Sisters of Grass by Theresa Kishkan

remember. And we will keep making baskets together. That will teach you how to use plants and make something useful.”
    After tea and a bowl of stew, Margaret and her grandmother gathered some baskets together and followed one of the creeks north of Douglas Lake up into a group of hills bright with spring sunflowers. The old woman told the girl that they’d come to this place every year with their faces painted — “some of us painted our whole face red, some just put a dot on each cheek” — and that they had a prayer:
    I inform you that I intend to eat you,
    may you help me to grow,
    may you help me to be graceful,
    not to be lazy.
    You are the most mysterious of all plants.
    â€œThis was our most important plant because we used so many parts of it, and each part had a different name in the old language, the stalk, the root, a different name for a collection of roots, the seeds, a name for when the leaves were just beginning to show. You’d know when other plants would be ready by this one. When the sunflower bloomed, it wouldn’t be long for the bitterroot, the spring buds, all the others we used.”
    â€œWhat does it taste like?” Margaret was thinking of the yellow petals and what it would be like to eat flowers.
    â€œWe’ll bring some back, eh, and you’ll know. The roots have to be cooked and then added to the pot of meat or fish. Some grease with it is good.” Grandmother Jackson took a knife from one of the baskets and carefully pried up several long tap roots, shaking the dirt from them gently. She then cut the entire crown of a little plant that had not yet flowered for a spring treat. Offering Margaret a part of it, she put the remainder into her mouth and chewed it with pleasure. Margaret chewed cautiously, finding the flavour mild and a little bitter.
    â€œThe girls, they made moccasins of the leaves, putting sweetgrass inside, after their first bleeding. Put one of these against your cheek and think what it would feel like to wear the moccasins.”
    Margaret closed her eyes and felt the fine hairs of the leaves, inhaling the smell, dry and warm, like the hills. She thought hard about the young girls coming away from their people, wanting to feel them around her in the unchanged hills as they learned their place in the landscape, which was her home. Sometimes, when she rode alone beyond the ranch, she had a sense that she was entering a timeless world where everything was of value: the erratics with their cryptic patterns of lichen, long grasses with insects riding their seedheads in the wind, a pile of bear scat alive with seeds containing the knowledge of what they would become — thistle, berry bush, little thorny rose. She would pass through this world quietly, only the soft sound of her horse’s hooves on dust, as much a part of it as sky. If she had time, she’d dismount and find a warm patch of grasses to lie among, her horse content to graze, the bit jingling against her teeth. Margaret would will each limb and muscle to relax into grass and go into a kind of sleep, motionless, while the horned larks sang in a tongue she could almost understand. She was weightless, unburdened, her hair perfumed. Rising, she took the memory of grass with her on the rest of her travels, tiny seeds thrust into the warmth of her hair.
    Opening her eyes, Margaret returned to her grandmother. “But why was the bone sticking out of the ground? Mother thought it was part of a burial ground when I told her about the rocks all around, but why would a drinking tube be in a burial ground?”
    Her grandmother came close and put her arm around the girl’s shoulders. “Margaret, when a girl died young, maybe still in the middle of her learning, or even before she began to bleed, she took her things into the grave with her, things she would have needed if she had lived. I think our people were careful to make sure the dead ones went prepared, not