The rear door of the Expedition opened, and Margot Lachance stepped out. “Okay if I stretch my legs?”
Jenny drew away from her father’s arms and wiped at the tears that rolled down her cheeks. She eyed the girl, then glanced at her father.
“I’ll explain later,” he said.
“I haven’t eaten all day,” Margot said. “You got any food around here?”
Jenny looked at Cork again, and he said, “See what you can rustle up, okay?”
She wiped once more at her tears. “This way,” she said to the girl and headed toward the cabin she’d been sharing with Waaboo.
Cork went to Meloux’s cabin. Inside, his grandson and Annie sat together at the table. Cork had the sense that he was interrupting an important conversation.
“Everybody okay here?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t say that,” his daughter replied. “But we’re all alive.”
“He was going to kill Annie,” Waaboo said. “But Prophet shot him.”
“Henry shot him,” Annie corrected.
“The truth is safe with me, Annie,” Cork said. “I’m just grateful no one was hurt.” He studied them again. “I have a sense I’ve interrupted something.”
“I told them, Dad,” Annie said.
“She’s dying, Baa-baa.”
That was what Waaboo had called him ever since the boy was old enough to talk. But he seldom used that name for Cork anymore. Usually only when he was in need of comfort.
“I know,” Cork said. He sat down with them and took Annie’s hand. “But she didn’t die today. And every day we have left, I intend to celebrate her life.” He looked deeply into his beloved daughter’s eyes. “We will all celebrate your life.”
Annie squeezed his hand and smiled. Cork felt the calm that came from her now. It was something he often felt in the presence of Henry Meloux, the open embrace of the Great Mystery. And he was not afraid of what lay ahead. What lay ahead for them all.
EPILOGUE
Stephen and Belle were married on a Saturday afternoon in late August. The wedding was supposed to be held outdoors, on the grounds of a lovely old lodge called Burntside on the shore of Iron Lake, where the view from beneath the pines was postcard perfect. But an hour before the ceremony, it began to rain, a heavy downpour. So the guests found themselves inside a big ancient barn that had been reconfigured into a space for just such an emergency. It wasn’t a large gathering, only the closest of Belle’s and Stephen’s families, forty guests in all. It was presided over by Anton Morriseau, Belle’s brother, who was duly licensed by the state of Minnesota and was a pipe carrier. The two young people each put tobacco into the pipe, and the smoke went upward to the manidoog to be blessed by those spirits. With the drum of rain on the barn roof and the occasional crack of thunder in the distance, Belle and Stephen exchanged the vows they’d written, and Anton Morriseau gave his blessing. Belle’s mother and Jenny draped a colorful blanket around the shoulders of the couple in the traditional way. And last of all, Henry Meloux was asked to give his own blessing.
He spoke first in Ojibwemowin, the language of the Anishinaabeg. Then he spoke again in English for those who didn’t understand.
“You are two minds, two hearts, two souls. But this day you begin a journey of one. Where it will lead, I cannot tell you. Only the Creator knows. But I can tell you this. On your journey, you will never be alone. In the cold, you will have another body for warmth. In times of uncertainty, you will have a hand to hold for comfort. In the dark, you will have the whisper of love to assure you that the light will return.” He took their hands and placed them between his own. “Go in peace, Grandchildren. May you find the way to bimaadiziwin, the good life. And know that the love of all the hearts here today goes with you.”
Then, as if Kitchimanidoo, the Creator, the Great Mystery, was pleased, the rain ceased, the sun broke through the clouds, and its bright rays poured into the broad doorway of the barn and illuminated the gathering.
Stephen and Belle chose to delay their honeymoon. There was still the protest at Spirit Crossing. They worked together until Stephen left to begin law school in the Twin Cities, and soon thereafter, Belle joined him. Within a few weeks, greed and the insatiable hunger for oil moved the pipeline forward across the Jiibay River and on to its inevitable completion.
Still, life can be quite generous in the blessings it offers. Many weeks after the wedding, there was a surprise for those in Tamarack County who’d feared the worst for the missing young woman named Crystal Two Knives. A few days before Thanksgiving, she came home, bringing with her a young man she called her soul mate. She told the story of how she’d met him by accident when the old jalopy she was driving to the Twin Cities broke down and he stopped to help. He was an acrobat, on his way to Las Vegas to join Cirque du Soleil. On a whim, or as Henry Meloux might have said, blown by the breath of the Great Mystery, she’d gone with him. She was sheepish and apologetic when questioned about not communicating with anyone. She explained that she was afraid Red LaGrange, her abusive ex-boyfriend, might track her down and do harm to her and her new love. But she’d been keeping tabs on things back home, checking out the Aurora Sentinel online, and when she read that LaGrange had been arrested in Duluth and was facing significant jail time, she decided to return home. In the end, she was forgiven because she was no longer one of the missing.
Annie O’Connor stayed in Aurora, eventually in hospice care in the house where she’d grown up. Maria was always at her side, tending to her needs with loving hands. In that same way, all the O’Connors ministered to her. For what little time Annie had left, she was surrounded by an aura of love. Then one snowy winter morning, she took quietly to the Path of Souls. Maria’s face was the last beautiful thing of this earth her eyes beheld before she closed them forever. She was laid to rest next to the grave of her mother, Jo O’Connor, in a lovely spot beneath a linden tree. Cork complied with her last wish, that on her headstone be written these three words: BE NOT AFRAID.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In my story, the chief of the Iron Lake Tribal Police force is Monte Bonhomme. Bonhomme is modeled after a good friend in the Anishinaabe community, an ininiwag named Monte “Awan” Fronk of the Makwa (Bear) Clan. Monte, a member of the Red Lake Nation, has been a tribal first responder for thirty-five years with the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe and currently oversees tribal emergency management operations. At fourteen years of age, his adopted daughter, Nada, whose Ojibwe name is Aakwaadizi Neshkaadizishkid Ikwe (She Is a Fierce Passionate Woman), went missing.
Early in her life, Nada was diagnosed with second-generation fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. The situation became apparent as Nada grew older and her behavior became more erratic. Her lack of impulse control was due in large measure to permanent frontal lobe damage caused by the disorder. This led to frequent outbursts, eventually reaching the point of requiring out of home placement for her own safety. Because of the lack of services for children who suffer from the syndrome, Nada experienced multiple placements, and eventually she began to run away. At first, she was gone for short periods but was located with the help of the exceptional resources provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, or NCMEC. Then, in 2013, she disappeared completely.
Her non-Native social worker made little effort to locate the missing girl. Monte reached out to his brothers and sisters in the public safety community in the Twin Cities. Eventually, Monte received word that his daughter’s photograph had been seen circulating on adult websites, and the devastating realization hit him that Nada was being trafficked. When the photographs suddenly dropped off the internet, Monte feared the worst. But one day, a human trafficking investigator with the Saint Paul Police Department reached out to him. Thanks to a NCMEC poster, a possible sighting of his daughter had been reported. In an extreme rarity within the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW), the police conducted a search of the suspected house and located Monte’s daughter. She was alive.
Nada was placed in a group home for older teens in Bemidji, but she refused to talk about her experience, which is not at all uncommon for victims of human trafficking. She became more stable. Eventually, she reached out to a sensitive resource officer at the alternative school she attended, who arranged for a properly trained investigator to take Nada to an advocacy center, where she was finally able to tell the truth of her traumatic two-year experience.
At eighteen, Nada aged out of the system. She moved to the Twin Cities, where she completed the work for her high school diploma, got a job, and lived independently. She was in a long-term relationship and was planning to marry. But the effects of being trafficked still haunted her, evidenced in periods of extreme anger or heavy drinking. Eventually, she and her fiancé broke up.
On May 26, 2021, Monte received the devastating news that Nada had been killed by another boyfriend, a murder-suicide in her Twin Cities apartment.
Monte arranged a traditional four-day Ojibwe funeral. Through the spiritual guidance of a respected Ojibwe elder named Baabiitaw Boyd, and with the support of family, community members, and Monte’s uniformed brothers and sisters in public safety, all of whom had gathered to grieve with him, Nada’s spirit began her journey to the place the Ojibwe call Gaagige-minawaanigoziwining, a place of everlasting peace.
According to a 2018 study undertaken by the Urban Indian Health Institute, homicide is the third-leading cause of death for Indigenous girls and teens.I More than half of American Indian or Alaska Native women (56.1 percent) have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime. The murder rate of AI/AN women is almost three times that of non-Hispanic White women.II In 2020, there were 1,496 American Indian or Alaska Native people recorded as missing in the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, 578 of whom were female. Because of reporting difficulties or omissions, this is probably a gross underreporting of the actual number.III
These are statistics, horrible in their implications of the threat to Native women in this country. But the numbers often mask the tragic individual stories of the women who have been victims of violence or who have gone missing. And the numbers say nothing about the grief suffered by their families and their communities.
After Nada’s death, Monte was approached by members of the MMIW movement and asked to speak about his daughter’s situation from the perspective of a Native father. He speaks openly now and publicly about the tragedy of his daughter’s life. Along with others whose loved ones have gone missing or been murdered, Monte continues to give voice to the victims, to seek justice, to do his best to open the eyes of people who refuse to see the enormity of the situation for those who live in Indian Country.
The horrific treatment of the Indigenous people on this continent goes back centuries, beginning with the perception of those earliest of our European ancestors who viewed the Native people here as savages and who, from the very beginning, treated them in savage ways. Ignorant misconceptions, destructive stereotypes, human avarice, persistent prejudices, all have contributed to the ongoing struggle of Native people to preserve their cultures, their languages, and their right to the freedoms that both our Constitution and lawful treaties are supposed to ensure.
The violence against Native people continues, as the statistics demonstrate. But the statistics are only part of the story. Another important part is the perception that still lingers in the hearts of so many Americans of European ancestry that somehow Native people are different from us.
I have no Native blood running through my veins. I’m aware every time I sit down to write a novel in my Cork O’Connor series that I’m intruding on a culture that is not my own. If I err in my evocation of the Anishinaabeg, it’s not intentional and, I hope, not detrimental. My wish is that in writing stories like this one, I may in some small way open the hearts and minds of readers to the enormous struggles our Native brothers and sisters face every day.
I. “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls,” Urban Indian Health Institute, 2018.
