Little Glutton

“Thanks for coming in, it’s way easier to do this in person than over the phone” Lisa had been stopping by sporadically for the three months I had been assigned to oversee the final stages of construction on the new cat shelter and veterinary clinic here on The Rez. A City Indian myself, living at the casino hotel and commuting daily to the facility in a little work-provided sedan with the big words "Animal Humane Society" plastered along the side, I had already been quite the oddity in town. But she was always kind and wise, happy to help me where she could.

“Ehhh, this is becoming like my second home,” she said with a smile that squinted her little black eyes to get even smaller behind her round, tanned cheeks. Her silver hair was pulled back in a quick braid, like she wasn’t planning to come into town today, but did it for me.

“I need to order the door signs, and the boss just last-minute agreed to get them in both English and Ojibwe per your suggestion last week. But,” I paused for dramatic effect, playfully smiling because, of course, there was a catch for her getting her suggestion approved, “we need someone who knows both words to tell us what to write. I don’t trust Google to give me the best translations, or at least not as good as you can.”

“Oh geez,” the long O really emphasized her heavy northern Minnesota Native accent, “I can help with the words, but yer gonna hafta spell check fer me with that Google machine of yers,” She wasn’t as technology inept as she pretended to be, especially for an elder. She was the one that got the Twin Cities Humane Society’s attention to The Rez in the first place. She had started an email chain with other animal rescues of neighboring reservations to seek out help for all the strays she was caring for on her property. She had even applied for, and received, a grant for the hay shelter her husband built on the side of her house. She didn’t like the internet, but she knew how to make it work for her.

“Deal,” I quickly agreed, “You talk, I’ll write and proof it as we go.” My Google machine skills were top-notch, and I had been learning Ojibwe during the construction downtime, “OK, obviously, our first sign should say Welcome! That’s AH-neen, and spelled A-A-N-I-I-N, right?”

“Eya’! You got it,” she was always pleasantly surprised at the words I knew, even though she’s the one who taught me half of them.

“OK, next is Clinic since the hall to the left will be the medical side, and to the right is the shelter where we’ll house the strays.”

“AH-ko-zee. It means ‘they are sick.’ You remember from yer lessons that Ojibwe is a verb language. We don’t talk in places and things like just clinic, we talk in actions.”

“I remember. And I already found it in the Ojibwe dictionary: aakozi,” I was Googling and listening, getting everything into one place at once, “Then the next word should be Shelter.”

“DA-zhay. That means ‘the animal lives in a certain place.’ Like how we’d point to a foxhole or a beaver den. The animals are here in this certain place, for their purpose of getting adopted.” Lisa was a storyteller, so there would never be a short answer with her. It was in her nature to explain and expound, to share all the knowledge she kept inside. It’s part of why I loved asking for her help.

“Dazhe. Found it, perfect word. Now, the clinic will take all animals combined, but the shelter will have one side for cats and another for dogs. Let’s start with the word for cats.”

“GA-zha-GAIN-suk. I love that word. It actually means Little Glutton,” she almost couldn’t get the definition out as she started getting the giggles, ”I just imagine the first ancestor to see a white man’s cat, after only knowing hardworking animals like the horse or skinny animals like the fox. They probably called it a little glutton as a joke and it just stuck. But I guess that’s what they are, eh?”

“I think it fits them perfectly,” I smiled, thinking of my sister’s chonky cats that matched the description, “Gaazhagensag. Got it. Now dogs?”

“on-ee-moo-SHUG. They were our first companions as the wolves came to trust our great-grandparents. We used to be grateful to the animals. We believed they chose us, to serve and comfort us. So in return, we would protect and care for them. We had a spiritual bond with animoshag before the settlers came. That was before we believed we owned them and instead when we lived alongside them.”

“But if we truly believed it’s our job to care for them, why are there so many sick and sad strays? Why have so many been starving and dying in the streets until you stepped up and now until we came in?” I had always wondered how a culture so tied to the animal world had moved so far from it.

“‘Cause of the poverty. We can’t afford to feed our own humans, how could we feed the dogs? And the stories of how they came to trust us died with my elders. When the boarding schools came to The Rez, they said it was against God to talk about the spiritual connections with the natural world. The nuns said they were just dumb mutts, and we had to believe them or risk getting our knuckles smacked. Our bond with the animal world has been broken but this place will restore our promise to care and they can go back to being our spirit guides and partners on the land.” 

That’s why she had given all of her time and most of her money to caring for strays. She was trying to restore the balance of all spirits on The Rez. Maybe she believed that if we could care for the animals better, we could care for each other again, too. 

“Makes sense. I’m sorry, sometimes my ignorance might come across as accusatory or flippant. I know our little shelter is just a band-aid on much bigger issues up here.”

“Yer more than a band-aid, ma-KOONZ,” Makoons meant Little Bear and it’s what she called me as a term of endearment and emphasis. She had told me how the bears taught us how to live a balanced life, to find time for work and for play. I worked too much and I needed to learn balance more, so I wasn’t a makwa, a full-grown bear. I was makoons. “You came back. Sure, you never lived here, but yer grandmother did. Her spirit called you to fill yer heart with a want to help and yer brain with figuring out how. And then you brought it all back to us. Together, we can change the culture. We can be the proud people we were only a century ago. Yer little shelter is helping remind us who we are, thank you.”

“It was all you, Lisa,” I have never been good at taking compliments, especially not from someone who deserved them more than I did, “Well, you’ve helped me get a good start on these signs. Let me play around with the formatting and design stuff tonight and we’ll figure out what else we need to say tomorrow. Same bat time, same bat channel?”

“Eya’, see you then, my girl,” she nodded and as quickly as she came, which wasn’t quick at all, she left.