The grass is green and the smell of fish and clover is thick in the air as I walk out of my grandmother's house and into the yard where my dad and his friend are cleaning and hanging fish nets. There are remains of filleted walleye, whitefish, perch, northern, sturgeon and other carcasses scattered about the yard. The smell of cold, clammy dead fish creeps into my nose but it is not unwelcome. It is the summer of 1988, and on the Red Lake reservation there will be full bellies tonight.
Growing up, my brothers and I took easily to playing games of throwing fish guts and eyeballs at each other. We'd run through the paths in the woods behind my grandmother's house and pretend we were miles from home. We'd find what we thought was the best place to make a new fort every week and the woods seemed to go on forever.
The yard was teeming with poison ivy, and although I rarely got the rash, my older brother Elliot seemed to be plagued by it every year.
I remember how Elliot would try all summer to make bows and arrows to his liking. He was good at splitting the arrows to put hawk feathers in the ends. He would experiment with different amounts and sizes of feathers and would show us the difference in how the arrows flew. So along with the fish in the yard, there were also the remnants of his many attempts to master the skill of bow and arrow making. While he did this, my younger brother Ben and I would splash around in the huge mud puddle in the drive way until he called us to witness his progress.
My dad would take us to one of the creeks or to the outlet to fish quite often. My brother Ben and I would walk along the big rocks at the edge of the rivers and look for crayfish, minnows, and lost treasures while my brother Elliot would switch from searching for lost lures to using his pole and changing his location along the river frequently. My dad would stake out his pole and sit around chatting with the other fishermen about where the fish were biting.
My dad and mom would take us out for long drives on the old roads the reservation kept secret. Most of the roads had a lot of tall plants growing on them and my dad said these were the best kind to drive on. We'd drive all day and sometimes all night, stopping here and there to pick berries and walk around. Some of the old roads didn't seem to come to life until you'd driven down them a long ways, and then they'd open up with all sorts of wildlife and the noises that came with it: eagle's nests, fox, bear, deer, pine marten, skunk; one time we saw a mother moose and her young one. My dad knew all of the old names for the roads, and I was amazed by this. Sometimes we'd get stuck and a couple of times we had to walk for miles to get to someone's house. One of these times we used moisture grabbing cloths to gather the morning dew off of grass to suck and acquire a little moisture. I found this exciting.
In the late summer after my dad had gone ricing he would place tarps on the ground in my grandma's yard, and pour all of the rice he had gathered on top of them to dry in the sun. In the early fall he would take us grouse hunting and he'd show us how to clean the birds. Sometimes in the evenings when we were out driving in the family car looking for grouse he'd leave his window open long enough so that the car would fill with mosquitoes. We'd have to drive fast with all of the windows down to flush them out.
In the winter we would go deer hunting and everyone benefited
from the season's kills. My dad would always give away almost the entirety of every deer he would get to family members, friends, and elders. Everyone did.
There was a swamp down the hill from the back of my grandmother's yard that was full of pine and swamp tea. In the early evenings of winter my grandmother would send my dad or one of his brothers down to gather the tea a couple of times a month and she'd make a huge batch of tea that would fill the house with the light fragrance of the plant. She was barely taller than the big pot she would use to brew the tea in and she'd stand at the stove for what seemed like hours with her long wooden spoon, stirring, sniffing, smiling, and giving my cousins, brothers, and myself those smiles.
The rich experiences of my childhood have never ended. I still feel like a little sprout that shoots up with the heat of the sun in the early spring to dance in the crisp clean reservation winds. Like the little flowers that blossom in the presence of rotting fish and laughter. Like the leaves that fall to cover the wood shavings of a bow well made. I have come to know the glow in my grandmother's eye as the same glow that can found in my eyes.