Free Motorcycles & Sweetgrass by Drew Hayden Taylor Page A

are with you and your family. But wait ’til you hear what I have to say!” Anthony trotted off in search of some traditional corn soup or sauerkraut. Maggie sighed, dropping her unappealing sandwich onto the plate. Her husband was dead, her son was retreating into himself and the acquisition of all this new land was proving to be the hottest political potato the community had seen in a long while.
    Maybe she should have cut Clifford more slack, back when he was chief. He had been dealing with the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, affectionately known as the RCAP, an attempt by the federal government to address many of the problems beingcomplained about by Canada’s Native population. And it took years. Clifford had spent many nights in Ottawa, and many more nights at the Band Office or on the phone. In her imagination, Maggie began to imagine the RCAP as a woman, her husband’s mistress. A big fat woman, a selfish one, always wanting more. She promised so much, but in the end, she delivered so little. Every night Clifford would come to bed with Maggie, but he was always thinking about “her,” the other woman, the RCAP. And now the legacy of that relationship was Maggie’s cross to bear.
    Some wanted the three hundred acres used for new housing. Others felt the time was right to install a water filtration plant, which in turn could mean somebody (quite probably the woman who had made the suggestion) could open up a laundromat, and all those who either didn’t have or couldn’t afford a washer/dryer wouldn’t have to drive forty minutes into town and stand around for two hours waiting for their clothes to be cleaned. And they could stop worrying about their town dying off like what happened in that Walkerton place. There were proposals for a golf course or a casino. Of course it wasn’t solely Maggie’s decision; there was the Band Council to go through, as well as a bunch of committees and boards to deal with. White people may have invented bureaucracy, but their relationship with the Department of Indian Affairs had taught the First Nations people of Canada how to excel at and, in their own way, indigenize it. All land utilization ideas and economic development schemes started their journey on Maggie’s desk. And she was getting tired of it.
    All around her the community swirled and flowed, everyone except Tony caught up in mourning. She thought of her family, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins. She couldn’t comprehend how families with only one or two kids functioned.
    Maybe that was why Maggie was such a good chief. She had been forged within the anarchy and chaos of a large family. Each brother and sister had made her stronger, both by love and by torment.
    The chair beside her scraped on the tile floor. “I don’t suppose anybody has seen Wayne?” said Diane, Maggie’s eldest sister. Wayne was Maggie’s youngest brother, three years younger than her, the youngest of the Benojee brood.
    “You know he won’t be here. He’ll probably come tonight when nobody’s around.”
    “Or when the moon’s full.” Diane, her plate a mound of triangular white sandwiches, began to feast. “Willie dropped by his island a few days ago. Couldn’t find him, so he left a note. Geez, you’d think he’d be here.”
    “You know Wayne. He’s got his own way of dealing with life.” Maggie couldn’t help noticing the pile of processed food on her sister’s plate. This was not the diet the doctor had prescribed for her diabetic sister.
    Diane noticed the look and scowled. “Don’t you dare give me that—there are no calories, sugars and starches at funeral receptions. You know that.” To illustrate her point, she stuffed a whole sandwich in her mouth, and grinned.
    Maggie couldn’t help but smile back. As for her younger brother, it wasn’t uncommon for Wayne to go missing for weeks, even months at a time. An isolationist and contemporary Native—
mystic
, for lack of a better term—Wayne