A Short History of Indians in Canada

by Thomas King

  Everett Joe thought a trip to the United Nations in New York would do more good, and, because he had lived in Toronto during the war, Everett volunteered to head the delegation.

  Siv Darling wanted to close the Gull Point road again.

  At around one o’clock in the morning, Florence Skloot, who had been sleeping in the second row next to the radiator ever since Father Maris got up to speak, woke up, hoisted herself on her walker, and shuffled to the front of the room.

  Florence was between eight-six and ninety-seven, depending on whom you talked to, and, even as a young woman, she had a reputation for speaking deliberately. But as she got older, everything had really slowed down until the distance between each word and gesture allowed that you could get up and go to the bathroom as Florence was sneaking up on the noun, and get back before she had found the verb.

  There were several glasses and a pitcher of water on the front table and Florence took the largest glass, filled it and drank it, and filled it again. Then she began.

  “I’m ashamed,” she said, and she paused to catch her breath and take another drink. “All we ever do is complain.”

  This was as fast as anyone could ever remember Florence moving, and Johnny Whitehorse, who had been thinking about stepping outside and having a smoke, decided to put it off until later.

  “Complain, complain, complain,” Florence continued. “No wonder the white peoples don’t like us anymore.”

  Florence leaned over her walker. “Those white peoples are like little kids, you know,” she said. “They don’t know any better. That’s why they do these things.”

  Florence stopped there, and, frankly, no one knew what to say. And no one left. Everyone just sat and waited. Finally, Florence cleared her throat and shifted her weight.

  “What we need to do,” she said in a clear, strong voice, “is to give them a hand with their problems instead of always complaining about ours.”

  Florence pulled a handkerchief from the sleeve of her sweater and wiped her face and cleaned the sides of her mouth. “We got to show them how to be friendly and generous,” she said. “We got to be the adults.”

  Florence drank another glass of water. “So, I am going to that town and give those white peoples some help,” she said. And she sat herself back on the walker and shuffled to her seat.

  As soon as Florence was settled, Bella Tewksbury stood up and looked around as if she was trying to locate a forest fire. “Damn it!” she said in a booming voice. “Florence is right. And I’m going to drive her to Victoria.”

  Bella balanced her hands on her hips and squeezed her lips together. “So,” she said, “who else is coming?”

  This led to about twenty minutes of grumbling and mumbling and arguing, but Bella stood there like a light-house in a storm and waited. Finally Lillian Armstrong got up and then Betty Tom and Phyllis Aubutt joined her. Before long, everyone was up and standing with Florence and Bella.

  The next morning Amos and Wilma and Siv got on the phone and began calling around to relatives and friends to see if anyone else wanted to come along. Bella and her sisters and nieces made sandwiches and packed cans of pop and bottles of water into cardboard boxes.

  Amos Mischief’s daughter Laura lived in Victoria and Amos figured that she wouldn’t mind putting up a few people at her place, but Bella said no, that they should treat the trip like a vacation and stay in a nice hotel.

  Whereupon Everett Joe began telling Bella about his two years in Toronto and the kinds of prices that he had had to pay for hotels.

  “Some of the fancier ones like the Royal York and the King Eddie were fifteen to twenty-five dollars,” Everett cautioned. “For one night.”

  “That was years ago,” said Bella. “It’s going to cost us a little more than that, even in Victoria.”

  “We should stop off and see Owen,” said Wilma.

  “He’s in jail,” said Amos.

  “If I was in jail,” said Wilma, “I’d sure want friends to stop by and say hello.”

  There was a festive atmosphere to the caravan of cars and vans and trucks that headed out of Fort Goodweatherday. Florence rode in the front seat of Bella’s station wagon and as soon as they turned left at the Petrocan station and headed inland, Florence rolled up against the door and went to sleep.

  Larry Pugent was on duty at the reception desk of the Empress Hotel and thought that the fifty or sixty Indians walking through the lobby in his direction were part of a tour from Nagoya, Japan, that was almost a day late. He quickly called Laura Okazaki to come to the front desk and give him a hand.

  “Ko-nee-chi-wa,” said Larry, and he bounced his head a little the way he had seen Laura do it.

  Bella looked at Larry and then she turned to Amos and Wilma and Florence and the rest of the people. “Jesus,” she said, “any of you guys speak French?”

  “Oui, je parle français,” said Larry, delighted that he wouldn’t have to depend on Laura after all.

  Bella leaned on the counter and smiled at Larry. “How about English? Anybody here speak English?”

  “Yes,” said Laura Okazaki, who had just finished talking long distance with the tour operator in Nagoya, “I speak very good English.”

  “Good,” said Bella. “How much for a room?”

  “Unfortunately,” said Larry, “we’re all booked.”

  “That was Nagoya on the phone,” said Laura. “They’ve had to cancel the tour.”

  “So,” said Larry, hardly missing a beat, “how many are in your party?”

  “The whole lot,” said Bella.

  Larry smiled at Laura, opened a book, counted heads, and ran his finger down several columns of small print. Then he went to a calculator, added up a line of figures, and wrote a number down on a piece of paper that said “Empress Hotel, Victoria, British Columbia,” at the top in gold lettering.

  Bella looked at the figure. “That much?” she said.

  “It’s a world-class hotel,” said Larry.

  “For two weeks?”

  “No,” said Larry, “for each day.”

  Amos called his daughter who called her boyfriend Brian who called his cousin Gerald who, as it happened, was related to Bella by marriage. Gerald called Reuben Lefthand who ran a Native arts and crafts store on Fort Street.

  Reuben’s uncle, Gus, ran a trailer park about twenty minutes out of town on the way to Sooke and would have been happy to put everybody up except it was tourist season and the entire park was full.

  “But I got some tents you can borrow,” Gus told everybody.

  “And I know just the place you can camp,” said Reuben.

  Reuben and Amos and George packed the tents in George’s van and everyone drove back into town with Reuben in the lead.

  “You think he knows what he’s doing?” Crystal asked Bella.

  “Hard to say,” said Bella. “He’s not from around here.”

  Which was partly true. Reuben’s mother was Salish, but his father was Crow out of Montana.

  “But I suppose,” said Bella, “a person shouldn’t hold that against him.”

  Reuben worked his way through town, down to the waterfront, and around to the far side of the quay. When he was in front of the provincial parliament buildings, he parked the car and got out.

  “Here we are,” he said. And he grabbed one of the tents and carried it up on the lawn.

  “You sure we can all camp here?” said Bella.

  “Sure,” said Reuben. “All the protest groups do it.”

  “We’re not a protest group,” said Wilma.

  “Some of them even build little houses out of wood and cardboard,” said Reuben.

  “What are we going to do for bathrooms?”

  “See that over there,” said Reuben, gesturing to a large greystone building at the head of the quay. “You can use the bathrooms in there.”

  “Is that a government building, too?” asked Amos, who was thinking he had seen that building somewhere before.

  “No,”
said Reuben, “it’s the Empress Hotel.”

  Later that evening, after Reuben and the men had set up the tents, two RCMP officers stopped in.

  “You can’t camp here,” said the second RCMP officer.

  “We’re not camping,” said Bella. “We’re protesting.”

  “Protesting what?” said the first RCMP officer.

  “The Steels’ decision,” said Amos.

  “And Owen Allands being stuck in jail,” said Everett.

  The officers walked back to their car and talked for a while, and then two more cars came along. Before long there were eight police cars parked in front of the provincial buildings and close to sixteen provincial and RCMP officers talking on their radios and to each other and to tourists who had stopped to see what was happening.

  Finally an RCMP officer walked over to where Bella and Florence and Amos and Everett and Wilma and the rest of the people from Fort Goodweatherday were waiting.

  “Okay,” said the RCMP officer, “do you have any drums?”

  “Why?” said Everett, who still wanted to go to New York and was not completely happy about camping out.

  “The last Native protest group had drums,” said the officer. “They made a lot of noise and disturbed the tourists.”

  “We’re here to help you people,” said Florence.

  “Appreciate it,” said the officer, and she tipped her cap to Florence. “We can use all the help we can get.”

  Early the next morning, Reuben Lefthand showed up with a large thermos of hot coffee and a box of day-old doughnuts. Even Bella was impressed.

  “I guess those people out in Montana know how to do things right, after all,” she told Wilma.

  “It’s going to be a beautiful day,” said Reuben. “Have you figured out how you’re going to help?”

  Everett waved a doughnut at the provincial building. “Since we’re already here, why don’t we take over a building or something and demand that they release Owen?”

  “I say we close a road,” said Siv.

  “What did that judge say about Natives?” said Wilma.

  “He said we lived short and brutish lives,” said Reuben. “We’ve had about four or five protests about that already.”

  “There we go complaining again,” said Florence.

  “If we’re going to demand anything,” said Amos, “we should demand that they put Fort Goodweatherday on the map.”

  For the next hour, everyone sat around and drank coffee and ate doughnuts and discussed everything from the Supreme Court decision to what Wilma’s daughter Thelma should name her newborn son. Everyone, that is, except Bella and Florence.

  Bella and Florence were busy looking through the newspaper that Reuben had brought along with the doughnuts and the coffee, and you could tell by the way Bella rattled the pages as she snapped them open and shut that she was serious.

  “So,” said Reuben, “any plans?”

  Florence folded up her part of the newspaper, leaned back in the folding chair, and helped herself to a doughnut. “It says here,” she began, “that the city is having trouble with tourists.”

  “That’s right,” said Reuben.

  “We have the same problem up north,” said Florence.

  Florence took a bite of the doughnut and then she took another bite. Bella handed her a cup of coffee, and Florence sipped at that for a few minutes. Nobody moved, and nobody said anything. Somewhere in the distance, you could hear a coordinating conjunction moving in Florence’s direction.

  “And,” continued Florence, after she had finished the doughnut, “they can be real pushy and nosy.”

  Reuben waited for a while and then leaned forward. “The problem is the city has too many tourists,” he said. “All the hotels are booked and you can hardly get a reservation at a restaurant.”

  “We had a reservation,” said Amos, adapting one of his two favourite jokes to the occasion, “until that idiot judge opened his mouth.”

  “Okay,” said Florence, and she hoisted herself onto her walker and began working her way down the grassy slope to the sidewalk.

  Bella watched Florence for a moment. “Well,” she said to the rest of the people from Fort Goodweatherday, “any questions?”

  All things considered, it was amazing how fast Florence could move on her walker. Around the quay they went and past the Empress Hotel, which you couldn’t see too well now because of the tour buses and the horse-drawn carriages that were parked in front.

  “Where are we going?” said Everett, who was having a little trouble keeping up.

  “Hey, look,” said Amos, “are they taking pictures of us?”

  Sure enough, as the procession headed into town, several tourists stopped and pulled out their cameras and their video recorders and began filming Florence and Bella and the rest of the people from Goodweatherday.

  Florence ignored the cameras. She clumped along past the boats in the harbour, up a short incline, past the Tourist Information booth, and straight on along Government Street until she got to a nice-looking bookstore with a stone stoop.

  “All right,” said Florence as she settled in against the stoop, “now we’re going to show the white peoples just how friendly and helpful we can be.”

  Everyone stood around the bookstore and waited to see what Florence had in mind. And they didn’t have to wait long.

  Coming down the street, a man and a woman were walking along looking at an open map. As Florence and the rest of the Indians watched, the couple stopped and looked down a street, walked a little further, looked back the way they had just come, and then walked ahead some more. When they arrived at the bookstore, Florence eased herself off the stoop and cut them off with her walker.

  “Pardon me,” said Florence. “You peoples look lost. Maybe we can help.”

  The man smiled at Florence and the woman looked around nervously, as Siv and Amos and Everett and Reuben and Crystal and her three girls and the rest of the people from Fort Goodweatherday crowded in to watch Florence.

  “No,” said the man, “we’re not lost. We’re just looking…for something.”

  “So, what are you looking around for?” said Florence.

  “Tell them, Jerry,” whispered the woman, “don’t be a hero.”

  “It’s okay, Linda,” said Jerry. “I’ve got this under control.”

  “Just tell them what they want to know.”

  “Tell us,” said Bella, who was now standing shoulder to shoulder with Jerry. “Florence wants to help you.”

  “It’s really nothing,” said Jerry. “We were just looking for the Empress Hotel.”

  “That one is easy,” said Florence.

  “I have a map,” said Jerry.

  “Let me see that,” said Amos, and he snatched the map from Jerry and turned it around, but it didn’t have Fort Goodweatherday on it, either.

  “Okay,” Florence said to Jerry and Linda, “follow me.” And she set out down Government Street at a healthy clip. Everyone from Fort Goodweatherday moved with her, and Jerry and Linda were caught up in the surge and carried along like logs in a flood.

  “Now that’s the way it’s done,” said Bella, after they had dropped Jerry and Linda off in front of the hotel and watched them scamper in.

  Even Siv Darling agreed that it had been a nice thing to do.

  “Come on,” said Florence, and she started back into town. “Let’s find another tourist to help.”

  The next morning, Reuben arrived with doughnuts and coffee just as the police were getting out of their cars. Florence and Bella were already up and sitting in lawn chairs in front of the tents, watching the boats in the harbour. “You guys made the papers,” said Reuben. And he dropped a copy of the newspaper in Bella’s lap.

  “Morning,” said the policeman who was right behind Reuben. “Who’s in charge of this protest?”

  There was a picture of Florence and Bella and the rest of the people from Fort Goodweatherday on the front page of the newspaper with a headline that
read, “Indians Harass Tourists as Part of Protest.”

  “We’d like to talk to your chief,” said the second policeman.

  Bella tried to read the article and look at the policeman at the same time. “Our what?”

  “The man in charge of this protest,” said the first policeman.

  Bella snorted and said something to Florence in Salish that made Florence smile.

  “I’m sorry,” said the second policeman. “I don’t speak French.”

  “There have been complaints,” said the first policeman.

  “That’s all changed,” said Florence. “We’re not going to complain anymore.”

  “That’s good to hear,” said the second policeman, “and mind the flowers.”

  “The problem,” said Bella, folding the newspaper and putting it on the grass, “is that they haven’t seen friendly Indians in so long, they thought we were trying to create a disturbance.”

  “So what do we do?” said Amos.

  “Smile,” said Florence. “We got to smile more.”

  Wilma made up a list of ways you could be helpful, and, for the rest of the day, everybody from Fort Goodweatherday smiled as hard as they could as they helped the tourists in Victoria with their bags or took their pictures or offered directions or suggested restaurants or just took the time to ask whether or not they had heard about the decision that the Chief Justice of the British Columbia Supreme Court had made concerning Native land and Native rights.

  Even Siv Darling smiled, which was a big concession for Siv since he seldom found anything to smile about.

  Everyone was tired by the end of the day. “Helping is a lot harder than complaining,” Amos told Crystal and her three daughters. “I hope Florence knows what she’s doing.”

  The next morning, Reuben arrived just behind the television trucks and a dark sedan. The three men who got out of the sedan were dressed in casual slacks and pullover shirts with little animals stitched into the material just below the collar. Two of the men had knapsacks slung over their shoulders. The third man was tall and slim, and from the moment he stepped out of the car until he got where the people from Fort Goodweatherday were waiting for him, he was smiling.