For Joshua by Richard Wagamese Read Free Book Online Page A

were passed down from my two adopted brothers and in an era when jeans and T-shirts were in vogue, I showed up for school in lime green dress pants, a paisley rayon shirt, and oxford shoes. My hair was still in a brush cut and the glasses I wore were what my classmates referred to as “very Jerry”—meaning the Jerry Lewis character in
The Nutty Professor
. I was ridiculed from the moment I stepped into the parking lot that first day.
    Again, I was the only Indian. As the laughter followed me down the hallway to my home room I decided to do anything I could to stop the laughter. I smoked, swore, acted out in class, and lied about who I was. I chose to be the class clown and with every laugh I got I felt more like I was accepted. I began to believe that all I needed to do was get a reaction from people, that getting attention was the same as getting recognition. It wasn’t. My grades fell. I went from As to Ds in one term and the resulting outcry at home was loud and painful.
    But most hurtful of all was Lori. I guess all of us remember our first crush. For me it was Lori. She was a hippie, or at least as close to a hippie as her mother allowedher to be. She had long, curly brown hair that she wore under a variety of hats and she favoured the miniskirts that were popular at the time. She was beautiful—big, blue eyes, long lashes, and a smile that made her seem to radiate. When she invited me to a couple’s skate at the roller rink one Saturday afternoon I almost fell over. All of the guys were after her. When we glided out onto the floor that afternoon I felt a curious mixture of being superior to every guy there and of being inferior to the beautiful and popular girl with whom I was holding hands. I became infatuated very quickly.
    Lori was very “into” Indians. She had read many books about Indian people, drawn many pictures, seen many movies and television shows about them and she really wanted to “go with” a Native guy. I was the only Native person she’d ever met and she was determined to be with me. She told me all about this as I walked her home after skating that afternoon. When she asked me questions about my background and heritage I did the only thing I knew how to do: I lied.
    Because I hadn’t been given any exposure to my tribal identity at home, I got all my Indian information from the same place everyone else around me got theirs. I watched Westerns on television, read comic books, and went to the movies. From these I gleaned that Indians were bloodthirstysavages with a religion that was close to voodoo. We all rode horses, wore war paint, and must have been afraid of the dark because wagon trains never got attacked during the night. We were untamed, unruly, and needed the help of white people to survive. That was the extent of my cultural knowledge.
    By the time I got to school on Monday the word was already out. Guys who’d never bothered talking to me before were suddenly interested in me. Girls who’d laughed and pointed at me before began looking at me out of curiosity. I felt huge. I felt like I mattered. But no one knew that I had no clue at all about my tribe, my history, language, culture, and ritual. No one knew how afraid I was that, when Lori found out that I wasn’t really an Indian, she would drop me and I would be back to being “very Jerry” in no time at all. So I lied even bigger lies. I invented a language I called Ojibway—a guttural, grunting kind of talk with a lot of extraneous hand motions and gestures. I took great pains to write this new language down and commit it to memory. I gave Lori a name in that fictitious language. I told her about ceremonies I’d been to—the Sun Dance, the Rain Dance, the Ghost Dance. I told her about my grandfather the medicine man and the shamans from other tribes who had given me strong medicine so that I could survive in the city. I talked about life on a reservation and stories about life on the land.The more I lied the more she