The Redemption of Oscar Wolf

by James Bartleman

  “There was a time in the history of our country,” Reverend Mortimer said, “when many well-intentioned people thought Aborigines, especially the young women, should be sterilized. The thought was that in so doing, Aborigines would be weeded out of the gene pool and the Australian race improved. There isn’t much support for such practices in Australia today, but we would be interested in your views.”

  “The government of Canada has traditionally not been involved in human breeding programs,” said Happlebee. “We leave that to the provinces; it’s a federal/provincial jurisdiction issue. But if I may provide my personal views, I think Hitler gave the science of eugenics a bad name. And that’s a pity because some very interesting efforts are quietly going on in Alberta at the moment where government doctors are improving the racial stock by tying the fallopian tubes of female mental defectives, poor people, and Indians when they find themselves in hospital for other reasons.”

  “What has been the reaction of the women?”

  “Why there’s been no reaction, no reaction at all. And that’s because we don’t tell them what the doctors are doing.”

  “Australian governments,” Father Murphy said, “have been removing the babies of Aborigine mothers and white fathers for generations and raising them in institutions where they are trained to be useful servants for white people. Some people think the practice is cruel since the children never see their mothers again and they call them the ‘stolen children.’ Others firmly believe everyone benefits: the children are educated and assimilated painlessly into Australian society and Australians obtain a ready supply of cheap labour. The commission would appreciate your frank views on our policy. Do you think its disadvantages outweigh its advantages?”

  “The benefits, of course, outweigh any possible drawbacks,” said Happlebee. “But you don’t go far enough. Our preferred option is to take the children of Indian couples from their homes, by force if necessary, and send them away to special Indian residential schools. And when they come home, usually after ten years, they function as well-educated leaders of their communities.”

  “How so?” said Fletcher. “Perhaps you could explain.”

  “We start from the premise that Indians are endowed with souls but are not as human as white people. If they were, they would have invented the wheel, composed sublime symphonies, and built great cities before the arrival of the fur traders and settlers.”

  “Many people in Australia share that assumption,” Reverend Mortimer said.

  “I don’t like to boast, but we Canadians are proud of the fact that for almost a century we have been running one of the world’s most innovative programs to turn these people into real humans. The concept is simple. We use education to re-program their brains and wipe out the savage parts of their psyches.”

  “You mean you brainwash them?”

  “Brainwashing has such a negative ring to it, don’t you think? We prefer to call our approach re-education.”

  “I imagine that with such an expenditure of money and effort, there must be many Indians going on to university.”

  “Oscar, of course, is one of our graduates, and I am sure there are others. They just don’t come to mind at the moment.”

  “But let’s hear what a genuine Indian has to say. Tell our guests how a residential school gave you your start in life,” he said, turning to Oscar.

  “Yes, Mr. Happlebee,” Oscar said, standing up and earnestly and untruthfully addressing the Australians. “Were it not for attending residential school, I would have spent my life hunting and fishing and living like a barbarian. My residential school training re-educated me and made me the man I am today. It prepared me to join the army, fight in some of the bloodiest battles of the war, attend the University of Toronto, and go on to a career in the Department just like any white Canadian. As a matter of fact, my grandmother and my mother went to residential schools, as well, and their lives were changed forever.”

  The next morning, the commission boarded a chartered bus and travelled over the Algonquin and Muskoka Highlands to the Indian Camp, carefully converted into a Potemkin village for the day. Organized in advance by the Indian agent from the Rama Indian Reserve and the mayor of Port Carling, the visit accomplished all the government’s objectives. Eighty Native men, women, and children, three hundred white villagers, and six hundred tourists and day trippers off the steamers were waiting when the bus travelled over a road quickly bulldozed over the ridge and down to the Indian Camp. As the commissioners came down the steps, eight drummers and singers, in the dress of nineteenth-century Apache warriors but really Mohawks from a reserve in the south of the province, began to pound a pow wow drum and to sing and wail laments of welcome. Reverend Huxley stepped forward and offered an ecumenical prayer of welcome, and as everyone in the crowd nodded their heads in agreement, emphasized that God and the Creator were one and the same, and that Indians and white Canadians, and maybe Aborigines and white Australians, could learn much from each other on spiritual matters.

  The chief of the Rama Indian Reserve had been told that if he did not cooperate, the funding for his reserve would be cut. So, outfitted in the ribbon shirt that he usually wore to pow wows, he made an impassioned speech in Chippewa telling the commissioners that the Indian agent on instructions from his department in Ottawa had come to the Indian Camp ahead of time to tell the people that it would be good for business to pretend they had no grievances against the government. Then, raising his arms, he strode to his car, his head uplifted in a scowl, and drove away. Oscar immediately broke into applause, and the commissioners, who didn’t understand a word of what the chief had said, and were too polite to ask for a translation, followed his lead.

  The next person to speak was the mayor of Port Carling, and he earnestly praised the historic ties that had unified the people of the Indian Camp and Port Carling dating back to the arrival of the first settlers to the region.

  “Our grandfathers and grandmothers came to the wilderness of the District of Muskoka many decades ago find a community of savages squatting on Crown land. And although they were pagans and living in a state of ignorance, they helped those first settlers to become established and formed friendships that persisted long after they voluntarily vacated their lands. And the strength of that relationship,” he said, looking directly at Oscar, “was confirmed one night in late June 1930 when a heartless arsonist, like a thief in the night, set fire to the business section of the village. The two founding peoples of Canada and Port Carling, Indian and white, fought together in a show of interracial partnership to save the buildings, but with only buckets of water to combat the merciless flames, the battle was lost. Two brave souls, one Indian and one white, died in the fire. And one day, perhaps not too far in the future, the constable will come knocking on the door of guilty party and bring him to justice.”

  Uncomfortable with the direction of the speech, Oscar looked away from the mayor, who was now shaking his finger at him and saying that the arsonist should do the right thing and surrender to the law. Rosa, Oscar saw, was standing at the back of the crowd with a group of Native women including his mother, but he wasn’t yet ready to meet and tell her their marriage was over. After the mayor finished speaking, the women moved forward, on a signal from the Indian agent, to drape braided wreaths of sweetgrass, like Hawaiian leis, around the necks of the delighted visitors.

  “Come with us,” they said. “Come and see how the Indians live in Canada.”

  Leading the commissioners to their shacks, they explained that these were just their summer cottages, and sold them quill boxes and toy tomahawks, all heavily marked up in price for the occasion.

  “It’s a shame we can’t show you our homes back on the reserve,” they said. “We all have electricity, hot and cold running water, double-pane insulated windows, mail order furniture, framed copies of Group of Seven paintings, indoor plumbing, and television sets, just like the other Indians in Canada.”

  They led them to the shore where thei
r waiting children rushed on cue into the water and began splashing each other, shouting out with cries of joy.

  “Access to sand beaches for all Indian children is an inherent right written down in the treaties between our grandfathers and the Crown and enshrined in the Indian Act,” the women said. “Just like access to clean water, sanitation, medical services, and equal education with mainstream society, which we are all privileged to enjoy.”

  Later that evening, after accompanying the highly impressed Australians to their accommodations at a nearby luxury lodge on the shore of Lake Muskoka where a special performance of Indian dancing and drumming was on the program, Oscar returned to the Indian Camp to ask Rosa for a divorce.

  Rosa, however, had different plans, and did not invite him inside when he knocked on the door of the shack.

  “I’ve been expecting you,” she said, speaking in fluent Chippewa. “Nothing much seems to have changed: I can smell the alcohol on your breath from where I’m standing. You’re probably as big a drunk as you ever were,” she said, stepping outside. “And it was mean of you to abandon me and never to write.”

  “But you don’t know how to read.”

  “Your mother would have read the letter to me, if you had made the effort.”

  “But you don’t speak English.”

  “No, I don’t, but I now speak Chippewa and your mother would have translated it for me. You are just making excuses for your bad behaviour. Your mother told me how bad a son you were, always lost in a world of your own, spending all your time at Old Mary’s listening to nonsense instead of helping out around your own house, leaving her all alone each spring and running off with your grandfather to the Indian Camp, and hanging around with white kids from the Port Carling school and being too good to associate with your own people. She told me things so terrible I can hardly believe them, like setting fires and betraying the white people who took you in after you went begging at their door. You don’t even own this old shack but your wonderful mother let me live here and she comes over all the time to teach me Chippewa and to show me how to cook bannock and to give me lessons on making moccasins and quill boxes.”

  As Rosa’s tirade continued, Oscar tried to stop listening and asked himself what could have happened to turn the sad, submissive, innocent girl from the jungles of Colombia into a nagging Chippewa wife? Perhaps it was punishment from the God he did not believe in for all those awful choices he had made in life? More likely it was the result of his mother saying nasty things about him behind his back.

  “Your mother said we should get a divorce,” Rosa was saying, advancing toward him and forcing him to retreat. “She said I’d never be happy with you. She said you could never be trusted. She said she’d take care of me but you’d have to send half your salary to support me.”

  Did Rosa just say divorce? Did this woman he first saw swimming naked in the Meta River, did this ungrateful individual he had saved from the death squads, did this refugee he had brought from the blood-soaked land Colombia to peaceful Canada just mention divorce? He should have been happy, for that was exactly what he wanted, but his feelings were hurt. He should have been the one to tell her their marriage was over. It wasn’t fair.

  “But you’re Catholic, Rosa, you can’t get a divorce.”

  “I’m not Catholic. It was you who made me get baptized so we could go through that form of marriage in Bogota. I don’t know what you thought you were doing when you took me away from my own country. You never understood that I am a real person with real feelings. Now go away and don’t come back. My lawyer will be in touch with yours.”

  While still smarting from his encounter with the new Rosa, Oscar walked away from the shack happy that his marriage would soon be over and he was free to devote himself to Anna. But just to be sure he was doing the right thing, he went to see Clem, although it was now the middle of the night.

  “It’s hard for me to say anything,” Clem said, his voice frail after Oscar woke him up and explained his problem. “Rosa’s been helping your mother take care of me and I kinda look upon her as a daughter. She looks a bit like Stella when she was younger, don’t you think?”

  4

  Oscar returned to Australia determined to marry Anna as soon as his divorce with Rosa was finalized.

  “I love you, Anna,” he said when he was drinking with her once again in the room above the bar in Kings Cross. “I want to meet your mother and all your relatives, I want to know the story of your people, and I want to remove you from your sinful life and bring you home to the Indian Camp.”

  “Who do you think you are, a social worker?” Anna said. “I’m a working woman and not at all ashamed of the services I provide.”

  “But we’re both Aboriginal persons; that should count for something.”

  “To me, you’re not an Aboriginal person. You’re just a client, but I’ll sell you all the love you will ever need as long as you have the money. And if you want, I’ll tell you the history of my people, but I charge for my services by the hour.”

  Oscar said he’d like to hear the story of her people, and Anna began by saying that millions of years ago, when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, a kind lady named Lucy lived with her family somewhere in Africa. They were all very happy there, but then one day it got very cold and glaciers crept across the land from south to north forcing Lucy and her family to leave their village and flee northward to safety. Eventually they reached the Jordan Valley in the Middle East where they had to make a decision. Should they turn west and go to Europe? Should they turn east and go to Asia? Or should they make boats and go to Australia? To Lucy’s great disappointment, they were unable to agree among themselves and the family split up, with some becoming Englishmen, some Red Indians, and the rest Aborigines. Lucy went to Australia with the ones heading south in boats across the ocean, and that is why the Aborigines say she is the mother of their homeland.

  Then the years went by, Anna said, and Lucy died and was mourned by all the people. More time went by, millions of years went by, and the Aborigine people lived in harmony with nature and with each other, never quarrelling, treating their women like goddesses, and eating only fruit that fell from the trees. They built a great city at Ayers Rock, in the middle of the desert, with running water, indoor toilets, and fast food restaurants and colour televisions. Then invaders arrived from England on sailing ships and by trickery defeated the troops of the last emperor and told everyone that Aborigines weren’t human beings. But the white invaders hadn’t managed to destroy all traces of Aborigine culture. To this day, the invisible Aborigine city of Angora, inhabited by people who worshipped a religion called the Dreaming and constructed by the same engineers who built Machu Picchu in the Andes Mountains, lies hidden inside Ayers Rock. The Australian government knows it’s there and sends out military missions led by the Australian Special Forces to find and destroy it, but always without success.

  Every night for a week, Anna told Oscar the same strange version of history, always saying, as she ended her story, that she wanted to visit Angora someday. And every night, as Oscar listened to Anna talk her nonsense, he sank deeper and deeper into an alcohol-fueled gloom, feeling guilty about his unfair treatment of Rosa and, most of all, about his collaboration with the high commissioner and Indian Affairs in hoodwinking the Australian commissioners. Finally he could take no more and he went downstairs to the bar where he drank and drank until the sun rose in the east over the Tasman Sea. He then got up out of his chair and made his way to the door, desperate to make it back to Canberra to tell the commissioners that there was an Aborigine city hidden in Ayers Rock.

  Oscar woke up in the ward for the clinically insane at the Canberra General Hospital. When he opened his eyes, he saw white padded walls, a white ceiling, white bars on the windows, and white sheets on a white bed. He didn’t know where he was or who he was. The door opened and a white-haired man with a white beard, wearing a white laboratory coat came in and sat down in a white chair. Oscar believed he was
in heaven and in the presence of God.

  “I see you’re awake,” God said. “How are we doing today?”

  Oscar remembered who he was and thought God was about to ask him to account for all the shameful things he had done in his life, for which he had no adequate explanation. Afraid he was about to be sent directly down to the fire and brimstone of Hell, he threw himself on the mercy of the Almighty, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Don’t send me down there. I’m really a good person even if I don’t believe in you. I went to Sunday school as a boy and that should count for something.”

  But as he spluttered on, he vaguely remembered drinking cheap Australian sparkling wine and running out into the street with a message of some sort to deliver to the commissioners.

  “The police found you sitting on the sidewalk outside a bar in Kings Cross,” God said, ignoring Oscar’s incoherent stammering and speaking to him as if he were a child. “You were yelling something about finally understanding the meaning of the Dreaming. You’ve been here under heavy sedation for a month. I hope you have health insurance.”

  At that moment, Oscar understood that he wasn’t in the presence of the God he wasn’t sure existed.

  On being discharged from the hospital, Oscar found the following letter on his desk when he went back to work.

  Dear Oscar,

  I am writing to tell you some terrible news. Clem McCrum died in his sleep. In accordance with his long-standing wish, he was cremated and there was no funeral service. Your mother and Rosa paddled down the Indian River, said a prayer, and threw his ashes into Lake Muskoka at the foot of the Manido of the Lake. Although he was not a believer, I think Clem would have approved. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help.