A Short History of Indians in Canada

by Thomas King

Uncle HOLIE and Sonny find the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY a nice window seat.

  “As soon as I find that turtle,” says the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY, “I’ll be back.”

  Uncle HOLIE and Sonny stand by the side of the train and watch the sun set. “Don’t worry,” Uncle HOLIE tells Sonny, as he signals the engineer and steps onto the caboose. “It’s what DAD would do. And there hasn’t been a turtle on the coast for years.”

  Sonny watches the train chug-chug-chug off into the night, the lights of the caboose swaying in the dusk. Then he walks back to the GARDEN COURT MOTOR MOTEL. With its twenty-four air-conditioned rooms. Cable television. Ice machine. Vibrating beds. Breakfast coupons for the Heavenly Pie Pizza Palace.

  Sonny gets a soft drink from the vending machine and stretches out on one of the aqua-green plastic chaise longues by the pool and closes his eyes. Fix the world? Just as well the WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY couldn’t find a turtle, he thinks to himself. Just as well she didn’t have a credit card.

  The white stucco of the motel plumps up pink and then blue as evening spreads out across the land, and the big neon ball that says “GARDEN COURT MOTOR MOTEL” and “Welcome” twinkles like a star in the western sky.

  Not Counting the Indian, There Were Six

  Auntie Beth was the scandal in our family. Before her death in a scuba-diving accident, she had had seven husbands. Not counting the Indian, there were six. Granny preferred not to count the Indian, because Beth and Juan “Kid Savage” McTavish were married in Mexico. It was an Indian ceremony; Beth sent back pictures but there was no doubt in Granny’s mind about the legitimacy of a “pow-wow” as she called it.

  “Can’t call that a marriage,” she said.

  Then, too, Granny wasn’t at all sure that Juan was really an Indian. She had lived a long time, she said, and she was sure we had killed off all the Indians.

  “He’s probably just a Mexican,” Granny said.

  According to the postcards Beth sent, Juan was a Kickapoo, part of a tribe that had fled the U.S. in the 1800s. Phoebe brought home a book from the library and, sure enough, the Kickapoos were in it. Granny just shook her head.

  “I’m sure we killed them, too.”

  Juan was a professional boxer as well. “He fights for Kickapoo culture,” Beth wrote. All the money he made in the ring, she explained, went back to the tribe and that was why they were too poor to travel and why Beth loved him. It was the kind of nobility you found in new novels and old poems, and Granny snorted whenever Beth started about sacrifices and commitments. Beth wrote several times to say that she and Juan were coming to visit, but they never did.

  One year later, Beth left noble causes and Juan and Mexico, and took up with a Chinese architect in Seattle. She married three more times before she died, floating up in the Gulf and leaving a string of stories, no children, and two and a half million dollars in her wake.

  None of us knew about the money until after she died, and we were all summoned to court and given our share of her estate. After that, Auntie Beth was toasted as “eccentric” rather than “crazy” and “headstrong” rather than “self-indulgent.” And all of the Auntie Beth stories were slowly resurrected from the family vault, polished and passed around at dinners as a memorial to the strength of the woman and a testimony to the power of cash. It was mostly the men in the family who drank to her health.

  Granny endured the stories, but she endured them poorly, interrupting whenever Geraldine or Phoebe began romancing Beth and her penchant for “minor eccentricities.”

  “She wasn’t eccentric, Phoebe,” Granny would say. “She was a silly girl.”

  “Oh, no,” Phoebe would whine. “Auntie Beth was just modern.”

  “Fiddle,” said Granny.

  On land, perched high in her floral wingback chair, Granny looked like a prehistoric bird, one of those dinosaur things, half reptile, with their long, jagged beaks and their ancient leather wings. Her hands were hooked claws which she clutched tightly in her lap, so you couldn’t see the danger. But in the ocean of life, she was a leviathan sunk comfortably in the depths, looking up with black, bloodless eyes, watching the rest of us float around above her.

  “Married six times,” Granny would say, suddenly, and shake her head.

  “Seven times, Granny,” Geraldine or Phoebe would correct.

  “Just looking for attention.”

  Granny had married once. There were eight children and a big house and Grandpa’s whiskey. Geraldine said that Grandpa started drinking one night and raised his hand to hit Granny. “Uncle John said he didn’t hit her, just raised his hand. When he realized what he had done, he was filled with remorse and began to cry.” However, Aunt Ruth told us that Grandpa had hit Granny, knocked her down and that he only stopped because he was too drunk to continue. In Uncle John’s version, Grandpa, blinded by tears, tried to sit down on a straight-backed kitchen chair, lost his balance, fell, and broke his arm. Aunt Ruth said that after Grandpa stopped hitting her, he collapsed in the easy chair and fell asleep and Granny went to the kitchen, took down a ten-inch cast-iron skillet, and broke his arm with it.

  Whatever happened, Grandpa’s arm was in a cast for two months and the next year, when Aunt Ruth graduated from high school, Grandpa moved out of the house (if you listened to Uncle John) or was thrown out (if you believed Aunt Ruth). He rented a small apartment above the firehouse and was found that winter, frozen in a hard lump behind the Chinese laundry, dead of a broken heart or dead drunk.

  After that, Geraldine said, Uncle John said Auntie Beth started doing all sorts of crazy things. “It was because Auntie Beth loved Grandpa and she hated Granny for killing him.” Aunt Ruth said Auntie Beth just liked being different. “Beth and Granny would always have these long talks about life,” Ruth told us. “Those two were too much alike. You could see it.” Uncle John said he could hear Beth and Granny arguing all the time, shouting. “Granny didn’t like Beth doing the things she did, but Beth would tell her to go to hell and do them anyway.”

  There was occasional agreement in these stories. When Beth was eighteen, Granny put her out of the house. Homer Pyre saw Beth and Harold Loften holding hands in the theatre and called Granny. Harold was black and/or a criminal and Granny was a racist and/or concerned. Beth said she did it just to see what Granny would do and what Granny did was to pull all of Beth’s clothes out of the drawers and wad them into three suitcases and place the cases on the front lawn. There was an envelope taped to the side of the large green one. Inside was a note, a bus ticket to Roseville, one hundred miles away, and a cheque for fifty dollars.

  “Here are your clothes,” the note said. “Please leave town.”

  So Auntie Beth left. Three years later, she came back with her first husband. He was a dentist in a three-piece blue suit with a blue shirt and a blue tie. He brought a bouquet of yellow flowers and a bright pink box of Granny’s favourite candy, large, white-and-red-striped, hard-shelled peppermints. Phoebe and Geraldine took turns bringing in tea and listening at the door.

  “He just sits there and goes on and on about teeth and what a nice house this is.”

  That evening, Beth and her dentist husband went back to San Francisco, and, when we got up in the morning, there were three suitcases on the front lawn. Phoebe and Geraldine opened the note that was taped to the side of the large green one. There was a cheque for fifty dollars and a note that said simply, “Having a wonderful time, wish you were here.”

  We brought the suitcases inside and Geraldine gave Granny the note.

  “Wasn’t that dentist fellow of Beth’s nice?” Geraldine said.

  Granny’s eyes crackled, and the shawl covering her hands moved.

  “He was so polite and well-dressed. That was a very modern tie.”

  Granny grunted and said something that sounded like “guppy.”

  And so the procession of “guppies” began. Every few years, Beth would bring another by, and Granny would sit in her chair, pass the candy dish, and wat
ch them with the casual purpose of a hungry animal.

  “Beth certainly lives an exciting life,” said Phoebe over supper. “All those men and all that travelling.”

  “Those aren’t men,” said Granny. “Please pass the turkey.” And Granny stabbed a big piece of white meat. “Was probably better off with the Mexican.”

  Between the marriages, Beth would come home alone. Sometimes she would just stay in her room. After her fourth marriage, when she was at the house, Geraldine and Phoebe and I sneaked down the stairs and listened at the door to the big room.

  “You’re looking well,” said Granny. “Any children?”

  “I’m not married right now.”

  “Oh,” said Granny.

  “I’ve met a very nice man, though. I think you’ll like him.”

  “Of course. What happened to the Mexican?”

  “You mean the Kickapoo.”

  “I mean the Mexican.”

  “Did you ever meet Bill?”

  “Who’s Bill?”

  Sometimes when Auntie Beth came home, she would take my sisters and me to the park, and we’d play on the swings and talk.

  “Have you been to Tahiti?” Beth would ask.

  Of course, we hadn’t, but Auntie Beth had, and she told us all about the sand piled up at steep angles on the beaches and the coral reefs alive with dark eels and bright fish and the sunsets all pink and glowing.

  “Have you ever been skydiving?”

  We said we didn’t even know anyone who had done that.

  “I’ve done that, too,” said Beth. “You have to wear goggles because the wind blows so hard up there. And it’s scary when you first step out of the plane and you begin to fall. Sometimes you wonder if your chute will open, but mostly you feel as though you could float forever like you were in an inner tube on the ocean. You just rock back and forth up there. My instructor says that some people enjoy the sensation so much that they just forget to open their chute.”

  Auntie Beth had done everything. She had gone canoeing down the Coppermine River in Canada and had surfed in Australia. She had been to Hawaii twice and climbed a volcano. She even had her own pilot’s licence, and she could speak French and Spanish.

  “Why’d you get married so many times?” Geraldine asked her once.

  “Looking,” said Beth.

  “For what?”

  “The right man, I guess.”

  “Why’d you marry all those wrong ones?”

  “They didn’t seem wrong at the time,” Beth laughed.

  “What was the Indian like?” said Phoebe.

  “He was the best,” said Beth.

  “Granny doesn’t have a man anymore, and she isn’t looking,” said Phoebe.

  “Granny doesn’t need a man,” said Beth.

  “Do you need a man?” said Geraldine.

  Granny and Beth had a big fight after Beth brought home her sixth or seventh husband, depending on how you were counting. He was an artist with short spiky hair and red glasses. He smoked long, thin, black cigars, and, when Granny had Geraldine get him an ashtray and a plastic bag, he picked at the side of his nose, looked over his red glasses, and said, “What’s the bag for, lady?”

  “It’s for your smelly butt,” said Granny and she leaned out of her chair, ready to float over to the couch and chew on his head.

  Later that night, Beth came back without her husband and she and Granny sat across from one another in the big room. For a long time, neither of them said a word.

  Finally, Beth said “You’ll be dead soon, why don’t you try being nice?”

  “I am nice,” said Granny.

  “Why do you hate me?”

  “I don’t hate you.”

  “You’ve never liked any of my husbands.”

  “I never met the Mexican.”

  “What about the others?”

  “I’m very fond of you.”

  “You don’t even let us stay in your house overnight.”

  “You can stay whenever you like,” said Granny.

  There was another silence. Beth sat on the couch. Granny sat in her chair.

  “I don’t think you love me at all.”

  “I love all my children.”

  “Robert says you’re an old shark,” said Beth.

  “Who’s Robert?” said Granny.

  The next morning, Beth was gone. None of us ever saw her again. The postcards continued to come, but there weren’t any more husbands. She sent us a postcard from Alaska and one from American Samoa. We looked up each place on the globe that Granny kept in the living room.

  About two years later, we received a letter from the Galveston sheriff’s office that said that Beth had died in a scuba-diving accident in the Gulf of Mexico. She had gone too deep, the letter said, and just ran out of air.

  Phoebe was sure Beth had gone back to Mexico to be with Juan. “Isn’t that romantic,” said Phoebe. “She was looking for him when she died.”

  “What was she doing looking for him underwater?” snapped Granny.

  But Phoebe was adamant, and maybe that’s what Beth was looking for after all, for Juan. Looking down into the warm waters past the smaller fish, down to where the blue plunges into darkness and great shadows float slowly in the depths. And maybe it was Granny she saw just before her lungs burst.

  Another Great Moment in Canadian Indian History

  Until Chief Justice Gordon Steels and the rest of the British Columbia Supreme Court decided that Owen Allands could not hunt on band land because Native rights in the province had been extinguished somewhere in the nineteenth century, the main topic of conversation in Fort Goodweatherday centred on why the town did not appear on any of the provincial road maps.

  Amos Mischief insisted that it was because Fort Goodweatherday was an Indian community and wasn’t worth the ink. Everett Joe said it was because the name was too long to squeeze in alongside the names of the larger towns along the coast.

  There was an “FG” on the map, stuck out in the ocean, and this could have been Fort Goodweatherday, but as Fort Gregory and Fort Gustave and Fort Godspeed were in the same vicinity, it could just as well have been them, too.

  “The ‘FG’,” Wilma Tom said each time the discussion about why Fort Goodweatherday wasn’t on the map came up, “marks the spots where the fishing is good.” It was an old joke. Wilma’s grandfather had told it all his life and everyone knew it, but because really funny jokes were hard to come by, and because Wilma could tell a joke better than most people, nobody minded hearing it again.

  Amos Mischief didn’t have a great deal of time for jokes and whenever he got wound up about Fort Goodweatherday and discrimination and bigotry, Bella Tewksbury, who voted Reform in the last election and didn’t mind telling you, would jump in and point out that Point Waboose, Grimsley, Lacoose, Russian Sound, and Pilgrim’s Passage weren’t on the map either. And all of them, with the exception of Lacoose, were larger than Fort Goodweatherday.

  “Russian Sound even has a post office,” said Bella. “What do you think about that?”

  A year ago, Siv Darling, who was known up and down the coast for his bluntness, wrote a letter to the Minister of Tourism in Victoria and asked him why the town wasn’t on the map. “Why isn’t Fort Goodweatherday on the provincial road map?” the letter read. “Sincerely, Siv Darling.”

  Four months later, a package from the Minister of Tourism came back. Inside were a guide to the provincial parks, a guide on where to go in Victoria and Vancouver, and a glossy magazine that arranged, by months, all the exciting things to do in the province. There were a dozen pamphlets that offered two-for-one deals on meals and tours, discounts on hotel accommo-dations and car rentals, a colour postcard of a bunch of totem poles, a bumper sticker that said, “Visit Victoria,” along with a really nice map of the province, which, sure enough, didn’t have Fort Goodweatherday on it either.

  There was a letter stuck on top of everything that thanked Siv for his interest in visiting British Columbia and
hoped his stay would be a pleasant one.

  So Owen Allands was in no mood to hear Chief Justice Steels tell him and the world that all the treaties and agreements made between Native peoples and the province were null, and forthwith abrogated. Owen was found guilty of trespass on Crown lands and was sentenced to six months in jail, but after he took the time to explain just where Chief Justice Steels could put the court’s decision, Owen’s stay in jail was extended to nine months.

  “Throwing Owen in jail like that was a bit much,” said Everett Joe. “What the hell did the judge expect him to say?”

  Bella brought a dictionary to the council meeting that was called to discuss the Steels decision, but she couldn’t find the word “abrogated” anywhere, partly because she was spelling it wrong, and partly because, as she was searching through the pages, she hit upon the word “abort,” which looked close enough. Rather than forget about it or leave well enough alone, Bella read the definition and was drawn into a heated discussion on abortion, and, by the time everyone had a turn at the microphone, a second council meeting had to be called for the next evening.

  The second meeting started off with an impassioned plea by Father Maris, who alternated months between Fort Goodweatherday and Lacoose, to stay calm and let the authorities do their jobs. It was the same speech he had made when the band closed the logging road that ran between Gull Point and Nadir to protest the clear-cutting of tribal land and very similar to the one he gave when Jimmy Turman’s son, Dustin, was found hanged in a cell in Campbell River.

  It was not a long speech, and, after he had finished, he thanked everyone for their patience, and went home.

  As soon as Father Maris was gone, Bella Tewksbury pushed her sleeves up and knotted her arms across her chest. She leaned forward on the chair and said in a very loud voice, “So, what are we going to do about this?”

  For the next four hours, everyone in the council meeting took turns at the microphone.

  Crystal Kingcome brought a box of three-by-five cards on which Crystal and her three girls—Sheri, Terri, and Mari—had written the eight hundred number of the Minister of Justice. Crystal urged everyone to call the number as often as they felt like it, and, if enough people called, it might do some good. Best of all, Crystal pointed out, the phone calls were free.