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I’d always admired Jim and watched as he danced - a little bowlegged in that way of Ojibwe men, but light on his feet. To be seated on a drum, to be a member of the society, is both an honor and a profound, lifelong duty. Ojibwe Big Drum society, or “drum,” as we call it, is a large, loud, social healing ceremony that takes place in dance halls designated specifically for that purpose in communities mostly in Minnesota and Wisconsin, throughout the year. I only know Jim at all because we had been a part of the Big Drum.
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My family was part of that coercive migration, and most of my family is officially enrolled at White Earth, though none of us have ever lived there. White Earth was originally made by strong-arming families to move there from the Leech Lake, Mille Lacs, Turtle Mountain and Fond du Lac reservations, so we are related by blood too. Our reservations are close and closely related: Both house the same tribe (the Ojibwe, also known as the Chippewa), we share the same homelands and our religious societies are intertwined. I grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota Jim’s place was roughly an hour and a half southwest, on the White Earth Reservation. Then in August of last year, I started dreaming about Jim McDougall. Or at least that’s how it felt - a huge stack of loss with no bottom to it. I might have been the earth, but my grief was a bit like those turtles. And what does that turtle rest on? The elder says: Look, it’s just turtles all the way down. What, wondered the anthro, does the turtle rest on? Another turtle. There’s an old joke that goes something like this: An anthropologist asked a Native elder what the world is made out of, and the elder tells him that the earth rests on the back of a turtle. One moment I would be fine, the next, inarticulate with rage and the next numb and unknowing. They were my guys, and when I got the news about Sean and then Dan, I collapsed but continued living somehow. By the time she ran home and came back with her mother, he was in the middle of a massive heart attack. He told his daughter that he wasn’t feeling well and that she should get the car. He, too, coughed and tried to clear his throat. Not even a year later, my other friend, Dan Jones - whose Ojibwe name was Gaagigebines - went for a walk with his daughter after dinner around the small Ojibwe reserve northeast of Fort Frances where he was from. By the time his partner got there, he was dead. He stumbled across the bedroom in his house near the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation and collapsed on the floor. On March 16, 2017, my friend Sean Fahrlander woke up coughing. Strung between the fixed poles of my parents’ deaths were the loss of my marriage, Trump’s election and the sudden and, it seemed to me, inexplicable deaths of my two best friends. My mother died that March, just after Covid hit. In the summer of 2020 I was - and there’s no fancy way to put this - falling apart.
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