Free Looks Like Daylight by Deborah Ellis Page B

from this school. I go home only for Christmas and spring break unless the weather is too bad. I’m at school most of the year.
    South Indian Lake is small. It’s a Cree community. Some of the elders still speak Cree fluently, which is a miracle when you think of everything that happened to them at the residential school. There’s moose, caribou, bears, some houses, a school, a fire hall, a Northern store, a health complex. There used to be a pool hall, but it burned down.
    There are a lot of traditional practices in the community. One of them is youth drumming practice. I’ve gone with my cousins. You learn to play with a good rhythm and to do the proper preparation before you play. You smudge with sweetgrass to cleanse, then you present an offering of tobacco to honor the drum. We drum at community gatherings and events like Treaty Days and Games Days. It makes me feel proud to be learning something that’s been passed down for generations.
    My Uncle Frank is trying to get someone to teach Hoop dancing. It would be pretty awesome to see some kids from our community doing Hoop dancing.
    Our community used to be on one side of the lake but then a dam was built and the community was flooded out and got moved to higher ground. People’s memories were washed away. The water used to be clear. Now it’s all muddy. It used to be healthy with fish, but there are hardly any fish now. My people got had.
    The homes in the community are very crowded. In my house there are twelve people — me, my brother, my sister Thelma, Thelma’s boyfriend, my sister Dorothy, Thelma’s kids Josh Jr., Kathy, Lorne, Jermine, Dorothy’s kids Shawn and Wayne, and my friend Marty, whose parents drink so he came to see if he could stay with us. It’s a small house. People sleep everywhere.
    So many of us are in there, but it makes it easy to watch the kids. There’s always someone around to keep an eye on them. It all somehow works out.
    When I was eleven I was taken away by Child and Family Services. They put me in a foster home in Thompson. I was there for a year and a half. The people were nice to me but I was missing home so much. For the longest time I didn’t talk at all or watch TV or eat hardly anything. I stayed in bed for a long time with the covers over my head. My sister was in the same foster home. She kept telling me everything was going to be all right, that Mom would come and get us.
    Then we went back to our parents. They’d drink after we went to bed. We’d get up early and clean the house before we went to school. You could smell the booze in the air.
    Dad still drinks large amounts of alcohol whenever he gets the chance. He’s had two minor strokes and his heart is weak. I ask him to stop but …
    He goes out to Nelson House for work. He’s gone for months, comes back for a bit, then goes off again.
    I try to be a good person. Sometimes I have turned to drugs and alcohol. Then I would see this chain. My grandparents drank and my parents drank and all this pain is like a chain around our community. Sometimes I find it hard to walk around my community without running into a drunk. I ask them, “Why are you hurting yourself?” They say, “I want to forget.” I try to tell them alcohol isn’t the answer.
    It’s supposed to be a dry community, but bootleggers smuggle it in. It’s very frustrating. I try to keep it out of my house. I look after my nieces and nephews and keep the house clean.
    There are big problems, but small bits of light can help. The people in South Indian Lake are good people. Even with all the pain they try to be there for each other. I’m proud to be a part of them.
    I’ve been to Winnipeg a couple of times. It may have everything but it doesn’t have that feeling of earth. Everything is covered in concrete.
    I wish I’d lived five hundred years ago, back when there was no arrival of white men. I think it