Northern Light by Kazim Ali

Author:Kazim Ali
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781773101996
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Published: 2021-02-05T00:00:00+00:00

10.

THAT NIGHT I don’t want to stay in. I have been telling myself some kind of story—that coming up here, seeing the landscape, feeling the air, that somehow I would feel some kind of belonging. What I found was more difficult, more complex than I could have imagined. My family, migrants, had crossed incredible distances to arrive in this place called Canada, but the place itself never belonged to us. The irony is that the migrant is clamoring for entry into the national space of “Canada,” while Indigenous people are automatically excluded from it—have to be excluded for that national space to exist in the first place. The further irony is that people like me and my family have more access to the space called Canada than Indigenous Peoples do because we, for the most part, are willing to buy in, sign up, and accept those naturalization papers and citizenship as if we were entitled to them.

Though it is extremely cold and getting colder, I bundle up and leave my room, which fronts on the forest, and walk around the motel to the big dirt lot that serves as a parking area.

As night thickens, the tire-textured ridges of mud freeze solid. The sky is clear and the dark is ablaze with blue lights, stars gathering together in the old stories I remember. Yet it’s too cold to stand and look at them, and I don’t want to be alone.

Across from the motel’s series of connected trailers, maybe two or three hundred meters away, is an indoor hockey rink, one of the few recreational facilities in Cross Lake, in addition to a few baseball diamonds on the other end of town, and the skate park we passed on the way to Jackson’s house. Of course, hockey equipment isn’t cheap, so only some families can buy equipment and uniforms and pay for travel to away tournaments. Yet hockey is serious business in Cross Lake: there are teams for both boys and girls in multiple age groups, and men’s and women’s adult teams as well.

The rink was built as part of the community recreational facilities promised under the Northern Flood Agreement, but not until 1983, when that clause of the 1977 agreement was successfully litigated in federal court by the Pimicikamak. At that time, the building cost around $800,000, with construction done cheaply and quickly under a court order, intended to be an “interim facility” until a full-sized recreational complex could be completed. Yet that planned complex was never built, and an estimate done in 2016 put the price tag for construction today at almost sixty million Canadian dollars.

There are fourteen different teams that play on the Cross Lake rink; a team for younger girls is the newest, just begun this year.

Even though the hour seems late because of my travel and because it is so dark outside, the rink is busy. There are at least twenty cars parked in front, and every once in a while as I stand there another car swings into the lot and parks.

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