Nen'daa
There were many things that Nathan Medicine Coyote would rather be doing than entertaining tourists with the cheesy dances and songs of his ancestors. He felt that the only reason why he was doing singing and dancing five times a week was for the stipend that the Tutchone tribe was paying its acting troupe. In all honesty, the young coyote had a life to live outside the reservation with its abject poverty, reduced standard of living, and constant reminders of cultural genocide.
The books that the young coyote had read in his history classes spoke of what became of the First Nations at the hands of European settlers- and the effects of the genocide were being perpetually repeated in reservations across both Canada and the United States through the generations. The Tutchone reservation was a terrible place to live- discarded beer bottles lay everywhere, fights would break out at the drop of a hat, a quarter of all the children who started at the elementary school at the reservation would drop out and not see their graduation from the high school. Unemployment was at around 30% and the jobs at the reservation with the other 70% being involved in jobs that were to say the least undesirable. And this was true of many reservations across the continent, not just the one in which Nathan lived.
Everyday, the reservation belonging to this proud branch of the Athabaskan nation was polluted by the many devils that the palefaces had brought with them. Homelessness, joblessness, and alcohol worked to constantly demoralize the tribesmen and keep them from either keeping the ancient traditions of their elders or embracing the future of the tribe. Seeing as how the condition of the tribe was the fault of the roundeye why should Nathan dance and sing for them in the native Athabaskan clothes which was made of moose and caribou hide. He felt embarrassed to wear these clothes, as these were the clothes that his ancestors wore shortly before having their land seized, their wives raped, and their respect and dignity dragged through the mud, the day they first met the Canadian settlers.
Situated in the middle of the oil-rich province of Alberta, the Tutchone had seen many of their working men take their money and talents elsewhere,as job opportunities were minimal around the reservation. Many had left north for jobs as roughnecks (oil-field workers) in Edmonton or to work ranches in Calgary. The Tutchone reservation was ten miles west of Red Deer, Alberta, a city of about 80,000 located between the two larger Alberta cities. The highlight of Nathan's life so far was his vacation to the Calgary Stampede when he was 14- he fell in love with the modern city of Calgary with its conveniences, entertainment, and connection to the rest of Canada. Nathan had also been to Edmonton before and thought if he could roughneck for a while he could own the oil fields and become wealthy. It took him a while to realize how hard a roughneck's life truly was- long pay in bad weather conditions, unrelenting bosses. This was the work of the desperate people who needed employment more than anything.
"Betrayers to their people those who leave their family to make money and forget. You will work for years and years to own that field and you will still roughneck. God has a way of punishing traitors and cowards. Nen'daa", his father Edmund, the chief, who was also the pastor of the church at the reservation would say. Nen'daa was a favored expression of his, inspired by a song that the Medicine Beat, a Tutchone band would sing- it meant "Return", a cry to the First Nations members who had abandoned their heritage. "Don't ever turn your back on your culture. For you will find out soon enough that your past is all you have. And your legacy will be the only thing people remember you for," he warned his son.
Edmund had seen his brother Jason's cubs who were born outside of the Tutchone culture struggle to remember their heritage- in his mind, they were nothing more than the outsider tourists who visited looking to buy souvenirs. This was true in Edmund's brother marrying an outsider wife, the final proof that Jason was a pretender. Edmund carried a love-hate relationship with the outsiders- he knew their purchases supported the tribes but the moccasins and spirit masks his people made served a purpose; beyond being curios for the visitors. These things meant so much more to the Athabaskans, these connected the Athabaskans to the spirits of nature that were very much alive in their world, even though the Athabaskan tribes had syncretisized their faith with that of the Christian missionaries. Edmund had tried to keep Nathan from leaving but a force more powerful than tribal traditions called the coyote from the outside world.
The main love of Nathan's life was basketball, a sport which demanded flexibility and upper-body strength, traits that Nathan Medicine Coyote had developed over the dances and games which were the traditional pasttimes of the Athabaskan peoples. It was also his only break from the hopelessness and squalor of reservation life- the one time in his life where the young coyote could be successful and victorious where there was otherwise constant reminders of subjugation and defeat.
At the gymnasium, this high-school phenom would score 30 or 40 points against the other high schoolers from the white universities and the Tutchone Warriors were undefeated as a result. If only Nathan could spend his college years playing the same sport and then get drafted into the NBA (and his great play had attracted the attention of many scouts from both Canadian and American universities), he would certainly win money and prestige for the people of his reservation so that the poverty and drunkenness and broken homes would leave, with his millions in contract money. He could see the trailer parks which served as the government-mandated school being upgraded as the result of his gracious donation into modern buildings where students would be proud to learn science, math, English, art, but also the language, heritage, and traditions of their Tutchone ancestors.
The night of the performance arrived and as Nathan regretfully put on his moccasins and caribou-hide robe for the dance, his father came and accompanied him to the blue room behind the stage, where the Tutchone performers would don the robes and moccasins worn by their ancestors. There, the two coyotes, father and son listened to the song that they had listened to many times before- "Nen'daa" by the Medicine Beat. The cassette player, though used extensively during its years playing music crackled to life and started playing the spoken-word opening to the song in the dressing room.
"As a child, as you're growing up, you leave the community without knowing where you're gonna go becuase you don't know and you had no control of that time. When they send you off to live in a different society, and then you return, you know nothing and you have to re-learn it all. And so you must go back- Nen'daa. Go back to your roots, to your great-grandfather's ways," the elderly and wise voice of Jerry Alfred spoke to them as the cassette played.
Edmund at the end of the song told his son "I know you don't want to perform your people's dances. But if you don't keep your culture alive, it will die with you." Those words bore through the coyote's heart- the purpose of the theatrics was not to merely entertain tourists but to encapsulate the traditions of the Tutchone First Nations, which Medicine Coyote realized was indeed his heritage, "the only thing that we as Tutchone really have to go by". At that moment he decided that he would dance for the audience to convey his pride in the heritage of his fathers before him and the pride that Edmund had in him. The outside world would within a year take him away with promises of success and a better life but that did not matter tonight. For Nathan Medicine Coyote, the dancer was no longer ashamed of his First Nations heritage. As he heard the flute played by his sister and the singular drum played by his father, he realized what culture truly meant- no matter what the future held for him, this coyote would always be a Tutchone.