People who have been hurt often go on to hurt others, and our unhealed pain as Native people has deeply affected the lives of our children. If we want self-government, we must accept that we are responsible for governing the development of this young generation, for nurturing them and aiding them towards the fullest possible expression of themselves. The words of our young writers shouldn’t be penned in isolation and loneliness. They should be heard in a circle of those who share the pain and yearn for the same peace. We seek truth and reconciliation to build a better country for those who follow. If that isn’t our aim, all our efforts will be for naught.
Surviving the Scoop
OUR CABIN IS nestled in the mountains. At least, that’s how it feels. Living so close to the land, we hear stories in the whisper of the wind through the pines, tales in the patter of rain, legends in the snowfall that comes with the first sharp slice of winter. Mushrooms, ferns and open surges of granite become connections to a larger spirit. Wise and ancient voices reside in the most common of things.
Safe in the lap of all these stories, I marvel at how easily this was once taken away from me.
Debra and I were in Winnipeg recently. We’d been invited to a conference that dealt with survivors of the Sixties Scoop. Back in the 1960s, the Canadian government actively promoted a program that scooped Native kids from their homes. Many were adopted into non-Native families who lived hundreds or thousands of miles away, in Louisiana, Florida, Texas or distant cities and towns across Canada. There’s not much space devoted to this in our history books, but it’s a part of Canada’s history nonetheless.
The once-closed files of those adoption agencies are open now. People displaced as kids can ask for their records to find out where they originated. Of all the possible questions that uprooted generation has, the biggest one, and the most painful, may be why we were forcibly cut off from our roots. For the great majority of us, the homes we landed in saw no need to let us know where we came from. “Adopted,” in the parlance of the day, meant “no longer Indian.” Thousands of us were denied the fundamental right to know who we were created to be.
This sad chapter in our country’s history followed closely on the heels of the closure of the residential schools. To those affected, the Scoop felt like a continuation of the same genocidal policy. For me, it meant the door was effectively slammed shut on my identity. I stood stark and alone as a fencepost in a field of snow. That’s how it felt to me.
The conference I was invited to drew many people who share that legacy. It also drew a professional circle of people who deal with our demographic; social workers, teachers, government ministry workers and policy developers. We gathered in a place called Thunderbird House, named for those spiritual beings that bring messages from Creator. We opened in the ceremonial way most of us had had to fight to rediscover and reclaim. The prayer, the song and the reverberations of the drum felt like a homecoming.
It was my task to present the opening address, and I couldn’t sleep the night before. I tossed and turned and worried. There were a hundred avenues I could take in approaching the issue. As I looked back over my life and saw again the profound impact of the decision to remove me from my people, I was torn about how to express what that meant. There had been moments when the pain and the confusion were so intense I felt as though my skin was peeling off. There were beatings and martial discipline that scarred me. There was abandonment and neglect. There was a feeling of melancholy that I carried for years, a haunting I was at odds to explain. Even when I found my people again, there were feelings of inadequacy, cultural embarrassment, anger and fear to overcome. So it was hard to decide what I should say.
I ended up talking about baseball. I talked about encountering a game that was foreign to me but that every other kid took for granted. I spoke about what I felt in my belly as the laughter of my classmates rolled over me. Shame at not being able to do what they did so easily. Anger at being mocked and belittled. Fear that I might never measure up in this strange new world. Resentment that no one had let me know things would be so different. I described for the people at the conference how those bitter feelings ate at me. Loneliness can be such an onerous weight. But then I spoke about gritting my teet hand learning the game and ending the laughter of the others at the same time as I eased those feelings in my belly. I talked about the courage it takes to confront a foreign system, to inhabit it and make it your own. I shared how freeing that is, how healing.
I closed my talk with baseball’s central metaphor: all of us working together can help each other make it home. That’s what it’s really all about in the end for everyone, not just Indians. Taking away someone’s right to know who they are is a sin. But it’s also a sin when there’s no one around to help you. It’s incumbent on everyone who has ever felt the lash of displacement to be on the field when the new kid shows up with no idea how to play the game.
Now that those adoption files are open, there are going to be a lot of people in that position. They’ll walk into our powwows, our ceremonies and our events with no idea of how to present themselves. They’ll have no idea how to wear their skin. We need to be there when they show up. We need to extend a hand in welcome and make them feel at home.
When you survive something titanic, it makes you stronger. It can make you wise and gentle if you’ve learned the lessons well. In the end, you’re not a survivor anymore. You’ve become who you were created to be.
Dog-Wise
I’VE READ A lot of metaphysical books over the years. When I was a teenager hanging out in libraries, I discovered shelves of books about achieving your greatest potential. I read Born to Win, all the transactional analysis books, Carlos Castaneda on the teachings of Don Juan. Kahlil Gibran was big back then, and so was R.D. Laing, whose book Knots tied me into a great psychiatric knot of my own. It was all hip and cool, fodder for a young mind searching for answers.
I augmented those books with readings from the works of Freud and Carl Jung. I dipped into Nietzsche, The Art of War, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I spent one memorable rainy weekend with the Upanishads. My head swam with ideas, and while I was struggling to find work or even a predictable routine for my days, those books kept my spirits up and my intellect on fire.
In the 1980s, I discovered Edward de Bono’s Course in Thinking, books on dysfunctional families and co-dependency by John Bradshaw and Melody Beattie, M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. If you were looking for answers, it seemed there was a host of writers, talkers, celebrities and gurus, all with the definitive solution.
Pop psychology was big business, and there was a huge audience and readership for it. Self-help was the buzz word, and I was right in there helping myself. I wore Birkenstocks. I bought crystals, incense, candles, relaxation tapes, mindfulness meditation CDs, recordings of shimmering instrumental music and a hundred varieties of tea. Along with all of that, I had my First Nations sacred medicines, smudging bowls, eagle feathers, hand drum and rattles. I visited psychics, seers, shamans, medicine people, channellers and people who communed with spirits from vanished civilizations. I went to seminars, workshops, lectures, experiential gatherings, sharing circles, warrior weekends and self-parenting retreats. I was prayed for, prayed over and preyed upon. If there were solutions to the problems in my life, I was hell bent on finding them.
All that searching took a lot of energy. Everywhere I went there were posters and brochures advertising the next big thing, the next breakthrough that would lead me to bliss. Mayan priests, Aztec shamans, Toltec teachers and even a reincarnated spirit from the land of Mu offered to bring me back to the teachings. It was mind-boggling. For a while there I didn’t know whether I should bang a gong, beat a drum, play a flute, tinkle a bell or stand on my head in a corner.
Nowadays, I’ve realized that all I need to know about successful living and psychic health I can learn from my dog. Molly doesn’t charge exorbitantly by the hour. She doesn’t use ethereal language.
She can communicate effectively using just her eyes, and there’s a spirit in her that’s kinetic and magical. If ever there was a being blessed with awareness, it’s Molly.
Molly is wise. She’s sage. She lives entirely in the moment, and she finds joy in everything. She eats regularly, takes a substantial nap every afternoon, drinks a lot of water, stretches before doing anything and is never afraid to express love or to ask for what she needs. She’s never too busy to listen, never too overwhelmed to find the smallest thing interesting and never pretends to be anything other than what she is. She welcomes everyone with abandon and feels sad when they leave. No one is neglected when it comes to Molly sharing her enthusiasm, and she’s willing to be friends unless you give her a reason to be skeptical. Molly knows there’s nothing better than feeling the sun on your belly and nowhere as comforting as home.
Life is much simpler now that I’ve become dog-wise. There are no thick books to read, no products to buy, no deep meaning to search for. Instead, there’s the satisfaction of knowing that the world is full of interesting smells and sounds and sights, of wonder and infinite possibility, and that if you venture out into it, you’ll always find someone willing to take a walk with you.
Wolf Tracks
THERE WERE WOLF tracks on the gravel road this morning. They ran along the roadside for a good quarter of a mile. If you weren’t paying attention, you could easily mistake them for the paw prints of a large dog. They were at least a hand span across, and the animal’s weight had pushed the prints deep into the muck. They veered off suddenly up a steep incline, as though the wolf had sensed something and decided to vanish. Small packs of coyotes dwell in the ridges behind our home. We’ve seen and heard them many times. Now and then they’ll ramble around eating the dog or cat food left out on people’s decks. But wolves are oddities here. I can recall seeing them once, out on the lake ice in the dead of winter. So the tracks surprised and enthralled me.
As I contemplated the wolf’s presence, ideas and shards of knowledge whirled through my head. I’ve never been close to a real wolf, but I was raised with the same mythology about the animal as everybody else. Wolves are creatures of mystery. They are beasties of the full moon, with long shadows. They are spectres, phantoms, shape shifters, amber-eyed denizens in the realm of our darkest fears. They are remnants of our primordial past, prowling the perimeters of memory: lank, lean and patient a shell.
I was twenty-four when I rejoined my people. Whenever my family took me out on the land, a keen thrill ran through me. As foreign as the bush was to me, I seemed to be connected to it. I was excited by the depth of the shadows among the trees, by the light splayed on a table of granite by the shore, by the smell of bog and marsh wafting across a bay. The land felt alive. When I was out there standing on it, I felt alive, too, fully alive for perhaps the first time in my life.
I felt that kinetic jolt of connection when we first moved here, and I experience it every morning when I walk. It’s not just the necessary task of walking the dog that calls me out; it’s the land itself, the lingering feel of wild. I thought I ’d never lose that sense of being joined when I first discovered it, but I learned it can be easily forgotten. I can seal myself off from that spiritual calm, that joyful feeling of belonging, with the simple act of closing a door. That bothers me. As a Native person whose ceremonial and spiritual sense stems from a relationship with the land, I don’t feel comfortable knowing I can shut that off like a light switch. As a human being with stewardship obligations to the planet, this embarrasses me. As a writer who often expresses themes of kinship, I’m stunned by the realization.
The easy way out is to say that we all have to work to survive, and my job involves being indoors at the computer. Moreover, I could add, the world demands a certain distance from us; we can’t be meditative and earth-conscious all the time. We can’t experience a primordial thrill with each breath. But that’s what we should strive for, I believe, that charge in the belly that says we are not alone and the world is not ours to order. The planet is not here for us. Rather, we are here for the planet. Something as simple yet confounding as a wolf track can take us back to that.
From the Ground
I’VE BECOME A frequent flyer. From Kamloops it’s possible to connect to anywhere, and over the past few years it sometimes seems as though I live in airports. Nodding off in economy class and waking up on the airport runway of a far-off city is as common for many people as easing into our driveways. But for me, it’s still a strange event.
When I was a young man, my idea of the country came from long days spent hitchhiking. I crossed Canada numerous times that way. The memories of my late teens and early twenties are marked by the charcoal ribbon of a highway stretching westward in the glint of a setting sun. I always had a book with me, and my memories are tied to that too. Waiting for a ride on the sweep of curve that leads past Portage La Prairie on a windy day in May is all dust and noise from tractor trailers and the words of William Faulkner.
As a free spirit then, I stopped and worked wherever I could, usually staying only as long as it took me to get paid. I’ve been a tree planter, a ditch digger, a sugarbeet picker, a farm hand, a railroad-crew labourer, a dish washer, a fish cleaner, a marina helper and a big-rig washer. It seems sometimes that I worked in every whistle stop west of Thunder Bay. I met other itinerant workers on the road, in hostels, in rundown bars where the draft beer was a dime and on street corners where we waited for trucks to stop and pick up the crew needed for that day. Talk was all we had to fill those idle hours, and I heard a lot of stories about a lot of places. When the work was through, it was back on the road for me, always heading west, always bearing the hope that the next town, the next city would reveal itself to be the refuge I was seeking. There were romantic moments when the song of the open road filled me, but most of the time I just wanted to get going. In those days, it was the moving itself that defined me, and I knew nothing else.
Recently, I had the chance to drive those same highways. From nine thousand metres, the country is a mere patchwork of territories. You get a sense of its size and scope through an airplane’s porthole windows, but the feel of the country and of the people who live here is missing. Driving from Kenora, Ontario, back to Kelowna allowed me to see things again from the ground up.
Our trip took us from the jut of the Canadian Shield across the Prairies, through the undulation of the foothills and on into the enormous push of cordillera in the B.C. Interior. I experienced a sense of timelessness in the mist of early morning in rustic Whitewood, Saskatchewan. There’s still a pioneer spirit in Moose Jaw, Swift Current, Gull Lake and Maple Creek. In the cow country of Alberta, you can feel the lingering presence of the buffalo. Gazing eastward as the sun sets in the foothills, you can’t help but be moved.
Canada from the ground is awesome. People everywhere are doing their thing, making the country work: truckers, wheat farmers, ranchers, hoteliers, work crews. The staunchness of spirit displayed by a truck-stop waitress can be captivating: efficiency and a down-home-folks attitude all at once. In small-town convenience stores, there’s time to chat up the owner and get the low down on the cost of things these days, politics, the younger generation. When you strike up a conversation with the other travellers pulled over at a spectacular viewing spot, you hear about life in Fond du Lac and Dunnville and Shubenacadie. Beneath it all is the land, breathing, pulsing, continuing to define us.
Certainly there are problems and tough political issues to be faced. My people still suffer the brunt of government indifference. Canadians in general feel the sharp economic pinch and the effects of climate change. Prices soar, disease threatens, and we have yet to find a political party that can generate sufficient enthusiasm about its policies to form a majority in the House. But despite all that, I think we live in the greatest country on earth. There’s potential for social greatness here. Whether we are Ojibway, Greek, Scottish, English, French or Turkish, this country offers us hope. You need to get out there a
nd look at the country from the ground to really see all that.
My frequent-flying experience will be different from now on. Gazing out the window as the land passes beneath me, I’ll remember the feel of the land, the pitch and sway of voices, the timbre of the story. It’s a wonderful tale. To be continued.
One Story, One Song Page 15
