Perfection of the Morning

by Sharon Butala

  I believe that since Aboriginal people around the world have non-technological cultures and live in and by Nature—or at least, once did when their cultures were developing—and these cultures had developed the concept of dreamtime and took dreaming very seriously whether in New Zealand, Australia, the Kalahari Desert of Africa, or the Great Plains of North America, that surely it was Nature which, whether with will and intention or not, taught, allowed, gave them dreams as an instrument of knowledge.

  I began to see from my own experience living in it that the land and the wild creatures who live in it and on it, and the turning of the earth, the rising and setting of the sun and the moon, and the constant passing of weather across its surface—that is, Nature—influenced rural people to make them what they are, more than even they knew.

  Close proximity to a natural environment—being in Nature—alters all of us in ways which remain pretty much unexplored, even undescribed in our culture. I am suggesting that these ways in which such a closeness affects us, from dreams to more subtle and less describable phenomena, are real, and that we should stop thinking, with our inflated human egos, that all the influence is the other way around. We might try to shift our thinking in this direction so that we stop blithely improving the natural world around us, and begin to learn, as Aboriginal people have, what Nature in her subtle but powerful manner has to teach us about how to live.

  More and more I am coming to believe that our alienation from the natural world is at root of much that has gone so wrong in the modern world, and that if Nature has anything to teach us at all, her first lesson is in humility.

  STONES IN THE GRASS

  As I write this, on the shelf in front of me sits a chunk of wine-colored rock. It is probably sandstone, although rock identification is not something I’ve expended much energy on since it is not in my nature to be obsessed with what natural objects themselves are made of, or how or when, or what their proper names might be. Although I had wanted to learn the names of plants and animals I saw every day, a more scientific approach otherwise is not only irrelevant to my reasons for going out into Nature but I think too often the effort to find the answers only distracts from what is really to be found there.

  This little rock is an oblong about four and a half inches by two and a half. The smooth, curved surface of its underside, still in its natural state, makes a satisfying fit to the curve of my palm. Its upper surface is rough and one rim has been carefully chipped to make a curved, sharp scraping edge. I can still see clearly the little indentations in the stone, probably made by another stone. Because of its warm wine color—most of these I find on the hills around here are chipped out of murky tan-colored chert—and because it is so clearly what it is, it is especially beautiful. But beyond that, I cherish it because it holds personal meaning for me.

  A writer friend had come for a visit, and knowing from his writings and his conversation that he and I shared a similar point of view about Nature, I took him for a walk to the particular field, my favorite, I’ve mentioned. We hadn’t been there, strolling, talking, five minutes, when suddenly he bent. At the same time as he bent I felt something strong in my chest and I said, as he lifted that small wine-colored piece of rock, “That looks like a scraper,” at the same moment as he said, holding it up, “It’s a scraper.”

  It was as though we had found it together, although he was the one who first saw it and bent and picked it up. Yet that something in my chest told me what he had found before I saw it, at the moment he was bending and lifting it. His find astonished me. “That’s the first artifact anyone has found here,” I said. “I’ve never found anything,” although I hadn’t been looking, since searching for spear or arrow points, stone hammers or pounders or scrapers, weapons and tools left behind by Aboriginal people, is also irrelevant to my reasons for going there.

  We examined it, touched it, exclaimed over its beauty and the fact that we had entered the land and found it, virtually together, as if the land had meant us to find it, as some sort of affirmation of…what? Us? Him? Some venture we might expect to engage in together? We didn’t know and we didn’t speculate. The event, although it raised questions, seemed significant enough in itself for us to regard it as a blessing and to let it go at that. “It feels like it wants to stay here,” the writer said, and dropped it back into the place where we’d found it. He didn’t ask me if I thought it should stay there, but I accepted what he had said and was silent as he replaced it. But I didn’t forget it, and now, because the scraper has taken on new meaning, I suspect he was wrong.

  When it first occurred to me that I might write this book, I thought the idea as impossible as I had the day more than fifteen years before when I first thought I might write a novel. I spent a year vacillating, trying to talk myself out of doing what I couldn’t stop thinking about until it had entered the realm of obsession. At last I succumbed.

  When I was ready, I sat down at my desk and typed The Perfection of the Morning, then waited in that state of suspension of writers like me, of held breath, obliviousness to one’s surroundings, the moment fraught with tension and with prayer, a kind of intense concentration not on some particular but on emptying oneself so that the right words might have room to form. And then, as so far has always happened, ideas began to flow, to shape themselves into words, sentences, paragraphs, as I typed.

  A strange thing began to happen. I began to have a powerful sense of that same field where we had found the scraper, hovering all around me at the far range of my vision. I could see without looking its green-tinted grassy hills and plains, the multihued rocks, the greasewood, sage, badger and wild rose bushes growing in the clefts of its hills. But it was more than that: it felt as it feels when I am there—I felt enveloped in that aura or presence, which on good days is as if I have entered the sway of another consciousness, as if I am not alone but watched over by a presence much bigger than I am. It was as though that presence or landscape had incarnated and come to me as I sat in my office far from it.

  I tried to shake it, to blink it away, to relegate it to the realm of imagination. It refused to go, and I saw I hadn’t induced it. Awe rose in my chest, heat flushed my face. I thought, this—the writing down of it after all that grappling with whether I should or could—must be the right thing to do. I sat and felt what I knew to be a vision blossom into its full shape around me. I waited for what I wasn’t sure: for the breath of cool wind on my cheek carrying with it the sweet, peppery scent of sage, for a voice to speak.

  One always asks too much of these small mysteries. In a moment the vision I was seeing faded and I was left with the work in the typewriter before me. But something had happened, something rare and beautiful. My task now seemed laden with purpose, indeed, a trust of some sort. I thought of my wounded spirit coyote; I thought of my soaring eagle spirit and of the solidity and beauty of my earthbound owl. Surely, I felt, there had to be a connection, and as I pondered them I realized the three visions had all to do with Nature—were visions of Nature. I felt blessed by these visions, and that I had to act on them, if I could see how I should act. I had no doubt I must write my book—the spirit coyote had looked meaningfully directly at me; the hills had hovered around me, as if to encourage me. If I could make no direct connection with the owl and the eagle, I didn’t worry about it.

  But, having finally gotten up the courage to start writing this book, a leap of faith if ever there was one, I found, after a week’s work, that I wasn’t sure where to go next, or that I had said all that needed to be said up to that point. I was in need of sustenance and inspiration, and so I left my desk to go walking in the field where we’d found the scraper.

  I walked and climbed, and sat and thought, and tried to clear my mind to make room for whatever it was I needed that no matter how hard I struggled my conscious mind hadn’t been able to produce. Finally, I came to the place which I think of as the focal point of the field. There I sat down with a panorama of fields and hills spread out below me, and concentr
ated, going over my reasons for trying to write this book, reminding myself of them, and reassessing them to see if they still made sense to me.

  My reasons still held; I had no sense that I should give the book up, although the problem of where to go next in it was still unsolved. But I knew, as I’ve always known with each book, that the best parts aren’t pieces that I imagine myself, at least that’s not how I conceive of them. They seem instead to come in a split second of insight, as if the inside of my body were, at such times, a darkened theater into which a shaft of wisdom, some visionary light, suddenly is thrust before the light goes quickly out again. Those blessed moments come best to me when, after a night of vivid dreaming, I get up and go straight to my work, or the state of mind which produces them can come from reading the work of a great writer, or—and this was why I was out in the field—they can be induced by solitary wandering, day after day, across the land in her natural state.

  On this day, frustrated in my writing and going back to the book’s beginnings in silence and alone, sitting in the grass over-looking a vast landscape barely peopled, but marked everywhere it hadn’t been plowed with the signs of centuries of crossings of unknown humans, feeling some pure connection to the universe, I hoped for a sign that would act as a stamp of approval, as had the small vision that came to me the morning I’d begun to write.

  Never ask for a sign, I muttered to myself; how heartless, fickle and inscrutable are the gods; you never get signs when you need them, and when you do, you can’t understand them; besides, you’re probably crazy.

  I thought, although I doubted anything at all would happen, that a sign could consist of my finding on my return journey through the land something to take away with me, which I normally never do. By “something” I meant an especially beautiful or unusual rock that I hadn’t seen before, or maybe even an arrow or spear point. I set out in a direction that would take me back roughly in a straight line to what I think of as the exit, my head down, watching the ground, occasionally looking up to check my bearings. It wasn’t the easiest route by any means, since I had chosen to climb hills and descend them when it would have been easier to go around them.

  Despite my efforts to take the direct route, I somehow managed to stray a little from it, because suddenly there in front of my shoes was that little wine-colored scraper the writer and I had deliberately left behind and which I had seen on every subsequent trip onto the land, but always left exactly where we’d found it.

  I thought, Now there’s a sign if ever I saw one. There are, after all, more than a hundred and fifty acres in that field and I am one very small person and I wasn’t even thinking about that scraper or its location, in fact, was trying to go somewhere else. So I picked it up and brought it home with me, after telling it and myself that I would put it back when my book was finished. It would be my talisman.

  Although occasionally I have found fossils and concretions in other places, this was the first scraper I had ever found—the first removable piece of evidence of human occupation prior to that of the ranchers and then the farmers. Now, as I grow to know the land better, I become more and more aware that wherever nobody picked the rocks and plowed the land, it is still strewn with signs of the nomadic camps of Aboriginal people, indicated by lost or abandoned stone artifacts of one kind or another.

  In the West in general and Saskatchewan in particular, where, according to the 1986 census, eight percent of the population claims part or all ancestry as Aboriginal—and it is thought that there is a significant number more who don’t know or else choose not to report this ancestry—Native people are very much a presence in most of the villages, towns and cities. My earliest memories, going back fifty years to the days of our life in the bush when my father ran a small sawmill, included the presence of Native people who had sometimes camped in their tepees in a small meadow nearby while the men worked at the mill. I remember their tepees and I remember the glimpses I caught of the faces of the men eating in the cookshack, where we “little girls,” as we were referred to, weren’t allowed to go, but I remember no children at all, and only the women who occasionally came to the kitchen door and talked to our mother. In their long dresses and with their strange silence, they frightened me and, much to her annoyance, when they came, I would hide behind my mother’s skirt.

  Native children were very much present at the convent near Prince Albert where I began school a few years later, since an orphanage for Native children in the city had burned down and many of the residents had been sent to live at our school where, according to my memories, they were shamefully treated. (Actually, the nuns showed nobody much mercy.) Later, in Melfort, although there were no Native children in our school at all that I can recall, every summer they camped in the woods on the edge of town and became a part of the tableau of town life, families rolling by in horse-drawn wagons, the women coming to the door selling berries and handmade rag rugs. Our mother and the other neighbor women reserved their strong sympathies for the women, whether rightly or wrongly, having no great regard for the men. On this subject, our father, who knew Native people firsthand as we did not, was silent.

  My sisters and I were raised in the attitude that Native people had been very badly treated by our government—“men,” our mother would have said—and that the conditions under which they lived were a crime. But we were poor people too—the working poor—and there wasn’t anything we could do about it. This was the attitude of most European people at the time in our position, and included in it, I believe, was an unwitting and unexamined racism, a dismissal of a people. If they had had a glorious past, our families knew little of it and would not have considered it pertinent. Nor did we know anything of the Native peoples’ myths, their beliefs or their attitude to the natural world. It would never have occurred to us to think they might have something to teach us about living on the prairie. In this blindness we were taught and encouraged by our schools, our churches, and our political leaders.

  And the truth was, because no Native people were ever a real part of our lives as children, I at least was afraid of them. Often a gang of us would pack lunches and go off to spend the day exploring and playing in the aspen bush around the town. If the Indians were camping nearby, we would be sure to stay well away from that part of the woods, or we would not go at all. I remember one day when we misjudged where their camp was or, absorbed in our play, forgot completely that they were there, or perhaps a gang of Native boys were out exploring as we were, and stumbled across us.

  We heard them coming and, before they broke through the bush, turned tail and ran for home faster, at least in my case, than I had ever run before. They chased us, although who knows what they would have done if we hadn’t run (might we have gotten to know each other?) out past the edge of the bush where, looking back over our shoulders as we ran, we saw them standing—I remember that some of them were waving sticks—shouting at us.

  Yet I remember a very different encounter as well: one of my sisters had been crippled very badly by polio in the epidemic of 1947, and one day a Native woman passing by on the sidewalk and seeing her condition as we played together handed her a five-dollar bill. Having been reduced by white society to selling berries—saskatoons, blueberries, chokecherries—for a pittance, she could still find it in her heart to pity a child of her oppressors in such grievous condition, and to show her compassion with a gesture of such magnitude.

  My fear—earlier of the women, and then of the boys—was grounded in nothing rational; nothing had ever happened to me to justify it. There was no place where we met Native people as equals in those days, not at school, not at play, or on the streets of the town, yet they were always there, like the forests, like the lakes and the prairie, always a part of what it was to live in Saskatchewan. Their constant presence on the fringes of our society was a dark shadow made up of equal parts guilt, which too often transmuted itself into scorn and even hatred, fear, curiosity, sympathy and shame. All of us walked in the gloom of that shadow believin
g, I suppose, if we thought about it at all, that one day we would be free of our guilt for what we did to them, not realizing, as I do now, that no matter how good our intentions or, indeed, our actions, many centuries and generations will have to pass before that sad history becomes no longer relevant.

  In my new home, looking at the faces of the people passing by on the streets of the few towns, I was aware of a puzzling gap. One day it dawned on me what it was I was missing. When I asked why there were no Native people around, nobody had an answer beyond an uncertain shrug of the shoulders. Some I asked pointed out that there is a reserve near Maple Creek and that one might see Native people on the streets of that town, which wasn’t an answer and in fact only increased the mystery.

  Peter and his father had occasionally bought fence posts from the men of the reserve and had a passing acquaintance with a few of them. Since my marriage I had seen some of the young men competing in the rodeo held every July in the Cypress Hills adjacent to their land, but I knew about the reserve to the north only that it was Cree, or so I thought, and that it was very small. Because I believed the reserve to be Cree, my initial impression was that our corner of southwest Saskatchewan must once have been Cree territory.

  It is plain to any inhabitant that nobody could live on land away from coulees for any length of time during much of the year, as out of them there is no shelter from wind, blizzards, thunderstorms or from the relentless summer sun, no wood for fires, and almost every summer by July nearly all the naturally collected surface water has evaporated in the intense heat. And, as has been amply documented, winters out on the open plains can be so appalling as to frighten the most intrepid westerner.