Nobody prepares you for the sting when you’re about to leave home. All my life I wanted to leave the rez—and every time I was about to, I stopped myself. It hurt. Leaving hurts. It’s not glamorous like Julia Roberts makes it seem. I can’t eat anything other than fried bologna or Klik for breakfast; I can’t pray to a God I’m afraid of; and believe it or not, even in the twenty-first century, two brown boys can’t fall in love on the rez. Sorry, Julia, your rah-rah-we’re-all-the-same walk-through didn’t work for me. I’m still me: a brown-skinned boy who loves the X-Men and Jake Bass.
One fact I’d learn is that leaving always hurts—home isn’t a space, it’s a feeling. You have to feel home and to feel it, you have to sense it: smell it, taste it, hear it. And it isn’t always comfortable—at least, not an NDN home. In fact, quite often, it’s uncomfortable. But it’s home because the bannock is still browning in the oven and your kokum is still making tea and eating Arrowroot biscuits. It’s home because it has to be—routine satiates these pangs. And, given time, it becomes mobile—you can take those rituals with you, uproot your home as if it were a flower. Yeah, maybe home is like a flower, a sunflower whose big bright head follows the sun; or maybe that’s too fancy a metaphor for NDNs? Maybe we’re more like dandelions, a weed that’s a pest in the yard but pretty to look at. Yeah, an NDN home is like a dandelion: pretty but disposable, and imbued with a million little seeds that dissolve into wishes for little white hands that pluck.
My home is full of hope and ghosts.