Richard Wagamese

There are moments here when the light comes to fill you. When the sun floods across the peak of the far mountain and everything is thrown into a veil of red you can feel it enter you, lift you, become you.
Or storm mornings when gray is the desolate cloak of the world you can feel it slip between your ribs, roil there, become your breath.
There are moments too, when the air inhabits you. Times when clarity rules and the fine line between air and light vanishes so that when you close your eyes you can feel yourself drifting.

Well, another year has come and gone and we step into the year 2011 with the usual expectations, optimism and a handful of resolutions to be better, more focused, deliberate, healthy and considerate.
That actually sounds a lot like last year to me but you get used to that after a while.

In our home the television is hardly ever on. There’s something about having the open land a step away that makes it irrelevant somehow. As though there’s a greater channel available, commercial free and ever changing. Sure, we watch the news, have our favorite couple programs and I catch all the baseball games I can, but our TV is the picture window that looks over the lake.
We have one of those new fangled flat LCD sets now. That might seem incongruous but it takes up a lot less room and almost disappears in the far corner. It’s an instrument, a tool.

Everything is energy. Everything moves in a circle. There are no endings only new beginnings. These are the foundational truths expressed in the ceremonial lives of my people. As I’ve aged each of them has become more pronounced in my life and each of them has become more and more valuable to the condition of my life.
The teachings and the belief system of my people has become a song I carry. I feel it most strongly on the land but it’s there nonetheless in everything I do.

I met a man some years ago who was a vaunted Ojibway teacher. He’d published books, taught at universities and been a high profile ethnological speaker.
That means he was able to talk about the entire gamut of Anishinabeg reality, both the historical and the contemporary. For the most part, he was regarded as a learned, wise and pre-eminent expert on our culture.
From a podium one day I heard him say “if you don’t speak the language, you are not Indian.”