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Stick Houses In Peshawbestown

Matthew L M. Fletcher:Assistant Professor, University of North Dakota School of Law. Director, Northern Plains Indian Law Center. Member, Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians. Appellate Judge, Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians. B.A. 1994, University of Michigan; J.D. 1997, University of Michigan Law School. The opinions expressed in this piece are the author's only, do not represent any position the Grand Traverse Band or the Pokagon Band may take or has taken, and may not be attributed to the Grand Traverse Band or the Pokagon Band. Though this piece is based loosely on actual events, the characters are entirely fictional. Chi-migwetch to John and Eva Petoskey, Wenona Singel, Myriam Jaidi, Dennis Garcia, Nancy Robinett, and Corinne Vorenkamp for their encouragement and inspiration (and their stories). As Sherman Alexie wrote, "These Indians you write about are helping you every day. Each and every one of them. Every house, every story, every poem, they're helping you." Sherman Alexie, The Business of Fancydancing: The Screenplay 101 (2003). This piece is for my nephew, Nolan Patrick Mugwa Fletcher, the newest member of my family, and for my mother, who always keeps us coming home.

There are many stories here. And, there is much to learn for the future. For all the pain and heartache we have felt, there has been and will be an equal amount of joy. That is how everything works. There is always a struggle to maintain the balance.

-Winona LaDuke1

It is undoubtedly true that Indians may be easily led to make bad bargains, and, when made, usually stick to them. -Kobogum v. Jackson Iron Co2

M-22, Leelanau County, 10 A.M.

Parker Roberts turned her head to the left for just a moment and crossed the yellow line. Our Honda sideswiped an oncoming Explorer and knocked it into the ditch. We spun out violently, sliding off the road and over the snow bank, through the air between scraggly trees, and onto the Grand Traverse Bay, covered in ice. We stayed there for four hours.

Parker liked to drive fast, like her grandmother, a traveling Powder Puff driver back in the thirties and forties. She didn't fly past other drivers or routinely collect speeding tickets, but on the highway she would set the cruise about fifteen over the limit. She drove fast enough to make a cop think about pulling her over, but not fast enough to make the cop's decision an easy one. She drove with enough latent talent to relax her passengers even as she pushed the envelope into legal recklessness. She was good enough to make us feel as though she drove defensively. She was smooth.

The ice cracked underneath us. Not right away because the west bay had been frozen for several weeks, but it was March and over forty degrees for the second day in a row. The mist over the bay was impenetrable and there was about two inches of water on top of the ice. We slid and slid over the bay, pushing a wave of water ahead of us as we spun out. I remember clenching my body, afraid that if I moved while we slid that our horizontal inertia would fail and we would sink. I knew cars should not be riding on the ice.

We did stop after a few seconds, leaving us in a blinding white room, our car surrounded by the curtain of fog. I couldn't see the road, the shore, the trees, or even the sun's outline through the glass in the sunroof. The trail left by the car instantly faded as the water lapped up against the tires. I looked all around, trying to remember the stories my father told me about the North Star, the Northern Lights, or which direction the sun rose, but I could not see any of those signs that morning through the mist rising out of the ice.

I don't remember my father's face except through pictures now. Someone had to die in the second Gulf War and he was one of the unlucky Americans. My mother, an undergraduate student at Central Michigan, vigorously protested the war before Strickland's call-up, mostly complaining about American imperialism and Iraqi civilian casualties. Though she did not express it in her letters to the local Members of Congress, she wrote in her diary that she feared being a war widow. She feared her son would be a half-orphan and that she would be a single mother. She would feel responsible for actions taken by her government in retaliation for her family's loss.

After Strickland accepted orders to travel to the war zone, Parker dropped out of college and came home to Peshawbestown. Gramma raised me, her duty as a grandmother according to the old Indians, while Parker took a job at Leelanau Sands and then at Eagletown Mar-ket when a cashier position opened. She rented a small apartment across the street from a pizza place in Suttons Bay and bought a used Civic from her cousin. Parker hated American cars as much as she hated American wars. She explained her foreign car purchase to the local patriots on the basis that the Civic got better ga...

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