The Shut Eye Dance

be careful what you wish for

In my book I tell a number of Anishinaabe stories. These are stories that I have heard and read and they aren’t always the same. The basics remain, but some elements are emphasized or embellishments added in order to make a point. So when somebody tells a familiar story, the story of the shut eye dance for example, I listen closely for what gets emphasized.

The shut eye dance.

It’s a fairly simple story. Nanabush is hungry, he’s often hungry and many of his stories begin that way. And he doesn’t like to work too hard, or work at all if possible although it often seems that he winds up working very hard at not working. He did provide for his grandmother, so I don’t want you to think that he was lazy or uncaring.

Anyway, on this day he was hungry and saw a flock of ducks. He called them over under the pretext of teaching them a new dance. He would sing and they would dance, but they had to keep their eyes shut. Why the ducks would agree to this I have no idea, but he promised it was a medicine dance and sometimes we want magic more than we want to expend effort too and so they danced while he sang. As they passed by he grabbed one after another, wringing their necks until he had a pile of ducks. Eventually one opened their eyes and saw what was happening, it called out the alarm and they all flew off.

Nanabush was angry about this, and idk why he was angry because he already had a good pile of ducks for little work but there you go. He didn’t get all of them.

Now already I’ve seen something different in the story that I hadn’t in previous hearings or in the way I told it in the book. In my book it’s a cautionary tale of keeping our eyes closed to what is around us, not paying attention. But in this telling it occurred to me that the ducks too wanted something for nothing. Medicine, healing. These things should take work and effort. They should not be as simple as dancing. We don’t like to work and sacrifice in order to gain knowledge. And that can be costly. So very costly.

The internet is full of horrific images right now, mostly white border patrols on horseback whipping Black migrants near the Texas/Mexico border.

Yes. On horseback. With whips.

And as horrific as these images are, even more horrific is knowing that some of the hands wielding those whips are brown. Because as I said, these border patrols are mostly but not entirely white.

We, the racially marginalized, dance the shut eye dance thinking that we’ll somehow evade having our necks wrung. And we won’t.

Interestingly in many tellings of this story it is loon who calls out the alarm, not one of the ducks. And I’m not sure where to place loon in this retelling because my brain is now going to the eighth fire and the need for the newcomers to pick up their own bundles and make better choices. With so many of us choosing to remain in the shut eye dance .. perhaps it is the voices of those who are not part of our communities that can sound the alarm.

hmm.

this did not go where I thought it would. But stories are like that.

What do you think? Share your thoughts and reflections.