Elsa and I were cleaning berries. Sitting around the picnic table, watching the kids play. The hot tea was just what we needed. The mist was rising from the lake and the wind had a cool edge to it. Maybe two hours of sunlight left. Early September.

"There's more leaves here than berries," she shook her head. Brief pause. Good-natured frown. "When I was a kid, we picked clean. None of this let somebody else clean up after us and we'll go play business." With the late afternoon sun behind her, Elsa was a silhouette, her white hair a corona around her head and shoulders. A halo. Her fingers moved quickly as she sorted out the ripe huckle-berries from all the other stuff the kids had picked.

The local radio station was playing a program about role models for Native kids. The importance of having somebody to look up to. Somebody with a good image and a high profile. A self-proclaimed expert on Native people and on counselling problem kids was answering questions from callers. They were talking about Alwyn Morris and Buffy Sainte-Marie and Louis Riel and all kinds of dead chiefs and Graham Greene. Everyone kept calling up and saying who their big hero was, Native hero. Some people phoned up thinking Charles Bronson and Chuck Connors were Indians, even Charlton Heston. Mostly it was kids who phoned up because it was Bingo night. But some parents got on the line.

One young-sounding girl, maybe eleven or twelve, said that her brother was her hero because he quit drinking. Another said her uncle was because he quit coming after her. "Thank you for calling." Click. Those two got clicked off the air pretty quick. Then I heard a soft firm voice on the air say, "You got to have local heroes, people the kids can see every day. Not all those big name people, most of them dead or living in another country. And if you hang up on me, I'll tell everybody all about you. You know my voice so we'll just leave it at that. So you just listen for a bit." It sounded a lot like Elsa. I looked up and she wasn't where she had been. I scanned the whole park. No Elsa. Walking towards where the car was parked, I stopped and smiled. There was Elsa in the phone booth, giving it to the radio announcer.

"Kids need these here role model people from their own community. All these other guys you're talking about are way above their heads. Sure, they're people you can look up to, but not for these kids. Not for kids with nothing. They need people like the ones those young kids were talking about when you clicked them off. Leaders aren't people so far above us, we're afraid to breathe the same air. Leaders are who we could all be if we weren't so messed up trying to be white and all that other stuff." The announcer tried to cut Elsa short.

"Just a minute now, mister. You been talking too much about stuff you don't know anything about. You listen for a bit and I'll bet you know when I'm finished." You could hear the announcer hold his breath. There was a pause, then Elsa spoke again. "My hero, the person I look up to most is everybody who quit drinking and taking drugs and everybody who quit beating other people up and who started to heal themselves and not just talk about it. My hero is somebody I know, not somebody from the TV or newspaper."

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but we have to move on to a commercial message and then to the next program."

"You just forget about that for a while." And he did. "When kids take the trouble to phone you up and tell you somebody from their own family or some friend of theirs or somebody they heard about from around here is their hero because they're trying to straighten out, you don't click them off like that. You got lots of fancy book learning and big talk, but you need manners just like everybody else." Pause. "I want somebody else to have a chance to talk so I'll go now."

"Thank you for calling..."

"So you just let people keep calling until they stop. It's important kids know that heroes and leaders are in their own community. Their own family. You don't need fancy clothes and newspaper stories and everybody taking pictures of you to be a hero. Sometimes we got to be our own heroes. If we don't feel good about ourselves, we don't have much to start with. That's all I got to say... for now." Click.

I smiled at Elsa as she hung up the phone and turned. We looked at one another, both smiling now, and walked back to the picnic bench together. The kids were there, cleaning the berries. They'd gotten tired of playing and the girls had somehow convinced the boys to help them clean up. We laughed together and then sat back and sipped tea and listened to the phone-in show until it got dark.

The next morning we found out that the show had gone on for four hours longer than it was supposed to. Elsa smiled in a half-cross way. "You got to be tough with these media people or they'll run over you like a crazy horse. Tough in a nice kind of way."