Tales from an Ojibway Chief: n’Gosh
Having just submitted ‘Worlds Between’, the second novel in The River of Lakes trilogy, for publication in the Spring, I am focusing now on the third novel. My working title for this book has been n’Gosh’, which is the name Steve Fobister gave me when we worked together as teenage boys, for it isn’t until this third novel, set in 1969, that a character loosely based on me shows up.
This character’s name, by the way, is Guy Greene. And Guy immediately falls in love with the daughter of Brian and Maureen Burke, who they named Grace O’Malley Burke.
First he saw her hair. It was long and black, wild and wavy. And then he saw her eyes, her bright blue eyes, just as wild. She was boundary breaking beautiful, and his were busted.
Steve gave me the name n’Gosh the first summer I worked in Ontario, the summer I turned 16. I loved it and was afraid to ask Steve what it meant. It was magic, too good to be true, that I had been given an Indian name, and I didn’t want to ruin it by finding out it meant something not so pleasant. I had a thick head of nearly black curly hair in those days and somewhere along the line I got the impression that’s what it meant, the curly headed one, something like that, so I left it there for much of the summer.
Then the first season was nearly over, soon I would be headed home, so finally I asked Steve what it meant. He said “I don’t know, you tell me.”
“I should tell you what it means?”
“Yes,” he replied, “you say it all the time?”
“I say it all the time?”
“Sure. Like when I show you a new water fall or the pictographs or the burial site, you always say ‘n’Gosh!'”