Kohkum & me

In Mi'gmaq and many other Turtle Island languages, stories are told from the outside in, circling toward a central point, and when they arrive there, they don't stop. Our stories didn't 'happen'—they are happening and always will be.

As an actor and writer without formal writing training, the centre of my practice sits in my physical experience of being displaced and the long and awkward road in search of home.

This is an attempt to wander through my first play, Kohkum & me, guided by the four directions on the Medicine Wheel and the fragmented memories of both those early writing days and my childhood migrations, to better understand how I became the writer I am today.

East. Spring. Birth

I tumble into the world at 3 a.m., dark-eyed innocence hiding the question I'm really asking, "Are these white hands and masked faces the ones we were running from?" And then I'm gone. Mom's brown fingers reaching like autumn branches as I'm pulled away by the white hands.

The word 'adoption' implies a thing that happens, instead of a thing that's happening, so, try as they might, it never becomes relational. Not relational enough.

I ask God to help, but folded hands feel funny, and I get fixated on that. Jesus didn't die with folded hands, but that's none of my business, I'm told.

Summer, Fall, and Winter come around a few times, but I'm still stuck in Spring, looking East.

"Some people's children live a lifetime not knowing where they came from, not stepping on the ground their blood calls home, or stepping on it daily. Totally oblivious. Some people's children are born with the first light of dawn on their fingertips … Some people's children walk around with the blood in their veins moving slower than everyone else's because the blood feels … rejected. Some people's children … are other people's children. When you look in a mirror, what do you see? Blood vessels turning to ice? No. Probably not. When you look in the mirror, you probably see somebody's child. I see nobody's child. I never saw a child at all."

~

I vomit my coffee and the last traces of yesterday's breakfast down the drain and stumble out of the bathroom … and there's Kohkum in the middle of the candy isle.

Kohkum:

Heya-Heya-heyyyy You look hungry! You gotta learn the famine song! HEYA-HEYA, HEYA MCDOUBLE TWENTY MCNUGGETS, HEYA-HEYA

Just get back on the bus.

Kohkum:

You know something, Coyote? I could almost mistake you for an Indian every now and then!

What's that supposed to mean?

Kohkum:

Now I wanna know something. When you look in the mirror, do you like what you see?

I try to avoid mirrors.

Kohkum:

Well, shit, there's your problem! You've forgotten what you look like! You think you're white!

White enough.

Kohkum:

Tell that to the judge.

What do you know of who I am?

Kohkum:

Do you really think finding a mom you never met is going to fix anything?

Not your problem!

Kohkum:

It is now.

Look. I'm a pastor's kid, alright? Ya know, I say my prayers and take communion … and I don't even like grape juice, so why isn't it enough, Kohkum? Put that in your pipe and Smoke it!

Kohkum:

Oh, believe you me, I will. The answer to your prayers is inside you. You just gotta listen.

Listen to what?

Kohkum:

Old people breath.

What the hell is wrong with you? You know nothing about me, you know nothing about my mom, and you have no idea what I've been through!

Kohkum:

I know that you're starving yourself.

I'm not starving, I'm fasting.

I start writing a play about it all, from the back seat of a Greyhound bus, looking for my ancestors in the gas stations in every dinky town on the Calgary-Vancouver milk run. My playwriting process begins to take shape in the form of imprinting my childhood migrations...