As Long as the Rivers Flow

by James Bartleman

  Eventually, in a soft voice, Martha asked Nora in Anishinaabemowin if she spoke her Native language: “Gdi nesh naabem nah?”

  Nora answered her in the affirmative: “Aanish gonna.”

  Martha smiled and remarked that Nora sure talked in a funny way: “Gdi pkan gdi nwaam.”

  Nora shot back saying she could say the same thing about Martha’s accent: “Maa dash wiin miigoo Naasaab! En weeyagng ma north.”

  The two women laughed and the ice was broken.

  “I was about to make myself a snack. We don’t have any country food here but I make real good grilled cheese sandwiches. Want one?”

  Martha nodded her agreement, and soon they were eating and talking quietly.

  “So where do you come from and what are you doing in the big city?” asked Nora.

  “I’m from way up north,” said Martha. “It was time to make a new start in my life and I thought I’d try my luck in Toronto. But this is a scary place and I don’t know if I can handle it.”

  “Sure you can,” said Nora. “You just have to get used to it and make some friends. I can help you.”

  “Could you put me up for tonight?” asked Martha. “I have some money.”

  “Of course,” said Nora. “You can stay as long as you want, and if you run short, you don’t have to pay.

  “What about your family. Are you married? Any children? Are they coming down to join you?”

  At the mention of children, Martha began to sob. Nora got up and put her arms around her shoulders and it was not necessary to say anything. When Martha stopped crying, she returned to her seat and waited for Martha to speak.

  Although used to keeping her feelings and thoughts to herself, Martha was comfortable with Nora and felt she could confide in her. She thus told her about Spider and Raven and how bad she felt for not being there for them when they needed her. When Nora said she shouldn’t be so hard on herself, and there were surely reasons for acting as she did, Martha opened up and told her everything: her residential school experience, Father Antoine, the death of her little cousin Little Joe, her depression, the circumstances of Spider’s birth and removal, the life she made for herself in the community afterwards, Raven’s birth and her departure for Toronto. By the time she had finished, it was one in the morning and both women were crying. With the help of Nora and the other staff members of Kwawag Andwad, Martha adjusted to life in the city. For the first six months, she lived at the shelter, taking her meals there and sharing her room with other women who likewise had come to Toronto knowing no one and trying to make a fresh start in life. The staff helped her prepare the paperwork to receive temporary welfare assistance, to register for medical care at the Anishinabe Health Centre, and to begin classes to finish her high school diploma. When Nora noticed that Martha sometimes appeared troubled, she invited her to join their weekly healing circle.

  “You will never be well, Martha, if you don’t share your feelings with others.”

  But Martha refused. She had been prepared to talk privately with Nora about her past—and that had helped—but it was a different thing to air her problems in public with strangers.

  As the years went by, Martha lived a modest version of the Canadian dream, moving to her own apartment and finding work as a waitress to pay for evening studies to obtain her high school certificate. She took courses to become a bookkeeper, obtained a well-paying job at the Native Friendship Centre and was even able to buy a car.

  Life would have been good were it not for the poor state of her relations with her mother and daughter. In the years she was away, even though Martha had the money to do so, she took no trips home. It was not that she did not want to see her family. She did, and after she had put some money aside, she told Nokomis in a letter that she would be returning home for the summer holidays. But the reply, drafted for Nokomis, who did not know how to read or write, by a clerk at the co-op, was a great disappointment.

  My daughter, I would like nothing better than to see you here at home again. But as much as it hurts me to say so, a visit at this time would upset Raven, even though she is still very young and I think it best you stay away awhile yet.

  Afterwards, Martha wrote often to her mother enclosing money to help her with living expenses and asking about Raven. In her letters back, Nokomis enclosed photos of her daughter that Martha framed and kept on her bedside table, but she gave no news of the little girl other than to say she was well. When Martha wrote some time later to say that she was now well established in Toronto and wanted to bring her daughter to live with her, her mother replied that she would be ever so lonely if her granddaughter were not with her to keep her company.

  Down there in the big city everyone looks down on the Anishinabe people. We may have our problems on the reserve but at least up here she would be among her own. What would you do with her when you go to work? You’ve no husband or family to help you and she’d eventually get into trouble. Remember what happened to Spider when you didn’t follow my advice on how to raise him? Don’t make the same mistake again.

  Filled with guilt at the memory of how terrible a mother she had been to her baby boy so many years before, Martha did not have the heart to contradict her mother and agreed to leave her daughter with her to raise. But when she was old enough, Raven began sending her own letters, initially with a child’s scrawl, and later more assertively, but always ending with, “I love you, mommy. When are you coming home?”

  Martha hated receiving her letters since she could not tell Raven the real reason she was staying away. From time to time, she would put a twenty-dollar bill in an envelope and send it off with a note telling her to buy herself a present at the co-op. Eventually, Raven sent her a terse note saying she didn’t want money, she wanted her mother. The next time Martha sent her twenty dollars, Raven sent it back without comment.

  Meanwhile, Martha got on with life, wearing her hair in braids and buying stylish clothes including a beautiful buckskin jacket with fringes and a traditional floral motif that she wore everywhere to proclaim her pride in her heritage. In addition to becoming close friends with Nora she became a regular volunteer at the shelter, helping women from remote reserves who arrived in the big city knowing no one.

  Then one day in the summer of 2002, Martha asked Nora whether she had liked attending university. “I’ve lived in Toronto far too long stuck in a comfortable rut. Maybe it’s time I exercised my brain. I’ve got the grades to get into the University of Toronto but don’t know if it’s for me. What do you think?”

  “I loved it,” said Nora. “But it’s not for everyone. I knew what I wanted to get out of it when I went in, to be a social worker and help Native people. Some go because they just want to learn about other cultures and religions and generally to improve their minds. How about you? Looking to upgrade yourself to get a better job?”

  “Not at all,” said Martha. “I like being a bookkeeper. I’m just curious about things and I like reading and books even if I’m no expert.”

  “Why not take an evening course and see if you like it?”

  Martha decided she would start off by studying nineteenth-century Canadian authors, and if all went well, she would move on and study the great writers of Canada of the twentieth century. Thus early one September evening, Martha joined several hundred other extramural students filing into a classroom for the first lecture of the fall semester on The Poets of Confederation. At seven o’clock, exactly on schedule, Professor Marshall, noted authority on the subject, entered the room and began his lecture.

  “Poetry,” said the professor, “bridges the gap between the prosaic and the sublime. It is like music in having the ability to convey an emotion and meaning that prose cannot.”

  Martha was not certain what Marshall was talking about, but listened attentively as he went on to say that the greatest of all the early Canadian poets, in his opinion, was Duncan Campbell Scott.

  “Scott,” he said, “was born into a modest family in the small town of Smiths Fal
ls in eastern Ontario. He was a man of deep artistic sensibility and humanity, and he became a poet who would have no equal in the pantheon of early Canadian authors. But remember, all poetry is personal. You may prefer someone else—that’s your right. But Scott touches me. I find it hard to read his poems without becoming emotional.”

  His voice breaking, Professor Marshall read from a selection of Scott’s poems. Those in which Scott described Indians were his favourites, particularly one called “Indian Place-Names.”

  The race has waned and left but tales of ghosts,

  That hover in the world like fading smoke

  About the lodges: gone are the dusky folk

  That once were cunning with the thong and snare

  Mighty with the paddle and the bow …

  The professor carried on, but Martha had stopped listening. Why was this poet writing about her people in such a superior way? Perhaps she didn’t understand what he was saying. After all, Scott was Marshall’s favourite poet, and as a professor he obviously would know more than she did about what was good poetry. When she picked a topic for a term paper, therefore, she decided to do hers on Scott to uncover his “deep artistic sensibility and humanity.”

  But what she discovered when she visited the university library was frightening. The books confirmed that he was considered one of Canada’s most famous early poets, widely admired for his disciplined and intense diction, for his depiction of Canada’s wilderness at the turn of the twentieth century and for his portrayal of Native people.

  So far, so good. But then Martha read his poem, “The Onondaga Madonna.”

  She stands full-throated and with careless pose,

  This woman of a weird and waning race,

  The tragic savage lurking in her face,

  Where all her pagan passion burns and glows,

  Her blood is mingled with her ancient foes,

  And thrills with war and wildness in her veins

  Her rebel lips are dabbled with the stains

  Of feuds and forays and her father’s woes.

  Martha shuddered. Scott was speaking about her. She read other poems in which he described Indians as being on their way to extinction, inherently bloodthirsty, lacking in principles, dark and wild. In some of them, the offspring of an Indian and a white person was depicted as being even more degenerate and savage than his Indian parent.

  There was more. She learned that Scott had been an influential member of the Department of Indian Affairs for some fifty years. He had been one of the government commissioners who had arrived in her community wearing a pith helmet and imposed the unequal treaty on her people so long ago. Most damaging of all, he was one of the architects of the Indian residential school system.

  Martha discovered that Scott believed Native people did not fit into the new Canadian identity that was coming into being as the twentieth century arrived. In his view, Indians should be assimilated, and the best way to do this was to send them to residential schools, to forbid them to speak their language and to force-feed them the values of the white man. The drastic measures were needed to ensure “there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic.” And it was on his watch that thousands of children, like her little cousin, deprived of proper food and medical care, died of malnutrition and disease in their lonely barracks.

  Martha was puzzled. How could someone who had done such terrible things go down in history as a man of great humanity? What was she missing? She then read that his only child, a daughter, had died at the age of twelve, and his wife had passed away some years later. She thought of Little Joe and remembered how hard her aunt had taken it when she learned of his death. Scott would have felt just as bad, she was sure. How then was it possible for someone who had suffered so much in his own life to have inflicted so much harm on so many Native people? He must not have understood that they were fully human.

  In her term paper, Martha said Scott’s poems about Natives were racist. If that meant Scott should go down in history as a racist poet, then so be it. And if anyone said that he was just a man of his time, then the people of that era—the church leaders, the politicians who supported his evil policies, and the Canadian public who found the government’s policies acceptable—were racists as well.

  Some time later at the beginning of a class, the professor asked a student to hand out the corrected term papers. When Martha received hers, she saw that she had received a failing grade. Worse was to follow.

  “Today,” the professor said, “I want to address the issue of political correctness in my classroom. One student, whom I will not name, in her paper on Duncan Campbell Scott, sought to mix political considerations with literary criticism. You should know that type of approach has been popular on university campuses for the past decade. Faculty members in some universities cannot even put The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on the syllabus without being called racist since Mark Twain uses the ‘N-word’ in his remarkable novel.

  “Well, let me tell all of you today that I will not stand for such nonsense in my class. Duncan Campbell Scott has been unfairly maligned for opinions and views he expressed that were accepted in his time. This student even had the nerve to condemn him for what he did in his day job. This I will not accept. We cannot judge Scott for not conforming to the politically correct standards of today.”

  Martha said nothing during class but went to see him afterwards. Marshall’s face turned red when Martha, dressed in her buckskin jacket, entered his office and sat down in a chair facing his desk. Although he had never spoken to her in class, he had taken note of her, and had assumed she was Indian from her name, brown skin and facial features.

  “I half-expected you would show up here, Ms Whiteduck. But I’m afraid I won’t be changing my mind about your mark.”

  Martha looked at the professor for a moment, the term paper in her hand. When he began to look uncomfortable, she spoke. “I’m proud to be Indian,” she said. “I’m also a residential school survivor and personally suffered a lot from the policy Duncan Campbell Scott did so much to put in place. I haven’t come looking for a better grade. I’ve come to talk to you person to person. I want to understand how you can admire someone who did so much harm to my people for so long.” Marshall looked at Martha more closely, noting for the first time that while she was older than most of the other students in his class, she possessed a type of sensuality that was more appealing to him than the fresh-faced beauty of women much younger that he normally cultivated.

  “I hope I haven’t hurt your feelings,” he said, in a more understanding manner. “I’m so used to students trying to use my class to promote fashionable political causes that I sometimes become angry and overreact. To tell the truth, I know next to nothing about your people and what you’ve lived through. Why don’t you wait until my office hours are over and join me for a coffee to talk things over?”

  An hour later, professor and student were deep in conversation in a neighbourhood coffee shop. While by nature Martha was shy, the professor displayed such an interest in her story, she opened up and told him about her life on the land as a little girl and her time at residential school and in Toronto.

  Marshall pressed her for greater detail. He had frankly been disturbed by what Martha had said about the schools in her term report. But had these schools not prepared Indian children for life in the twentieth century? Had the children not been taught to read and write? Had they not returned home every summer to their families? Had the teachers not served as role models for the students? Were there not reasons other than the residential school experience to account for the problems Indian communities were dealing with today?

  “I want to tell you about what happened to me and let you judge for yourself,” said Martha. After she told him about Father Antoine and Little Joe, Marshall looked away.

  “I had no idea,” he said. “I had no idea such things were still going on during my lifetime in Canada. I’ve always believed, and I guess I still d
o feel, that we should judge literature on the standards of literature and not on the political views or behaviour of the author. But you’ve really shaken me and given me lots to think about. Now let me have that paper back and I’ll give you a better grade.”

  But Martha refused. “I told you, Professor Marshall, I didn’t come to see you to get a better mark. Besides I’ve learned a lot from our discussion tonight.”

  “Well, at least let me buy you dinner. I owe you that much for giving you such a hard time. And please call me Linden. Professor Marshall is for use only in class.”

  9

  Different Worlds

  THE NEXT MORNING, Martha woke up in a strange room to the sounds of Linden puttering around somewhere in the house. She got out of bed, turned on the light and saw her clothes neatly laid out on an armchair, just as she had left them the previous night.

  As the memories of what had taken place came back, she wondered what had come over her. Since her arrival in Toronto, she had found it hard to establish relationships with men. It was not that they did not pursue her. They did, drawn by her natural elegance, good looks and intelligence, but after her experience at the hands of Father Antoine and Russsell, none of her relationships had lasted for long. Now she had allowed someone who was almost a stranger to talk her into returning home with him “for a quiet nightcap” and into his bed.

  But without knowing why, she trusted Linden. Perhaps it was because he was so knowledgeable about things she knew nothing about and had an excellent sense of humour. Perhaps it was because he had been so forthcoming about his marital situation, telling her he had once been married but was now happily single. Whatever the reason, she was flattered that such a cultivated person would take an interest in her.

  Linden opened the door and came in. “I see you’re up. Welcome to my home in the daylight. I’m cooking up a great English breakfast for the two of us. How do you like your eggs?”