You always do it without complaining, except for one time when your Tó:ta got fed up with some kids throwing their Kik Cola soda bottles on the ground and busting them on the rocks in the water, and she yelled at them to stop doing that and told them to pick up the broken glass. There was a family eating lunch at the flat rocks, and the man got mad at her. He said something about the sharp words she used with those kids, even telling her she had a hard face for acting like she owned the beach. “This isn’t your river, Konwakeri,” he said. “You should just leave them kids alone.” 

Your grandmother was always so soft-spoken, but utkon saraksen, you saw a different look in her eyes then, and she got mad at that man. But she didn’t swear at him or anything like that. All she did was look right at his wife and say, “That’s my house over there, and I’ve lived in it all my life. I know darn well I don’t own the river or the land — nobody does. I don’t need to be told that by you. But we are the ones who live here and who take care of this place, who clean it up every day and make it nice for people like you to come over here from town and use it.” That’s all she said, but she kept looking right at the wife. And the woman turned and looked at her husband, and that man just looked away, and he didn’t say anything else that whole day.

There is a rowboat tied to the dock, and you look at it and think back to when she would take you out on the river, just you and her. You were still just small and sitting in the front of the boat while she was rowing up and down the shoreline, in the early morning, when it was so calm on the water. You hung your face over the side of the boat watching fish. You could see all the way to the bottom, and there were all kinds of fish in the water. Teiotién:taron, a big sturgeon, swam right under your face and scared the heck out of you.

It was just a mile from the river to the place they moved your house to, yet once you were away from the river and living in town, it was like overnight everybody became city people. Your lives were being lived turned away from the water; the seaway was between you and the river, the place where you grew up and where the roots of your family went into the earth and where your father buried the cord that was cut when you were born. It is where your heart and true home are, still. Living in the village right on top of each other, you didn’t have the same feeling about your neighbours that you used to have when you lived on the riverside. People started keeping to themselves in their own little houses, and they didn’t help each other the way they did before.

For years you used to wonder why that was and how things got that way, but now you know. It’s because on the riverside you didn’t need money to be complete and to feel happy. They took away your land to build the seaway, and after that your connections to that place and the land got weak; the land was now just a street you lived on, a quarter acre of property that you put a fence around to make sure your neighbours didn’t come onto it, where you built your new and better houses with insulated walls and indoor toilets. After you moved from the riverside, you all had jobs and cars and TVs, but you couldn’t go to the riverside anymore where your grandparents used to live. You couldn’t go on the river and fish for sturgeon and eels, or float down the river on a log past the black bridge and then walk to the place along the shore where the bushes used to be so thick it was like going into a long, dark maze with the berry bushes totally covering the path and hanging overhead like a tunnel. You couldn’t walk through the bushes and just reach up over your head and pick ripe ahtahwakaion, the small, soft, red berries shaped like thimbles, and handfuls of strawberries too that were hanging down on the path, and there were no women and kids gathered there anymore eating their fill and loading up big black ash baskets with wild berries.