Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada's Past

by Tantoo Cardinal

  The traffic light changes first to yellow, then to green. Daniel Daylight has always taken pleasure in looking at what, to him, is an act of magic. Thump, thump, goes the travelling car as it crosses the bridge built for trains. The thump, thump stops. And now they’re in Prince William (or in land that is human, as Mr. Tipper calls it, where people can “vote,” just like in Winnipeg)—paved streets, lights so bright Daniel Daylight has to squint, lights so bright it looks like mid-afternoon. On Mr. Tipper’s car radio, the music is back; some sad, lonely man is howling away about being “cheated” by someone, maybe his wife. To Daniel Daylight, it sounds, for some reason, like the Indians are being cheated.

  In Mrs. Hay’s living room, Daniel Daylight sits straight-backed at her upright Baldwin piano. Sitting in a chair right beside him, her hairdo white, short, and fluffy, her face as wrinkled as prunes, the elderly and kind human woman smiles at her one Cree student through glasses so thick they could be ashtrays, Daniel Daylight sits there thinking. Scales first, chords next, then arpeggios, key of E. Major. Right hand only, two octaves up: E, G-sharp, B, E, G-sharp, B, E. And two octaves down: E, G-sharp, B, E, G-sharp, B, E. Back up, back down, Mrs. Hay humming softly along, in her cracked, quavery voice, with the tune such as it is. Daniel Daylight cannot help but wonder as he plays his arpeggio in E major if playing the piano will or will not make him human. Left hand next, same arpeggio, only two octaves lower, first up: E, G-sharp, B, E, G-sharp, B, E. And two octaves down: E, G-sharp, B, E, G-sharp, B, E. He is dying to stop right there at the E with the brown stain and confront Mrs. Hay with the question, for Mr. Tipper, as always, has left him with her, alone, at her house for the hour.

  “Very good, Danny,” says Mrs. Hay, giving him no chance to ask any questions. Only she, of all the people he knows in the world, calls or has called him Danny. Not his five older brothers, not his six older sisters, not his one hundred friends, not even his parents call him “Danny Daylight.” Daniel Daylight is not sure he likes it. But he says nothing. In any case, it’s too late now; she has called him “Danny” ever since he first walked into her house that fine, sunny day in September almost three years ago. They move on. First “Sonatina” by Clementi, key of G, allegro moderato, a Grade Six piece; of this fact, Daniel Daylight is very proud if only because he has been taking piano lessons for only two and a half years and should, by rights, still be in Grade Three, not Grade Six already.

  “Its the 14th of January,” says Mrs. Hay as she peers over her glasses at the calendar that hangs on the wall with the picture, right above the calendar’s big, black “1960,” of her husband, Mr. Hay, driving a train and smiling and waving. “The festival starts on the 29th of March.” Daniel Daylight thus has ten weeks to practise and memorize “Sonatina,” for that is his solo entry at the festival and he plans nothing less than to win first prize. As he plays “Sonatina,” a piece energetic and happy because it, after all, is written in the key of G, major, allegro moderato (meaning, in Italian, “fast, but not too fast,” as in “moderate”), Daniel Daylight, in his mind, sees his father, Cheechup Daylight, and his mother, Adelaide, standing in a line at the little wooden church in the village of Minstik Lake, a worn yellow pencil each in hand. They are lining up to vote. At this point in their lives, they are not human, for a sign on their backs says as much: “Non-human.” The melody line for Clementi’s “Sonatina” soars like a swallow flying up to the clouds, tugging at the heart of Daniel Daylight as with a rope. If he plays it well enough, his parents will surely turn, allegro moderato, into humans, Daniel Daylight prays as he plays. He comes to the end: dominant chord (his right thumb adding the minor seventh) followed, seemak (right away), by the tonic. Thump. Thump. In the pianist’s mind, Cheechup Daylight and his wife, Adelaide, are turned away from the little voting booth by the missionary priest, Father Roy. They are not human. They cannot vote.

  “Very good, Danny,” says Mrs. Hay. “Jenny should be here in just five minutes,” she adds, smiling. “But …” And this is where Mrs. Hay, kind as a koogoom (grandmother) as she may be, criticizes him and his playing, sometimes in a manner that takes him quite by surprise. He is tensing up at his right temple as he plays, says Mrs. Hay. If he is tensing up, at his right temple, meaning to say that a vein pops up in that region, as she calls it, every time he reaches for a high note, then his right arm is tensing up and if his right arm is tensing up then his right hand is tensing up. Which is why the melody, from measure 17 to measure 21, in particular, sounds not very happy, forced, not quite “there,” explains Mrs. Hay. He must try it again. He does, Mrs. Hay, this time, holding her bone-thin, liver-spotted, white right hand, gentle as a puff of absorbent cotton, on Daniel Daylight’s thin right wrist, guiding him, as it were, from phrase to phrase to phrase. Better this time, he can feel it: his right arm is not tensing up, not as much anyway. Again, however, as “Sonatina” comes to an end, his parents are turned away from the little cardboard booth at the church that stands on the hill overlooking the northern extremity of Minstik Lake. Still, they are not human. Ding, goes Mrs. Hay’s electric doorbell. And into the vestibule of her back entrance blow a flurry of snow and Jenny Dean. Taking off her bulky winter outerwear—mitts, coat, hat, scarf, boots—her cheeks glow pink from the cold of a mid-January evening in far north Manitoba and her hazel cat-like eyes sparkle as does her blond, curly hair—yes, decides Daniel Daylight, Jenny Dean looks, indeed, like a human.

  Now Jenny Dean is sitting on the brown wooden bench right there beside Daniel Daylight. She smells so nice, thinks Daniel Daylight, like snow just fallen on a green spruce bough. The sheet music for the duet Mrs. Hay has chosen as their entry at the festival sits open on the piano’s music stand before them. He can feel his red-flannel-sleeved right arm pressing up against the girl’s yellow-pullovered left arm. His is the lower part, the part with the bass line and chord structure, hers the higher part, the part with the melody but with the occasional part of a chord, meaning that the Cree Indian, non-human pianist, the “Heart,” Daniel Daylight, and the white girl human pianist, the “Flower,” Jenny Dean, will be sharing chords, in public, from a piece of music called “Hearts and Flowers” written in the key of C, major, andante cantabile—meaning, in Italian, “at a walking pace and singing”—by a human woman named Joan C. McCumber.

  Water-like, limpid, and calm, the chords start playing, they float, placed with care on the keyboard by Daniel Daylight. The bass sneaks in, the melody begins. Playing octaves, Jenny Dean’s hands begin at the two Cs above middle C, arc up to the G in a curve graceful and smooth, then waft back down to the F, move on down to the E, and thence to the D, skip down to the B and swerve back up to the C whence they had started. The melody pauses, Daniel Daylight’s series of major chords billow out to fill the silence, the melody resumes with another arcing phrase, filled with sunlight. For Daniel Daylight, two things happen. First, from where he sits, he sees four hands, two brown (non-human), two white (human), playing the piano. He is sure, somehow, that once he and Jenny Dean have mastered the piece and won first prize in the duet section of the music festival, he—and his parents—will be human. They will have the vote. Father Roy will not be able to turn Cheechup Daylight and his wife, Adelaide, away from the little voting booth at the little wooden church that overlooks the northern extremity of beautiful, extraordinary Minstik Lake with its ten thousand islands.

  One month later, Daniel Daylight sits at a table in a booth at the Nip House on Prince William’s main thoroughfare, looking with amazement at the valentine just given him, at Mrs. Hay’s, by the human piano player Jenny Dean. Standing upright on the table one foot before him, the card is covered with hearts and flowers. High above it looms the very white face of Mr. Tipper with his Elmer-Fudd-like, round, pudgy nose, and behind Mr. Tipper, a wall made of one giant mirror. On the radio that sits on the counter five tables, and therefore five booths, behind Daniel Daylight, Kitty Wells is singing, “Three Ways to Love You, It’s True,” his sister, Florence Daylight’s, favourite song,
the one she sings with her boyfriend, Alec Cook, as they sit there on the shores of Minstik Lake strumming and strumming their two old guitars. Now it is mid-February, the Kiwanis Music Festival looms even closer—just six weeks, Mrs. Hay has informed Daniel Daylight and Jenny Dean, so Daniel Daylight is excited to the point where he can’t stop slurping, through a straw and as loudly as he can, at his glass half-filled with black Coca-Cola. They are sitting in the “Indians Only” section of the restaurant, Mr. Tipper, for some reason, chooses this moment to explain to Daniel Daylight, his blue eyes peering at the restaurant spread out behind and over Daniel Daylight’s shoulder. Daniel Daylight stops his slurping and peers past the rim of the tall thin glass at the wall behind Mr. Tipper, the wall which, of course, is one giant mirror. Darting his eyeballs about like tiny searchlights, he looks for a sign that will, indeed, say “Indians Only.”

  “There is no sign that says ‘Indians only,’” says Mr. Tipper, knowing, as almost always, what is going on inside the mind of Daniel Daylight.

  “Indians only …” Kitty Wells has stopped singing, Daniel Daylight suddenly observes, and a man’s speaking voice has taken over on the radio. Daniel Daylight locks his eyes with Mr. Tippers—what on earth will the man say next about …?

  “Hamburger deluxe, gravy on the side!” yells the big, fat waitress who always scowls at Daniel Daylight, drowning out the voice of the man on the radio, at least temporarily.

  “… cannot vote,” the man on the radio ends his speech.

  “You see?” says Mr. Tipper, sipping at his coffee with his thick purplish lips. “They’re not human, not according to the radio, not according to the government. It is the law.”

  “Who made the law?” Daniel Daylight feels emboldened to ask Mr. Tipper.

  “No one,” says Mr. Tipper. “They are unwritten. Its the same thing at the movie house right here in Prince William, the taverns, the bingo hall, even the churches, Baptist, Anglican, and Catholic—Indians on one side, whites on the other.”

  Suddenly ignoring his half-finished plate of french fries with gravy, his Coke, and his valentine, Daniel Daylight twists his back around to look at the rest of the restaurant—looking in the mirror will not do: 1) the Nip House has room for at least sixty customers; 2) the fire-engine-red-vinyl-covered booths are not high enough to hide anyone from anyone; 3) true to Mr. Tipper’s unwanted observation, white people sit on one side of the restaurant, Indian people on the other. He turns back to the mirror and to Mr. Tipper, who, of course, is the one exception, being as he is a white man sitting with the brown-skinned, black-haired, non-human, Cree Indian pianist Daniel Daylight on the “Indians Only” side of the restaurant. Mr. Tipper must be brave, Daniel Daylight thinks rather sadly, lets go his Coke, and slips his valentine into a pocket of his black woollen parka. Suddenly, he is no longer hungry.

  Six weeks later, Daniel Daylight sits inside Mr. Tipper’s travelling car with the radio playing, again, country music, a song that Daniel Daylight does not know. He is about to ask when Mr. Tipper asks him, “What they will think when they see you and Jenny Dean playing together at the festival?” Daniel Daylight has no answer, not at the moment anyway, for “They will love our music” sounds somehow hypocritical, facetious, not quite truthful. Again they are going down the winding gravel road, with snow-covered forest rushing by as always, a rabbit bounding past on the snowbank just to the right. Daniel Daylight is on his way, this time, to the Kiwanis Music Festival in Prince William. He is going there to compete in the solo/Grade Six section with his “Sonatina” by Clementi, key of G, allegro moderato, which he now has down note-perfect and memorized. More important, however—at least so says Mr. Tipper, and with this notion Daniel Daylight is inclined to agree—he is going there to compete in the duet section of the annual event with the white girl/human, Jenny Dean, in a piece with the title “Hearts and Flowers,” written by the human composer Joan C. McCumber.

  They come to the Indian reserve called Waskeechoos, the sign that says so just going by and the next one saying “Speed Limit 30 MPH.” The travelling car slows down. It bumps, rocks, and rattles. One pot-hole here, two there. Ice. The travelling car slides once, for six inches, then stops. A non-human man walks past, from the town and back to his home in Waskeechoos.

  “People can’t vote?” asks Daniel Daylight, his English, and his confidence, having bloomed rather nicely in the last two months for, of course, it is now the 31st of March, 1960, the last day of the three-day-long Kiwanis Music Festival, and northern Manitoba is still gripped hard by winter.

  “Soon they might,” says Mr. Tipper. “I heard on the radio the other day …” But the traffic light at the railway bridge has just turned green and Daniel Daylight, in any case, has drifted off already to his own reserve 350 miles north, where his father and his mother are standing in line at the church on the hill that overlooks beautiful, extraordinary Minstik Lake, a worn yellow pencil each in hand. They are getting ready to select a man they can send to Ottawa to speak for Minstik Lake and all its people, perhaps even Chief Samba Cheese Weetigo. Into the line behind and in front of them are crushed all six hundred people of Minstik Lake, even babies. And they are roaring; they want to vote. “Apparently the law is changing,” says Mr. Tipper, “soon. Or so I heard on the radio.” Good, thinks Daniel Daylight, all these people back there in Waskeechoos, like those people where I come from, will soon be human, he sits there thinking. He doesn’t even notice that they are now on “human territory,” as Mr. Tipper calls it, for already he can see himself on stage at the Kiwanis Auditorium in downtown Prince William, sitting at the piano beside Jenny Dean, playing music with all his might so his parents, and therefore he, can change from non-human to human. He is glad that Sister St. Alphonse, the principal seamstress at the Watson Lake Indian Residential School, has found him a suit for the evening: black, white shirt, red necktie, black shoes, all, for the moment, under his black woollen parka. His hands, meanwhile, are wrapped in woollen mittens so thick they do not stand a chance of getting cold, stiff, or claw-like, he has decided, not when he has to use them, tonight, to make a point.

  At the Kiwanis Auditorium in downtown Prince William, Daniel Daylight sits in the audience with his back tall and straight, like all good pianists, Mrs. Hay has always insisted. From where he sits, in the middle and on the room’s right side, he can see—now that he is two months wiser, courtesy of Mr. Tipper—that the room is, indeed, divided: white people on one side, Indian people on the other, the latter a little on the sparse side. Just like at the Nip House and at Wong’s, Daniel Daylight sits there and thinks, and at the movies, the bingo hall, the taverns, and the churches—according, anyway, to Mr. Tipper, who has been to all these places. As he sits there waiting for his turn on stage, he can, on the left side of the hall, see Jenny Dean and her parents, with Mrs. Hay, waving at him and waving at him, beckoning him to come to their side. Shyly, he shakes his head. Jenny Dean, with her parents, belongs on the human side, he, with his parents (who are not only non-human but absent) on the other. Only Mr. Tipper sits beside him, and he is not even supposed to be there. On stage, some dreadful music is playing: two human boys at the piano, aged ten years or so (guesses Daniel Daylight), wearing green V-neck sweaters, white shirts, and bowties, their hair yellow as hay, skin white as cake mix. According to the program, they are playing a duet called “Squadrons of the Air” but Daniel Daylight can’t really tell; whatever the word “squadrons” means, it sounds like they are dropping bombs from the air on some poor hapless village. Next come two human girls, plump as bran muffins, red-haired, freckled, dressed in Virgin-Mary-blue smocks with long-sleeved white blouses, again aged ten years or so. They haven’t even sat down on the bench when they charge like tanks into a duet called “Swaying Daffodils.” For Daniel Daylight, the daffodils try desperately to sway first this way and then that but can’t quite do it; to him, first they bang around, then leap about, then bang around some more, until they just droop from exhaustion, stems halfbent over, heads
hanging down, sad daffodils, unlucky plants. They are next, he, Daniel Daylight, and, she, Jenny Dean.

  Daniel Daylight marches down the aisle that separates the Indian section of the huge auditorium from the white section. Jenny Dean joins him from the other side. Two hundred and fifty human people look at them as with the eyes of alligators, Daniel Daylight thinks, for he can feel them on his back, cold and wet and gooey. He shudders, then climbs the steps that lead to the stage and the upright piano, following the eight-year-old white girl Jenny Dean in her fluffy pink cotton dress with the white lace collar and shoulders that puff out like popcorn. They reach the piano. They sit down. From where he sits, Daniel Daylight can see Mr. Tipper looking up at him with eyes, he is sure of it, that say, “Go on, you can do it.” Only twenty-five or so Indian people, mostly women, sit scattered around him, also looking up at him but with dark eyes that say nothing. On the room’s other side, he can see the eyes that, to him, are screaming, “No, you can’t; you can’t do it. You can’t do it at all.” Feeling Jenny Dean’s naked left arm pressing up against his own black-suited, white-shirted arm, he takes his right hand off his lap, raises it above the keyboard of the Heintzman upright. He can hear a gasp from the audience. Then he is sure he can hear the white side whispering to one another, “What’s he doing there, little Indian boy, brown-skinned boy? His people cannot vote; therefore they are not human. Non-human boys do not play the piano, not in public, and not with human girls.” Daniel Daylight, however, will have none of it. Instead, gentle as snow on spruce boughs at night, he lets fall his right hand right on the C-major chord.