Critical analysis essay    Follow the essay-writing processes…

ConstableFreedomQuail15 Critical analysis essay    Follow the essay-writing processes…Critical analysis essay  Follow the essay-writing processes including peer review. Include clear evidence from the short story.Legends Are Made, Not Born by Cherie Dimaline MY MOM WAS A CATHOLIC HALFBREED who named me after a pack of smokes, Semaa-tobacco. She died in a fiery blaze of glory winning a snowmobile race. My father, also a Catholic halfbreed, had no say in what I was to be named and wasn’t around to explain her death. He’s less important here, though he did remain a steady if infrequent fixture in my later life until he died, less adventurously, at eighty-four, in an old age home. The night of the race I was at my grandma’s house. She was supposed to be watching me but I always felt it was more of a mutual watching. At six, she decided it was hightime I started to pull my own weight in euchre; after all, our family had a sharking reputation to uphold. There was even a cursing cut of the cards one could do when shuffling that was named after us. We were at the kitchen table, a cloud of dense cigarette smoke hanging overhead like an ethereal chandelier. I was just slapping down the Jack of Spades over Grandma’s ace, she was just beginning the opening syllable of her best French swear word, when my uncle Travis barged in the front door. His eyes were as wild as his hair, a spiky curled mullet that that was now fringed down across his forehead with melting snow. He looked like a bush man, a trapper half-mad with lonely fear. Something in his eyes made my tummy crunch up with the hot pinch of sudden urine. One look to the door, to her youngest son, and Grandma finished her swear. “Tabernacle! What’s wrong with you?” He slid those eyes over to me, sitting there in my mustard-coloured Winnie the Pooh pajamas with the detachable feet and buttoned waist, holding a handful of playing cards too large for my thin, brown fingers. I became aware of how small I looked, of how small I was, saw those eyes became sad. I knew the apocalypse had started before he said her name. “Dorothy.” “What? What did she do now?” Grandma threw her cards on the table. It sounded like an open palm slap. She was standing, her voice beginning to shake. I knew then that she knew, too, could read the obituary listed in Travis’ eyes. He took a step back towards the door, back away from his mother’s heavy steps, away from the orphan in his pissy pants. He pointed behind him, over his shoulder at the door. “Down at Langlade’s.” He took another backward step. “They already called the priest.” “Nooooo!” Grandma fell to her knees, an alarmingly aggressive movement in an old lady. Her hands clawed at her blouse as if she would rip open her own chest and tear out her broken heart. I watched her from my chair, where I sat. My cards, having fallen from my numb fingers, were floating in the yellow puddle around my knees. After the funeral, I went to stay with my mom’s best friend, a six-foot Cree I called Auntie Dave. My uncles were too busy drinking and getting kicked off the reserve for increasing the population. Grandma never was really the same and, even if she had been in her right mind, child services thought her apartment was too tiny for a growing boy and an old woman. At that time, my dad was still AWOL. Besides, my mom would have wanted it that way; she was always keen on me spending time with Auntie Dave. Clearly she knew I was gay before I knew what that even meant. I wonder if she also knew about Dave being magic? I didn’t, not until my seventh birthday. Dave’s place was what my mom called ‘beauty in the eye of the beholder; crap in the eyes of the town.’ It was up on the hill behind St. Ann’s where my mother was buried, and set back from the toad by an acre of wild flowers and tall grass. You had to turn off onto a dirt road that wound into curves and one cheeky loop for no apparent reason, and follow it all the way to the line of birch trees that stood as slim sentinels to the actual home, The place looked like abandoned vacancy from the road, But behind the birches was a kingdom. The house was three stories high with a sloped roof like the red pagodas of Japan. The back was bare but the front looked like a patchwork quilt of glass and frame. No less than thirty windows of all shapes and sizes were plugged into the front, giving thirty different views of the pond and the bush and the shed, that just happened to be an honest-to-god library instead of a place to keep tools and camping gear. The trees here were strung with little white Christmas lights and there were three different hammocks hanging from the low branches on the opposite side of the pond like multi-coloured cocoons hung with string-work lace. Auntie Dave slept in a loft on the third floor. It was a huge space that included a small bathroom and a desk piled high with paper, books, bottles, scrolls and a magnifying glass so substantial I couldn’t hold in in one hand until I was ten years old. His space was crowded but tidy; braided rugs strewn over the floor, stain-glass Moroccan lanterns hung low from the slanted ceiling, and a rack of deer antlers across one wall that held his silk kimono, a knitted toque from old Nunavut and a vintage champagnecoloured gown heavy with glass beads and crystal finishes. “Some days you need to feel like a young Catherine the Great, even out in the bush,” he had explained. Auntie Dave gave me the downstairs bedroom on the second floor, off the living room. The first floor was taken up by a bathroom, the kitchen with its glass cupboards and slate island, and the dining room of regally mismatched chairs with a chandelier crafted from branches and small bulbs. The whole house was whimsical and unexpected and I loved it. My room was small by comparison, but the biggest I’d ever had. There was already a four-poster bed against the wall, hung with red velvet curtains and with a soft globe lamp hanging on the interior. The dresser was so large, all my earthly possessions fit in one-and-a-half drawers. I used the other two-and-a-half to keep my growing rock collection, and later, to house the catalogues and magazines that captured my interest in a way that made me want them in my room, near the bed. I slept for a week straight after they buried my mother. Dave let me be for the first three days, but then started waking me up to eat on the fourth, and by the fifth, had devised chores that I must get done before I could hole-up in my bed with the curtains drawn tight. “Can’t wait for things to change. You need to move them along yourself. Sometimes the best way is with work,” he’d say, handing me a shovel to move the snow off the library path. ‘Just to the library. I’ll take care of the other path.” The other path was a bricked laneway that led away from the back of the library and into the woods. I assumed there was an actual tool shed back there. Or maybe a woodpile. Mostly I was just grateful I didn’t have to shovel it and didn’t bother to ask questions that might lead to it being on my ‘to-do list.’ By early spring, we were eating two meals a day together at the round, wood table on the bottom floor. Dave cooked, which was new for me: chicken and Fruit Loops for brunch; spinach and fresh bread for dinner. It was as if he wasn’t sure how to put things together in a normal kind of way. I wondered if other people ate this way. “Well, it’s your seventh birthday in a week.” He said this over pancakes and celery on a sunny May morning. I nodded. “Seven is an important number.” I blinked. “Time to start again. It’s a new cycle.” He nibbled a celery top, pulling off the tiny leaves and chewing them with his front teeth, white and green against his dark skin. “Next week we go into the bush.” It wasn’t a question. He left the table and I finished my meal, stuffing strips of pancake into the hollows of my celery. I woke up early on the morning of my birthday, brought to consciousness by sounds from the kitchen. I walked down the stairs to Dave in the champagne gown, long hair unbraided and wavy across his back like a dark habit. “Happy born day, kid,” he sang out, tossing a black wave back over his exposed shoulder. He danced over to the stairs and lifted me off the bot tom step, waltzing me across the tiles and depositing me in the largest of our dining room chairs. I giggled, waking up completely in the midst of this small celebration. “Auntie, why are you dressed up?” He blinked extended eyelashes at me, carrying over a full chocolate birthday cake with a tea light on top for breakfast. “Because, boy, today is the day we go into the bush.” I blew out the candle and wished for nothing short of magic. I draped a blanket over my shoulders, fastened into a cape by a safety pin at my neck. Auntie Dave held my hand, his bracelets like wind chimes near my ear. We were on the other side of the library, at the top of the second path. He carried a basket with him, stuffed to overflow with car rots from our newly-sprouting garden. He took a deep breath and we started our walk. As we walked, he told me a story. “The generation before last were the final people to live on Old Earth. The water had flooded the lands and was poisoned by the work of man. It was the migration story, of how we came to New Earth a hundred years ago. I’d heard it many times in my youth. All kids do. “Indigenous people, we were hit pretty hard. Not only did we lose our land, but we were the last to be evacuated to New Earth. A last priority. By then, so many of us had died and so much was lost.” The trees out here were dense. The lower branches grabbed wisps of Dave’s hair so that he looked like a mad queen in his gown and hair crown. We ducked and untangled and kept on the path. “We were careful about what we brought with us. We weren’t allowed much, so the Elders held Council in nations across Turtle Island to decide what was best, what was integral to our survival. “Every nation had priorities and those were carefully listed and collected: species of fish, weirs, ulus, quilt frames, seeds for sage, tobacco, cedar, plantain, dandelions, sweetgrass, a hundred strains of corn, and so on. Everyone decided to take as much of the lands that were left and crates of dirt were scooped up and stacked in our ship, labelled with the original names of the territories from which they were pulled.” I listened, but was more interested now in what was ahead. I’d heard as many versions of the migration story as there were tellers. Everyone put their own emphasis on the parts they thought most important. I was fascinated by the larger trees back here, the birch and willow that had been transplanted by Grandma’s parents when they were given this territory for the Anishnaabe Metis. “Do you know what the Two-Spirits brought?” Dave slowed down. We had to push our way through denser brush now. “Two-Spirits held their own council?” This was new information. I knew about TwoSpirited people: the people who held both male and female genders, but not a separate Council. Dave nodded. “At times we have to meet separately, when we are not at the bigger councils,” He let go of my hand to hold up the hem of his gown as he stepped over some ferns. “We met and decided on a few necessities for our people’s wellbeing. And we decided on families to carry out the task of keeping them safe for the next seven generations. My family was one of them,” We came through the last cluster of brush and trees bursting with new leaves and stepped into a clearing dotted with early wildflowers and smelling strongly of sweetgrass. There was a shuffling near the back of the clearing. I strained my eyes, but the sun was so strong and all I could make out was brightness among the brown and grey trunks. Auntie Dave bent to the side and placed the basket of carrots beside his right foot. Then he turned to me, placing a smooth hand on each shoulder. “Dorothy left us all a great gift when she had my name put on your birth certificate.” I was shocked. What about my father, the short man with the buzz cut who smelled like whiskey and old laundry? I’d met him only a handful of times, but he was always reminding me that he was my dad and should be respected as such. “It meant that if anything happened, you would come to me, thank the Jesus. It also meant, that on paper and in spirit, I had a son.” His eyes grew soft under their purple lids. More shuffling, and a loud sniffing. I looked back across the clearing to the bright spot. I couldn’t trust my sight, not with what I was seeing. “Do you know about the White Buffalo prophecy?” I nodded, eyes still fixed on the smooth white flank visible through the leaves. “Did you also know that the White Buffalo holds a special place for us? They say that if you see a White Buffalo in a dream then you are truly TwoSpirited.” He picked up the basket, turned back to the field and clicked his tongue. Out of the trees came two huge buffalo, so pale they looked constructed of cloud and chalk. Following behind was a small calf, clumsy on its legs, eager in its gait. Dave walked to the centre and unloaded the basket of bright orange carrots onto the grass, his champagne gown pooling at his feet like liquid metal. “We are the keepers of the White Buffalo on New Earth. I was the last before your mother took that snowmobile to heaven.” He discreetly made the sign of the cross, touching each bare shoulder and ending at his red lips. He stroked above the nose of the female that was nudging the vegetables with her snout. He turned to me and held out one manicured hand, “Come.” I walked into the clearing with a weight much different than the one left by my mother’s death; a weight that balanced out the ache and made the ordinary extraordinary.Arts & HumanitiesEnglish