Terese Mailhot: Paying tribute to my brother and my protector Guy

Mom thought my brother could intuit the future. Her assumptions weren’t baseless; she was a historian. As Nlaka’ pamux, we’ve been known to see things, like the white man before he came, or Jesus before the text. It’s all in the history books, trying to dismantle the Other. Maybe anthropologists and their records are stupid things to reference. I’m beyond the era of total ethnography, we seem to exist in spite of it. Grampa Crow said when Simon Fraser came to Stein Valley it was hot; the women were taking baths in the river, and they thought Simon was Jesus. His white, starched shirt illuminated in the daylight. The women rested their hand on him and cried as he walked on the stony earth. Grampa Crow was a divine rhetorician who had several stories on how he lost his thumb: the war, the rodeo, Indian school, a big mammal bit it off. You can trust a storyteller for the true nature of something, but never trust the details.

Guyweeyo had a mild faith about it all: his powers, Mom, and the books, but not stories in their relation or their nature. His dizzy spells or visions could be sacred, or maybe he wasn’t eating enough. It was all the same.

He got his name from his dad, Tona. We think it translates to, “a place of hope,” but our ways prevent rendering the name. After 32 years of knowing my brother, I had only recently learned the name of his father. There have been too many traumas to go around asking questions of each other: Mother’s death, the fathers who stayed too long, and the ones who left. Nlaka’ pamux requires the dignity to deny a splintered lineage. In organicity, one can only be Nlaka’ pamux.