Jed Wolf

“What the hell does a Jewish kid from Connecticut know about Indians?” Homer said when I met him in his kitchen. I stood in the doorway of the run-down railroad station that served as the tribal office in Swanton, Vermont, responding simply, “Not much, but I know what plants to avoid eating in the woods and how to make soap from weeds, and I like kids.”

Homer St. Francis was a big guy with a bad temper, but he had a soft spot for kids too. “Get in here,” he yelled out the window, and several scruffy crew-cut boys and a wild girl spilled in from outside. “Here’s some,” Homer said, grinning like he wasn’t sure which were his. He gave one a slap on the head and said, “See what you can do with ’em, and whatever you do don’t call ’em Native Americans!”

“Uh, my name sounds Jewish but I’m not,” I said while herding the kids out the door.

“Well, our names sound Catholic but we’re injuns,” Homer said. “The keys are in the van.”

The Missisquoi River flows nothing like its Vermont cousins. While the Lamoille and Winooski hurry down from the mountains to Lake Champlain, the Missisquoi meanders like a low country southern river through the huge glacial plain below Montreal. Glassy and wide, its surface ripples with northern pike, largemouth bass, and bullhead. Silver maples, poplars, and cottonwoods draped with wild grapes lean in from soft, sandy banks. Impenetrable oxbow swamps, vestiges of ice age course changes, flood for beaver and moose in spring then dry to quicksand in fall to foil hunters.

This was Abenaki land once, before European settlers drove them out and underground in the 1700s. Those who remained faced Vermont’s eugenics programs, breeding programs designed to help them assimilate, blend and disappear into whiteness. Homer had been vital in winning state recognition of tribal rights for Abenaki descendants, and now here I was, hired to teach their kids about indigenous ways.

The children piled into the brand-new nail-polish-red van, and we headed out fishing. They might not finish school, but all Swanton kids fish. You don’t need anything fancy to catch dinner on the Missisquoi—just a branch and a few feet of monofilament untangled from the brushy banks. “Bull pout,” as they were locally called, a kind of catfish would bite at anything—chewing gum and cigarette butts—but these kids brought frozen corn. Watching them roughhouse like animals and cleverly tease each other while hauling in fish, I decided fleshy bull pout were responsible for the superior Abenaki mind.

My own attempts at living off the land weren’t going so well. My partner Karen and I were barely making ends meet at our dangerously old house in Bakersfield., Vermont. Our dream of self-sufficiency was costly—gardens failed, roofs leaked, animals got sick, and we got sick from eating wild spring greens. But we were young, hardy, and naive. Before our dream dissolved completely, I had my memorable encounter with Terry LaFar.

Terry was a ne’er-do-well Abenaki/French descendant who hung out at the tribal office smoking weed. He had a gold tooth, played guitar, and though he drank too much, Terry sang with such frighteningly intense emotions you couldn’t help but love him. One day he drove up to our place in the stolen tribal van with a week-old calf, both covered in scours diarrhea.

“Your farm needs a cow, Uncle Jed,” Terry said, checking himself in the side-view mirror while the screaming calf squirted diarrhea on the back seats. He’d “rescued” it from the slaughterhouse behind his house. “It squeezed out a plywood pen and was screaming to get back in when Terry heard him. I couldn’t let him do it, Jed, he didn’t know no better.”

Homer later announced we’d be taking a field trip to Canada—to the Abenaki at St. François-du-Lac Odanak Indian reservation near Pierreville, Quebec. These were the “pure” Abenaki who’d retreated north during colonial times, never subjected to eugenics like the Swanton families. According to Homer, we were attending a “pow wow,” and though it sounded ridiculous, these Abenaki were self-supporting and willing to share their ideas.

Once we started driving, I realized Homer St. Francis was likely an esteemed visitor—the noble chief from the US who everyone had undoubtedly read about—and I felt proud to be transporting him and his clan. But his family and cousins seemed ironically out of their element, bouncing through their ancient territory. We crossed the irritating border, nervously mocking the white customs officers, then drove for hours through hedgerow plains and long, low un-American-looking hills through St. Alphonse, St. Cecile, Valerien and Liboire.

“Anyone doubting the St. Francis name’s link to the Abenaki ought to take a trip up here,” I said, noticing reservation signs and dark skinned locals in town after town. Most of my passengers had never been so far from home and looked a little scared. When we finally arrived, no one except Homer knew what to expect. Amid vaguely French-looking architecture, a wooden Indian fort looked as out of place in that quaint Quebec village as the penned-in swans back in Swanton.

The wigwams and tourists made clear what this was about. My hard-to-read passengers appeared uninterested if not appalled, but their kids thought the place might be cool and raced toward their fabled history. Homer was greeted by Canadian elders then shuffled him off like in a scene from The Sopranos. The rest of us stretched our legs and ambled toward craft booths to the beckoning sound of a tacky Navajo flute. The elders eyed the beaded belts, fake feather headdresses, and peace pipes with what appeared to me like a touch of self-loathing.

Back in Swanton, I threw myself into helping them start their organic garden without being paid. The Missisquoi wildlife refuge included extremely poor abandoned farms where only Jimson weed grew. We removed the van’s seats, and the kids and I hauled loads of water weeds, lily pads, and leaf muck for mulch. We caught buckets of bull pout and buried them under mounds of ancient sand, carefully pressed in corn, beans, and squash seeds. In a few weeks, sprouts were everywhere, but in a month they vanished in the baking sun. After lugging several five-gallon buckets of water up from the river, I understood why no one else had tried.

Not long after I said goodbye, Karen and I watched our pony Snowflake foal. Terry’s stolen calf turned into a nice Dutch Holstein, and we sold her for $200. I would have split the money with crazy Terry but was afraid to look for him, for what I might find. We found good homes for our other animals and traded our hippie lifestyle for a modest Victorian house in the center of a civilized town and grew nothing but flowers. Though we tried, some folks just can’t assimilate. Without hardship to overcome, she and I broke up soon after, and I moved on.

Years later, I understood what Homer had seen in me that day in his kitchen—another misfit trying to find his place, another soul caught between worlds. The Abenaki had survived by adapting, by learning to wear their history lightly while carrying it deep. Maybe that’s what Homer was teaching all along, though I’ was too busy in the closet to notice: Sometimes the best way to honor the past is to let it guide us even if that means leaving well enough alone in the sand along the Missisquoi.