Wabanaki Trailer Park: Annika Gamelin

Annika Gamelin

Wabanaki Trailer Park

Yourself

When we just did adventure tours, I got a lot of bright-eyed questions about spirits. Ancestors. Feeling the power of the earth and such. I’m Wabanaki Confederacy, I must be into that stuff, right? I never thought of it as a mystical thing, a tribal thing, to treat the land with respect. We learn from our elders. You can’t find much older out here than the land. That’s the starry-eyed version. The one down here in the grit is that the land will kill you and keep on going like a logging truck. So you respect it, and try to find peace with that idea. Understand that it’s so much bigger than all of us, and has its own big plan. Yes, this world has slipped out of balance. And yes, we have words for that with a whole bunch of vowel sounds. But you and I have been walking on a giant all these years. It just shrugged its shoulders.

Solomon Island

Before the storm, Paul and I were talking expansion. I’d talk, he’d agree. On the mainland, maybe up in the Appalachians. Been tracking sightings of unidentified creatures there since we got started. You cross off half of them as overactive imagination and we’re still talking dozens. We could move up from one hunt a month to two a week. Damn, but those New Yorkers can’t get enough trophies. Decorating their boardrooms or something. Sightings were on the up and up here, too. Not just the Sasquatch and the wendigo. There’s something out there…different to the rest. I hear its call some nights. It’s a wrong sound. Not an animal call, but something that’s making a noise like it thinks an animal should. Doesn’t even carry on the air right. If it’s marking out it’s territory, that’s the best of a bad situation. Means it’s not coming down here.

The Wabanaki

If there’s still a tribe here, I’d call it a dysfunctional one. I mostly keep out of Wabanaki business. They can’t get along with each other, let alone cope in the real world. And half the townies still lock up their mouthwash when they see one of us coming. Then there’s the matter of our sacred land. Sometimes they can’t trip over themselves fast enough to sell it off by the yard. Others, they dig in their heels even when Sycoil suits are here sweating money. Me, I think they like the fantasy that there’s good soil to protect and sour soil to make the evil eye at. It doesn’t work that way. People gave Blue Ridge a bad name, not ancient curses. No one disturbed the burial grounds and yet there they are, up and walking anyway. It can take days for these boys to agree on the communal food order. If they were the defenders of this island? I’d feel bad for the island.