Prologue

My name is Joe Littlechief and I grew up knowing that there was something different about me.

I lived in a place where the smell of fry bread was always in the air. We hunted for food rather than for sport. Our reserve didn’t have a casino or anything. We lived pretty simply. But it was home and I didn’t know any other life.

For the most part, I guess I was a typical seventeen-year-old. I played soccer with my friends. We gathered on Friday nights to talk and dance and just hang out. I had an old beater that I bought for fifty bucks from Harry Lafontaine, but it didn’t run most of the time. I tinkered with the car when I had the time. I watched hockey and played PS4.

Like a lot of kids on the rez, I lived with just my mom. It’s not like I had any pent up feelings about my parents’ divorce. It had happened when I was so young that all I ever knew was having only my mom to rely on. No need for a therapist or anything. Mom loved church. Something to do with her years with the nuns I guess. I never could figure out why my grandfather sent her and my aunt to a residential school. He had spent most of his childhood in one being abused. But my mom had a better experience and the one thing she took away from the school was a deep faith in God. She was pretty devout. She took the whole commandment thing pretty seriously and the priest’s word was law. The church community set the standard for her life, and she really relied on it when she and my dad split up. From what she told me, Dad had been a sporadic churchgoer and much less strict with the rules. Maybe that’s why their marriage didn’t work.

My friends and I have as much fun as we can find on the rez. As a group, we hang out in a clearing in the woods, talking shit, and flirting with the girls. Sometimes someone would grab a bottle out of their parents’ stash and we’d pass it around. Truthfully, I’d usually fake it. I’d bring it to my lips and pretend to take a drink. I got good at grimacing and choking in what I assumed was the usual reaction to the rum or rye or whatever they’d taken.

My father had been a drinker. I didn’t remember much about him but I remembered that. Stumbling into the house in the middle of the night, stinking of booze and smoke. Groping at my mom. Sometimes taking a swing at her. She’d beg him to repent — to come to church and renounce Satan and the evils of drink. He’d refuse and drink harder. My mom finally kicked him out and he left to start a family with someone who shared his love of the local watering hole. I haven’t seen him since. No big loss. Like I said, I didn’t remember any good times with my dad. And I knew I didn’t want to end up like him.

See, for the most part I’m just a normal, average teenaged boy. Except for one thing. When all the guys sat around and talked about the girls they wanted to hook up with or commented on how big Maggie Running Wolf’s boobs were getting, I found myself looking at Benjy — a kid I had known since we were babies. I’d look at my best friend talking about Maggie and I’d wonder what it would feel like to kiss him instead.