The year that I came out to the people back on the rez, I had this one cousin who texted me that if he ever saw me, he’d kick the living shit out of me. As much as I wanted to go home then, I sure as hell didn’t want to make that a reality. When I told Jordan this, she said she’d come back to the rez with me: “I’ll fix his wagon,” she said, a phrase she stole from her dad after her baby was taken away a few years back. She threw a house party one night after her daughter had gone to sleep, but it turns out she did mushrooms and went on a hardcore trip. Family services stepped in the next day and labelled her an unfit mother. “She was my rainbow baby,” she says when she’s drunk. “Supposed to make everything better. My aunties told me that a baby fixes things.” I never met her daughter, but knew that her kid was her life—her entire fridge was plastered with pics of her. “Madilyn took after her momma,” she said once. “Piss her off and she’d get mad as a goddamn coyote.” I always wondered just what in the hell fixing a wagon had to do with giving someone a beat-down, but these were the types of questions you never asked Jordan.
“Treat him like a buffalo,” she also said as she cracked her knuckles, referring to my cousin. “Smash his ol’ head in.”
I never took her up on that offer, I didn’t want to go there and end up with a bloodied face—hell, I wasn’t the one from Bloodvein. So we partied at her house instead. She called up her friends, who were all pretty cool, and told them to come on down, but only if they had chip-ins. We all scrambled enough cash to get a two-four and some whisky from Peggy, who horded alcohol like gold—she was smart that way, stealing bottles and selling them during holidays, or pow wows, or reserving them for after-parties where she’d sell them for twice their worth. Desperate times called for desperate measures as they say, annit? The whisky, though, was a poor choice on our end because everyone knows whisky does two things to us: makes us rowdy, or nostalgic as all hell. But we gathered up a good crew of people—most of them Nate, but she knew a couple East Indian guys who did stick-and-poke tattoos and sold them to rich white kids who thought they were traditional henna. All us NDNs, I thought, sure know how to turn pennies into bills.
We had a little gathering at her place, a room full of brownness in a shoddy apartment down on Magnus Avenue. We could be as loud as we wanted to be—Jordan’s neighbours knew not to file any noise complaints on account of how her screams of rage could shake their walls and knock down portraits. We played that drinking game “Never Have I Ever” which was pretty slack because it was super easy to get me out, all they had to do was say “never have I ever sucked a dick” and I would immediately lose. As we grew drunker, we slapped on A Tribe Called Red and had our own stadium pow wow. None of us knew the words but we sang along anyways, “way, yah, hey-ya-how.” We thought we were hardcore traditionalists, but we probably sounded like a pack of rez dogs. We did shots of whisky, danced to electronic pow wow, and hugged each other and cried all night. That’s how NDNs are, once the firewater kicks in we all become straight-up storytellers. We said prayers for dead cousins, for the stillborn, for the friends we lost in snowmobile accidents. Hell, we cried for those we didn’t even know—so-and-so’s cousin who we met once who died from fentanyl, or that girl who OD’d in the band office last year. That’s how NDNs become friends, though, over a good story, a damn good cry, and then a right righteous laugh when the next little NDN pulls up in a rezzed-out van. “Holy hell,” we’d all say in unison, “look at Fred Flintstone over here.” That night we drank into the wee hours of the morning and one of Jordan’s friends got drunk enough to think that his reflection in the mirror was his dancing partner; he punched his own reflection and tore his knuckle up pretty good. “Howa, he’s just snapped,” someone said, which made Jordan laugh. “Oh heck, that guy’s feeling no pain,” she said. That saying is weird, “feeling no pain.” I used to laugh at it too, but nowadays I think that they’re drunk because they’re feeling all kinds of pain.
In that tiny living room with lawn chairs for furniture and an air mattress in the corner, we all danced until our feet were blistered. We linked arms in a circle, feeling the music we loved but in a language that haunted us. And of course, little ol’ gay me vogued in the middle of the circle—a little Willi Ninja went a long way to a bunch of breeders, but you know, you got to earn your street cred somehow. They round danced around me at a pace that seemed impossible, until the room was spinning, the lights weaving in between their bodies, and me, sweaty, crusty-eyed, and horny as all hell, slowly lounging into a half-baked death drop while they cheered, thinking I was some goddamn ballet dancer.
“This ceremonial enough for ya, Jon?” Jordan shouted.
“Hah, not even—” I jested.
But truth be told, I wanted that—me, time-stepping in the middle of a group of Nates, dancing like Kokum taught me whenever the “Red River Jig” came on NCI radio.