Jack listened as he always did, with an expression I couldn’t quite read and a half smile at the corner of his lips. Then he said something I’ll never forget: “All tribal people are the same.” He took his time answering when I asked him what he meant. Elders do that a lot. They force you to sit with your question, so that you understand there are no simple answers in matters of the soul. By making you wait, they help you to develop patience. They guide you to mindfulness and a sharpened ability to listen.
“There are no pure cultures any more,” Jack said finally. He meant that everyone has to let go of something in order to get something else. As First Nations people, he said, we had to let go of snowshoes and toboggans to get snowmobiles and pickup trucks. We had let go of smoke signals to get telephones. Ultimately, we had let go of our languages to speak English. It was the same for everyone everywhere, he said. The world asks us to sacrifice something in order to be included.
What we need to look for in this world, Jack Kakakaway told me, are the things we share. There are as many things that make us the same as there are those that make us different. The difficulty is seeing them. The things that join us are as basic as breathing, as small as a tear. We all began as people huddled in a band around a fire in the night. We all longed for the comfort of a voice in the darkness. We’ve all sacrificed part of our identity to become a part of the whole. What we’ve lost is what binds us, what makes us the same.
Old Jack has been gone more than sixteen years now, but I’ve always remembered his teaching. It changed my life. I moved away from my us-and-them mentality and started looking for what makes people alike. That’s what life really asks of us, and it’s the most humble, yet profound, gift we can offer one another.
The Path to Healing
I AM A VICTIM of Canada’s residential school system. I never attended a residential school, so I cannot say that I survived one. However, my parents and my extended family members did. The pain they endured became my pain, too.
At the time I was born, my family still followed the seasonal nomadic ways of traditional Ojibway people. In the rolling territories surrounding the Winnipeg River in northwestern Ontario, they fished, hunted and trapped. My first home was a canvas army tent hung from a spruce bough frame. Some of the first sounds I heard were the calls of the loon, the snap and crackle of a fire and the low, rolling undulations of Ojibway talk. My mother, my siblings and I lived communally with my matriarchal grandparents and some aunts, uncles and cousins.
But there was a spectre in our midst.
Having attended residential school, the members of my family returned to the land bearing heavy psychological, emotional and spiritual burdens. Despite my mother’s staunch declarations in later life that she had learned good things there—she’d found Jesus and the gospel, learned how to keep a house—she was wounded in ways she could not voice. Each of the adults had suffered in an institution that tried to scrape the Indian out of their insides, and they came back to the bush raw, sore and aching. Their pain blinded them to the incredible healing powers within traditional Indian ways. And once they discovered that alcohol could numb their deep hurt and isolation, we ceased to be a family.
From within their trauma, the adults around me struck out vengefully, like frightened children. When I was a toddler, my left arm and shoulder were smashed. Left untreated, my arm hung backwards in its joint. Over time, it atrophied and withered. My siblings and I endured great tides of violence and abuse. We were beaten, nearly drowned and terrorized. We took to hiding in the bush and waiting until the shouting and cursing of the drunken adults had died away. Those long nights were cold and very frightening. In the dim light of dawn, the eldest of us would sneak back into camp to get food and blankets.
In the winter of 1958, when I was almost three, the adults left my two brothers, my sister and me alone in the bush camp across the bay from the tiny railroad town of Minaki. The wind was blowing bitterly, and our firewood ran out at the same time as our food. When it became apparent that we would freeze to death without wood, my older sister and brother hauled my younger brother and me across the frozen bay on a sled piled with furs. We huddled at the railroad depot, cold, hungry and crying. A passing Ontario provincial policeman found us and took us to the Children’s Aid Society. I would not see my mother or my extended family again for twenty-one years.
I lived in two different foster homes until I was adopted at age nine. I left my adoptive home at age sixteen. For years after that, I lived on the street or in prison. I became a drug user and an alcoholic. I was haunted by fears and bad memories. Although I was too young to remember what had happened, I carried the residual trauma of my toddler years. I grew up ashamed and angry that there was no one to tell me who I was or where I had come from.
As a writer and a journalist, I have spoken to hundreds of residential school survivors. Their stories have told me a great deal about how my own family had suffered. At first, I ascribed all of my pain to the residential schools, and I hated those I held responsible. I blamed the churches that had run those schools for my alcoholism, my loneliness, my fears and my failures. In my mind, I envisaged a world where I could have grown up as a fully functioning Ojibway, and that glittered in comparison to the pain-wracked life I had lived. But finally, I’d had enough of the anger. I was tired of being drunk and full of blame. I was tired of fighting against something that could not be confronted. My life was slipping away on me, and I did not want to grow old still clinging to my fury.
After considering my situation, I decided that I would visit a church. I had had religion forced on me in my adopted home, and churches had run the residential schools that shredded the spirit of my family. If I were to lose my anger, I reasoned, I would need to face the root of it. I determined that I would take myself to a church, sit there and listen to the service. I chose a United church, because they had been the first group to issue an apology for their role in the residential school debacle. The United Church was the first to publicly declare responsibility for the hurt that had crippled generations and to make a tangible motion towards reconciliation. That put it in a more favourable light with me.
No one spoke to me as I took my seat in a pew near the back that first Sunday morning. There were no other Native people present, and when the service began I heard everything through the tough screen of rage. Then I noticed an old woman beside me sitting with her eyes closed. She looked calm and peaceful, and there was a glow to her features that I coveted. So I closed my eyes, too, tilted my head back and listened. What I heard then was the unassuming voice of the minister telling a story about helping a poor, drug-addicted woman on the street despite his own fear and doubt. What I heard was the voice of compassion.
I went back the next week. Again I listened to the minister with my eyes closed. This time he talked about some lessons he had learned while waiting in the grocery line and being stuck in freeway traffic. I was surprised. Here was a man responsible for directing the lives of his congregation, and he was talking about his own spiritual shortcomings. There was no self-aggrandizement, no implied superiority.
I went back to that church many times in the weeks that followed. The messages I got were about our search as humans for a sense of comfort and belonging. I don’t know exactly when my rage and resentment disappeared. I only know there came a time when I could see that all of the messages were about healing, about love and kindness and trust and an abiding faith in a God, a Creator. There was nothing to be angry about in any of that.
After I came home to my people, I sought out teachers and healers and ceremonies. I committed myself to learning the spiritual principles that had allowed Native peoples to sustain themselves through incredible changes. I adopted many of those teachings in my daily life, and every ceremony I attended taught me more about the essence of our spiritual lives. I realized that what I had heard from that minister was no different from the root message in our own teachings.
It’s been years now since I sat in that
church, but I have not receded into the dark sea of rage or old hurts. There are genuine reasons to be angry. The damage caused by the residential schools to both the survivors and those like me who were victimized a generation or more later is real, and sometimes overwhelming. But healing can happen if you want it badly enough. Every spiritually enhancing experience demands a sacrifice of us. For me, the price of admission was a willingness to let that solid block of anger dissolve.
As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission makes its tour of the country, I hope it hears some stories from people who have fought through their resentment and hatred to gain a sense of peace. We need to hear stories of healing, not just relentless retellings of pain. Despite the horrors, it is possible to move forward and leave hurt behind. Our neighbours in this country need to hear about our capacity for forgiveness and for self-examination. That is how reconciliation will happen.
It’s a big word, reconciliation. It requires truth and true humility, on both sides. As Aboriginal people, we have an incredible capacity for survival and endurance, as well as for forgiveness. In reconciling with ourselves, we find the ability to create harmony with others. That is where it has to start— in the fertile soil of our own hearts, minds and spirits.
The Caribou Teaching
MY PEOPLE SAY that animals are our greatest teachers. They believe that Creator asked the animals to introduce human beings to the world, to be our guides and show us how to move gently on the earth. The animals accepted this great responsibility, and we have thrived ever since because of their teachings. They are stalwart examples of principles like harmony and balance in action, and, as my people say, that is our purpose here as humans—to learn to live principled lives.
So it was disheartening to read about the shocking decline in the population of Arctic caribou. I have never had the pleasure of roaming the tundra, but I love the image of teeming hordes of caribou pouring across the land. For many of us, it’s a national motif.
Scientists report that the number of cows on the calving grounds has fallen by 98 per cent over the last fourteen years. Only ninety-three cows were spotted near Baker Lake, Nunavut, in 2009. That was down from more than 5,500 for the Beverly herd in the same area in 1994. The birth rate for caribou is now one fifth its historical level. For the Beverly herd, which once numbered a quarter million, the situation spells doom.
Scientists have labelled the decline of the caribou as “mysterious,” but that’s just a handy euphemism for “don’t bollocks our funding.” There is no mystery to the impending demise of the caribou. “Progress” has doomed them to extinction, just as it did another Canadian symbol, the buffalo. Here in the mountains, logging and mineral exploration have decimated great numbers of assorted creatures. Similarly, industrial activity has destroyed the calving grounds of the caribou.
In addition to the Beverly herd, five of the eight main western Arctic caribou herds are in serious decline. That’s tough news for the Dene, Metis and Inuit whose diet and culture depend on those animals. Then again, disappearing Aboriginal people is a symbol of Canada, too. When the land is needed for development, what’s a species or a culture or two in the long view of things?
Trying to harness nature is a foolhardy business. As a species, we’ve resisted learning that, and the earth is rebelling. My people also say there will come a time when the animals turn their backs on humans. When that happens, we will feel a loneliness like no other, and the world will become a barren place. Recent signs across the globe support the accuracy of this teaching. Everywhere, animals are in danger of vanishing. Natural disasters are increasing in size and frequency, and vast alterations in the earth’s rhythms are taking place. Heedless, we march along to the beat of progress. We allow industry to increase its carbon emissions or to police itself in meeting carbon limits that are ineffective in producing real results. Some scientists would have us believe that global warming is simply a fashionable theme rather than a phenomenon that threatens us with extinction. Meanwhile, the caribou are leaving us.
The spirit teaching of the great caribou herds is community. They offer us a model of interaction that we would do well to adopt. Their presence on the land is an ongoing gift. Their disappearance would create a moral, spiritual and ethical vacuum. We can’t allow our arrogance to create such holes in our relationship with our living, breathing planet. Our home is a finite place, and the responsibility for living here with respect, humility and purpose rests with all of us. I fervently hope it isn’t too late to say, borrowing from the great Neil Young, long may we run.
Harmony
ACCORDING TO THE teachings of my people, harmony is the most difficult thing to achieve in life. The Old Ones say that the pursuit of harmony is a lifelong endeavour. Because of the intense struggle along the way, the journey is a spiritual one. There are not many who choose to make it, and it’s easy to see why.
To seek harmony is to seek truth, and truth seekers have always had a rough go of it in this world. Those who see life as something to be solved, put in order and contained are constantly bending truth to their own demands. But my people knew there was one thing that would never change. They knew there was an energy that brought all things together and held them there in balance. A Great Spirit. A great mystery. They honoured that mystery not by trying to explain it but simply by recognizing and celebrating it.
In the Aboriginal way of seeing the world, everything is alive. Everything exists in a never-ending state of relationship. If there is order to be found, it lies in the all-encompassing faith in this belief.
When the dog and I discovered deer carcasses strewn alongside the timber road where we walked, I was deeply distressed. Hunters had shot the deer and left their bodies behind. One pair, humped together under a sheet of plastic, had been beheaded. Creatures had been visiting the carcasses: coyotes, ravens, eagles, magpies, probably bobcats.
Over the week that followed, Molly and I came across half a dozen dead deer all left in the same condition. Their legs had been cut off and thrown into the trees. Near the creek, a head had been tossed in the grass minus its antlers. Up the road one morning, near a carcass, we saw a juvenile cougar slink off through the trees. The squawking of ravens told me of other bodies nearby.
The first emotion I felt was anger, bitter and churning. This senseless display exhibited disrespect at every level: for the animals, for the land, for the other people who used that road and for the planet itself. Empty coffee containers, beer cans, cigarette packages and bloody rope were strewn everywhere. The behaviour of these hunters had been careless, thoughtless and crude. I stomped off down the hill to warn my neighbours about the proximity of the young cougar.
The next emotion I experienced was shame. It’s hard to be male when others of your gender mistake manliness for a can of Coors and a rifle. It’s tough to be male when people shrug off such disrespectful behaviour as simply “boys being boys.” It’s shameful being a man when, for some men, wasting and discarding has replaced sharing. What these men had done offended my sense of propriety, dignity and rightness in every way.
Strangely enough, I also felt lonely. I go to the land for the experience of reconnection. I stand there and I feel I belong in a way I don’t wholly comprehend. Once you have been fulfilled in this way, you see everything around you as valuable, necessary and irreplaceable. When a life is severed, the loss of that life force affects everything else. I didn’t miss the deer; I missed the idea of them. I missed their spirit.
In the end, I mostly felt sad. I thought of the multitude of woes that confront us all around the world these days, the planet reeling from the effects of our indifference. Displays like the one I encountered with the deer are at the root of it all. This is why the earth suffers—because the majority of us have forgotten the idea of harmony or never learned it in the first place. We’ve forgotten that our responsibility is to take care of our home, and we’ve allowed dishonour to replace respect. Every bit of trash strewn in pristine places is proof of that. It sa
ddened me that people can’t recognize the larger impact of their actions, or often the effect of their inaction, either.
We are all energy, cause and effect at the same time. Those hunters found it too inconvenient to haul those deer out and deal with them respectfully. They found it too inconvenient to care. This apathy may be at the heart of the challenge we face as a species today. It is sometimes terribly inconvenient to act in an honourable way. So the earth suffers. Our home becomes sullied, and harmony is fractured at every turn.
We are one spirit, one song, and our world will be harmonious only when we make the time to care. For ourselves. For each other. For our home. You don’t need to be a Native person to understand that—just human.
Getting to It
AUTUMN DESCENDS LIKE rain in the mountains. The light changes, taking on a quality like the dimming of a candle flame, mazy and opaque. The deer turn a brown that’s almost grey. The bears retreat higher into the ridges. Many of the birds fly south, and there are fewer loon calls from the lake as darkness sets in. The stars shine bright in the night sky like chunks of ice.
A change of season is a marvellous thing. It’s a thrill for each of the senses when these great shifts happen. Fading colours. The smell of wet foliage. The taste of frost in the air. The chill against the soles of your feet as you plod up the mountain trail. The honking of geese far above.
Deb and I have a new woodshed that I built with friends at the tail end of last summer. Even though it’s just a lean-to with a roof, I drew up a plan and made careful measurements. I bought the supplies and did the prep work alone. Then Ron and Ed, the Ukrainian brothers from down the hill, arrived to lend a hand. The shed is sturdy, painted the same colour as the house. Filling it with the wood I’d cut was hard work, but I savoured every minute of it.
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