Mark Lawes

I want to share a couple stories of optimism with you…They are stories of a friend of mine, Sequoyah…he’s a 70 year old Choctaw/German from Oklahoma City. No teeth and a big smile, he’s always laughing at something. He went to residential school, fought in Vietnam, served time for drug trafficking, etc, etc, etc. He stays with me when he needs a place to sleep in Calgary.

Anyway a few years ago he was traveling from Calgary to Regina with Niki (a former roommate of mine) heading for Saskatoon. A couple hours outside the city Sequoyah asked Niki the price of the hotel that they were supposed to be staying at. She said the hotel was $65. He dug into his pocket, pulled out 50 bucks and said, well this won’t do us much good will it? And threw the money out the window. I can hear him laughing now.

Another time while he was staying with me, he had to go down to the immigration office. The women at the counter was asking about his personal information, what’s your address, what’s your bank account, what’s your social insurance number. He told her he didn’t have any of these things….The woman at the counter said, that must be nice, I wish I could be like that. He said, you can.

My former roommate Niki, her native name is wakwa pulxaneeks (flower child) is the only person in her extended family who is not alcoholic or addicted to drugs. She grew up with abuse. When I first met her she was staying with her aunt and uncle in Calgary who were both crack addicts. She has never tasted a drop of alcohol or experimented with drugs. She said that, from the time she was a child, she knew that she needed to do something different, as a symbol of hope for her people.

And finally a quote from Thomas King when speaking about a Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish writer Louis Owens who killed himself in airport parking garage on his way to an academic conference in Bellingham, Wahsington: “We wrote knowing that none of the stories we wrote would change the world. But we wrote in the hope that they would.”