by Dawn Dumont
The unusual part was that a white couple was even on the reserve. The world was still segregated back then. Whites did not go near the reserve. Indians did not leave. Although the Indians did not have a choice in the matter, it was illegal to leave the reserve without a permit from the local Indian agent until the late 1960s.
According to my mom, Indian agents abused their power. Some would withhold food rations to make people do their bidding. One agent had affairs with Native girls and when he knocked them up, he forced them to marry single dudes on the reserve. Apparently the job description for Indian agents began with the phrase, “Have you always wanted to visit the prairies and be a huge douche bag to Native people?”
So when a Caucasian couple drove to the reserve, it was a big deal. They and their family were not strangers to Native people. They bought hay and produce from enterprising Native businessmen who snuck off the reserve in the middle of the night to sell it to white farmers. The couple had even hired young Native guys to labour on their land. And like everyone else, they had seen the Native families when they came to town, the mothers wearing a tail of children. Perhaps they had seen this particular family and made their decision then.
Finding your way through the reserve is a tricky business. For one thing, there are no road signs and no addresses. People find their way by memory or else with the help of a guide. Directions are no help unless you’ve been there a few times, because they tend to sound like, “Turn at the hill that looks like a buffalo hump. Then keep driving past Rabbit Hill, take a right at the old Nokusis place and then a left at the new Nokusis place. If you reach the old, old Nokusis place, you’ve gone too far.”
When they arrived, my grandfather’s yard was full of activity. The couple must have been momentarily entranced by the chaos: chickens, horses, pigs, goats, dogs, and children running to and fro.
Some of the children were in the midst of chores, others in the midst of avoiding them. The kids pulled away from their activities and picked their way carefully through the various types of animal shit to look at the car and the couple more closely. They ran their hands over the car. They stared at the couple who smiled in a friendly way to them. After a minute or two, the kids grew bold and asked them a few questions, “Would you like to buy some eggs? How about some milk? We got goat and cow milk if you want.”
Experience had taught the kids that white people meant money and the kids weren’t afraid of money.
The man and woman introduced themselves to the children and began to ask them their various ages. The kids shouted their ages proudly. “Ten” “Nine” “Six” “Twelve” “Four” “Seven!”
About this time my grandfather William made his way out of the barn. He invited them to join him inside the house for tea served by my grandmother, Rose.
Grandma Rose was friendly in a careful way. She washed her hands free from flour and asked them to sit at the table. She was polite to white people but did not trust them. Grandma had attended the Indian Residential School in the valley and still remembered people in white sheets standing outside the school in the middle of the night, their hoods illuminated by the candles they carried.
Then her oldest daughter, Edith, had married a white guy and moved to British Columbia. The man was nice enough; his family was not. In an effort to fit in, Edith was pretending to be Italian. It made Grandma laugh to think of her daughter pulling the wool over her in-laws eyes but it wasn’t a happy laugh.
My grandfather knew his way around the white world. He had attended university for a degree in music. He spoke four languages: English, Cree, French and Ukrainian. He felt comfortable sitting in the kitchen of any of the white farmers living around the reserve. It helped that he didn’t look like the stereotypical Native: his eyes were grey, his skin was light brown and he often had a full beard courtesy of his Metis ancestors.
My grandfather figured the white people had stopped by to buy some chickens or vegetables from his immense garden. When you have twelve children, you can have a huge garden. And when you have a dozen kids, you probably should have a huge garden.
The couple got right to the point. They wanted to adopt a child. They pointed out the window at a five years old girl playing with her siblings. She was the fairest of my grandparents’ children.
“It would be easier for her to fit in,” explained the woman.
“We would be able to give her a good home,” said the man.
“If you can’t part with her,” the woman offered, “we could also take one of your boys. That one is also very fair.”
I was not there that day (my mom was only five years old after all). I can imagine the look on my grandpa’s face (red) and the nature of his language (profane). From the facts available to me, the couple left quickly after making their request, and did not return.
My mom grew up knowing this story and it gave her a sense of importance. She even went so far as to find out where that unlucky couple lived. One day, our family drove by their place on our way to Melville, one of the larger small towns in the area. “That could have been my house,” she said, pointing at a large ranch-style house.
The house was impressive. It had four bedrooms (at least), a kitchen, a dining room and a breakfast nook. And could it be? Yes, there was even a pool sparkling in the backyard.
“They’re millionaires,” she sighed. “Can you imagine how rich I’d be?”
Mom rested her head on her seat and considered her wealth.
This thought was somewhat unsettling to my eight-year-old mind. “What about us? Would you still have had us?”
She looked into the backseat and studied our brown faces and dirty limbs encased in (from what I can tell from the photographs) colourful striped polyester shorts and tops that covered only three quarters of our round bellies.
“How would I know?” she said airily, her voice and diction already whiter.
I looked up at my dad, dark and quiet in the driver’s seat. And I wondered, would he have tracked her down to the white people’s house? Or would he have found a different Native wife? And would my mom have married a Native, or a white man? And if she’d married a white man, would we be her kids? Or Dad’s?
It was a difficult question. Truth be told, I’d have preferred to be my mom’s kid swimming in her deliciously cool-looking pool.
Then I looked down at my brown skin and knew that if I’d been in Grandpa’s yard I’d have never made the cut. Nor would my little brother, David, who was a tiny, pudgy version of my dad. My sister, Celeste, had fair skin and honey coloured hair — now she stood a chance of being picked. But she was such a mischief, tantrum-thrower and all round wild Indian that any white people unwise enough to have picked her would have surely brought her back the next day.
By the time I finished considering this, we were safely back on the reserve where we belonged.
When it came time to pick a high school, my parents had a choice of sending us to an all-Native boarding school or to a mainstream school about half an hour away.
The boarding school was one of those “Indian Residential” Schools that had a terrible reputation for abusing Aboriginal people for decades, though my parents didn’t quite understand why.
My dad had attended a red-bricked Residential school from ages seven to seventeen and my mom for two years when she was a teenager. Neither of them had any complaints. “Just a school like any else,” Mom would say, “I don’t see what the big deal is about them.”
A year after he was enrolled at the school, the nuns and priests at the school decided that my dad’s last name, “Day Walker,” was too Native-sounding and changed it to “Walker.”
Mom figured they meant well. “They knew he’d have an easier time fitting in if he didn’t have a damned Native name ruining his chances for jobs and whatnot.” I looked over at my dad’s dark skin, raven black hair and hawk nose and wondered how the priests and nuns planned on hiding that from future employers.
When she was in the mood, Mom would share her Resi
dential School experience with us. She had watched as two girls were beaten with a strap in front of her for trying to escape one night. “I was so glad I didn’t go with them,” laughed my mom. “That could have been me!”
Mom told us about being always being hungry. “My stomach would hurt but that’s only because I was used to eating so much more at my mom and dad’s. Sure it bothered me that the nuns and priests ate better than we did. That was to be expected, they’re God’s helpers.” Her off-hand manner was confusing; it was wrong to hurt children but how come Mom and Dad weren’t mad about what happened to them?
My dad had been bullied by older kids and narrowly escaped a beating at the hands of one of these bullies but that, too, was all in a day’s fun. “Oh, the good times we used to have, running away from the big guys. You’d be surprised how long you can hide in a broom closet.”
Listening to their stories, I would wonder what they would consider abuse: hot pokers? dog attacks? waterboarding?
If you have followed the history of residential schools, you know that Native people sued the residential schools and their organizers: the United Church, the Catholic Church and the Canadian Government. The lawsuits alleged physical, emotional and sexual abuses at the hands of the people who ran these schools. After years of litigation, the Canadian government settled with the Aboriginal people who attended the schools and paid out money to everyone who had attended. The payments were called, “The Common Experience” payments because the students had the same common experience that residential schools sucked.
To my parents the schools were tough, yes. Abusive? No. Even when I would argue that the rational behind the schools was inherently racist and say, “They wanted to beat the Indian out of you.”
My parents disagreed.
“You can’t make someone not Native. Either you are or you aren’t.”
My parents did not deny that some children who attended these schools were abused. “Well, yes there’s always some of that everywhere you go.”
“And you don’t think these schools left children particularly defenseless?”
“Well, of course. No one meant anything bad by it.” They were always hopeful, always optimistic about the intentions of others. I could never get my parents to admit that the residential schools were a terrible thing.
“I had a good time. Maybe not everyone else did, but I did. And the schools prepared you for life — you know, for the real world,” Mom said.
“Yeah, if the real world is the Jerry Springer show.”
“Oh go on! It wasn’t that bad.”
As time went on, their tune began to change. When the first lawsuits were being litigated, my parents moved onto the fence. “I suppose it was bad for that person but I don’t remember any abuse like that. Still, that sounds really awful . . . ”
After hundreds more people had received their money, “Now that I think of it, they were pretty mean at those schools and they didn’t need to be. We were just kids.”
Then finally when Canada announced the Common Experience payouts, my parents printed off their forms and dutifully listed the years they attended the schools. We knew our parents deserved the money. Still we teased them about their hypocrisy.
“I thought you said it wasn’t that bad,” I commented.
Mom gave me a hurt look. “I did go hungry and my parents could only visit once a year.”
My dad added, “I didn’t get to speak my language. I missed that.”
Mom agreed. “Honestly, I’d love your father more if he could speak Cree. A lot more.”
In the early Eighties, a Native band near us came into a lot of money and bought the local Residential school. They removed the Catholic component and replaced it with a curriculum based on sports and being cool. At least that’s how it seemed to my sister and me. Our cousin Rachel went there. Her enrollment guaranteed that for the rest of her life no matter where she went in Western Canada, she always knew where the best party was. Only the most socially progressive Native teenagers in the province attended it: the girls with the best hair and clothes and the guys with the widest smiles and the deepest dimples.
I saw one of the Lebret girls in our town one afternoon — Stacey Littlechild. She was famous for being beautiful and dating one of the hot Gambler boys. She stood in the dingy foyer between the restaurant and the bar. Her hair was straight and sleek, a black sheet that floated down her back, as she got up to look out the window for the Greyhound bus. I walked past her and ate her outfit with my eyes in the three seconds that you are allowed to stare before you’re marked as a creepy weirdo. Sadly I knew that even if I had the money to shop in the stores she frequented, I would never, ever put together an outfit that was so stylish and casual and cool. Stacey was in my town, standing in my bus depot and yet it was like she owned everything. Simply by passing through, she put her mark on the place.
Rachel knew girls like Stacey (or Stace as you called her if you knew her.) Her stories were coloured with their names; Rachel wasn’t bragging about knowing Native celebrities, she simply knew them. And we didn’t.
Celeste and I were jealous. We asked our parents to let us switch schools. They wouldn’t budge. Mom preferred to keep her children where she could see them. Dad had a different reason; the residential schools were segregated and Dad believed in integration. Whenever my sister and I would bring up the idea of moving to the Residential school, he would say, “You might as well learn how to get along with them now.”
I complained to my parents. “It’s racist at our school. Everybody knows that.”
Mom disagreed, “Just be yourself and people will want to be your friend.”
At school a veil of air separated the Natives and whites. You could be standing right beside a white person and it was as though you were invisible. They would stick their arm up and address the teacher. “I don’t have a partner!”
“Dawn doesn’t have a partner.”
“Oh right. Dawn?” I would nod and internally roll my eyes.
I didn’t dare reject my partner as it meant another class sitting alone in the back. By the way, doodling for entire class isn’t as fun as it sounds.
Celeste was fearless and outgoing so I always figured she had it easier than me. One day she came home seriously pissed off. “You will never believe what Sandy said to me!” Sandy was a chubby, dark haired white girl in Celeste’s class.
I knew who Sandy was; I had tutored her in math the year before. She was nice even if she did tell me that my chapped lips looked gross one day. She was right; they did look disgusting.
“Was it something about your lips?” I asked.
“No. She told me that if I wanted to, then I could be white.”
I wasn’t exactly stunned. I knew that my sister was fairer than the rest of our family. In fact, she was the blondest person on the reserve (other than Valerie, our resident southern belle.)
“Why would you want to be white?” I asked.
“That’s the whole point. Sandy assumed that everyone would want to be white, if they had a choice.”
“Why would she assume that?”
“Because she thinks we’re ashamed of being Native!”
Sandy was wrong on both points. Nobody could choose to be white at our school. Even if your looks allowed you to jump over the first barrier, how would you explain what bus you got off of each morning? How would you explain your cousins, your brother or your sister? These weren’t decision that you could make or unmake. Despite her hair colour, Celeste was First Nations. She lived on the reserve, she ate Indian foods and went to pow-wows. She said, “as if” and “Ch.” She played “boys chase the girls” and “girls chase the boys” at recess.
Sandy was wrong about the second point as well. While we didn’t wear our pride on our sleeves, we didn’t want to be any other race. I wanted to make sure that Celeste was on the same page, so I asked her, “Do you want to be white?”
Celeste looked at me as I had grown horns out of my head. “Of cours
e not,” she huffed.
I was relieved. The white girls already had everything; they couldn’t have my sister too.
“So what did you tell her?”
“I asked her why would I want to be white? And she said, ‘how rude Celeste!’ I told her if she mentioned it again, I would punch her in the mouth.” My sister smiled at her own viciousness.
I felt sorry for Sandy. I’m sure she was surprised to find out that even though the whites considered us inferior, we did not.
The white kids dominated the school while the First Nations kids pretended they didn’t care. But they did care, and they showed how much by dropping out. When I started junior high, there had been at least fifteen reserve-raised girls in my class. By the time I graduated, there were none left. The others had transferred to city schools where they fit in better, where there were more Native students, more guys to crush on, more parties to attend. There were more races in the city too, so racists had to split their attention among Asian, Black, Aboriginal and immigrant students.
My old best friend, Trina explained, “In the country I’m an Indian. Up here, I’m a minority. You know?” I missed my friends but I understood their reasons for transferring schools.
I was lonely, but I knew things weren’t going to change any time soon. I consoled myself that there were only three more years to go. I could deal with having one friend in some of my classes and blending into the wall in my other ones. There was always recess when I could detach myself from my classmates and join the small group of Native and Metis kids hanging out at our table in the library. We would survive.
While becoming invisible at school was a natural choice for me and my introverted siblings, this strategy wouldn’t work for the brash and confident. When my aunt Beth had trouble with her two oldest sons in The Pas, Manitoba, she decided to send them to our school. One of them, seventeen year old Malcolm, had gotten into trouble with gangs in the area. They had offered him a choice between joining the gang or getting beat up. Malcolm chose to beat up the guy sent to beat him up. Though Malcolm had no fear of repercussions, his mom was scared for him and his younger brother Nathan — and drove them five hours south in the middle of the night.