Dropped Threads 2: More of What We Aren't Told

by Carol Shields

  And another community. Nestled in the northeast portion of the province of Manitoba is the small fly-in community of St. Theresa Point. A mall houses the “economic heart” of this isolated place—a Northern Store, a chain retail outlet, a fast-food business, and a convenience store that is closed all the time that I am there. To deal with the 80 to 90 percent unemployment, there is one economic development officer and two staff members. It’s December when I arrive to interview these people and other community members to find out about their vision for community development. The place where I stay used to house the nuns. The windows are covered in plastic for insulation that doesn’t work too well, so while I fit in some marking for the Native studies course I teach at university, I’m on my bed huddled beneath five quilts.

  And yet, my strongest memory is of the joy I share with these First Nations people. We gather at a radio station to play music and help raise money for a local charity. The big question is what designer made my socks—as a guest in town, I’m an object of much interest. We get caller after caller flinging answers at us. The fifth caller in wins a bingo card with the answer—Calvin Klein! In this remote little community, where the lineup stretches 150 feet down the mall at 9:00 a.m. on welfare day, the laughter flows freely, people get engaged in a guessing game for charity and they know about a designer from New York. We finish off the day with a ceremony honouring the elders. Smiling faces in a community known in the outside world by a single statistic—unemployment.

  St. Theresa Point, Manitoba. Haines Junction, Yukon. Fort Resolution, Northwest Territories. Tiny dots on the map. Hardly worth noticing. The people living in these places are some of the faces behind the statistics that any non-Aboriginal Canadian might know about from the “newspaper reality”—headlines about our problems, about Aboriginal people being at greater risk for a wide range of medical problems, including infectious and cardiovascular diseases, as well as chronic conditions such as diabetes and tuberculosis; about how life expectancy for our people is seven to eight years fewer than for other Canadians; about the frequency of alcohol and substance abuse, family violence and suicide, which alone is two to three times higher for First Nations people than for other Canadians.

  I am a teacher. While my training is in management studies, I teach at a university in the Native Studies department. I hold two degrees in business and a law degree. In 2000, I finished a Ph.D. on Aboriginal economy. One of the first things I say to my students when we meet in the classroom is that my goal is to help them see beyond these “problem” statistics and to move the understanding of my people from their heads—the logical, rational and objective place that universities ask us to operate from—to their hearts. That is, I believe, the beginning of true knowledge, wisdom and understanding. Those are the teachings that I follow.

  Logic dictates that people with huge obstacles that go to the essence of their existence are too far down a dark hole to have any kind of hope for significant and lasting change. That has not been my experience. That is not what I teach my students. These statistics do point to huge problems that we have to come to grips with—but are they the whole picture? Where am I in those statistics? Where are my colleagues and some of my relatives? Where are the ones who live their lives with courage, pride and delight? Like Auntie Maggie, a trapper woman who laughs through hardships and celebrates life and its natural ending after outliving three husbands in northern Manitoba. Like Jane Priscilla Wuttunee, my granny, a healer and mother of twelve. Like James Wuttunee, my grandfather, who fed and clothed his family with grace, good heart and hard, hard work. We’ve been the invisible ones and, for far too long, the silent.

  We are more than our problems, and the chorus of our voices is getting stronger. In the work I do, I witness the positive changes happening in individuals, families and communities. I know other statistics that balance those we read in the daily newspapers, the ones that represent the inroads we are making in education and business: currently there are over forty thousand Aboriginals enrolled in colleges and universities in Canada, up from a total of sixty in 1961; and there are over twenty-two thousand viable Aboriginal-owned Canadian businesses, up from a total of eighty-five hundred in 1981. But statistics can never get to the heart of who we are; for that we need others to know the stories of individual Aboriginal people who stand out in our communities—people like my father, William Wuttunee.

  William, of Cree, Irish and Scottish heritage, was born in 1928 on Red Pheasant Reserve, Saskatchewan, a tiny place of about thirty-six square miles—typical, dirt poor and filled with people who do the best they can in trying circumstances. He had eight brothers and sisters (three others died) who were born to Priscilla and James Wuttunee. James made the decision to move his family from the reserve to the nearby small town, Battleford. He felt he had to give up his status as an Indian in order to provide his family with a better life; he did not, however, give up who he was or his integrity as an Indian.

  My father attended residential school for two years, with the resulting emotional scars suffered by any ten-year-old who feels as though school turned out to be “a prison for unknown crimes.” After earning the highest marks across Canada in Grade 12, my father won a scholarship to McGill University. He studied law and eventually completed his studies at the University of Saskatchewan. He met my mother in Regina, married despite the opposition at that time from my mother’s Caucasian, strict Catholic family and had five children. I am the eldest.

  My father entered into a pact with one of his brothers: they would raise their children without the burden of anger and shame from our history. No passing down of the outrage against the injustices suffered by our people. Supported by my mother, who feels strongly connected to Aboriginal culture, my siblings and I learned the positive, beautiful things about being Indian. My father taught us about our relatives: we knew our aunts, uncles and cousins; we visited the reserve regularly and learned to take pride in our culture. These heart gifts are part of me.

  Did you read about my father or about my family in the newspaper this morning? We are part of the reality that isn’t often reported on. Newspapers don’t tell the whole story, but they may well be the main source of information for most Canadians on the pulse of Indian country. Even if these stories run alongside ones about other “problem” circumstances or people in Canada, somehow they take on a different hue if they are about Aboriginal peoples. They sit differently. Reaction is often, Why waste money on a losing proposition? Why isn’t anything changing? Sometimes those attitudes colour encounters we have with others.

  One particularly memorable encounter for me was with a man from a business-support program in B.C. who was attending a conference on entrepreneurship that I, as an M.B.A. student, was also attending. We began talking over lunch, and for some reason, this man felt he should advise me that I had three strikes against me. He stated matter-of-factly that my age (thirty-two) and the facts that I was female and Aboriginal were deterrents to my becoming successful in business.

  I consider those traits my biggest assets.

  It may be hard to have hope for us when so many are surrounded by a darkness born out of painful personal experiences. But there is hope. I carry hope because of what I see happening in individual lives, what I witness in small, isolated communities and because of the many gifts I have been given by my father and my mother—pride in my heritage, an ability to see the beauty of the human spirit and a belief in myself. I see the hope, the dreams and the reality that are not measured by those statistics you read in the newspaper. I see the bright lights shining across this country. They are the heart and soul of my people. This story is my gift to them.

  Bettina’s

  Hat

  Linda Rogers

  A few years ago my friend the fabric artist Bettina Matzkuhn was putting together a show of reversible hats painted with personal totems; she’d asked a number of her friends to provide primal images for her to work with. Her question to me was whether I had a “comfort fetish,�
� something like an old blanket I depended on at those times when children suck their thumbs and twirl their hair. “Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’m a grown-up.” Then I remembered—the mantra I always resort to in times of stress or illness: “I want my mother.”

  When the catalogue of Bettina’s hats arrived, I saw that my mantra had been translated into a breast with legs painted on the crown of a hat. It took a hat with a nipple to make me realize I’d come a long way from wanting to be an honorary boy—girls were too passive and weak—to understanding how much I loved and needed my tribe.

  Initiation into the tribe of women wasn’t easy for me, growing up in the fifties. “Mother tongue” was an oxymoron then; our mothers’ tongues were tied as surely as their breasts and hips were shackled in products by Maidenform. My mother, using her “man’s” mind in the woman’s world of advocacy for social causes, managed almost every arts and humanitarian organization in Vancouver, but even intelligent, socially aware mothers like her were complicit in the conspiracy to separate girls from their bodies and from each other. Because our mothers wanted to protect us, they taught us to dissemble, to squeeze into moulds as constricting as girdles.

  Part of the moulding involved constraints on language. There were words we did not utter in my family, and for me, the only daughter, the list was long. My parents never used what they termed “vulgar” language, which included the correct names of body parts that were considered private. I never heard any word at all for “vagina.” In fact, I didn’t know I had one until I menstruated!

  In sharp contrast to the blank space in language for female genitals, there was a plethora of ridiculous, “underground” terms for the penis, like “peeper,” “dingus,” and “dewey.” The subversive language indicated that this body part was dirty, for peeing, never the instrument of desire and ultimately pleasure. On the way home from school one day when I was about nine years old, my friend and I were stopped by a man in a car, who wanted to show us “something.” We knew what the something was but didn’t have a word we were allowed to use. I took his licence number and reported him to my mother, who called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. When the constable came to our house, I was reading. I don’t think I looked up past his boots once.

  “Do you know what a penis is?” the policeman asked. I said no. Young ladies, nice girls, did not know words like that, and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t admit it to a cop. He informed my mother I wouldn’t be asked to testify because of the limitations of my vocabulary. My mother accepted this as a testament to her effective daughter-rearing. But surely it must have struck both of us as ironic that someone who had already wormed her way through a large chunk of English literature should be described as word challenged.

  And yet, my father, who was a lawyer, taught me that language was the key that would unlock every mystery, whether it was legal, philosophical, theological or anthropological. Why was it, then, that I kept bumping into words and concepts that might as well have had a big red line through them, indicating DO NOT GO THERE? I was given free rein in my parents’ magnificent library, where I devoured my father’s grown-up books, even though I certainly didn’t understand everything I read. I knew better than to ask them about words I’d never heard mentioned in the house and did not appear in my dictionary; instead, I drew my own conclusions or interrogated one of the worldly boys at school. In Tender Is the Night, Dick Diver comments on bad sex with his wife, Nicole, saying he never made love to dry loins. What did that mean? Certainly he wasn’t kissing overcooked lamb chops. I assumed it was a typo and transposed two letters so it read “lions.” Henry Miller uses the word “cunt” in the first sentence of The Tropic of Cancer. I got a detention in French class for whispering a query to a classmate who might have known what that word meant.

  Much of the terminology we did have access to reinforced rigid division between good and evil. This was a time when humans were separated along gender lines—beer parlours were divided into “Men’s” and “Ladies and Escorts”—and our sex seemed to be further split into “good girls” and “bad girls.” Bad girls were easy. They wore feather earrings and tight skirts and rode sidesaddle on their boyfriends’ motorcycles. Bad girls advertised: they looked cheap. Good girls didn’t. They were to be “young ladies” who wore gloves, went to Sunday school, crossed their legs at the ankles (never the knees) and ignored the prospect of intercourse, that most secret of all activities. I knew I was supposed to be a “good girl.” What I didn’t know was the real meaning of the changes in my body and that it wasn’t bad to grow into my sexuality; in fact, that it was essential to my becoming a woman.

  In those days when the dumbing of young people was a wide social practice, firmly ensconced in homes, schools and churches, we were also dished out misinformation. As a child, I had a nanny who tied my left hand behind my back to force me to use my right one. She also warned me not to cross my eyes or they’d stay that way. I suppose that being left-handed and female was bad enough without adding crossed eyes to the sinister mix. “Children who indulge in self-abuse go blind,” the nuns at Our Lady of Perpetual Help School told my Catholic friend. My friends and I weren’t sure exactly what self-abuse was, other than it happened below the waist—a place that some people called “down there”—but we knew it was a sin. These were the days before the excesses of some of the Catholic clergy were reported, and we all bought the story that the holy Catholic Church was the chief arbiter on what constituted a sin, which included any form of sexual pleasure before marriage, let alone a self-induced one.

  Later I accompanied my mother to Jericho Hill School for the Deaf and Blind, where she read to blind children. By then, schoolyard talk had filled me in a bit, so I assumed all these kids were suffering the consequences of sexual self-abuse. Even at that time, it was hard for me to believe all these perfectly nice children deserved such a terrible punishment. And then I began to worry about my paternal grandmother, pillar of the Church of England, who reportedly went blind from diabetes. Was she also guilty of indulging in the solitary pleasures of the flesh?

  There were also stories about pregnant, unmarried girls being sent “to visit their aunts” because they had been “led down the garden path.” Putting together my own observations and the story of Eve’s expulsion from Eden, I began to associate gardens with trouble, their earthly delights an invitation to transgress any one of a number of social laws.

  In the well-groomed gardens of my neighbourhood, no one ever talked about the pleasure of being a woman. The cautionary tales, the horror stories we were told were the electric prods used to control young females, to keep us in line. I am astonished by what I didn’t know, given that I was insatiably curious. It’s so much easier these days to call yourself “sexually liberated.” That means your sexuality—heterosexual, homosexual, autoerotic—is your own damn business.

  The one thing I did know was that if I wanted to marry within the Lucky Sperm Club, people “entitled” by birth into upper-class families, I had to be cautious and play the game. I had an appetite, but nice girls hid their hunger. “Greed” and “ambition” were words appropriate to men. My father told me a girl shouldn’t compete in sports or in school and should never be “hungry.” A hungry woman was by definition hungry for men. That would have made me an insatiable nymphomaniac—a word that hung over my neck like a sharpened guillotine—and would have resulted in social death.

  Rejecting the tightrope civilities of the good girl and the civilized gardens we were to be confined in, I decided it was safer to be a tomboy. The beginning of my adolescent rebellion against female stereotypes was contempt for those I perceived to be “girly” girls with flabby pastel minds the colour of their cashmere twin sets. When hormones transformed us into devious dissemblers, a half-dozen female friends and I—warriors, we liked to call ourselves—were determined to explore and name the forbidden territory “down there,” but not within the parameters patrolled by our careful parents. Since the civilized world of house, gar
den, school, church and the language that defined them were all mined with potential sin and judgment, my gang took over the wilderness beyond. That was our Promised Land, uncharted, unclaimed territory where we could explore our inner savages.

  In the ravines and bushes of the university woods, we devious dissemblers ate as many berries as we liked. We cursed and wanked and pissed on leaves, out-boyed the boys. One of the girls brought Vaseline. Her mother had been a nurse in England during the war. She told us they put Vaseline on burn victims to encourage the growth of body hair. We covered our “private parts” and waited to evolve from young ladies to hairy wild women. In the wild, we did all the things boys got to do, especially bonding with one another in a physical way.

  One summer afternoon, bored with stealing apples and smoking smuggled cigarettes, we kidnapped a boy, took him to the woods and undressed him. Because I drew the longest blade of grass, I was blindfolded and allowed to touch him between the legs, where his member responded. None of us had been informed about that. Aha! Perhaps boys scorned girls because of this transformative power we didn’t know we had.

  “Penis!” we yelled at the top of our lungs as the kidnapped boy ran away, out of the woods back to the civilized gardens. “Penis! Penis!” Our mothers couldn’t hear us. Our Sunday school teachers couldn’t hear us. The police couldn’t hear us. We were free in the forest, armed with the understanding that sexual power is the real reason men fear women.

  Not long after we witnessed our first glorious erection, I was in a Holiday Theatre production of The Emperor’s New Clothes. The emperor had a day job as a substitute teacher. He came to my school and taught English literature and drama, and even though he was smart enough to remember his lines and his blocking, which included expressing surprise that he was doing stark-naked walkabouts, he didn’t seem to have assimilated the information that girls under the age of sixteen were jailbait. During lunch hour, he invited me to a picnic in the woods. Having been there with my warrior friends, I saw no problem and went with him to the edge of the forest, where he began peeling off his transparent schoolteacher’s disguise. Eureka! There it was, another fully erect penis.