Kelly

It is night and also morning. I’m looking for drugs, but not just any drugs. Definitely not the drugs people use here. I’m not from here, this remote community, and I’ve never seen so many people in my life dead or dying, every single day, right in front of my eyes. It isn’t like Toronto or Montreal or even Vancouver, all places I’ve lived in the great urban outdoors. This town is small, and dense with death. It feels more like a death camp, I think; a place the government has sent drug users to die.

I step over bodies and check pulses on my way to get my morning coffee. I’m white enough to maybe benefit from this so-called Good Samaritan Act, but still, I rarely call. If I do, I pretend it’s some old white lady having a heart attack. I never tell 911 it’s an OD. I’m not bringing no cops here. Just Narcan, hide, wait for paramedics. If I got nothing on me, then point, watch, call bullshit when they don’t try to revive the guy.

I feel sadness and revulsion and fear. Who lets all these deaths happen, man? I wonder why they don’t just buy safer dope, find another dealer, maybe; get some test strips at least, you know?

My questions betray my urban upbringing. Kelly, who you haven’t met yet, laughs. He says: Yep. You’re white, alright. He says: Cold water only shocks the system when you’ve been sitting in a jacuzzi. It doesn’t shock the people who are accustomed to the cold.

I feel mildly offended. I’ve never even seen a damned jacuzzi. Kelly laughs again. He’s used to my reaction. Native folks here are used to others being offended by their existence, by their experiences, but most of all, by the truth [the truth is, i fear my skin is saturated in pesticides]. Sometimes, I defend myself from the parts of the truth I don’t like. At times, I say: Hey! Come on, man. You know my dad’s a full-blooded Indian, status-card-carrying, legit, man. Sometimes I reach for Indigeneity with my lighter-calloused fingertips, needing, not to somehow absolve myself of a vague, historically inaccurate guilt, like some white folks do – no, the fact that I came here as a doe-eyed kid fleeing a country that wasn’t safe for me makes the flavour of colonization taste less like one scoop of White-Canadian Guilt, and more like two scoops of White Non-Canadian Confusion – this is more like a need to justify to myself a pain that is cold and fat and sweet like legacy, but still isn’t quite mine.

My father chose to be my father, but to gift me a finger-woven sash and a jingle dress in ceremony is still not to gift me blood. And so, although his experience became mine through tradition, through love, through abuse and child welfare and struggle and secrets and addictions and stories and joy and so many other ways – unlike my younger siblings, whose births he caused, I am foreign-blooded; I do not belong here. But I don’t like to feel left out, so I sometimes step into a space that isn’t mine. And I know that fact alone makes me more settler than not [but if i am fruit in this analogy, i have not yet seen or felt or known my core – help me know, i must know]. I am always dead or dying of my pride, caught in the off-centre of many worlds. This shames me.

All I know is, right now, I’m still looking for drugs. It shouldn’t take this long, man. Every Canadian city I’ve ever lived, within a few minutes of arrival I’m set. Not here. To be fair, I could have been set a thousand times over if I’d just switch my drug of choice. But I won’t. A diva, they say. No way. I feel my urban superiority complex springing up to create a cold cage of prejudice around me. To be here from Toronto is to be someone. I make it clear I’m different. I feel I am better than other folks because I’ve travelled. I feel I am better than other folks because the drugs I do aren’t like the drugs they do. This doesn’t bother people. When they laugh and see through me, I falter angrily. It’s my money, eh?

It’s like I said, I don’t want to settle for the drugs everyone is smoking here, everywhere I look. They tell me: just do it, it’s cheaper, easier to find! They say: just switch, at least try it, this stuff lasts longer anyway! But drugs are nothing if not an adult comfort item, sacred in ritual preference, a pseudo-organic replacement of the colonial teddy bear that never felt safe for people like me to cling to, and goddammit, I want that familiarity. I feel a tantrum rise up in me. I want the drugs I know; the drugs we had before this pandemic, before masks and mandates sanitized the lives of rich people and isolated the rest of us in a strangely criminal way.

They shut down the borders so that now, most of us looking for drugs grown south of the border can’t find them – drug users have all switched to this new stuff. They have adapted. But this is not the old adage of adapt or die, which in itself may or may not have always been a lie depending on who you ask – this is the opposite: an adaptation that is killing everyone I see. Everyone I have met since I got here is dead or dying. I am soberly determined to find the drugs I know – the old stuff, the old ways. I do not want to adapt when adaptation to these domestic bathtub chemical drugs looks clear like death to me. The hundreds of crosses they’ve erected on Brady Street say it all. “Overdose Crisis,” the sign says. I call bullshit. No one increased any damn dose all of a sudden. It’s that since the outbreak of this pandemic and the border closures, everything is cut with poison. I ramble passionately and often about this to anyone who will listen: There are intergalactic opioid poisons and superhuman amphetamine derivatives from psychotic radioactive spiders in everything new, man. Don’t laugh, eh. I don’t care how long it lasts. I just want the old stuff.

Finally, I find a guy: “You can’t buy it cooked here but you can buy it and I’ll cook it for ya.” I’ve never done this, and we are outdoors. But I don’t want any new-fangled drug, don’t want to be dead or dying, so I tell myself I’m not adapting, not compromising [eat me, taste me, consume me, is there flesh under my skin?] and I say: “yeah, cool, I’ll follow you.”

His name is Kelly. I mentioned him before. He’s an artist, a father, a lover, a joker. Kelly is down from a rez my kids once lived on for a summer, an invitation from their father’s blood, not mine. They spent time there, participated in cultural programming, the purpose of which was to learn the old ways, to learn to be in touch with this earth; to live off the land, as they say.

Kelly and I aren’t living off the land like that tonight or this morning. We are living in spite of it: this land that has raised up and fed a people who are descended from a people who were determined to wipe out what they determined was a risk to their conquest; a people who brought small-pox and germ warfare and infections, and it’s this same people who are so afraid of the potential of disease, now. That’s why now, when folks bar us from their stores and dismantle our tents, it’s because Kelly and I and others are not just a nuisance but a threat. They fear us. They fear everything.

Guiltily, I know this disease arrived on our shore the same way I did, as a small child seeking a warm body to inhabit; back before my father legally adopted me, before the Sundays when my uncle would ruffle my frizzy hair and tell me, “He’s been through a lot, you know. Don’t push him. He’ll tell you his stories one day”, and I pulled the rabbit skin on the hoop taut while my uncle scraped artfully with the knife I had helped him sharpen, and said that I was his favourite niece; back when I didn’t know that blood and ancestry could redefine belonging - but I don’t tell Kelly any of this. I say only what I need to.

We are supposed to mask up and wash our hands for these fearful white folk, although ironically, they seldom buzz us in to use the public washrooms so that we can do so [did the others wash before they bit into my skin? or only after?]. Ours are hands that haven’t been clean in years anyway, but we grab their little free bottles of Purell to placate. (Ha! Just look at that lady’s face when you took it! Hey lady! You see some Native guy with all this Purell and just assume he drinks it, amirite?! Yeah, early in the night, we laugh at things like this. Later on, we rage about them.)

Idiots, we want to say. We carry sanny just like our people have always adapted to carry the right tools [i notice i am using ‘we’, using ‘our’; before i overthink it i forget my skin, feel only my heart, almost belong]. Life is sacred, man. WE will not be guilty of any of the dead or dying. We’ll sanny up before we share crack pipes with your kids if it makes you feel better. Because the irony is that these new drugs, more than the virus, are what’s killing them all here: settler, Native, immigrant and refugee. Dope doesn’t check for MNO citizenship, status cards, or any other type of documentation. The sirens come and we all scatter: settler, Native, immigrant and refugee. We make ourselves invisible so that housed people can feel safe from a threat even more invisible than we unhoused folks are.

Meanwhile, back on Kelly’s rez there is unspoken fear, a fear that lives in blood and bellies; ghosts of generations of kokums who remember new diseases [there are seeds inside. viable seeds. i can’t say how i know this. keep chewing]. Native folks up here have been vaccinated against gullibility already. This immunity travels to next generations and protects against new threats – even though sometimes the fear stays as a symptom.

It’s not a secret – disease travels quick on reserves, and everyone knows they’ll be the last to get any sort of help. Urban and rez-dwelling Indians like my father, like my grandfather, like my cousins, aunts, and uncles; like my partner, like my children, and like Kelly, have learned a new kind of self-reliance: not the kind that comes from skill and teachings, but the kind that comes from knowing not to trust any kind of promise to help, if it’s from outside. Native folks help each other.

I am not sure if I possess this kind of Indigenous immunity or not. I do not know if it takes blood or only family. I don’t know much. But somewhere along the line, while searching so desperately for my place here, I got to know drugs. And I know us drug users help each other.

Wealthy immigrants, and sober, housed settler folk run around in circles, and panic, and protest, and cry. The reserves have shut outsiders out now, have posted Nishnaabe cops at the side roads, are masking up at bingo and looking sideways at those who leave each day to work essential jobs or to buy dope off-rez, something considered non-essential. (But drug users know it’s either that or settle for the stuff that’ll kill us. And even the cops get tired of burying their kids. So sometimes even the cops close their eyes.)

Kelly can’t sell his art to the Nishnaabe cops, can’t keep risking his life for dope that’s cut with superhuman killing stuff. So, folks like Kelly leave the rez, come to little Northern cities like this, sell their art to both the appreciative and the token-toters; teach folks like me to cook our own drugs. Kelly is teaching me a new way to live off the land. These are essential skills for drug users in a strange, post-pandemic world, so that we don’t become just more of the dead or dying [ah – perhaps my core is winter-bitter, but my summer juices sticky the chins of eager others. if so, here come the bees].

There’s a myth that says drug users have a death-wish. Actually, drugs are a tool that many of us have sought in order to prolong our lives. Its effects usually, at least temporarily, make the death-wishes go away. Drug users are adept at surviving because we have such a strong desire to live that we are willing to live even as pariahs, as exiled poets, adhering to the outskirts of society, relegated to blatant abuse and abject poverty in order to hopefully obtain more days of life – and all this rather than succumb to death as the inevitable end-stage of a trauma-induced depression that most drug users seem to have in common. But - Anishinaabeg know life. They have already survived pandemics; have survived a post-colonization nightmare designed specifically to destroy them. I also want to live. I pursue life with vigor. I follow Kelly like a beloved big brother.

*

Kelly cooks our dope gently under the bridge beside the river. The water below us and the cars passing above us, roar. He is kind, makes sure I can see, makes sure I try each step myself, makes sure I have the skills I will need to live off this new landscape that is trying to kill us all. He doesn’t blame the tired earth - after all, we’ve been trying to kill it for longer than this pandemic has been here.

He tells me stories as he cooks; tells me about his baby mama, mostly. He tells me how he loves her as he sways his hips, flicks his lighter, tries to stop his hands from shaking. His daughter and his son are the loves of his life. His daughter likes horses. His son likes video games and also reading YA novels. He talks about them as his strong, dirt-crusted hands expertly and lovingly prepare drugs for me like food. “Are you okay?” He wants to know this often. I wonder if it’s something about me that makes him ask, or something about him, or something else entirely.

Later, Kelly cries. Stories spill out of him the way his drawings do, he says. He shows me some of his art on his phone. I feel different when I see it. I forget to enjoy the high for a moment, absorbed in tumbling lines and shapes performing as lithe, drunken gymnasts, alternately meeting and breaking to form hauntingly familiar shapes: land animals, birds, fish, and other creations of our angry and generous earth. Something in his belly teaches him the lines, he says. Really, I say? Like how a mother’s belly teaches us about our children? Yes, he says, his drawings are his children just like we are the drawings of Creator. He burns sage before he draws, he says, and the lines just fall out of him. We are not burning sage, or tobacco, but rather something else, and sitting there under the bridge taking turns getting high, we feel a dystopian connection to a new landscape that has scarred all of us.

We talk about all of the deaths we know of recently [earth’s belly is not yet full! and yet, do you know a single fruit that won’t decay? the best you can do is try to be food, first, i suppose]. Last week, last month, last year. “Did you know…person x, person y, person z?” Usually, no. Sometimes, yes. Everyone we know is dead or dying.

We try to come to terms with this as the dope runs out and our bodies come to terms with coming down. I pull out some booze I packed to make this easier. I don’t smoke pot. Kelly does. He lights a joint. I swig waterbottle whisky and I listen as he prays his kids’ mother will forgive him for sins I don’t ask about and don’t need to know. I silently wish I had a lover who felt that way about me. I shiver. I had forgotten to be sad until just now.

When I leave here, I will be all alone.

As we walk back to the place we met up, Kelly sees an elderly Odawa speaker from the island. Despite having more languages in common, Kelly approaches him wordlessly. It occurs to me that the more languages we share with one another, the less we need to say. I suddenly feel different about all the words Kelly and I have exchanged, words I had felt glad about until now. Taking stereotypically colonial offense, I curse the way I use language. It’s probably the same way most people use language – to help me feel close to people while at the same time helping me keep those people at arm’s length. But this particular morning, I feel different, new, and so I fight the urge to feel offended; to defend myself from anything at all [will i fall hard to the earth at maturity? or will someone pluck me gratefully from the vine? which will hurt less?]. I refuse to believe the nagging feeling in me that makes every human exchange feel like a subversive treaty.

Kelly and I provided each other with conversation only in English, just as the treaty governing the land I am standing on was provided to its signees only in English, just as every drug ever purchased here and every request to wear masks in the shops here and every paramedic response to an OD here has always been provided in English, a language that does not belong to me, to Kelly, or to Turtle Island at all; a language that is relatively new here, really, but a language that nevertheless we always expect and that we have mastered with a necessity that doesn’t ask questions. The greater the lack of necessity, the fewer words need to be said, in any tongue. The greatness of my necessity turns my cheeks red in the summer night as I reflect on the constant flow of my needy tongue.

The man that Kelly approaches is trying to smoke the last of his dope off of tin foil, but his hands can’t stop shaking, and the wind is blowing, and his lighter won’t stay lit. He looks desperate not to lose his toke. Kelly walks up to him, creates shelter, holds the foil steady as the man holds the straw, lights the lighter behind his cupped hand against the wind. I stand awkwardly. I don’t know this man, and this encounter seems somehow sacred, somehow private. It is like watching the two men naked. I feel I should not be here.

Though no words are spoken between them, a language is still being conveyed. This is not the language of drug users, a language written in the most basic survival patterns of my autonomic nervous system. It is not the language of my homeland, a language written in the most basic early development patterns of my synapses. And it is not the language of my own heart speaking to me, written in the most primitive patterns of four recurring alphabet letters in various rearrangements but translating into a body and my own space inside it. This is a language that lives in the land under the men’s feet. The language I am observing stands strong as a witness beneath the two men, holding them up. It transcends drugs, translates meanings with vibrations that are more than words. This language I observe speaks of more than even culture and time and space. I can feel the vibrations, but the earth refuses to translate them for me.

When you learn a second language as a young child, as I did, even fluency cannot ever make this second language the langue de la coeur, the langue des reves, the language of the very first love and the very deepest heartbreak. This land embraces my Indigenous identity to a point, offers me healing, belonging, and even a provincial adoption certificate, but it does not translate for my foreign feet. This land draws a line more loyal than a treaty and all its tricky foreign words. This space, as this moment in time, is no longer mine. Waving awkwardly, I thank Kelly again, try for one last hug or pat on the shoulder, but the moment has passed.

My pipe is still hot in my pocket. My heart is still warm with the glow of almost-belonging. The sadness in me drains from my feet into the earth. Though it refuses to translate for me into a language that isn’t mine, the land willingly carries my burdens. I am grateful for this. I don’t sleep but I also don’t worry. My kids spent a summer, once, learning to live off the land with knowledge keepers and language-speakers of their people. But I have spent a night and a morning learning to live off of a Northern urban landscape, determined not to become another one of the dead or dying. And I have spent a lifetime learning to [grow bravely and cowardly, an unlabelled seed, falling on the earth for a chance to become a strange, hybrid plant that may or may not fruit, because hybrids often don’t, and to] live in the in-betweens: urban and remote, Native and white, old and new, change and sameness.

*

For weeks afterwards, I look for Kelly everywhere. I visit his dealer, the park, the bridge, N’Swakamok; ask others I know from Wiki, feel the sirens of panic rising up in me - but when I quiet my panic and listen to the bees as they point the way to the sticky juices in my foreign veins, something in my seed-soft belly tells me my friend is gone. My heart begins to contort until I cry out in a language I don’t know, a wordless sound I did not even tell my mouth to make.

They don’t usually have funerals for people who grow and rot the way we do. Even a cross on Brady Street requires a level of societal acceptance not always available to beautiful cracked-out drifters and other exiled human poets. I wonder which, if any, of the sirens outside my heart were for him. I wonder who stepped over him, who phoned. I wonder what will happen to the lines and shapes that lived in his spirit and fell from his belly, the stories that lived in his chest and fell from his lips, the children that lived from his love and fell from his fruit tree [what abundance of pollinators! groundlings, rain, seasons], and to the baby mama that he told me was the most wonderful and incredible woman Creator had ever even thought to make.

When the sound stops coming out of me, I find the Vermillion River and I wash my hands. Not with sanitizer, as useful an adaptation as it has been. Not with any sort of bathtub chemical, though these have served their purpose too. Just with the river, and with plain old soap. Once I start, I can’t stop. The washing feels necessary, and the necessity attracts words to my head like a beacon, words that are fire; words that only the water can extinguish. I wash and I scrub my head, my body, all of me. Nothing is dirty here. I am clean. Come disease, come drugs, come sins, come words, come anything inside or outside of me – none of it can dirty me. I am clean.

The drugs do not make me dirty. The earth does not need to translate this for me. It is not a natural understanding either, but rather cleanness is a skill I have learned from those who teach skills like this. The earth speaks, but I translate consciously. Everything I do is conscious, because I am not on my own land, but I am in my own body, and the land in its kindness takes care of my body and of me. I lay on the bank on this day in August, naked, clean earth clinging to me, and I finally know: what I am is not half, or a half of a half, as my siblings used to chide me. I am not better or wiser than anyone, though as I admitted earlier, before this night, I felt that way. Even my speech is different. I do not feel so other. The river waters us all. What I am is not new or old or any one thing. What I am is middles and in-betweens. I am around and through and over and under. I am connections and adaptations and things that change and stay the same.

I am not dead or dying today. I am alive, and I am not afraid of the drugs, or the virus, or the people, or the old, or the new. This is not because there is nothing to fear, but it is because as an urban refugee, I learned to adapt to fear and to react with love and creativity. And it is because as a child of an Indigenous community, my father’s family and his blood gifted me a second language of bravery. I do not have Kelly’s resilience in my blood, but I carry it in my heart and my belly – I alone carry like a basket, many big, bruised fruits my spirit has been collecting on this soil since the day my father’s fishing boat first came to get me and my mother from the sea. I carry and consume and share these treasures carefully, because they are impermanent and perishable, but also nourishing and truly delicious – and this is how to carry life [yes, the reason you cannot bite into me is because i am not the fruit after all, that which grows from the land itself, but only a basket].

I decide to plant in Kelly’s dirt-rich place a memorial. Now, under the bridge, there are four items: a stone, a spoon, a pencil, and a cup of water. The stone is what cannot be moved easily. The spoon is what can be shared, generously. The pencil is for stories that become art, wounds, words. The cup of water is for what is always changing, emptying and refilling, a part of every living thing. On lonely days, I fill Kelly’s cup.

It is the water that filled us once, when we were whole. The drugs are what fill us since we have been broken. These drugs are fire, fire. Killing in smoke and leaving fertile and resilient [a new birth is coming! we are growing back greener, stronger, healthier and more beautiful than before] and as water after fire will heal the broken land, this water can fill us again, and where we were burned, life will surely grow. As fire, as water, we can and we must learn to move, to grow, to change, and also, like stone and like the earth itself, we must remember to stay rooted, to stay the same. As long as we can share wisdom and skills here, we are sharing life as well as sharing land, as the land allows. And this is how we heal. As the earth itself heals. We do not heal as plants. We heal as planets.

I never told Kelly that I loved him, because my words for love in the language we were speaking was born from a necessity that felt shameful, and to use words for love in English toward Kelly would be inaccurate. This love I feel is not shameful, romantic, sexual, or strange. It is not clingy or even familiar. It is only human, alive, and shamelessly necessary. We lack a truly decolonized word for love in English. If I was speaking in my own tongue, on my own soil, I would have a word for this. I do not know if Kelly’s tongue has a word for love like this. I didn’t ask.

I am still laying on my back in the earth, and my eyes are leaking my unspoken grief into the soil in the language of my earlier cry. I don’t understand, but I am too tired to be frustrated. The land catches my tears, agrees to express this love I feel to Kelly, wherever he may be, above or below the soil. This brings me peace with no words.

We can, and we must, draw the pictures and tell the stories and plant the seeds and tend the wounds and share the kindness and feel the love that lives inside us [the idea that people are good or bad is a double-scoop white lie: even the rottenest core is food and strength to the pollinator larvae that will hatch from its insides - and every fruit rots]. Grow and bloom, and fall and rot, and death and birth, and birth and birth and birth, as we pollinate this earth and also leave our fruits here to live and to die and to cause life again.

In this way we create each other. We collect each other. We connect each other. Now we are living! And now we are also dead and dying, and yet still beautiful, as water and fire, of spirit and of blood, on and underneath the earth, living off of and in spite of the strong, tired land.