Dummy Trout

Dummy Trout surprised me that spring afternoon at the Blue Ravens Exhibition. She raised two brazen hand puppets, the seductive Ice Woman on one hand, and the wily Niinag Trickster on the other, and with jerky gestures the rough and ready puppets roused the native stories of winter enticements and erotic teases.

The puppets distracted the spectators at the exhibition of abstract watercolors and sidetracked the portrayals of native veterans and blue ravens mounted at the Ogema Train Station on the White Earth Reservation. The station agent provided the platform for the exhibition, and winced at the mere sight of the hand puppets. He shunned the crude wooden creatures and praised the scenes of fractured soldiers and blue ravens, an original native style of totemic fauvism by Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu.

The puppets were a trace of trickster stories.

Dummy was clever and braved desire and mockery as a mute for more than thirty years with the ironic motion of hand puppets. Miraculously she survived a firestorm on her eighteenth birthday, walked in uneven circles for three days, mimed the moods of heartache, and never voiced another name, word, or song. She grieved, teased, and snickered forever in silence. Nookaa, her only lover, and hundreds of other natives were burned to white ashes and forgotten in the history of the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894.

Dummy stowed a fistful of ash in a Mason jar.

Snatch, Papa Pius, Makwa and two other lively and loyal mongrels lived with the mute native puppeteer in the Manidoo Mansion, a shack covered with tarpaper near the elbow of Spirit Lake on the White Earth Reservation.

The lakeside house and place name were overstated in mockery, and yet that shack with a slant roof and two small windows became a monument of native memories, of the endurance of a gutsy native voyageur who tutored soprano mongrels and revived the magic of native puppets. The mongrels were natural healers and devoted to the motion of hand puppets, caught the sleight of hand, the tease, crux and waves of gestures, and retrieved the murmurs, wishes and whimsy of the silent stories and mercy of memory.

Dummy Trout mimed, cued, teased, and signaled at ceremonies, parties, parades, and reservation events, and forever doted on that eternal native spirit in the bounce, jiggle, and conscious sway of the hand puppets.

Dummy was a silent storier of truth.

Snatch, a blotched blond spaniel and retriever, was the only migrant mongrel from outside the woodsy reservation, and the nickname described a moody manner at meals, as he snatched food and ran away to eat. Snatch and hundreds of other mongrels were abandoned with horses, pets, and even houses, barns, chapels of ease, and costly machinery during the Great Depression. The land was timeworn, farm families were evicted, even grease monkeys were suspended, and for thousands of veterans railroad boxcars became homes.

The mongrels avoided the vagrants and roamed in packs to survive, but most of the twitchy mongrels, once favored as escorts in the outback, slowly died of hunger, or were tracked down as puny prey by other animals. Snatch was enticed by the voice of a coloratura soprano, as stories of his rescue were told many times, and wandered with caution to the recorded sound of opera music at the Manidoo Mansion.

Papa Pius was nicknamed in honor of the succession of popes, an ironic gesture of pagan mongrels and spirited hand puppets. Makwa, the native word for bear, was a noisy mongrel terrier, forever teased with a hefty name. Miinan, the word for blueberry, named for the color of her heavy coat, and Queena, a rangy reservation basset hound and golden retriever mongrel, nicknamed in honor of the famous coloratura soprano at the Metropolitan Opera, were the two musical mongrels at Manidoo Mansion.

Dummy saluted opera sopranos with two handsome hand puppets, and marvelous truth stories were told about the great performances of mongrel singers. The Debwe truth stories were innate native scenes and related to creature voices and the elusive tease of creation and memory, and the stories continued in the adventures of earth divers and native tricksters. The original truth stories were about the mystery of luminescence, that shimmer and natural motion of blue light, and about natives who once danced with animals and chanted to the clouds. Later the visionary stories were told about totemic unions, erotic winks, and the common tricks of creation. Debwe stories revealed natural motion, the flight of a native dream song, the touch and fade of winter, and the steady flow of the great river, and landed in a hand puppet show of operatic mongrels.

The two rough and ready hand puppets, presents to my brother and me, became our curious new voices as veterans of the First World War. The two puppets, in the care of my brother, first told stories of our coax and cover as veterans in the Bonus Expeditionary Force that summer at Capitol Hill in Washington.

By Now Beaulieu rode Treaty, a native farm horse, from Bad Boy Lake to the Exhibition of Blue Ravens at the Ogema Train Station. Treaty, once the wagon horse at the Leecy Hotel, slowly clopped along the platform. She pitched her head near the abstract watercolor scenes. The mongrels moaned in the presence of a horse but were not shied. By Now had served as an army nurse and was ready to march with us and other bonus veterans at Capitol Hill. Walter Waters, the inspired leader of the overnight Bonus Army, and thousands of veterans from around the country were on their way to demand a bonus payment from the United States Congress.

The Ice Woman, or Mikwan Ekwe, was an elusive winter menace, a native enchanter of quietus. She lurked around the woodsy lakes on cold and clear nights, a wispy shadow, and with erotic whispers lured lonesome native hunters to rest in the pure snow, a serene death with the sound of lusty moans, but since the fur trade, the waves of deadly diseases, shamanic deceit, wars, extreme economic depressions, poverty, and hunger, and with the scarcity of totems and game the old icy stories were reimagined without winter and told in every season of the year. The urgent croak of ravens in the paper birch and that native dream song of "summer in the spring" became our new stories to outlive the treacherous tease of winter and poverty.

Miss Heady, our language teacher at the government school, taught us the word "quietus," and she used that word in precise conversations. Quietus was the absence of nature, never the scenes of bear walks or kill-deer deception, but she never became a government teacher to wrangle with wild creatures, furred or feathered, or to treasure the noise of the seasons. Naturally, she had never been enticed by the stories of the Ice Woman. Aloysius, my brother, actually painted a great blue raven named Quietus, the blue shadows of bloody broken wings over the heaves and mounds of snow.

Heady confirmed in every sentence that she was a creature of bloodline clarity, the quietus of eastern culture...