Page 21 - 1st Anthology 2011

My only memories of growing up on the reserve, is that it is a place where you can run
around, eat and had a place to sleep. As I was growing older I had lots of chores to do. I

just took them naturally. Sometimes I ask my mom, how come I have to work so hard.
She said, well you’re the one that’s doing it.

My dad, he farmed and he had lots of animals and my mom, her project was pigs. With
things like that we survived. I called the pigs, my mom’s pigs. She was the only one that
can get into the pigs’ pen, without the mother pig chasing her. If it were my dad the
mother pig would chase him, even when they had the piglets. It was my mom that was
always there. She had to help the sow to help deliver the litter, and I had to help too.

You want to know how come you have to work so hard, and she said that’s what you have
to live for. If we didn’t have any chickens, we would have no eggs. If we didn’t have any
pigs, we wouldn’t have any meat.

My dad knew how to clean the pigs. I had to help him too. He made a big pot with boiling
water and he tied up the pigs legs and he would put it down in the boiling water. He had
a table beside it, and when it was finished he put it on the table. I had to help scrap the

hair off. He had to take the guts out first. Otherwise it would have rotted. Anyway that’s
how we cleaned the pigs, and after everything is all done my dad would cut it all up.

Our fridge was a natural spring. It’s somewhere in the woods, I don’t know if it’s still
there. My brother is living there. My dad put a box in there, and he would wrap it up with
the brown paper with linen on it. My mom would wrap it up and sometimes she put salt
in it. We put it in that box, it was sitting in the spring, where the water was coming up.
Some part of the food he let the water run right through it. Some of them he kept them

dry, I don’t know why.

My dad was good. When I asked him questions, he didn’t refuse to tell me. Same with my
mom, that’s why I think I worked so hard all my life. It was my job to make sure the
chickens were fed. We had lots of geese and ducks. We had a natural spring and around it
was flat. So the ducks and the geese came in and out of the water.

The only time we had turkeys, was just before Christmas. My dad bought them when they
were small then we would raise them. Not many, just enough for the family and whoever
deserves it out of the old people. They didn’t even know how to cook turkeys. My mom
always managed to cook for them.

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