Ink of Ages Fiction Prize

A Whisper Can Outlast Stone

It all started with treaties, too many, too fast – a storm of letters we didn’t recognize. We listened, and signed, believing they would listen too. Soon, we were told that we had to send our children away. Then came the priest. He stood in our camp like a guest who’d already decided he owned the place. His hands were folded piously, but his eyes were hard, scrutinizing. He proudly announced a new law. The Indian Act. He said it like scripture, and to him it may have been, but to us, it was a declaration of a war that we had already lost. 

My name is Memengwaa of the Makwa Doodem. I was fifteen when my younger brother, Niigaanii, was taken to the school at Fort Frances. He was only eight, and he slept with a dreamcatcher tied to his wrist by a strip of deerhide. We stopped speaking our language in front of strangers, but it was temporary.

“They cannot take the roots,” my father reminded me. “Not with words.” But even trees fall when the bark is peeled. That night, a shrike landed near our lodge. My grandmother whispered, eyes following his inky black wings, “The birds guide us, no matter the time.” 

We left an offering by the cedar that night and said, “Miigwech.” Thank you.

***

When Niigaanii returned in summer, his eyes no longer shone, and his hair was cut to the scalp, along with all of its memories. His clothes were stiff and tight. 

“Say your name,” I implored gently. “Your true one.” 

He looked down at the floor. “Peter,” he murmured.

“No,” I replied. “That’s not the name the spirits remember.”

That night, I found his makak, his birchbark box. What once held drum beads and animal carvings now held a catechism. I placed it next to mine, next to our grandmother’s copper kettle and the tobacco pouch we used for offerings. It was returned to its rightful place, surrounded by love. Then, I leaned forward, into the fire’s glow, its crackles like an old song, and whispered, “Niigaani.” They could not outlaw breath.

The next year, they banned our dances and ceremonies. The priest told us those were pagan acts. “Crimes,” he summarized simply, with an easy smile as if we were all in agreement. 

But my aunt, who kept the lodge, said otherwise. “The spirits don’t need noise to listen; the sacred can live in silence.”

She taught me the old songs. The teachings of the bear, the seven fires, and Grandmother Moon. Each night, I whispered them to myself until they lived under my tongue. When she died that winter, I tied a pouch of cedar and sweetgrass to the tallest branch of her maple. The priest didn’t see a thing; some things were not meant for his eyes. 

Next, they stripped our leadership. The Indian Agents said only men approved by the Crown could be chiefs. 

“They want strangers to lead us,” my father warned, his eyes locked on mine. “But memory will always be stronger than law.”

We did what had to be done, we remembered with our feet, walking traplines laid by our grandfathers. We remembered with our hands, folding wild rice into baskets that we were no longer allowed to sell without permits. We remembered in dreams, where the spirits still came without asking.

One evening, deep in the woods, I saw the memegwesiwag—the Little People—tiny figures darting through ferns, circling an old maple. When I blinked, they vanished. But the next morning, a sprout had appeared in place of a burned stump. My aunt once said, “Where they dance, healing begins.”

In the spring of my eighteenth year, the priest returned with a soldier, their eyes triumphant. Someone had reported a gathering. They asked about the Midewiwin lodge and accused us of heathen rites.

“No lodge here,” I said, looking them in the eye.

But they searched anyway. They threw open our medicine bundles with sticks, flipped over canoes, and ripped apart fire pits. They found the birchbark scrolls with chants and teachings.

“Savage,” grunted the soldier. 

“Evidence,” said the priest. 

“Sacred,” I whispered. 

The soldier lit a fire, and the scrolls were thrown in; anger breathed through the fire, rising in sharp, bitter bursts. I turned away from the smoke, but not before I saw Niigaanii. He had told them.

I found him that night, by the lake, knees pulled to his chest. 

“I didn’t mean to,” he choked. “They said the spirits were devils. They said you’d burn.” 

“You don’t have to believe their stories,” I said. “You can remember ours.” 

“I can’t,” he whispered. “I’ve forgotten too much.”

“Then listen …” 

I sang the lullaby our grandmother used to hum while she braided sweetgrass. About the Sky Woman who fell, the turtle who offered his back, the fire that remembered. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“So am I,” I confessed. “But we’re not lost yet.”

That summer, we made a new scroll. Not with birch. The birch trees near the camp hadn’t healed from the burning. Instead, I peeled bark from a downed maple. Niigaanii carved into it with Grandfather’s bone awl: a bear, a lodge, a flame, and a girl planting a seed. Below that, he scratched our names, the ones the spirits would still know. We sealed it in pine resin and buried it beneath the old white pine, where our grandmother used to sing. 

***

Now I am older, my hair lighter. I sit beside the fire, weaving baskets no one regulates anymore. My daughters dance in ribbon skirts while my grandchildren giggle in Ojibwe without fear. 

One night, they settle around me, asking why I buried bark instead of burning it, why I still keep Niigaanii’s makak by the fire, and why I sing when I’m alone.

I tell them, “Because when someone tries to erase you, you carve yourself back. And even when voices shout like thunder, a whisper can outlast stone.”

They listen quietly, eyes wide. Then they echo back, 

“Miigwech.”

*

Makwa Doodem – Bear Clan in Ojibwe; one of the familial clans with its teachings and responsibilities.

Midewiwin – The Ojibwe Grand Medicine Society, centered around a sacred medicine lodge where spiritual healing ceremonies and teachings are shared within the community.

Miigwech – Thank you.