It makes me so sad to see it.

“Our ancestors were brave men,” Tom always says. “But who will be our heroes now? We are sick and we no longer know how to cure ourselves. We wallow in our dependency and our fear. We hide behind the filthy curtains of our wooden houses. We hardly dare peek outside when a white man walks by. We spit our hate and our despair onto our own floors. We bury our heads in the ground because we are ashamed of what we have become.”

The last Thursday of every month, all the mothers gather in front of the band office like a clutch of partridges. They wait silently, their heads and shoulders covered with plaid shawls. Their flowered dresses reach the ground. I can’t see their faces or their feet or hands. They almost look like statues.

At nine o’clock sharp, the manager opens the band office. The women climb the steps like some solemn religious procession as they go to pick up the social assistance that the government gives all Indian families so that they can survive. The check is written out to the woman. She can claim it by signing the register with an X.

At home, the men are anxiously waiting for their wives to return. The husband will take the piece of paper to the Hudson’s Bay Company store, the only place where it can be cashed. He’ll take the check the same way he used to take his pelts of beaver, otter, fox and marten that he had trapped during the winter on his hunting grounds. But now he just cashes his check, using part of it to settle his debts at the store — just enough so that he can run into debt again before the end of the next month.

At that moment, a small seaplane flies over the reserve. It circles overhead like a bird of prey, then lands on the other side of the point that juts out into the big lake. It’s the smuggler who comes on the last Thursday of every month, sniffing out some good business. He berths at the old dock, sheltered from view. He’s in a hurry to unload his precious cargo — cases of beer — that he piles one on top of the other.

The men arrive one by one. They stay a respectable distance apart on the path, to make it seem as though they don’t see each other. They have faces like stone. At the dock, each man holds out forty dollars and then grabs two cases of beer. Once they are back on the path, they move quickly, eyes fixed on the ground like a fox that’s afraid of dropping its prey.

Then the former hunters drown their sorrows.