By Jared Lank
Growing up, the start of November always meant a few specific things for me:hunting season and a lot more time spent around the table on those early winter evenings with my dad and my great uncle playing Rummy 500, drinking Red Rose tea and eating luskinikn. It’s a time of year that consistently feels like a return to normal after the sweltering heat of summer. A time to reflect and recollect in the warm embrace of wood fire. It was in these moments that my father and uncle reminisced about how they grew up. I was fortunate enough to listen in and learn about my family; about how my great-grandparents left the rez in Nova Scotia and became farm hands in Aroostook county, and eventually made their way to southern Maine, where we live today. I learned about how they lived, what their world was like, and what being Native meant to us. I loved those nights. To this day I still look forward to the first frost and any excuse to light up our wood stove.
November also signaled the early days of the school year. As an off-res, mixed Native kid in Maine, I always struggled with the duality that world around me forced onto my identity. When I’d look in the mirror, I couldn’t help but question my place in those family stories as a pale skinned kid with blue eyes. Being one of the only Native kids in my tiny K-8 school, that stigma was reinforced every day as I walked by the giant 10-foot “Arundel Indians” mascot plaque in our school hallway. The Indian I was at home wasn’t the boy I was at school.
In the 90’s, the only Natives we learned about in the classroom were the western tribes and stereotypical caricatures. Definitely not Mi’kmaq people. When it did occasionally come up that I was, in fact, an Indian, it came with a classroom of kids (and teachers) all telling me I didn’t look like the Indians in their favorite westerns, or the Plains Indians in our textbooks. It taught me to keep my mouth shut. It really got to me and, after a while, I started to believe them. I’d sit at that table with my dad and uncle, and separate my own life from those stories. I was living in a white world where the only other Natives I knew were my family and we sat around drinking tea, playing cards, and hunting. I loved it, but this life didn’t align with what the world around me was constantly telling me about it meant to be Native. It took me a long time to unlearn that shame and learn to be proud.
I chose the film Powwow Highway as the film to pair with my Gram’s luski recipe for a couple different reasons. I think at the surface I was drawn to it because of its deeply ’80s aesthetic quality and tone — It’s the exact type of film that would be playing in the background on the old CRT console TV in my uncle’s apartment while we duked it out over a game of hold ‘em. There’s a comfort there that I can’t quite put my finger on, but it has a unique ability to transport me back to those days.
