Читать книгу Canoeing with Jose онлайн

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At the time, I was living in a dingy apartment above the CC Club. Every night the seedy Uptown tavern was crowded with punks, hipsters, and blue-collar regulars drinking Grain Belt from plastic pitchers and listening to the jukebox—a catalog of the thriving punk scene that pulsed on the streets of Minneapolis’s south side. Many of the musicians playing on these records were CC regulars: Grant Hart from Hüsker Dü, Bob Stinson from the Replacements, members of Soul Asylum, Blue Hippos, Run Westy Run, and Babes in Toyland.

I was generally seething at the state of the world, and when the jukebox rumbled with livid punk rock, crackling the linoleum tile on the kitchen floor until well after midnight, it resonated like the beat of my heart. But on the cool October night when I returned home from campus with a copy of Canoeing with the Cree, I longed for silence.

Had I judged the book by its cover, or by its opening lines, I would have rejected Canoeing with the Cree immediately. While I was just a few weeks into my first Native American studies class and my awareness of the history and culture of Minnesota’s indigenous people was still embryonic, I knew enough to dismiss the cover copy’s assertion that Sevareid and Port were the first to paddle from Minnesota to Hudson Bay. Given the long history of Native peoples and voyageurs traversing the vast system of waterways extending from the mouth of the St. Lawrence River to Hudson Bay and the Great Lakes, I was confident that this journey had been undertaken long before Sevareid and Port. Nor was I particularly impressed by the citation from Kipling that begins the first chapter, with its reference to “Red Gods making their medicine.”