I watched the other three listen to this small story, which they had surely heard before, and saw how it seemed to bring them alive for a moment. Ruthie leaned back laughing with her arms across her belly. There is a connection between native people and animals which never seems to be lost. What do they see; what do they know? This is something that those of us who do not have native blood will never understand. (There are many intuitive secrets like this. Rob, for instance, was a dot painter. I asked him how he'd learned. — It's not teach yourself, he said, it's in there. I can tell straight away if a Koorie* fella's done it or some whitefella.) Something of this nature was occurring when Rob told the story of the snake. I have seen that same alertness and happiness enter the eyes of Canadian Inuit office managers, Ojibway prostitutes and Sioux panhandlers when somebody mentions a caribou, a beaver, a coyote, even an insect, and when I see it I envy those people because I do not have it. This was what Ruthie wanted to keep. — One time this big king cricket came in, she began. It was
An' she tell me to kill it, he said sourly.
Thank God we didn't kill it, because it was very rare.
That was the whole story, and then Sadie talked about how good wallabies tasted and Ruthie drank another V.B. and got sad again and said: Once they started feedin' the people on flour and treacle, we started gettin' fat. Before that there was no such thing as a fat aboriginal woman.
I got all that knocked out of me, said Rob with satisfaction. Eatin' all that junk food. They beat it right out of me. Now it don't tempt me.
Course we can't hunt what we want, either, said Ruthie. Like wallabies. Even though the government is killing those animals as pests, we get prevented.
It was about then that I understood that Ruthie with her pretty, mobile face was an ideologue, a militant. Everything she said was hard and inflexibly generalized. Oppression often seems to forge such people. Because the world they exist in is hostile, whatever analysis of their condition they build cannot be the graceful and perhaps unsound tower of the intellectual, who has the leisure and means to rebuild should some chance wind of malice or objective truth bring it down. People like Ruthie make fortresses of their convictions. They build guardedly, of heavy thoughts quarried from local reality. Her pure young face suffused itself with passion and sadness. She tried to sell me her T-shirt which said STOP BLACK DEATHS IN CUSTODY, but I didn't have any money left.
* Aboriginal.
So when you get up in the morning, what do you do? I said. Snake finished his V.B. and got the next. — Get up, he said, say hello to everyone, thank God we're still alive, that the pigs didn't kill us in our sleep.
The cops call it crime, said Ruthie. We call it survival. Well, look, I said. (I was getting a little tired of her.) If things could be different, how would you want them to be?
Don't ask us that! cried Ruthie, leaping to her feet. We just want what belongs to us!
We never signed no treaty, man, said Rob, sitting there with his beer clasped between his parted knees, tanned, bearded and grim. And they just took our land. Once we can get our land back, maybe we can get something. Whatever we get, it's better than nothing.
What land will they give you back? my friend Jenny asked naively.
Whatever they don't want.
We want land, said Ruthie greedily. We'd make money just like the fuckin' white people. Make us a million off that land.
Sadie smiled a little. — I'd buy a house, a car, and plant a
I'd buy half a mountain and a river, said her husband quietly.
Why not just
She took the last V.B. in the case and popped it open. Then she whispered: They're gonna kill us, too. Just like everything else. We're gonna go extinct. Just like the animals.
No one said anything, and she drank half her beer in one go. Then she said: We don't come from monkeys. We're just here. We always were here, always will be.
After that, she poured the rest of the can down her throat.
