A Short History of Indians in Canada

by Thomas King

  “Oh, God!” said Bella. “University.”

  “Don’t know,” said Florence, selecting a doughnut from the box Reuben was passing around. “Could be government.”

  “Good morning,” said the tall, slim man. “Welcome to Victoria.”

  The television crews pushed in, measuring the angles. They dragged their cameras and cables through the flower beds and up the rise, swirling around the men from the government like currents in a river.

  “We understand what you’re trying to do,” said the tall, slim man, looking around the camp and nodding his head, “and we wanted to tell you that we’re sympathetic.”

  Bella looked at Amos, and Amos looked at Wilma, and Wilma looked at Florence. The television lights were hot and bright, and Florence had to shield her eyes.

  “But this isn’t the way to do it,” said the second man.

  “No,” said the third man. “In the end, people who are sympathetic with your cause right now will turn against you.”

  “We may lose a tourist or two,” said the tall, slim man, “but in the end, the only people you’ll hurt will be yourselves.”

  And the three men went around the camp and shook hands and asked everyone from Fort Goodweatherday questions such as where they were from and how they liked Victoria so far and whom they were pulling for in the playoffs.

  After the men got back into their sedan and drove off, and the television people packed up their cameras and cables, Bella leaned over to Florence.

  “You were right,” she said in a low voice. “Government. For sure.”

  The people from Fort Goodweatherday stayed on in Victoria and helped out as best they could, and, by the end of the week, the number of tourists in the city had dropped by forty-seven percent.

  “It says here,” said Bella, as she sat on the lawn of the provincial building and read an article in the newspaper over coffee and doughnuts, “that the British Columbia Supreme Court is going to reconsider Steels’ decision.”

  “They going to let Owen go?

  “You guys are something else,” Reuben told Bella. “I’ve never seen the place so dead.”

  “Smiling and being helpful,” said Florence, “is always better than complaining.”

  “It didn’t put us on the map,” said Amos.

  “When are we going home?” said Wilma. “I’ve got a grandson needs naming.”

  Florence pulled herself onto her walker. The late morning sun filled the harbour and set the boats ablaze, and, from where she stood, Florence could see the Empress Hotel lying in the shade like a sleeping dog and the quiet streets that ran from town to the water and the information booth at the far side of the quay that hadn’t been open for the past two days.

  “Well,” she said, “looks like we’ve done as much as we can.”

  The drive back to Fort Goodweatherday was uneventful unless you count the two flat tires Amos discovered when he came out of the restaurant in Campbell River or the shouting match Bella got into at a gas station with a woman who had recognized the people from Fort Goodweatherday from a picture in the paper.

  “Some people are so proud,” Bella told Wilma, “having to admit they need help makes them cranky.”

  The weather along the coast was unseasonably sunny, and when everyone arrived home, most of the news, with the exception of the salmon fishing season having been reduced by three weeks, was good. Thelma hadn’t named her son yet, which made Wilma happy because Wilma wasn’t sure Thelma was old enough to come up with a good name on her own.

  “She was thinking of calling him Clarence,” Wilma told Bella. “Good thing I got back in time.”

  The following week, Owen Allands was released from jail.

  Amos remained unhappy about Fort Goodweatherday not being on the map, but as Bella was quick to point out, Victoria was on the map and look at the mess it was in.

  “There were people everywhere,” said Wilma. “That tourist thing is a little scary. Not sure I want everybody in the world knowing where I live.”

  At the next council meeting, Florence gave a report on the trip to Victoria and how helping other people with their problems had been the right thing to do.

  “Should have seen the looks on their faces,” Florence told everyone. “It’s not something they’ll soon forget.”

  “Course we can’t be doing this all the time,” Bella cautioned. “Being helpful is all well and good, but it’s a long drive, and it we’re not careful, we could create one of those cycles of dependency.”

  “Don’t forget the provincial road map problem,” said Amos Mischief.

  Everyone at the meeting agreed with Bella and Amos.

  “Helping was fun,” said Wilma, who had decided that Barnes was a better name for her grandson than Clarence, “but eventually, those people are just going to have to learn to work things out for themselves.”

  P.S.

  * * *

  Ideas, interviews & features

  * * *

  About the Author

  Author Biography

  THOMAS KING is one of Canada’s most beloved and critically acclaimed writers. He is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, children’s author, scriptwriter, radio personality and photographer.

  In the early sixties, King got a job on a tramp steamer and spent three years working as a photojournalist in New Zealand and Australia, where he made a first attempt at a novel he describes as “real pukey stuff.” His attempts at short fiction were no better—“Blithering messes and romantic slop.”

  He returned to North America in 1967, and finished a B.A. and an M.A. at California State University, Chico, and then went to the University of Utah, where he got a Ph.D. During his last year there, he got a job offer from the University of Lethbridge and, in 1980, arrived in Canada.

  It was at the University of Lethbridge that King began to develop as a writer. “I met this woman, Helen Hoy, at the university,” says King. “I had nothing to impress her with, but because she was in literature, I thought I might impress her with my writing. Maybe it was Helen or maybe it was coming to Canada. In any case, suddenly I could write.” King and Hoy have been together ever since.

  In 1989, Thomas King received a one-month writer’s residency at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. During that intensive month, he finished work on his first novel, Medicine River, and wrote the first draft of his second novel, Green Grass, Running Water.

  Medicine River was published to critical acclaim. The New York Times described it as “precise, elegant…a most satisfying novel.” It won the Alberta Writers Guild Best First Novel Award in 1990, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Later, it was made into a CBC television movie, starring Graham Greene, and a three-part radio play, aired on CBC Radio.

  Green Grass, Running Water, King’s second novel, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award in 1993 and won the Canadian Authors Award for Fiction. A national bestseller, it was also named to Quill & Quire’s Best Canadian Fiction of the Century list. Green Grass, Running Water was the runner up in CBC Radio’s 2004 “Canada Reads” contest. In the same year, King gave the prestigious Massey lectures, and the book from those lectures, The Truth About Stories, which investigates North America’s relationship with its Aboriginal peoples, won the Trillium Book Award.

  King has also written three acclaimed children’s books, garnering a Governor General’s Award for A Coyote Columbus Story. His highly praised story collection, One Good Story, That One became a Canadian bestseller in 1993. His third novel, Truth and Bright Water, published in 1999, was a bestseller as well. In 2002 he published DreadfulWater Shows Up, the first book in the DreadfulWater mystery series, under the pseudonym Hartley Goodweather. The second book in the series, The Red Power Murders, was published in 2006, just a few months after his second collection of short stories, A Short History of Indians in Canada.

  Recently called to the Order of Canada, King has also received an Aboriginal Achieve
ment Award from the National Aboriginal Foundation and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Western American Literary Association. Thomas King is a professor of English at the University of Guelph, where he teaches creative writing and native literature. He is currently working on a new novel, The Back of the Turtle, as well as episodes of his popular CBC radio show, the Dead Dog Café.

  About the Book

  In Conversation with Thomas King and Margaret Atwood

  From an interview conducted by Margaret Atwood for Fine Print in 2005

  Margaret Atwood: My first question is actually my fifth one.

  Thomas King: (laughing) I’m in real trouble.

  MA: Which is: how far up people’s noses are you willing to get? In other words, how outrageous are you willing to be? Do you ever get attacked for going too far—such as in the couple of stories in this book—by making white people too stupid to live?

  * * *

  “There is a point past which satire will not protect you—a point past which humour will not allow you to be part of polite society. But I don’t know where that is yet.”

  * * *

  TK: Is there a lawyer in the house?…It really is the society that I go after, but I must admit that individual people sometimes get in the way. That is a problem. I suppose there is a point past which satire will not protect you—a point past which humour will not allow you to be part of polite society. But I don’t know where that is yet. I haven’t gotten there yet. I worry about that, though.

  MA: Do you ever get letters about it?

  TK: Yes. Actually, most letters are about the Dead Dog Café. And I’ve gotten a number of letters that say, “This is the biggest piece of racist shit in the world. Why the CBC would put this on the air is beyond me. I never listen to your show.”

  MA: So, in one of your stories you have a little boy who gets in trouble at school, and the teacher makes him write on the board a hundred times “Racism hurts everybody.” And then he goes home and says, “The teacher made me write on the blackboard a hundred times “Racism hurts everybody,” he says to his mother. And his mother says, “Yes, it does hurt everybody, but it hurts some more than others.”

  TK: I suppose that’s what satire is. Satire hurts some people more than others. And the people that it hurts, well, I suppose that was my fault. I’m responsible for that.

  * * *

  “Satire hurts some people more than others.”

  * * *

  MA: You didn’t mean to do that.

  TK: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, I mean, the nice thing about satire—the nice thing about humour—is that you can write about really sad things, really tragic things, and you can make them not just palpable, you can almost make them funny to where you can get people laughing, and they won’t attack you until long after you’ve caught the cab back to the hotel, and they sort of figure out that they’ve been had, or that it actually hurts a lot more than they thought it did.

  MA: Uh huh.

  TK: I’m really quick on my feet.

  MA: So my next question is: Do you really know or have you met a wily, charming old Indian man who says “Ho!”?

  TK: “Ho!”?

  MA: Says “Ho!” a lot. Ho, exclamation mark. Like the ones this character says in a number of your stories, in fact. This guy keeps turning up and saying “Ho!” and then telling stories. Have you actually ever met anybody like that?

  TK: (laughing) You have to have a wise old Indian in any stories you have about Indians, for crying out loud.

  MA: Why does he say “Ho!”?

  TK: Haven’t you seen the movies? Actually, it’s not so much “Ho!” I couldn’t figure out how to represent that sound that many people in conversations make to let you know that they’re still paying attention. So you’ll be talking to someone and they’ll go “Ah, ah, ah.” But how do you write “Ah”? Spell it. Somebody spell it for me.

  * * *

  “You have to have a wise old Indian in any stories you have about Indians.”

  * * *

  MA: I agree. So “Ho!” is better.

  TK: Well, now that you say it out loud, no, it’s not better. But I was happy with it until—

  MA: Well, I’m saying it in the wrong tone of voice. If I said (deeper) “Ho!”—that would be better, right?

  TK: I was perfectly happy with “Ah” until you said “Ho!”

  MA: Anyway, I was about to say that you do those kinds of stories particularly well, and I wondered whether you were ever going to put together a collection of just those stories.

  TK: Oh, the ones they do in that sort of storytelling voice.

  MA: The old guy says “Ho!” and tells stories.

  TK: Oh, the old guy. “Ho, Coyote!”

  MA: Yeah, that one.

  TK: “That one was pretty tricky that day.” That voice.

  MA: That voice.

  TK: No, probably not. I guess I would worry that that voice, if it wasn’t cut with other voices in a collection, for instance, might become overpowering. I tried to write a novel—actually, Green Grass, Running Water—I tried to write it in that voice and wasn’t able to do it in the end. It was just too much, too much. I had to back off and have other voices come in there and sort of create, dare I say, an opera.

  * * *

  “Atwood: Now I’m going to ask you a serious question. A serious question. All right. Here we go.”

  * * *

  MA: Now I’m going to ask you a serious question. A serious question. All right. Here we go. My first encounters with your work go way back.

  TK: They do.

  MA: I reviewed two of your stories in the early nineties, and then I put “One Good Story, That One”—just one story—into one of those Oxford short story collections, and around the same time, you edited All My Relations, which has got to be the first anthology of fiction and poetry by Canadian native writers. I believe it was the first one, because when I was looking, around 1971, when writing Survival, there was Pauline Johnson and Louis Riel and some life stories, and that was it.

  TK: Yeah, they’re still there, too.

  MA: Since that time, there’s been an explosion of native writing in Canada, and you were in at the beginning of it. So my question is, what was it like to be surfing the first wave? Was it scary? Was it fun? What was it like?

  TK: Well, you know, I had no idea what I was doing.

  * * *

  “People didn’t know what to make of some of the early works.”

  * * *

  MA: Was that scary or fun?

  TK: It was kind of fun…I mean, picture it: you’re on the beach, and something you’ve never seen before, somebody in a log out on the water—and whether you think it’s great or not, it’s sort of interesting to look at, to see what they’re going to do, and so I—

  MA: So are you the person on the log, or are you the person on the beach?

  TK: Yeah, I’d rather have been on the beach, but I was on the log, as it turned out. There was a kind of excitement to that, because, in part, I suppose, people didn’t know what to make of some of the early works, and they were all so delighted to get them.

  The reading public was very generous to many of us who were in that initial sort of surge, if you will. And so it didn’t have some of the dangers, possibly, that it has now, where people have seen some native writing in Canada and have, you know, maybe an inkling of what it might be about. You know, to be at that beginning—I was scared to death, actually.

  MA: Well, there was a scary part, and I know Tomson Highway had some of this because if you’re writing from inside a group that feels under siege, the other people in that group don’t always like it when you say things that aren’t totally positive all the time about that group.

  * * *

  “To be at that beginning of native writing in Canada—I was scared to death, actually.”

  * * *

  TK: Yeah.

  MA: Not that I’ve had any personal experience of that.

  TK: No. I’ve
never seen a bad review of your books.

  MA: Well, you’ve not been looking in the right places.