the kind of places they let sink away
    spirit places I mean to say
    where our spirits come alive, each of us, all