Written by Özten Elaine Paul
Artwork by Aileen Bahmanipour
For nishiime, Erlen Brandon Özkanli, 2003—2018
You faced north as the dump truck filled your brother’s grave with dirt. They charged extra just to dig into the earth, frozen solid from a long winter. Your father wanted an Islamic funeral, and the Imam recited a prayer before the truck rolled in. “In his last months, this boy kept the Q’uran with him at all times, Allah. Therefore he is forgiven,” he closed. The Imam did not know that you placed a small feather in that Q’uran, gifted by an elder who travelled to the hospital hours after the doctors announced their decision to halt treatment.
“I told him to not be afraid,” the elder had said.
That night at the hospital, you watched as he swept the feather up and down your brother’s arms and legs, lightly moving across the swollen tumours. Your brother’s violent snores softened into sighs beneath the feather. You caught a few of the elder’s words as he spoke: bimaadiziwin, nibowin, and waawiyeyaa.
“I’m going to talk to his spirit in the language now,” said the elder. Anishinaabemowin taught you to look at the world in terms of spirit; you were never sure of Gizhe-Manidoo before learning. The first time you prayed out of desperation was in the language.
You spent most of the 2017 holiday season on a sleeper chair in your brother’s hospital room. His New Year’s hat slipped off as you bent over his bed to kiss him on the cheek, saying I love you, with a silent promise to begin praying. You had been studying for less than a year, but did not realize how little you could speak from memory until that moment. You held a lit match around the smudge bowl on your desk in preparation. As you looked down at the ring of embers closing in on the sage, you thought of the Mashkikiwikwe, the one who said that our souls do not understand English.
“Ni…wii…danokii,” you mustered into the beam of smoke rising from the leaves. This jar of sage sat on your desk for months, unused until now. You had untwisted the lid periodically during the fall, taking a whiff, and recalling what it was like to be on the land—to have endless silence. Cycles of insobriety started as soon as you returned to the city, and so you did not touch the sage. The Mashkikiwikwe said to abstain for four days, one for each direction, before smudging. Nothing could compel you to quit for that long, not until the word cancer popped up in a text.
Smudging had been a routine the previous summer, as you worked with native mothers in a housing facility. You spent most mornings in the south end of the smudge circle, remembering to press the smoke onto your lips when the bowl came around.
As the end of the season and your practicum began to near, you worked on an Anishinaabemowin lesson for the women. Feelings of inadequacy lingered throughout this period. Your language journey had begun just six months before at a land-based course, leaving you with a binder full of grammar charts and a determination to understand them.
Learning Anishinaabemowin this way means learning more English. Words like intransitive, obviative, and dubitative hurt your head, so you hung around the handyman, a fluent speaker, during breaks. “I didn’t learn like this,” he said as he flicked through the charts, before handing them back.
Your work space was in the basement—a former computer room filled with papers and artwork from past residents. There, you spent hours on verbs, the central part of Anishinaabemowin. You realized that one verb could become a sentence if you added the right pieces: prefix, tense, suffix.
Your first task of the practicum was to clean out this room with a coworker. You fished through old case files and expired cheques, before coming across a paper which explained the importance of learning one’s language. Even if you say it wrong, Creator will understand what’s in your heart is the line that sticks in your memory.
“Giiwedin anang,” one student said, pointing north towards a star in the sky. Everyone was huddled in their towels around the fire, the flames radiating faces of post-sweat glows. It was your first.
“Guess I’m a real neech now,” you said, laughing, watching your breath float away.
You felt awake for the first time in the dark of the lodge, surrounded by voices singing in Anishinaabemowin.
You never thought you would be at a language camp. Your great-grandmother held on to her tongue despite her stay at Cecilia Jeffery Indian Residential School. Though she passed the language on to her children, it was diluted with your mother, and almost wiped out completely with you.
You felt comfortable singing by the third pushup of the makwa song, but then the drummers signalled the last one, pounding the four beats loudly.
“We sit in a circle because it represents life,” said the Mashkikiwikwe. “If you are in need of answers, look to the past. If you find nothing, then they have not come to you yet.” The water splashed and sizzled as it hit the rocks. The warmth of the steam wrapped around your face like a hug.
You breathed in the heat.
“We learn our language so we can speak to our relatives in the spirit world,” the Mashkikiwikwe said. “Our spirits don’t speak English.”
The people who wanted to sweat that night were told to meet in the mess hall. You packed your bag and walked down the hill, noticing a man’s singing voice as you got closer.
The room was filled with people, but silent as you walked in. Everyone was gathered around the professor, who held a drum in his hand. He was singing the travelling song for a relative who had recently passed away, and he started to cry, his head held down. You would come to learn that the song is a prayer, wishing safe travels for loved ones who are beginning their journey to the spirit world.
The scene felt alien to you, and so you watched from the corner quietly—frozen—not knowing that you would cry to the same song just one year later, your baby brother’s cold hand wrapped in yours.
Özten is a two-spirit Anishinaabe/Turkish-Cypriot writer from Winnipeg’s North End, located on Treaty 1 territory. She studies English/Creative Writing at the University of Winnipeg, where she was awarded a scholarship for emerging writers. Özten is also a writer for the Six Seasons of the Asiniskow Ithiniwak project. She speaks Anishinaabemowin at an intermediate level, and has previously taught and mentored beginning learners. Omaamaayan-iban gii-onjibaa iwedi ishkonigan Northwest Angle #33B. Mooz odoodem. Özten onoonde-ozhibii’ige dibaajimowinan gaagige. Her ultimate writing goal is to have a piece about Jersey Shore published in a respected journal. You can now find her on twitter @dibaajimo.
Aileen Bahmanipour is an Iranian born Vancouver-based artist. She has received her BFA in Painting from the Art University of Tehran and MFA in Visual arts at the University of British Columbia. Bahmanipour has exhibited her work in a body of solo and group exhibitions in Iran as well as in Canada, including her solo and group exhibitions at Vancouver’s grunt gallery, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Gallery 1515, Hatch Art Gallery, and Two Rivers Gallery. She is the recipient of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant in 2017, and Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Artist Award in 2019.