Free Fall from Grace by Wayne Arthurson Page A

coloring and long black hair pulled into two braids, Lester fit in with the crowd.
    “Been here long?” I asked him.
    “Yeah, got a bunch of shots of the mayor and some elders shaking hands, a short smudge ceremony, stuff like that. Nothing earth-shattering but it should work. How about you? Any suggestions that might tie in with the story?”
    “At the moment the story is the farthest thing from my mind. I’m still thinking about what I’m going to say.”
    “Yeah, I heard about that. Didn’t peg you as native but then again there you go. Guess I should say congrats on your promotion.”
    “A promotion usually comes with more money and some benefits but I think this one is just going to create more work for me.”
    “That’s the way it usually works,” he said, looking past me at the stage. “Looks like you’re up. I’ll get a nice shot for your own files if you want.”
    Someone called my name and I stepped onto the stage, still unsure of what to say, but I figured I could make something up on the fly. I had done this before, mostly at the small-town newspapers where I used to work, and I knew that before I spoke, I was supposed to shake hands with everyone onstage. But my outstretched hand was ignored by the mayor. Instead of looking at me, he was looking at Lester. “Come on. Don’t be shy, Mr. Desroches,” he said, waving at Lester to come forward and mispronouncing my name, adding a third syllable instead of just having two. “Come introduce yourself to your people.”
    Lester looked extremely uncomfortable, and the mayor, although still smiling and waving, had a bit of an angry look in his eyes because Lester wasn’t responding to him. Since many in the crowd knew that Lester wasn’t Leo Desroches, they were silent, embarrassed and disappointed by the gaffe and unsure of what to do. That silence, and the fact that one or two of the elders onstage were shaking their heads and rolling their eyes, tipped off the mayor and his entourage that something had gone wrong. I pushed aside my annoyance at being ignored and stepped in front of the mayor and grabbed his hand. There was a confused look on his face and he seemed to want to say something, but I gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder, like he had just told a funny joke, and then stepped up to the mic. The crowd stared at me, unsure of how to respond.
    I didn’t think about what I was going to say, I just let the words flow naturally. “I know what you’re thinking, ’cause I’ve been thinking about it ever since I got this job: ‘Who the hell is this white man and what is he doing in a place like this?’” Someone from the mayor’s entourage gasped but there were a few giggles coming from the crowd and from the line of elders onstage. “And I’ll be honest, I have no idea how to answer that, except to say something that my Cree mother always used to tell me: ‘Just because you look like your dad, don’t forget that it takes two people to make a person and there’s plenty of my blood inside of you.’”
    Okay, Mom never said that, but these people didn’t need to know that. I continued. “And while I’m being honest, despite what Mom says, I still feel like a white man because that’s how I grew up. As a kid I knew little about my native culture, about our past, the good and the bad, and while that’s meant I’ve never been subjected to the racism, institutional and personal, that plagues natives in this country, it also meant I was saddled with a stigma of shame, that maybe I should hide the Aboriginal side of me because, for whatever reason, many people in this city and country felt it wasn’t a good thing.
    “Still, I’ve also had the feeling that I missed out by not being able to celebrate that side of myself, so hopefully my position as the Aboriginal issues reporter will help me touch that side of my being. I’d like, at the very least, to help the native community in this city and maybe in some way become a member of