(Magpie) Language of the Heart

I constructed this poem sometime in 1998 or 99 and at that time had been aware of my brother’s contracting the HIV virus for (just under) 10 years – he’d been living with it years longer. I tried to workshop it in a UBC creative writing class right after I wrote it because I liked it but I could never get through it.

My brother Kelly was called Magpie because he was brash, loud, occasionally a pest…and beautiful. He and I spent time together in the same foster home as very small children and I remember us constantly running away and every time (for some reason) taking off our shoes and socks (which always made them SO mad, lol). We were split up for this and I was not to see him again until we were grown men by which time he had become ill.

It would be a lie to say we got along well all the time though we did have our moments. On rare occasions we sat up all night drinking at the rez and regaled each other with our exploits and daring adventures. The other end of our experiential equation is that for subtle and deep reasons we could almost never seem so get along. I was needful but not in the same way as when we were children and he clearly had basic needs of a kind we intuitively understood could not be met. On some level, I believe we were resentful towards each other for apparently leaving the other way back when (which of course is ridiculous), while at the same time angry at ourselves for feeling powerless to help someone (your own brother) so clearly in need of help. This kind of anger, frustration and unresolved feelings of futility are so prevalent in our community that it can make people lash out at whoever is near. My brother and I fought at a house party on the rez (which I had invited him to as a means of reconciliation). I came away from that encounter with a broken ankle and today I wear the incident as a badge of honor in some circles, and in others, it provides clear evidence of the the fact that often it is hurt people who hurt people.

It so happened in the palliative care ward of an Edmonton hospital one night (as outside a late spring blizzard was subsiding) that I was alone with Kelly for the last time in this life. Due to weather, timing and grace it was just my brother and I. These were the days of SARS-related health concerns and so hospital staff insisted visitors don all manner of protective-wear (latex gloves, gown, mask and cap) which of course I removed once we were alone soon after midnight. He was far past any ability to speak or communicate but I was aware he could understand me because tears would stream from the waxy hollows where his eyes had once been as I began to speak as I felt compelled to do once we were alone. I thanked my brother for looking after us as little boys in the best way he could and told him how good he looked (Magpies crave attention, you see) and how lucky he was to soon be with everyone who had come before us. His hands were cold as I held them and told him I had written a poem about him and though I could only remember the last part I would recite what I had memorized (the stanza beginning: in my dreams – we are boys again…)

It was, as mentioned, his last night on earth but it is the best of him which with stays with me, informs me, guides me, comforts and protects me. He is still my big brother. It is special on a personal scale but it feels like a blessed and pre-destined thing to have been with Kelly and to have been able to look after him, if only once and to know for certain there was love in his final moments. Art can be transcendent at times and is, I believe, spiritual practice.

Ekosi





Magpie

Carrying tobacco
and colored prints of fabric
I stand barefoot in wet grass -
traffic drowns out the sound of my voice
but I am speaking
and I am looking to the sky

Saying that you have gone south
and you still have the gun with you,
they promise me they will catch up to you
(who is to punish them for their crimes?)
I would believe them were it not for the knowledge
that none has ever been able to catch up with you
so hard and fast do you run -
and I am wary of promises

It has never been the way between us to agree
but tonight,
I want you to keep on running

With clenched teeth
and fists
I demand answers
(where there are none)

I demand answers!

In every direction that I look for you
I see faces committed to forgetting,
dedicated to relegating us to mere “social
constructs,” rejecting antithetical images
of what they think Indians are

we are:
boys stolen at 2 and 6 years old
boys raised by strangers without black hair, and then
boys who return home as strange men
boys sharing a mother poisoned by prescriptions
boys whose cousins hang in trees
boys finding uncles with shotgun holes in them
boys who have not forgiven their fathers – only forgotten them
boys who are bleeding


In my dreams
we are boys again
and running barefoot through city streets
our shoes discarded
It must be that you remember
a place worth running to -
I am scared
but you are older
and I will follow you anywhere

Magpie,
you are that dark bird
wounded,
singing in the dead of night
waiting your whole life for a moment to arrive

Tonight
I can feel a cold wind at my back
on this wind
will you fly over gray fields?
your feathers long, blue and black
along the river’s silent edge will you soar?

If only one good memory
is left in our hearts
I will meet you there


©2012 Champsteen Publishing

Charlie's Lullaby

words and music by Larry Nicholson


recorded live at The Great Hall - First Nations House of Learning (University of British Columbia)

violin: Jessica Deutsch
hand drum, backing vocal: Kristi Haavisto
guitar, vocal: Larry


As well as being Cree, my daughters, Storm and Grace are Ojibway/Anishnabe through their mother and her people. There is so much that is beautiful about the Ojibway and the way they understand the universe and their place in it. There is the Ojibway philosophy that it is our children who determine who their parents will be. The eternal spirit may wait many, many lifetimes until precisely the right mother and father are found. They choose us - it is out of our hands. The weight carried by this idea and all its implications is so immense that it leaves you grateful and of the mind to say thank-you to your children for including you, for coming all this way...just for you

do you see why good ideas and words and music ARE medicine?...

- - -

welcome to the world dear
it's warm beside you dear
with mama in the sky dear
and heaven down here on earth dear

you called out my name love
in my sleep where you came love
the wild and the tame love
i look and they're one and the same love

you brought rain to the sky dear
i'm happy to cry dear
i'll never know why dear
that you came all this way just for me dear

you're free like the bird child
you are the prayer that was heard child
i know not the word child
for the light that you brought to the world child

you called out my name love
in my sleep where you came love
the wild and the tame love
i look and they're one and the same love...


© 2009, 2012 Champsteen Publishing

BEING NATIVE 101

Today’s East Side Smudge goes down and for the most impoverished postal code in Canada (statistically, speaking) it is clearly needed. Elsewhere on this blog I’ve written about institutional and systemic failure to address some basic issues of health and safety for the most vulnerable people. And though I may have implied it throughout my blog if not stated it outright - the healing of communities and nations begins here (taps chest)…

Basic universal fact about Indians: Indians pray.

If you are an Indian, 1st Nations, Indigenous, Native, Aboriginal (or WHATEVER) and are reading this and are not one in the regular habit of praying, my question is: what do YOU know that all your relatives and ancestors before you didn’t? I encounter a lot of Indians these days that seem to be too cool for school and get visibly skittish when it comes to acknowledging their "relationship" with Creator (insert lol here), that is, praying. How did it get like this? When did praying become something unseemly or embarrassing for us Indigenous types?

At ceremonies, events and gatherings I hear all the time, we pray for the ones to come and acknowledge those who came before us. Since becoming a father to 2 girls (now 11 and 14), I have come to experience a more profound sense of connection to people from the past (that I never met). I unabashedly pray for my kids (and their kids not born yet) and there is no doubt in my mind as I type this that people well before my time prayed for me. This is partly how it works being an Indian…it’s my part in what I call a sacred duty - All these things are real to me! - Perhaps a simpler way is to say it matters to me to pray and to try and put good energy out in the universe.

I may have never met you (if you are reading here for the first time) but if you are of aboriginal ancestry I am telling you, without question - you come from a long, long line of powerful, formidable, accomplished and deeply spiritual people who ALL prayed. My theory is that it is only due to a wide array of unique, historical circumstances that praying seems currently to have become a novelty among my generation and, for increasingly obvious reasons for the generation before ours, it is now a complicated if not painful subject. But our ancestral ties, our time on this earth, our unique vision of ourselves and our place in the universe are thousands of years in the making and cannot be undone or destroyed by force, plague or policy, it’s all been tried.

I have yet to visit any 1st Nations community where prayer wasn’t an active part in daily lives of those in pursuit of nothing more complicated or easily attainable than balance. This daily pursuit/practice or meditation if you like, has profound implications and potential for transformation and creative possibility. The solutions to our challenges require creative thinking to bring about change. Look to the people you admire, I am willing to bet that most if not all these are people engaged in frequent spiritual practice of one sort or another (cause I know you admire the admirable and not the shallow, superficial types, this is also part of my basic premise, lol).

We as a people have demonstrated consistently (though pessimists will say otherwise) a high capacity to deal with adversity, upheaval, trauma and grief. The evidence is…we are still here. But as I head down to Main and Hastings and the community smudge today I am more focused on the untapped reserves in our capacities for kindness, empathy, compassion, gratitude and our capacity for love. It is the VALUES which make us who we are from day to day. As you read this, YOU are an answered prayer - the fact that you live and breathe – this is not rhetorical. I am telling you: your people before you…prayed…for YOU…think about it.

So - your life-long question at the school of hard knocks or at Being an Indian 101:

Who are you and what do you stand for?

© 2011 Champsteen Publishing

Watershed (song)

words and music: larry nicholson


I come from the heartland of peaceful hills
I’ve seen the kindness of love and the space it fills
I know no mother, no father mine to see
but everything I am is everything they’ll be
on painted ponies I named each road
the good will of strangers carried my load
I’ve tasted honey, I’ve tasted wine
I hold the sweet holy memory of her lips on mine
and I’ve known freedom…yes, I recall

inside the empire of broken dreams
cascading temples of gold where fortune streams
down darkened alleys are the ones who pay
for all this wreckage, these midnight ways
the ones grown lonely in the howlin’ wind
who mark the cost in dust in everything we’ve been
can love turn back time - will it pay the bills
or stop a bullet that tears through the night so still?
I’ve been a witness…yes I recall

saved all the letters you wrote about snow
and all the miles in between that remind me of home
out of the ashes, the watershed
a distant memory of names and of times we bled
speak to me softly on this moonless night
where faith can’t be seen and there’s no starlight
though still the waters must bring the rain
to hear a voice beside me in the darkness say
I’m too a witness…yes, I recall...
and I remember…yes, I recall…


©2011 Champsteen Publishing