For all the Niitsitapiiks,
The Real People who never had the chance to heal.
It’s strange how our earliest childhood memories are like flashes of images stored in our brains and remembered through electrical pluses between the thousands of synapses which make us intelligent creatures. My childhood memories are filled with both good and bad experiences. If a sspomitápi/sky person were to have an all-access pass to all my memories stored in my bio-hard drive, they would see my earliest memory from a summer vacation when my nose began to bleed from the impact of hitting a pool of water at the bottom of a blue waterslide. In the Blackfoot way, we believe that sspomitápi/sky people are celestial bodies like Naató’si/The Sun and /The Moon, are our grandfather and grandmother. Naató’si can see everything the light touches and has an omniscient presence in our lives. His light forms the reality we see. Our elders tell us to be careful of the words we breathe into the universe and the actions we move into existence because they have ripple effects that revert to us. We can plant good seeds of reciprocity, but we must be careful not to plant bad seeds. The natural balance of the cosmos teeters on the brink of chaos and is constantly being tested. The sspomitápiksi are keepers of balance.
All my grandparents and both of my parents are survivors of residential schools. I grew up in a family of “strong Catholics.” I said my Catholic prayers before bed and went to church on Sundays with my family. After, we would be rewarded with brunch at Smitty’s. I attended a Catholic school, where I learned to speak the colonizer’s language. I knew how to speak French more than Niitsi’pówahsin, the Blackfoot real language. I learned the biblical stories but no stories of Náápi the trickster and Katoyissa the superhero.
I have two younger brothers., Nicholas and Luke. We were free-roaming kids who explored west Lethbridge on our bikes. It was the ‘90s, and kids actually went outside and played. It was just us boys until my little sister Paige came to us as a premature baby from the Children’s Hospital. Her first three months of life were spent in the Children’s Hospital. We often visited her in Calgary and stayed at the Ronald McDonald House with other families who had children in the hospital. She was tiny and wrapped in blankets when she arrived at our house. My mom told us, boys, that we are now her protectors.
My mother was a great storyteller. My dad would chase us boys to bed, and then we would ask our mom to tell us the same two stories she told night after night. My mom would be sitting on the foot of the bed, and the hallway light would shine into the eggshell white walls of the bedroom Nick and Luke shared. They had a blue-metal-tubed bunk bed with NHL-themed bed sheets and laundry scattered on the floor. My brother had a silk baby blue blanket, which he carried everywhere he went. Often, he would take it with him when we visited my grandparents on the Blood Reserve. It was his comfort item. Sometimes, my parents would have to separate us boys because we constantly fought each other. Nick would get the single bedroom, and Luke and I would get the bunkbed, or I would get the single bedroom and Luke and Nick would get the bunkbed. Luke was always the sidekick.
I remember my mom telling us boys bedtime stories: Goldilocks and the Three Bears and The Three Little Pigs. She was a great storyteller, and I can still picture the bowls of porridge, one steaming hot, one too cold, and one just right, sitting on a wooden table in an isolated cabin somewhere in the middle of the woods. From my mom’s words, I could still picture the three little pig houses: one made of straw, one made of wood, and one made of bricks. The big bad wolf could not “huff, puff, and blow” the brick house down. I remember her voice singing, “We’re not afraid of the big bad wolf, the big bad wolf. Tra la la la.”
We lived in a neighbourhood in West Lethbridge with rows of townhouses, kitty-corner to the Firehall. There was a shared backyard that was more like a courtyard where a concrete pad sat under a big cottonwood tree — surrounded by thick green grass and a few pine trees. Our living room patio led right out to this wide-open area, where we would play street hockey for hours. A streetlight lit our little backyard rink where we would pretend we were Theo Fleury or Al MacInnis; most of the time, we would play into the night, and Ko’komiki’somm would watch us. Nicholas was sometimes unsportsmanlike and would start throwing his stick around while losing. But if you ask him, he would say we were the poor losers. Ah, the competition between brothers is enduring. Sometimes, we would drop the gloves, and full-out fistfights would break out. When he won, he would rub it in our faces and yell out war cries he learned at the Sundance, “Ah-wooo! Ah-wooo! Ah-wo-wo-wo-wo! Ah-wooo!” Then we would say, “Best out of three?”’
I am not sure why Nicholas was filled with rebellion. Maybe he has an old Blackfoot warrior spirit. Still, he has grown into a family man who is humble in his bones and who follows our traditional Blackfoot way of life.
Those townhouses we lived in are still there on the West Side. When I drive by them, I glimpse into that big courtyard and see three boys playing hockey with innocence and no worries in the world. In those three-bedroom townhouses, the kind that are tall, skinny houses, our initials are carved into the wood studs under the stairs in an unfinished basement. On the main floor, there is a tiny dining room connected to a galley kitchen, and a short hallway leads to the back living room where furry orange shag carpet hugs the floor. The tan couch everybody had with brown and burgundy floral print sits in front of the 24” tube TV. A large patio window that slides open leads out to the patio where my CCM bike was stolen. The upstairs had a bathroom sandwich between the Master bedroom and my brother’s and my bedroom. It was a decent house, and the neighbours were friendly. Our cousins lived on the other side of the townhouse complex, and my aunty Merna would often be visiting with my mom. We boys would be in the living room playing Super Mario or NHL. Sometimes, we would smell potent smoke that smelled like a skunk coming from the kitchen, and we would get told to play outside.
I remember listening to one of their stories when they would visit and drink coffee at the kitchen table. My mom said two of my uncles were filling out forms, and one asked, “How do you spell town?”
“T.O.N.”
“Stoonaat stupid, I meant Cardston.” And they busted out laughing. They were always visiting and laughing for hours.
In years gone by, the neighbourhood kid, Andrew, came over. he always visited and played hockey with us boys at our house. My dad called him Animal. I asked my dad why he called Andrew Animal, and he said, “Because cousin Andrew’s nickname is Animal.” Sometimes, I would call him Animal, but most of the time, I called him Andrew. I asked him, “Why are you always coming over?” I didn’t mind his company, but I was curious. He said that his dad was mean and drank beer a lot, and he felt safe at our place. Once, Andrew came over for dinner and ate KFC with my family. The centrepiece was a red and white bucket of Colonel Sanders’ golden fried chicken with the famous eleven secret herbs and spices surrounded by all the fixings: fries, coleslaw, potato salad, macaroni salad, gravy, butter rolls, and pastries. KFC is a Blackfoot delicacy. We were all serving while our mouths salivating in anticipation of the savoury, greasy food when Andrew spilled the extra large gravy all over the bag of butter rolls. The gravy flowed down the plastic bag, and a brown pool of gravy dappled with the secret herbs and spices formed between the valleys of styrofoam containers. We all gasped. My dad said, “Cheeez…” I thought he would start yelling, but he said, “It’s alright, don’t worry about it.”
One day, while I was playing Nintendo, there was a knock at the patio window. It was Andrew. He was acting sneaky and told me to come outside. I told him to wait while I got my shoes on. It was in the middle of the summer, so I didn’t need my Notre Dame Starter jacket. I ran to the back, and he was gone. Then I heard a whisper, “Blair, Blair, over there.” I looked at the neighbour’s patio, and Andrew waved me over. Andrew snuck into the living room and told me to come inside. I looked in the patio window, and the house was bare. It had the same orange shag carpets and white eggshell walls.
We entered the vacant townhouse. Andrew, the white boy across the street, pulled out two cans of beer. On the label were romantic images of Indians camped by the river as an old-fashioned train chugged and a car dusted by. An aeroplane flew above the mountains like an eagle stalking the little white bunnies scattered the lush green grass. I knew what beer looked and smelled like because my dad and uncles drank beer. I also knew it wasn’t for kids, so when Andrew cracked one open, took a big shot, and then asked me to take a shot, I said no. He said, “Come on, just try it, Blair, Blair, over there.” I said, “No!” but he wouldn’t stop peer-pressing me. Looking back on it, I think he was drunk, so I took a drink. It tasted gross. How could adults drink this shit? It was nothing like ginger ale. I spit it out, and Andrew started laughing at me, so I took another shot and kept it down. I was in the sixth grade at the time and fresh out of the DARE program (Drug Abuse Resistance Education). After that, I took no more shots and wouldn’t drink náápiaohkii again until I was 17 and whooped it up at the annual summer fair.
If the sspomitápiksi looked back into my childhood memories, they would see me sitting in the schoolyard under a lone pine tree, humming old Blackfoot songs I barely knew and wishing I was around my people. The sspomitápiksi would see the Bearzan brothers, my frenemies, who bullied and excluded me most days, but some days were my “best” friends.” Sspomitápiksi would see very dark, awful moments that attached to my spirit and were the underlying cause of numerous mental health breakdowns and downward spirals of addiction, which I endured throughout my adult life. They would see me running away from these dark moments, running away from commitment and going through failed relationship after failed relationship.
Sspomitápiksi would be waiting for me after I was tired of running. They waited for me. I met them when I entered their lodge. They found me on the wolf trail, where lost people are found. I saw their light shine through the crackling glow of embers. I heard sspomitápi in the lodge when the grandfather whispered in my ear, “It’s okay, son, you are home now; you can rest.”