For Joshua

by Richard Wagamese

  And I drank out of guilt. John had introduced to me a way of being that was authentic, vibrant, and empowering. The more I absorbed of that way, the more I respected it. But when I drank again I felt guilty because I was disrespecting those teachings, I was dishonouring them, I was, as a friend once put it to me, “spitting in the Creator’s face, knowing what you know and doing what you do.” When I sobered up again, as I always did for short periods, I carried around a big pile of guilt over that dishonour. So guilt became my constant companion, too.

  I became desperate. I needed more success in order to feel adequate, to place myself above the guilt and fear. So I worked. I worked hard. The reward of all that work was that I became “known” as a writer and I published my first book in 1994. Then I got drunk. For the next six years I achieved, then followed that achievement with a binge. Always. Two more books appeared in stores. I taught at a university. I was a guest speaker at other universities. And I had a beautiful baby boy to carry my name: Joshua Richard Wagamese. But none of this was enough to quell the guilt and fear I felt in my gut. For six arduous years I stood up and fell down, stood up and fell down. And I re-created all the ordeals of my youth.

  In that time I was sent to jail, lived on the street, went to detox, got beaten up, wandered from woman to woman, woke up on riverbanks, in dumpsters, back alleys, and strangers’ homes. I cheated, lied, and stole. And always, always, I would get sober long enough to convince myself and the people around me that I was okay this time, that it would be different. But it never was.

  Then one day I woke up on a riverbank and I wanted to die. I couldn’t stand the thought of another day in the misery of my life. I looked at the water flowing past me and I thought that if I filled my pockets with enough rocks I could end this seemingly endless cycle of injury and disappointment for myself and others. I could quit being a victim—and victimizing others. I could check out and no one would miss me. I wanted to die so badly it seemed like a logical choice.

  But the drinker in me needed one more bottle.

  As it turns out, the Creator needed me to go off on a search for one more bottle. I found it, although I had no money. When you drink out of desperation you can always find a drink. That’s the paradox of being a drunk like I was: even though the thing you need to feel better is actually killing you, you can always find it. Always. I found it with a group of desperate drinkers like myself and as we huddled under a railroad bridge, taking turns gulping down that whisky, I still had one eye on that river. Later, walking aimlessly about on my own, I lifted a bottle of mouthwash from a corner store and gulped it down as I stood in the middle of a bridge over that water. I was convinced it was finished, that I was finished, that I had no strength left for one more try.

  But I was wrong.

  I wound up in the hospital that day. I wound up connected to heart monitors and IVs dripping sufficient medication to allay the alcoholic seizures that were certain to follow. I was there five days. While I lay in that bed I had nothing to do but think. I thought about my life and how I had lived it.

  I thought about John and how, when he died suddenly, I felt abandoned and utterly alone. Year after year I allowed memory to take me where it would and I watched myself slowly disappear despite the show I was putting on for the outside world. So many unnecessary losses, so many needless hurts inflicted and endured, so many wrong turns, so many excuses and denials. Sometime during the course of those four nights in that hospital bed I became convinced that I could do what John had asked me to start doing on that hill so long ago: to accept who I was.

  I had another Vision Quest in detox. I admitted that I was a drunk and that, in the condition I was in on that hospital bed, I was hopeless. I was defeated. That if I drank again I would die—with or without rocks in the pocket.

  I found people who were just like me and I began to travel with them. Over time they showed me exactly what John had shown me, that I wasn’t bad, deficient, or unworthy—I was just a drunk who needed to stay sober in order to help himself. If I chose to do that, they offered to help me clean up the mess of my past and learn to use it as a tool for building a better future. Nothing was required but an earnest desire, and by the time I had been with them a month or so I had that desire.

  The wonderful thing about that is that these were not Native people. Or at least, not all of them were. They were people who had lived with the same feelings about themselves that I had. They were just people. Just drunks who didn’t drink, and they loved me until I could learn to love myself. With their help, I reconnected to the teachings John had introduced to me. I began to appreciate myself for surviving all I had put myself through and I found my way back to acceptance of who I was created to be. They helped me remember the most basic of our teachings: that we are gifted with our identities, and nothing is big enough to take that gift away from us. Ever. I was created to be a male Ojibway human being and those people helped me back to that recognition. They helped me back to learning how to honour it.

  When I had been around them a long time and had investigated my life and shared it with people, something strange happened. I was walking down the street towards the library on a cold, grey morning, looking at the sky and thinking how magical life can be and how many benefits were being paid me for the work I had done on healing my hurts and wounds. I remembered that on the morning of my last drink, the sky had looked just as it did on the street that moment. I thought about that morning. And it hit me. All of a sudden it just dawned on me and I smiled—because it didn’t hurt anymore. My life was no longer a Technicolor nightmare. It was a black-and-white reality. A reality that didn’t hurt anymore.

  And so I began to look at my Native life in the same way I’d looked at my drunkard’s life. I searched my past and admitted where I had been wrong. I investigated myself and found lots to toss away. And, consequently, a lot to keep and rebuild my life around. I found the me that existed under the rubble of all I’d caused to collapse. I found beliefs and values I never knew I had. I found understandings I never recalled being given. I found a peace in being a male Ojibway human being that I never knew was possible. I just needed an earnest desire to learn and it had been granted me.

  What I learned on that search is what I need to tell you, my son. I need to tell you because there are many places where I fell, and by telling you I might help you avoid them. That’s my duty, my responsibility, and my honour.

  For a long time our people have called this country home. This is where we fit, where we belong, and it is from here that our teachings sprang. We are who we are because of this land. When we stand upon it, even now, even with all of the changes that have scarred it, marred it, and made it less pure, we can feel the eternal connection that exists for us when our hearts are open. The sense of oneness that happens, the feeling of connection, is a result of hearts in tune with the land—resonating with each change, thrumming with the energy of its ongoing creation, tingling with expectancy at the wonders of each new season and beating with the measured, eternal rhythm of the drum at the centre of all of it. That’s what makes us Ojibway people: the knowledge that the land is a feeling, and sensing it in the soles of our feet.

  When we travelled about in the days long past, it wasn’t a search for permanence that drove us. For the one place on the land that we could call ours. It wasn’t a search for a territory we could control. It was for the experience of the land. We were bands of wanderers, perfectly at home wherever we were, at peace with the land and seeking an ever deeper relationship with it. Our travels gave us new perspectives, new ways of seeing, new teachings and a renewed sense of ourselves. The more we experienced of the land, the more we experienced ourselves. That’s not in any book, it’s not taught in any school, and there are a lot of people who will argue that we were just aimless, trying to scrounge survival from the land. But our people knew that we are who we are because of the land, and only through experience combined with teachings could we gain true knowledge. So we travelled. We experienced.


  The cultural teachings of our elders, the tools of the pipe and drum and ceremony, are all meant to help us get back to belief in who we are. They are meant to centre us, to take us right back to our hearts. To the truth of us. When we get there, we discover that the tools are merely aids, and that what really matters is what we carry in our hearts.

  I was confused for a long time, lost in pride, and I started to think about Canada as a nation. And that meant history. History told me that our people got a raw deal. It told me that we had had our land stolen from us. It told me that we had suffered through the tearing away of our culture, languages, and ceremonies. It told me that we had become second-class citizens on the land that once belonged to us. All I could see was that the settlers cared only for themselves. They were greedy and self-centred and could only see our people as a problem to be solved. Because of that we have suffered great injustices and hurts and someone had to be responsible for fixing things. Until that happened we had no choice but to be separate, to stand to one side and demand our due. That was how I saw Canada.

  But Canada is not a nation first. It is people. It is the feeling of the land. And it’s the feeling of the people on the land for the land. That’s what defines this country: the feeling of the people for the land. Not only those of us who were here first, who are native to it, but everyone. There aren’t many people in any part of Canada that don’t love the country for itself. You won’t have to travel far to find people who love it for the plains, the mountains, the muskeg, lakes, rivers, marshes, tidal bores, glaciers, estuaries, deltas, and seas. All my travelling had taught me that. So had the people I’d met.

  Earl loved rivers and he built his life on the banks of one. It cradled him, wrapped him up in it its sights and sounds and smells. The coal miner’s sons from Sydney loved the smells and textures of harbour life and made them come alive in their music. Sylvie and Luc carried the rustic joy of the Québec bush to the campus of a university. Glen, the rambler, adored the feisty, beer-swilling rollick of the bush camps, sawmills, and mines because they all reflected the land on which they were made—a bold, swaggering land—and he lived his life with the same verve and swagger. The Saskatchewan farmer’s son and the Métis steelworker were filled with the ache and passion of a prairie life, and their lives were poems and paeans to it. All of their stories came from the experience of generations spent on the land. They came from heartache and loss, disillusionment and sorrow, success and celebration, birth and dying—the same places our stories come from. That night around the fire in Nipigon had taught me this, had placed all of it in my soul. It took sitting on that hill and thinking about unity and belonging to bring it back.

  You don’t have to be Ojibway, Cree, Haida, Inuk, or Blackfoot to love Canada. You don’t have to be Native, because the truth is that everyone born here is native to this land. Everyone who has ever laid a loved one to rest within the breast of this earth has a spiritual tie to it that is as strong, as valid, as our own. Everyone who can trace a line to ancestors here, everyone whose lives have sprung from a relationship with the land, everyone whose family story is one that includes hardship, struggle, and a reclaimed dignity, has a right to claim themselves as native to Canada. We are the original people of this land, and that will never change, but everyone whose first breath is from the crystal clear air of Canada is native to this country. There are many people among us who will be angered by that thought, many who will deny it, but if history, intention, and responsibility have anything at all to teach us about ourselves, it is that our thinking must change.

  We are the original people. We are the ones who emerged from the forest to welcome the strangers when they arrived here so long ago. We are the ones who saw them suffer from the harshness of life on the land. We are the ones who came to their aid. We are the ones who guided them through seemingly impossible territories to show them the splendour of the country. We are the ones who taught them to respect it for its power. We are the ones who showed them how to nurture it, to gather its resources, to reap its blessings, and to honour it for them. We taught them to survive here. We taught them to grow. We taught them to take this land like a potion, to drink it deeply into themselves, to feel its energy, its transforming juices, and to become more. We taught them to be at home here. We taught them how to love this country.

  It was our role to do those things. It was our responsibility. It was the original instructions handed from Creator to us—to walk gently upon the land and do each other no harm. It is still our role. It is still our responsibility.

  As original people we are the guardians of the land. Protectors. That role will never change. When you protect something you keep it from harm. You cradle it within your spirit, and nurture it in everything you do so that it will grow, become more, become what the Creator intended. We cannot know what the Creator intends for anything. Even with our own children we do not know. But we have to follow the rules of protectors nonetheless and nurture them. Tecumseh’s mother did not know what the Creator intended when he was crawling around her wigwam. Big Bear’s mother did not know. Neither did the mothers of Sacajawea or Pocahontas. They protected them, guided them, nurtured them, kept them from harm and they became great. It remains for us to do the same with Canada. Always. Because we do not know what the Creator intends for it. That will come to pass in the Creator’s time. But we know what he intends for us and that is to be this land’s guardians—to show the way.

  As original people we know how to honour this land. We know how to bless it. We know how to approach it spiritually. We know how to take the lessons from that spirituality and give it back to the land.

  The truth is, Joshua, that a real Indian is a person who lives feeling. Real Indians use the teaching tools of our way to travel inside themselves. Real Indians, having made that sacred journey, discover their own truth—their selves. When they discover their selves they discover that the Creator has graced them with another tremendous gift: the gift of choice.

  When you know who you are you can choose anything. You can choose what to wear, where to live, where to work, what to study, the activities you enjoy, the people you want for friends. Everything. You can choose everything that the world has to offer and it will not change the fact of who you are. You can experiment with choice. You can try anything on for size, and if it fits and you’re comfortable, keep it, make it your own. Or, on the other hand, if it feels cumbersome and awkward, you can let it go and make another choice. Armed with identity, the knowing, you are empowered with choice to help make that knowing an ongoing thing. You can always learn more about who you are. You can always become more and more real.

  That’s the truth of our way.

  As parents and teachers we need to tell our children this—that you can never be less than who you were created to be. You never have to qualify. You never have to prove yourself. You just need to be.

  Each of us carries within ourselves the memory of drums on distant hills. In each beat of our hearts we hear the wails and chants of singers, of dancers’ shuffling steps, of spirits raised in one great voice to praise the Earth and the breadth of her dominion. In our veins runs the blood of generations past, and in that rich, thick flow are tribal memories of days long gone when our people truly lived in union with the land. Those memories flicker and dance with every move we make in this modern world. They call to us. Beckon to us in dream time. Rise up like sudden phantoms in times of trouble. Ebb and flow like tidal waters in the casual day-in day-out routines of living. They are in our blood, and our spirits long to be reconnected to them. We all crave, as deeply as any thirst, a return to those tribal fires where the people gathered in one small band to huddle against the night. A return to times when we lived in harmony, balance, brotherhood, and belonging. A return to the shelter of those tribal flames, to the sense of warmth they gave, the belief that in that one small circle of our people could be found the hearts and bones of our survival. We’ve felt that fire slowly die in our communities. We’ve w
atched its light fade, its warmth disperse, and its embers lose their spark.

  And that is what we mourn.

  From that mourning comes a staunch desire. A desire to re-create it all. To rebuild it. To live as our tribal hearts would have us live—in unity, peace, and brotherhood. That is what our tribal hearts desire and that is what we miss.

  We go to great lengths sometimes to make it real for ourselves. We go to great lengths to fan those dying embers, to stoke those flames back to life, to chase away the night. In our cultural lives we insist that real Indians know how to sing and dance and drum. In our traditional lives we insist that real Indians attend every ceremony, make every offering, possess all the medicines, and speak our languages. In our communities we insist that real Indians live as everyone else lives, choose what everyone else chooses, and fit in by being exactly the same. We insist on all of this because we have seen how quickly things can disappear into the night and we need everyone to fan the dying embers of those tribal fires. We don’t want to lose any more of ourselves, so we get tough on each other, demand that we all be what we believe everyone needs to be to stay strong, to live, to survive. We don’t want to grieve the loss of another part of ourselves.

  Our neighbours in this country need to hear this, too. They need to hear that there is so much unrest among their Native brothers and sisters because of grief and longing. They seek to understand us, but we have too often closed the door to our lodges and said that only Indians may come in. They wonder why we seem so upset, why we insist on land claims, special treaty rights, a voice in political decisions that affect us. They wonder why we are so angry at them.