Things I Know, Entry No. 2

SASKATCHEWAN: noun 1. A province of Canada. (From the Cree language "kisiskāciwani-sīpiy" meaning "We don't mind so much if the white man has this bit.") 2. An Inuit onomatopoeia for the sound dead seals make when dragged across snow.

Early History

Saskatchwan was born Warren Ellis "Chad" Skatchewan April 3, 1861 to Mungford Two-Fist Skatchewan, a hopelessly lost native Seminole, and Juanita Cheryl (née Rubenstein), a mountain. Skatchewan was born in a cave somewhere in modern-day Alberta, a fact that has been a source of some embarrassment and no fewer than 81 attempted cover-ups and whitewashings by modern Saskatchewanese political historians. At the time of Chad's, as he was known by his parents and friends throughout childhood, birth, his father was employed intermittently as a roof shingler, a tile setter, a shaman, an arborvitae topiary and a circuit judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. His mother found steady work as a mountain.

The Path to Self-Determination

Given his parents' rather unimpressive statuses as a drifter and a middling peak in a wayward arm of the Canadian Rockies, respectively, Chad realized early on that he would have to find his own way in the world. He showed some of his father's characteristic restlessness in his search to find his purpose. His forays into the fields of stonemasonry, interior decoration and Senior Vice President in Charge of Account Development and Copyediting for the Madison Avenue advertising firm Diehlman, Kruger, Widness and Vine all left him feeling cold, vast, windswept and mostly unpopulated. His longest and most successful career attempt was his 11-year reign as god-king of the South Pacific island of Bolangui, where his word was divine law and transgressions were paid in human blood, measured not in drops but in rivers.

All through this period, Chad maintained steady attendance through correspondence courses in classes related to licensed vocational nursing, much to his father's shame.

Political Rise

The unexpected arrival of four North American missionaries to Bolangui by canoe immediately changed the course of Chad's life. Three of the four new arrivals were immediately seized, seasoned and very respectfully eaten at a feast in the god-king's honor. The fourth was allowed to live when she shouted out just as the knife was put to her throat that Chad had been, quite unexpectedly, named a Provisional District of the Northwest Territories on July 1, 1881.

From Territory to Imprisonment

Chad spent the next 14 years quiety studying for his LVN degree as well as taking on settlers, accommodatingly growing things like wheat and corn and diplomatically keeping the murderously antagonistic Alberta and Manitoba apart from one another.

These were not all happy years. Chad had grown accustomed to both the balmy tropical climes and the life-giving sycophancy of his god-king days on Bolangui. The ball-shrinking frigidness of winters on the Canadian Shield and the milquetoast collegiality and coequality of constitutional-monarchic dominionesque government were great psychological strains.

During a particular cold snap lasting from December 1882 to August 1890, at a vulnerable low moment during court-mandated Provincial Group Therapy, the Provisional Province of Athabasca suggested Chad was "deflecting" feelings of inadequacy due to his obscure birth by belittling British Columbia for the stark unoriginality of its name, to which Chad replied by suggesting Athabasca "go fuck [it]self." Within weeks, the incident escalated in an attempted coup by Chad to overthrow the unelected leadership of Canada as a whole and declare himself Grand High Mountain Spirit of the United Empire of Canada-Bolangui. The attempt was thwarted by unprecedented (and unrepeated) Ontario-Quebec cooperation and an ill-timed long stretch of drunkenness by Chad.

Chad was subsequently exiled to himself for the remainder of his natural life and thus doomed to eternal world irrelevance, where he today remains under the typographical-error name "Saskatchewan."

Personal Life

As a child of mixed parentage, Chad found it difficult to build long-lasting relationships. Bolanguinian native women, naturally, offered themselves to him to do with as he pleased, which he often and vigorously did, but at the expense of real and meaningful interaction. He thought he had cohabitated for four months with self-proclaimed environmentalist "Dr." Annette Nussman-Flail, but was embarrassed later to discover that she lingered so long with him only because she was, at the time, under the impression that she was in fact a tree.

Favoring his mother's heritage, his longest lasting relationship was with a glacial depression named Cordelia Johanssen. The match lasted two years until Johanssen left Chad for a migrant flock of Canadian geese.