River Dreams

i.

Microfiche holds its secrets tight. I know because I have danced around the safehouse. Small stories ours. Tucked beneath a shoe ad on page thirteen. Squeezed in just before the classifieds.

My uncle lived and died on Windigo Island. An herbalist, a hermit, a holy man to some. A man who laughed big and teased big. He named the island himself. Carefully, because he thought the name might save him from tourists. One year a local resort owner made maps that identified the island in English. But someone accidentally transposed the order of the words, and it became “Island Cannibal.” Uncle threatened to put that name on a T-shirt with an arrow pointing up.

He didn’t name the ziibi. It became Bluebird River—a resort name good for postcard buyers.

In reality, the water—the alive being we called nibi—flowed gray. Cloudy and curving through the northern forest. Birch, white pine, red maple, and tamarack loved nibi as much as we did. The Anishinaabeg called the cold trout-filled water Inaabate Ziibi—Smoke River. Because he lived there, my uncle, my nizhishenh, earned the nickname Smoke Man.

Everyone in nearby Green Lake adopted that “Indian” name for him, too. The only personal detail in his generic obituary mischaracterized him as a man who sold kinnickinnic, a ceremonial pipe tobacco, to tourist stores. Uncle actually sold wild rice to local merchants when he needed money, never the tobacco.

I located his death notice in the Green Lake Times next to a coupon for two dollars off Folgers; and, two issues later, the succinct obituary. “Found by a passing boater…death has been ruled a drowning.” No mention of the controversy over damming the river, or later Uncle challenging water quality reports. No mention of foul play.

Hence my haunting the microfiche reader at the local library. I needed backstory.

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