Michelle Porter - Approaching Fire

My dear Pp,

I trace you in the stories the women in our family tell, and in the oral family tree shared at all the aunties kitchen tables, heavy with all the coffees and cookies and bars made of chocolate, icing sugar, and butter. I find pieces of you in the photos and records and official family-tree documents the women kept in their closets to prove who they were, in case anybody asked. You are there in the genealogical book a researcher from La Socit historique de Saint-Boniface put together in order to show the breadth and depth of our ancestry in support of my membership with the Manitoba Metis Federation and citizenship with the Mtis Nation.

The family tree is not a light document. It has weight. In my hands, its heavier to pick up than I expected. The family tree exists in two spiral-bound volumes and these pages trace our family back to the time of the voyageurs and the first

French who came to the land we now call Canada. These 200 pages include copies of scrip records Ive never seen before. They hold stories that arent written in the documentation of father, son, uncle and mother, daughter, aunt. The stories are always trying to break away from the plastic coil binding.

Youre on the first page of the family tree book. Right there. From my mother to her mother to you, my great-grandfather. Sometimes, the stories Ive heard make me forget that Ive never met you. I never called you Pp while you were there across the room, about to look up and see the child asking for your attention.

With each letter, I travel deeper into an old fire started by our ancestors. With each word I place on paper, I am looking for you. I am looking to understand your place in the Mtis Nation, and my place as your relation. I write to understand the story of our belonging to each other. Writing is a way of calling out to you.

We never belonged to each other in the way grandparents sometimes belong to their grandchildren; you never fried pancakes for me the way you did for my mother and you never played fiddle in any kitchen I danced in. You were gone before I was born. Yet, each time I find some new detail about your life, the thread that pulls between now and back then gets tangled up in the wings of an emotion I cant name and it takes days to unravel.

Maybe you could help? Oh, laugh and have fun at my expense: Im not really expecting a voice from the spirit world. But you could answer in the bits and pieces of history that I uncover and weave together here. There is this, too: If I learn to listen in the way that this story needs, youll keep answering after this book is published. This story we are telling will never be finished and it will be told again and again with beginnings and endings that shift, that change shape.

What I am doing reaches into my college days, when every writing assignment somehow took me back to my grandmother and to you. It reaches into childhood, too, where every story carried a version of your name.

I didnt know all your names then. Knowing you as Pp, I knew you as a child knows. When I was old enough to know you had a name of your own, I knew you also as Bob and the possibilities of you doubled.

Your full name in our genealogical records: Lon Joseph Robert Goulet.

This name doesnt fit on my tongue. Your recorded birth name is a shirt that is too tight around the shoulders. Everyone called you Bob. The name on most of the vinyl records that keep your songs alive is Bob Goulet. The name used in newspaper advertisements for your performances is Bob Goulet. Who is this Lon Joseph Robert Goulet?

Are you wondering what else Im going to ask of you? I would, if I were you. If some future great-granddaughter of mine started digging around my life and asking questions, Id raise an eyebrow. From wherever I was in the afterlife, Id stop what I was doing and Id ask if she has any idea what it is shes looking for. By then, Id know that most of the people who dig for roots in the dirt of their beginnings dont expect to find a sky beneath it all.

Curiosity started it all. All my life I wanted to know why yougreat-grandfather, Pp, Bobmoved away from Manitoba. It was where your music was born; it was where all your relations lived. You left the Mtis heartland for the woods of British Columbia, where nobody knew you or your wife or your daughters. I couldnt understand it. I mean, look at where I established my Mtis membership: In Manitoba, a place I never lived or even went to growing up. I grew up in Alberta. Many of my cousins and relations live in British Columbia, but Manitoba is where my roots are.

These letters are a beginning. These are the words that have been travelling between my head and my heart. I asked and answers began to arrive. Not always direct ones, but hints and suppositions and maybes. At the end of that I came to the question I think I was really after: How do we belong to each other, my great-grandfather, and what can we teach each otherwhat can you teach me? This is a beginning.

Just now it strikes me how easy a thing it is to misplace a man.

A woman of course was never difficult
to misplace. Women are
misplaced all the time and
other than one or two or three lists
of exceptions
they arent much missed
by the world.