From One Ravens' Eye

Page 7

Hello, ahneen and tansi once again. To get you involved in this week's go round, stick an innocent brown hand deep down in our pocket. What do you feel in there? Would you like to feel more of it? If your fingers aren't touching something made of paper that crinkles or is made of metal and jingles, quit doing that. Head instead for your wallet, your purse, your kid's kookoosh bank or your recent bingo stash. Now closely regard that cash. Go ahead, smell, feel and taste it. Drop some to hear the sound it makes. What is that stuff you are fooling around with? Sure it's money, shooniah, but what is it really?

If you are anything like me, money and I have never understood each other too good. Partly because we're never together long enough to develop an understanding relationship, but mostly because how it measures stuff and how I add it up never comes out the same.

Now imagine in your postcard of actual experience mind, an island. White stone shoreline, wind turned pine. What does it mean in terms of your passing there.

An overnight place maybe, enough room for a tent, a fire. Shelter from a sudden storm that time. Where you and your kids swarm once in awhile, the sun drying you warm. Even if you've never stopped there, something in those green and blues lines pleased the smiling place in your heart and in your mind.

What if you were given a stack of tens, twenties and hundreds to place a money value on a place like that? How much would you lay down for the tourist lodge developed to say how much you wanted for the spot. That place that thereafter would no longer be yours even just to use.

How that deal went would be like a small history of North America.

Unless you understood the ins and outs of shooniah, its value to them, if you decided to or were forced to sell, you'd probably end up ripped or gypped. Part of that is because that's how the game is played and part is because that island is being looked at in two very different ways.

Before the mooniah arrived with the shooniah no such thing existed in this entire race. Oh, the Iroquois has wampum and a few tribes in B.C. trading stones, but neither had branch offices from coast to coast. Yes, trading happened, too. You give me spare parts for a buffalo in return for a basket of wild rice. One thing for another, both useful to the other, a straight deal, eh, brother.

Now money, it put a made up value on things. An artificial way of seeing how one compared to another in terms that didn't exist in our natural world before. A beaver now meant more than Beaver. Its fur meant bucks, bucks which everybody soon found out didn't grow on trees.

Who knows how things would be if the fur traders and land companies hadn't seen a way to make money over here. Things would certainly be different, that's for sure. How different? Well, the answer to that lies in the area of wishful thinking. The cold fact is that cash is here and you and me, we have to deal with it some more yet.

My friend George used to be a struggling Ojibway writer like me. Now he's on

his way to becoming independently wealthy. He's taking this real estate course learning the financial ropes of the land, money, mortgage, profit game. He jokes about Indians regaining what's theirs by buying it back, as he says, "acre by bloody acre."

George has found that tricky balance that shooniah requires of a person between our ways and that of the marketplace. For me that tightrope walk is too much yet.

For instance, money isn't enough to solve our problems either as a person or as a tribe. The report done on oil rich reserves show that. Despite the money in those houses, alcohol, suicide and family violence still finds it way in just as much as it does on poor, swampy, old mine.

On mine, the river has been poisoned by an upstream papermill. There is more profit in paper bags than in the health and continued existence of people.

From my Edmonton apartment with one eye a person could see a high-rise penthouse.It's got a spiral staircase just like in the movies. With the other you watch a person in rags digging in garbage cans trying to make a living.

You know what the worst part is, though? The worst part is that the stuff is necessary. You gotta have enough for flour and salt at least, even if you can find a way to live just on wild meat. In the city it means a place to live and groceries. Next week more on dealing with the value conflict on a day to day basis.

Before we go, some more on George. I wouldn't want to leave you with bad thoughts on my friend. In a year or so he'll be able to advise you on those dealings regarding the island we started off talking about out. Because you are a skin like him, he'd talk hard and fast on your behalf.

When I get around to paying my bills, I pull my money from my jeans pocket. It's always crumpled and bunched up. The landlord stands there smiling like he would at a kid handing him monopoly money. When I show up there broke, though, he smiles even less than that. You know if I ever strike it rich, I'm definitely going to need bigger pockets. Do you ever notice when you start to get ahead everybody starts reaching in there for some?

Until next time, meegwetch, meegwetch and thank you.