One of her neighbours had been commissioned to make handicrafts and beadwork for the tourists that were passing through the area on the national-park circuit, on their way to Waterton, and she offered Brandy a small wage to lend a hand. The commission was a private one, from a white and tidy man who ran a bright and tidy souvenir shop in Cardston. Twice a week Brandy walked the two and a half miles to the womanâs house and would sit at a white table with long dishes of vibrant beads splayed in front of her like the rays of a prism. While she worked, the woman, who was about the same age as her mother, talked incessantly, rolling through her array of opinions, often looking up and waiting for Brandy to acknowledge that she agreed in some way or was at least listening.
âIâll tell you something: life on the reserve,â the woman said one day, speaking in Blackfoot but mixing English words into her sentences without much rhyme or reason, âitâs changing. And people who canât keep up with it, theyâll be left behind. Thatâs just how it is.â
Brandy stopped to watch her as she slipped the beads down the string, threaded the needle through a piece of leather, and pulled it tight.
âYou know, the other day, an old womanâI wonât tell you whoâsaw the work Iâm doing here, and do you know what she told me? She said it was wrong. The colours, the patterns, theyâre not right. Thatâs what she said, âNot right.â But Iâll tell you something: Iâm making money. My own money, not just what I get from the treaty payments; like other peopleâlike her.â
She rolled her eyes. âCan you see what Iâm talking about? Now that womanâI wonât tell you whoâshe just doesnât get it; no one cares what the colours mean anymore. Not the tourists, not my generation, not yours. And why donât we care? Tell me, why? Because we know: life on the reserve is changing.â
She worked quietly for a long while before pausing to look into the middle distance, nodding to herself. âThatâs just how it is.â
Brandy walked home that day through a strong Chinook wind, the silt that her footsteps disturbed along the gravel being swept off to the side. She thought about what the woman had said, about everything changing around her. But the truth was that she didnât feel like it was. She looked up at the Chinook arch over the Rockies, bridging one side of the skyline to the other with a ribbon of cloud that was as grey and rounded as bone. No, as far as she could tell, everything was the same: the same road, the same buttes, same river, houses, and all of them enveloped in the same wind, like they always had been. A gust of it whipped her hair into her eyes and she flinched, pulled it out, and tucked it behind her ears, where it didnât stay.
Brandy loved the wind. She loved it because it was like a living thing, like a temperamental creature that had a thousand moods, a thousand voices. She loved how it yowled through the power lines with angry groans that made up the deepest sounds of winter, how it whistled through the cracks around the doors and windows, the pressure filling the room like a rigid lung, the reflections of shapes in the windows bulging, thinning, bulging again. She loved how it could flap cowboy hats off men and untie womenâs scarves as they walked across parking lots, how it whirled empty grocery bags in the eddying corners of buildings for days, then randomly plucked them into the air and lifted them higher, netting them in the branches of winter trees where they rattled wildly, flailing with a popping resonance that filled your ears, even after the car door was slammed shut and you sat in the vehicle, which jostled on its springs with each gust, and cleaned out the sand and grit that had collected in the corners of your eyes. She loved how that same wind, sometimes only inside of an