Wolverine the Trickster, Labrador Innu Tales Read online

  "Wolverine created the earth as well as men and women. If you don't

  know that, you don't know shit.”

  -TIM CAHILL, author of Hold the Enlightenment and Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

  “Only a world-class writer and storyteller like Lawrence Millman could do

  justice to the wondrous stories of Wolverine with such elegance, humor,

  and originality. At once hilarious and deeply sympathetic, Millman's

  Wolverine tales -- as collected from a truly endangered culture -- are

  literature in all the best senses. I loved them!”

  -HOWARD MOSHER, author of Disappearances and Walking to Gatlinburg

  *****

  Wolverine, the Trickster

  Labrador Innu Tales Collected and Retold

  by Lawrence Millman

  Illustrated by Suzy Hunt

  Published by Komatik Press

  Smashwords Addition

  Copyright 2010 Lawrence Millman

  All Illustrations Copyright 2010 Suzy Hunt

  Where the author did his collecting of tales in the 1980s - the Innu villages of Sheshashui and Utshimassits in Labrador.

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  WOLVERINE:

  An Innu Trickster Figure

  Night falls on the tundra twenty miles west of Utshimassits, Labrador. Somewhere a dog or a wolf is howling, or maybe it's the wind howling down from the height of land. Two ancient women take turns spitting into a lard bucket. My host, a tubercular wraith of a man named Thomas Pastitshi, spits into the bucket himself, then begins telling a story about the Innu trickster Wolverine, whose penis, he says, is approximately forty feet long. No, fifty feet long, one of the women corrects him. Their laughter, accompanied by racking coughs, transforms the tent into a voluptuous palace...

  The Innu, formerly Naskapi or Naskapi-Montagnais, are not to be confused with their better-known, more northerly neighbors, the Inuit. Whereas most of Labrador's Inuit inhabit one large village, Nain, the Algonquin-speaking Innu now live in a pair of small villages, Natuashish and Sheshashui, several hundred miles apart. And whereas the Inuit are mostly employed in the commercial fishing industry, the Innu -- at least some of the older, more traditional Innu -- still cling to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They camp in the bush, trapping and hunting caribou, from October to late March, a period when interior Labrador's temperatures routinely plunge to fifty or sixty degrees below zero, and the snow piles up in Biblical pro-portions. More temperate seasons are hardly any better: they're plagued by mosquitoes, black flies, and the so-called Labrador bulldog, all three of which conspire to make a person's life miserable.

  Obviously, such conditions are no joke, but you might need a joke, or the equivalent of a joke, to reconcile yourself to them, especially if you've picked the wrong place to find caribou or a blizzard has wrecked your tent. Enter Wolverine, who might be able to pro-vide you with some much-needed solace. That he might also be responsible for the destruction of your tent hardly matters. For he is a conundrum: part-human, part-animal, and closer to a deity than to either a human or an animal.

  To understand Wolverine (or, as the Innu call him, Kwakwadjec), it's helpful to understand the wolverine it-self, probably the canniest member of the mustelid family. Nicknamed "devil bear," wolverines commonly steal both bait and quarry from traps, traveling right down a particular trapline. They have no trouble surviving the rigors of the subarctic winter. Indeed, they're the only northern mammal whose fur actually turns darker rather than lighter in the winter. A wolverine will stand up to a bear ten, no, twenty times its own weight. Likewise, it's one of the few mammals that will shade its eyes with its paws in order to see better. To disguise its own scent, wolverines will search for the scent of another animal, then roll repeatedly in it. They are self-sufficient and nomadic, much like the Innu themselves in the not too distant past.

  You can see why this wily mustelid became a trickster figure, and also why the mustelid in question became the inspiration for Wolverine, the popular comic book su-perhero with retractable claws and an ability to heal him-self however nasty the wound. Yet there's a flip side to the Innu Wolverine. It's the same flip side you find in other Native trickster figures. Like the Haida Raven, the Oglala Iktoni, the Cree Whiskey Jack, and the Navajo-Hopi Coyote, Wolverine combines extreme canniness with a devil-may-care attitude that isn't canny at all. He thinks his own shit is the shit of a cannibal giant, and he mistakes pieces of his own ass for caribou jerky. Still, there's an important lesson to be gained from such errors: namely, that it's okay to fuck up. There may even be some virtue in fucking up. After all, Wolverine manages to survive a whole winter by eating his own ass.

  There's no getting around the fact that a rather large portion of stories about Wolverine are ribald if not downright scatological. That doesn't mean such stories are "dirty," though. In Inueimun, the language of the Innu, references to bodily functions or genitalia carry no moral or immoral connotations whatsoever. For smut is White Man's invention. Here let me insert a brief polemic:

  One of the many injustices perpetrated by White Man on the Native is the theft of his lore and the subsequent whitewashing of it for puritans of all ages and persuasions. Cleaned up versions of Native stories fill the mythology/folklore shelves of libraries as well as the last remaining bookstores. On those shelves, the well-endowed Ojibway trickster Nanabozho seems to have lost his organ of generation, while Coyote no longer possesses the divine ability to shit whenever and wherever he pleases. Even Wolverine has found himself air-brushed on a few occasions. All because genuine earthiness runs counter to White Man's romantic image -- romantic and patronizing -- of the Native as a sexless Child of Nature. The object of such censorship ends up as a sort of Bambi in Native drag or a New Age icon. Which is worse would be difficult to say.

  As nomads inhabiting a more or less inhospitable part of North America, the Innu were unavailable to Christ-wielding missionaries somewhat longer than most other Native groups. Wolverine himself survived in oral lore long enough for me to hear a number of tales about him when I first spent time with the Innu in the 1980s. In 1988, Apinam Ashini, an Innu elder from Sheshashui, even told me that he'd seen Wolverine in a shaking tent ceremony only a few months before my visit. Wolverine had been dancing around inside the tent and, according to Apinam, farting to accompany his dance movements. How typical of him, I thought.

  Most Innu storytelling happens away from any settlement, usually at a camp in the bush. Before a story can be told, the teller has to make certain that there aren't any evil spirits in the vicinity, or his stories will attract them in much the same way that the scent of blood will attract a predator. Wolverine stories, on the other hand, can be told anywhere and at any time, since they tend to be more anecdotal than mythic. Also, they're usually told in bunches. If someone tells you how Wolverine created the world by blowing into a Muskrat's ass, you'll probably learn how he tried to destroy the world, too.

  You find tricksters primarily in the lore of unpampered cultures. Indeed, the more hardscrabble or subsistence-oriented the culture, the more likely its trickster will be to inhabit a world rich in scatology. A trickster will know exactly what to do on those myriad occasions when shit happens. This awareness makes a Wolverine, a Raven, or
a Coyote an extremely good role model as well as an extremely bad one. Needless to say, neither the political nor the corporate world has tricksters. They have scoundrels like Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon and Bernie Madoff. There's a huge difference between a trickster and a scoundrel: the former is benign, but the latter is not.

  It's been twenty years since I last visited the Innu, and a lot of shit has happened since then. In Sheshashui, alcoholism and gas sniffing have become rampant, even among children as young as five or six years old. Espe-cially gas sniffing: kids hardly more than toddlers will steal gas from a snowmachine, then sniff around the clock. In Utshimassits (Davis Inlet), the infant mortality rate was seven times the Canadian average, and the suicide rate off the proverbial charts. I've put that last sentence in the past tense because, in 2002, the Canadian government relocated the community's inhabitants to Natuashish (Sango Bay), a place sacred to them. But the same problems that made the Innu think of Utshimassits as cursed have persisted in Natuashish, which I suspect is not considered sacred anymore.

  Never in all their history have the Innu been more in need of Wolverine: not only the laughter-inducing Wolverine, but also the Wolverine who created a whole new world after the old one had been drowned.

  Lawrence Millman

  February 2010

  *****

  WOLVERINE CREATES THE WORLD

  Long, long ago there were great floods. Almost the entire world was drowned in water. Wolverine was able to keep himself dry only by leaping from stone to stone. If these floods get any worse, he said to himself, they will put an end to my wandering, maybe even put an end to the world, too.

  So Wolverine called a meeting of all the animals who made their homes in water. He asked each of them to help him save the world from drowning.

  First, he talked to Otter. "Dive down, Otter," he said, "and bring me some ground."

  Otter did as he was told, but he didn't come up with any ground. He said he couldn't see anything down there except weeds and a few fish.

  Next Wolverine talked to Beaver. He said: "If you bring up some ground, I will find a pretty little wife for you. Maybe build the biggest lodge in the world for you, too."

  So Beaver dove down, but he didn't bring up any ground, either. "I can't swim deep enough to reach the bottom," he gasped, "and as for a wife and a big lodge, I'd rather live with-out them than drown."

  Muskrat was Wolverine's last hope. "I might be able to save the world," Muskrat said, "but only if you tie a thong to my leg."

  Wolverine tied the thong, and Muskrat jumped into the water. He was gone for quite a long time. I hope he didn't drown, thought Wolverine. He pulled up the rope, and when he did, up came the thong...without Muskrat.

  Too bad, said Wolverine to himself. This means only wa-ter, water, and more water from now on.

  But all of a sudden Muskrat surfaced. His mouth was so full of ground that he wasn't able to talk, so Wolverine put his mouth to Muskrat's ass and blew as hard as he could. Out came the ground from Muskrat's mouth, more and more ground, heaps and heaps of it, seemingly without end.

  This ground is the very earth we walk on today.

  *****

  TCIWETINOWINU

  One winter Wolverine was wandering through slush, slush, slush, nothing but slush.

  Everywhere he went, he'd sink up to his chest in it. He couldn't cross rivers because there was never enough ice on them. Nor could he cross lakes because there was always much water on the ice.

  "What's wrong with Tciwetinowinu?" he said. "If he really wants to prove that he's a man, he should send a real winter."

  A short while later an enormous man dressed entirely in white came to Wolverine's camp. The man said, "I'm Tciwetinowinu. I hear you're not pleased with the weather."

  "That's true. It seems you don't know how to make winters anymore."

  Tciwetinowinu smiled. "I'll see what I can do," he said.

  Next summer was very warm. Autumn was also warm. Winter started out like it was going to be warm, too.

  Tciwetinowinu is a woman, thought Wolverine.

  Then snow started to come down in thick clumps, and Wolverine's camp was buried. He had never seen so much snow before. After the snow piled up, it grew cold. Very cold. Wolverine had never been this cold before, either.

  One evening Tciwetinowinu dropped by for a visit. Wolverine's teeth were rattling, and his feet were frozen, but he would not let on that he was cold.

  "How are you enjoying this weather, friend?" asked Tciwetinowinu.

  "It's all right," said Wolverine, "but I was hoping for some-thing a little colder."

  "Well, I'll see what I can do," Tciwetinowinu smiled, then he walked out of the tent.

  The next day was so cold that branches were snapping off trees, and Wolverine's piss froze before it reached the ground. He was standing in front of his fire, pouring grease on it, more and more grease.

  Now Tciwetinowinu dropped by for another visit. "How do you like the weather now?" he said.

  As before, Wolverine would not give in. What did he do, then? He began telling his guest all the gossip he'd heard during the past year. Who'd stolen the most wives, who'd eaten their own children, and so on. As he talked, he kept pouring more grease on the fire.

  Tciwetinowinu was beginning to melt. On and on Wolverine gossiped, even as his guest got smaller and smaller.

  At last Tciwetinowinu said: "You're stronger than I am, friend. If I stay here, I'll melt down to nothing."

  Being a polite host, Wolverine followed his guest out of the tent. The minute he stepped outside, he noticed that the cold was less severe.

  And ever since Tciwetinowinu walked out of Wolverine's tent, winters have been winters, neither too cold nor too warm, just right.

  *****

  WHY SHREWS ARE SHREWS

  Once Wolverine drank from a waterhole for such a long time that his mouth froze to the ice. None of his friends could find a way to get him loose.

  Too bad, brother, Wolf told him, but I'm afraid you'll have to stay this way until spring thaw.

  Um-m-m, replied Wolverine, for he couldn't talk with a frozen mouth. What he'd been trying to tell Wolf was, "A fine friend you are to leave me like this!"

  Then a couple of shrews came along. Right away they went to work with their sharp little teeth, and in almost no time Wolverine was free from the ice.

  I promise I'll never hunt you again, Wolverine told the shrews.

  But, as usual, he didn't keep his promise. A week later, he gathered a bunch of shrews, impaled them on a stick, and roasted them over his campfire.

  Which is why shrews have such a reputation for shrewishness: they don't trust anyone but their fellow shrews.

  *****

  WOLVERINE THE MISTAPEO

  Wolverine lay on his back, with his tongue hanging out. Lemmings were really glad to see him like this, for if he was dead, he couldn't eat them anymore. But every time one of them got close to him, he'd grab it and thrust it down his throat.

  At last there were only two lemmings left, both very young. They'd seen Wolverine eat their parents, and they asked him to eat them, too.

  "You're too little," Wolverine told them. "But come back when you grow up, and I'll be happy to eat you."

  The little lemmings wanted to be with their parents, so they cried over and over again, Please eat us, oh please eat us...

  Wolverine was tired after eating so many lemmings, and he fell asleep. Just what the little lemmings had been waiting for. They leaped into his mouth, slid down his throat, and scampered into his stomach, where they found their parents.

  "So good of you to join us, children," said their parents.

  To celebrate being together again, they had a big mukoshan. They made such a racket singing and dancing that they woke up Wolverine.

  There seems to be a mukoshan in my stomach, said Wolverine to himself. How come I wasn't invited?

  And since he was a mistapeo, he conjured himself into a lemming, swallowed himself, a
nd ended up in his own stomach. The lemmings welcomed him and gave him a drum to beat, but they told him to shut his eyes while he was beating it, as that was their custom.

  While Wolverine had his eyes closed, all the lemmings escaped from his mouth.

  The singing seems to have stopped, thought Wolverine. Whereupon he opened his eyes and discovered that he was alone in his own stomach. He now conjured himself into a piece of shit and emerged from his ass, then conjured himself back into Wolverine.

  Well, I've learned my lesson, he thought. From now on, I'll never attend a mukoshan that's going on inside me.

  A few days later, he conjured himself into an arctic hare because some arctic hares that he'd eaten seemed to be having a big party in his stomach.

  *****

  WOLVERINE EATS HIS OWN ASS

  Once it happened that Wolverine couldn't stop farting. And those farts were scaring away all the game.

  "Shut up!" he told his ass.

  "You shut up," his ass said, "or else stop eating so much moss. That's why you're farting all the time."

  "No, you're why I'm farting all the time, and I'm going to punish you for it."

  So he heated a large stone and sat down on it, staying there until he'd burnt his ass to a reddish crisp.

  "You're killing me!" cried the ass.

  "Maybe this will teach you not to fart when I'm trying to hunt," Wolverine said.

  Over the next few days, his ass began to heal, and one of the scabs fell off.