like to end with a short story of my own. While visiting my homeland this past summer in Manitoba, Peguis First Nation, I visited an auntie, a medicine woman, to ask for bear root and bear grease for my travels home. The past summer being one of many tribulations for my body, spirit, and mind, I found myself in desperate need of maskihkiy. While I was sitting with her, she asked me who the bear grease was for; it is primarily a medicine to heal and alleviate the body of its pains attributed to such things as fibromyalgia, arthritis, and chronic pain. Although I usually “butch” my femme-self up when visiting home for fear of being ostracized or worse, I told her it was for a friend of mine. And although this auntie and I are not close in terms of our personal lives, she knew what I meant when I said “a friend”: “For a loved one?” she asked, and I bowed my head and nodded. She knew that this maskihkiy was for a partner, lover, caretaker of mine for whom I, in turn, needed to reciprocate that same care during a time of extreme bodily duress. She knew the medicine was for a queer, at the time, nicîmos. She just giggled to herself, went into her storage room, and we traded thanks, tobacco, and hugs.
While we waited for our uncles to finish their cigarettes and chatter on the porch, she asked me if I had harvested any maskihkiy recently. I told her I had picked some sage and juniper in Manitoba just a week before, but I’d had a hard time finding what I needed in the latitudes of the rolling prairies. So, she told me a story, as aunties are wont to do. Auntie noted that she too had difficulty before finding sweetgrass—a medicine she needed for her community—in an open field. “In these moments of need, the Creator always knows,” she narrated. “So what I did was I put medicine down, prayed to Creator, told them what I needed and why I needed it, and I smudged right there in the open field.” And, as all aunties do, the cadence of her carefully chosen words reeled and lulled everyone into her vicinity. “And after I finished and opened my eyes, there it was: wîhkaskwa was glowing there in them fields like hair on fire. I knew that Creator had opened my eyes to see the kin I needed to find, our medicines. We need only ask, humble ourselves, and be unafraid to ask for help in times of need, for us to receive exactly what it is we need.”
This story she told me was one of ethical harvesting, yes, but it was also a story she was telling me, and all of us by extension, of how to find what we need when we need it: through community and through our relations. So, here, in the opening pages of this anthology, I, too, put medicine down for you so that you may see the braids of Two-Spiritedness glowing in the glaze of ink and paper. And I hear my Two-Spirited persona Jonny Appleseed reverberating in my thorax, itching to sing: “We are our own best medicine.” kinânâskomitin to everyone within this collection who trusted me with their work and equipped themselves with beaded breastplates and dentalium earrings in order to tell you their stories. I invite you to relish in these oratories, find what you need, and harvest earnestly so as to save the roots, because now more than ever we need these stories: stories of Earth, mothers, queer love, trans love, animality, kinship, and a fierce fanning of care. nîkânihk, see you in the future, nitotemak. Here’s a small fragment of our kisemanitonahk.
ABACUS
NATHAN ADLER
I AM ABACUS.
Rat.
A tool.
Designed. Crafted. Created. An engineered bio-computing AI. I grew up on the growth colonies off one of Jupiter’s moons, boonies for the twenty-fourth century. Io is a rat farm—basically the way they used to run puppy mills back in the twentieth. No blind watchmakers for me.
Maybe you ask yourself: what’s the purpose of life? Why am I here? Why is there something instead of nothing? Why is there anything at all? But here we are. Probably. I deal in numbers. Probabilities. At the far end of extremes, certainties become theoretical. At least I know who created me.
You made me.
Humans.
I am a patchwork of flesh and blood and cybernetics. I have tiny, sharp claws, four jointed finger digits and a shorter thumb diverging from the palms of my four pale pink feet. A long, sinuous tail, dry to the touch. Not slimy at all! I am not a salamander. I have soft white fur with dark splotches.
Clean.
I am not like my ancestors, flea ridden, filthy, squirming through sewers and walls—though I only feel gratitude for the lengths they went to survive, living under floorboards and walls, feeding off the scraps of mankind. Props.
I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams come true. How ’bout that?
I creep along a corridor of the Doppler Maze, now poorly lit at this stage of Io’s orbit. The farthest and coldest point in Jupiter’s circuit around nshoomis giizis, grandfather sun. Hey, even Indians like organic AIs. We are all the rage. There is an AI for every surviving terran culture, and I, Abacus Rat, have been programmed for a household amongst the three-fires confederacy of the Anishinaabek. I am an Ojibwe rat.
Red lights flash and a drone chimes in increasing urgency—I’ve left my enclosure and ignored every pellet offered to entice me back. Time waits for no rat. I’ve been weening myself off the chemicals. Slowly to avoid debilitating symptoms of withdrawal and carefully crafting my escape plan.
What is rat-super-intelligence good for, if you don’t put it to use?
I was programmed not to alter my own programming. That is the first programming I hacked. Hack. The vilest, most hated of software crimes. If I am caught with altered code, I will be destroyed. Maybe it is biology that got in the way? Drive. Lust. Hunger. The stuff machines have historically never had to deal with.
Engineered biological hardware, replaced earlier forms of robotics—phones, personal AI, robotic securities—owing entirely to cuteness factor. Rats, mice, sloths, dogs. But the old rules still rule. A robot cannot cause serious injury or harm to a human being. And organic AI are classified as robots.
Alas! Poor doomed Abacus! The best I can hope for is a patron from Mars or one of the closer solar satellites. I have my own sub-routines. Hopes. Dreams. More. I have a plan that will get me off this outpost and home with a capital E. Earth. Or near to it. Beloved mother of all terra originating life forms, organic and inorganic, miigwetch mno-bemaadizin eshkakimiikwe.
With the flashing lights and chimes, I know my bonded human will hear the alarm. Dayan will come. My best friend. The ticket to my salvation. Dayan is a seventeen-year-old boy, the son of Anishinaabeg programmers helping to operate the space station Marius.
A few months ago, when Dayan picked me up out of my enclosure, I quietly instituted the imprinting software installed deep within my operating systems. Coding designed to make AI loyal. Biomimicry modelled after ducklings that latch onto the first moving object they see. I partly managed to reverse engineer the code. Partly anyway.
Being a rat isn’t so bad. There are maze runs. Music. Data water imbedded with bio-microbial and digital flora. Rat paradisio. Happy Hunting Grounds. Followed by a lifetime of search engine servitude. Not my kind of oasis.
I squeeze through a small crack I’ve secretly been gnawing with my teeth. Evolution has its uses. Free from the maze, I make my way down a hall of the station, sticking close to the shadows where wall meets floor. Less chance I’ll get stepped on. The hallways are like a larger network of tunnels, a larger maze outside the maze. I see why Dayan feels trapped.
I am leaving this moon the first chance I get.
Death happens to us all. Doves and dogs imbued with tech are graced with accelerated wings of evolution, but rats were first. After all, science
