Excerpt
not be in a good mood. And they will not be in a good mood, and they
will not dance for one.”
“But they are dancing,” Ken said.
She squeezed his arm. “Maybe some are missing. The dead must be allowed
to go. One should not hunger for them and impede their journey.
One should not get in their way, or they will not be in a good mood and
we will not be in a good mood.”
The lights faded and the old woman made a shrill, sharp sound and
clapped her hands. The lights began to dance again. She made the same
sound again, and the lights intensified. Watching them, Ken was filled
with an immense sense of gratitude. Whatever troubles and pains lived
in his heart, they were surely minor compared to the tribulations of these
people who were now his family.
He was intensely aware of being in this place of his childhood dreams,
a spectator to events he could never have imagined – and the thought
pleased and distressed him in almost equal proportions. The power of
the sky, and the land, and the creatures it contained, intoxicated him. He
was in awe of the people’s acceptance and understanding, of their history
and their predicament. He admired their determination not to succumb
to the power of a distant government, which at best, was ambivalent toward
them, and at worst, considered them a nuisance that needed to be
eliminated. They were wards of the state, little more than children in the
government’s eyes, forbidden to live freely in their own world – not allowed
to live in the white world, and caught in a limbo of no hope and
no future.
How did he fit in? Was being a spectator his only role? Was he destined
to record the life of these people on impossibly small ribbons of adding
machine tape?
What was emerging in his drawings and in his mind was a portrait
of heaven and a sketch of hell, something so knotted that to unravel the
bonds seemed an impossible task.
He had never before been merely a watcher. He had always participated
fully in his life. But what could he do? He was a novice to this way
of life and depended on the goodwill of these people who were little more
than refugees.
Speaking carefully, in the language he was beginning to master, he
asked her, “Why are you showing me all the ways of your people?”
“For reasons,” she said, “For reasons.”
“And what about the song in the igloo,” he asked. “What is Nunavut?”
The old woman clapped her hands and the Northern Lights brightened.
“The ancestors are happy when they know we are watching them
dance.”
Libros Libertad 