Nancy is pretty. She has black eyes, round cheeks and long hair that falls over her shoulders. She dresses well. She’s eighteen and has three children. She already had two when she married William. During the day, her mother looks after the kids.

I walk down the hall and stand in the doorway. A man looks up and waves at me.

“Come on in!”

He holds out his hand. He’s white with red hair, used to work for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Behind his back we say he looks like an old stovepipe because his face and neck are covered with brown spots like rust.

I hold out my letter about the appointment. He takes it and looks at me, his head tilted to one side, his lips pressed together. His glasses have thick frames the same color as his freckles.

“Right, okay! Larivière?”

He turns to a big gray metal file cabinet. With one finger he pushes on a drawer and it silently slides open. I see a long tidy row of tightly packed brown files, one behind the other. They all have red labels that stick up like little flags. They remind me of the surveyors’ stakes.

His fingers march over the tops of the files as he squints at each one and mutters under his breath.

“Bearskin… okay… Brascoupé, okay…okay… okay.”

I watch him closely.

“H…Laloo, okay… Larivière! Here we go, Pierre Larivière!” He looks pleased with himself as he pulls a thick folder out of the drawer. He comes back and sits across from me, puts the file on his desk and opens it.

I can’t believe my eyes. If I understand all this correctly, that cabinet contains a file on each one of us. I look at mine. I see a bundle of pink pages covered with writing. It looks like government stationery.

The man bends over the file and reads the first page out loud. I lean forward on the edge of my seat and crane my neck to try to see what he’s reading, but I can’t make it out.

“Pierre Larivière,” he reads. “Also known as Nipishish, son of Shipu, Algonquin, and Flore St. Amour, White…” He glances up at me. “…born in Maniwaki in 1944.”

He continues reading in a low voice. He mumbles away and I can’t understand what he’s saying.

“Okay!” He stares at me attentively. “Okay! You attended St. Mark Residential School?”

I’m caught off guard. I nod. He seems to know everything, yet I never imagined there was a file containing all this information about me. And it seems as though there’s one for each of us! Why? What could this file say about me?

“Here we go,” he says. “I have your personal form here. Okay. Now I just need your letter of confirmation…”

He flips a few pages.

“Okay! Here it is!”

He produces a typed page that he reads to himself in silence. I don’t like these silences.