Celia's Song by Lee Maracle Page A

brown against her disappearing jawline, her brows, her furrowed age-lines. It catches her eyes in its flicker and paints her lips. Celia likes the way it burns away the years so she can’t see the tired in her mother’s eyes or the sad lines around her mouth.
    Momma skips to the end of the story without answering Jacob. This annoys him. Celia knows Jacob is annoyed, but she lets the answer set in the glow of the candles, the art of the faces, and the bellowing of the thunder without explaining it to him.
    Stacey, too, sees his annoyance. She knows Jacob wants a schoolteacher answer. It annoys her to think that he wants an explanation, as though he can’t imagine enough to add a remark to the talk around the table. It’s true, Stacey thinks, we ran out of wood to build homes and fires. The chief went to the government, the government came back with a plan, and then the government demanded a vote.
    â€œWe ran out of wood and they gave us a vote.” Momma laughs at the absurdity. “Wasn’t that some powerful piece of nothing?”
    Celia nods. Nothing had ever been solved by the vote. Before the vote families talked to each other through their men, from men to women, from women to women, between children who overheard the women, back to the men, then back to the chief. By the time a decision was made it was clear what needed to be done, because much talk had already occurred, many sides had been seen, much had changed and much value had been added. The decision was obvious. Everyone knew what part they were going to play when the plan was finally unfurled. If every family sent someone to make the decision happen it flew. If there was a missing family, the chief turned over the dirt he stood on, shrugged, and went home. That was it. Momma had hit the nail on the head. The chatter died with the vote.
    Celia thinks about the healing circle she belongs to. They talk to each other, but it was limited to disclosing hurt and trauma, or rage. That kind of talk feels narrow and tiring. She knows they need it, but now she wants it peppered between the other kinds of conversations they never seem to have anymore.
    I smile. Celia is on her way. She doesn’t know she has shifted direction, but there it is, she is on her way home to the old ways.
    THE VOTE WAS SILENT , ominous in its lack of community and collaboration. It stood between them and the ordinary conversations they needed to have to make decisions about their lives. The vote was powerful in its ability to silence the village and isolate each from the other. It was like the white men, all-powerful and silencing, except it was invisible.
    â€œFirst came the vote, then mortgages. Now they want taxes,” Stacey concludes in silence, not wanting to add more thickness to the air. It was more than just the food, the wood, the smell of their homes. When the tension was thick before, someone would throw a frond of cedar onto the stove and the smoke would gather it up and quickly carry it away. But now the tension increased in a room, it choked the collective breath of the people in it; it took cedar longer to burn it away.
    â€œAin’t that some shit,” Rena says again. She isn’t sure about running out of wood. There are mountains of wood behind them. It wasn’t that they ran out of wood. It was the absence of access to the wood in them mountains that was the problem, and now they are facing it. Rena remembers the last time she, her sisters, and Nora had hauled shakes out of those mountains; it must have been the early fifties. Helicopters whirled above, searching for them. Eventually the choppers found them. They were arrested for culling the wood from the forest. Nora spent thirty days in jail and Rena and her sisters were sentenced to three months to a year without their mother or their village. “Someone has to have a licence; stumpage fees have to be paid to someone,” the judge had said. Nora refused to pay the fine. She