My people say the birds are child spirits. We recognize their innocent, exuberant joy even though we sometimes forget how to sing ourselves. Birds reconnect us to the song within each of us. That’s why we miss them so much when they leave us and celebrate their return. In the splash of late winter sunshine, they’re gleeful. Standing in the chill air to watch them takes me beyond time, its rush and its burdens. Even the dog is drawn to their energy as she sits at my knee.
As a young man, I’d always taken birds for granted, never paused to observe them or consider that they might have something to teach me. Then, at a traditional winter gathering, I heard a story that changed my way of thinking.
In the Long Ago Time, before the time of the Human Beings, one winter grew especially harsh and deadly. The snows piled higher than they ever had, and Keewatin, the frigid north wind, blew long. The cold was so devastating that the sap in the trees froze, and their limbs swelled and exploded. Everywhere in the forest was the sound of popping trees. It was a haunting sound in the darkness.
A small chickadee who was nearly frozen hopped along on top of the snow until he came to the base of a small tamarack tree. The wind was gusting mightily. As the little chickadee huddled close to the trunk of the tree, he begged the tree to lower its branches to shelter him. At that time, all beings could speak to one another, and the world was filled with their lively chatter.
But the tamarack was young and proud. It revelled in its fine shape and refused to lower its branches. So the little chickadee gathered his strength and hopped on through the snow, clutching his wings about him to stave off the cold. Eventually, he came to an old pine tree and moved close to the trunk. The chickadee asked the same favour of this tree. Seeing his plight, the pine tree dropped its lower branches to shelter the small bird.
Creator watched the drama unfold. She asked the tamarack why it had refused to help the small bird. The tamarack replied that it did not see the need to surrender its beauty to shelter a bird who would likely die anyway. Then Creator asked the pine tree why it had decided to help the freezing chickadee. The pine tree replied that it had felt the bite of many frigid winds and knew how lonely and terrifying that could be.
As a sign of the pine tree’s compassion, Creator allowed the pine to keep its drooped lower branches from then on. Creator allowed the tamarack to keep its magnificent shape, but because of the tree’s vanity and selfishness it would henceforth lose its needles every fall. The tamarack would always face the winter naked and cold, as an indicator of its lack of mercy and compassion.
I was as haughty as the tamarack when I first heard that story. I’d just reconnected to my Native family and my culture, and there was a tough battle going on within me. I worried that all my years of displacement had disqualified me as an Indian, that I lacked the necessary soul to really belong. So I used vanity as a mask, dressing in a flashy Native style— fringed moosehide jackets with elaborate beadwork, turquoise rings, hide vests and moccasins. I ordered shirts sewn in Native designs and grew my hair so that I could braid and tie it in traditional fashion. I did everything I could to hide my terror and loneliness.
That story about the trees and the chickadee got me interested in birds, though. When I started to watch and listen to them, I discovered a calm I had never felt before. I read bird books and got some binoculars, and I visited birds wherever they were, in marshes and forests, meadows and semi-arid deserts. I could sit for hours enthralled by their vitality and cheer. In their songs, I heard celebration. In their behaviour, I saw harmony with their surroundings. Seed eaters, sap suckers, bark borers, fishers, insect divers and birds of prey shared the same sky. Each bird had its own important place in the scheme of things. Most importantly, the birds taught me that it’s not elaborate feathers that make you beautiful. It’s what you do and how you treat your fellow beings.
Scientists believe that birds are more ancient than dinosaurs. Flitting and hopping among the branches, gliding high above, they represent a wisdom gleaned through millennia. Pay attention to this world you’ve been given, they seem to say. Sing. Celebrate. That’s what matters most.
SOUTH
TRUST
TRUST IS THE spiritual by-product of innocence. My people say that innocence is more than lack of knowledge and experience, it’s learning to look at the world with wonder. When we do that, we live in a learning way. Trust, the ability to open yourself to teachings, is the gateway for each of us to becoming who we were created to be. All things bear teachings. Teachings are hidden in every leaf and rock. But only when we look at the world with wonder do the teachings reveal themselves, and trust is also the ability to put those teachings to work in our lives. Trust is, in fact, our first act of faith and our first step towards the principle of courage that will guide us.
With This Ring. . .
SPRING IS THE time to plan the year’s projects. There’s some exterior painting to be done, the garden to be put in. A pergola or a roofed porch, perhaps, to be added to the deck. This year, Deb and I have a new project, too: we’ve decided to get married.
Both of us have been married twice before. This time feels different, though. We’ve been together going on seven years now. We’ve had trials and tough periods. We’ve also supported each other through difficulties and practised forgiveness. Each of us feels our best self in the other’s company. We want to celebrate that and order it with ceremony. So last week we went to town to shop for a ring.
I’ve never been what you would call a conventional man. My life has been marked by some dubious choices, and even some crazy ones. The people around me sometimes wondered if I had a few wires crossed. I drank too much too often. I floated when I should have been seeking stability. I always craved the sort of set-down life I saw on The Waltons or Bonanza. I just never thought I’d get it.
I learned early in my life not to have expectations. As a foster kid, you drift in and out of other people’s homes without fanfare or farewells. I wandered through my life picking and choosing things at random for the most part. So picking out a ring felt big.
We didn’t want anything extravagant. The ring we settled on wasn’t a “rock.” It was simple and elegant. But it exerted a power I hadn’t expected. Once we’d bought it, songs touched a soft place in me that I hadn’t known existed. Certain scenes in movies and TV shows got me all emotional. I looked up at the sky with a sense of wild expectation. And I smiled more. Even without the diamonds, that ring would be a marvellous object. Gold exudes the promise of riches beyond measure.
When I first saw that ring on Deb’s hand, I felt raised up. It was as though everything I had done in my life had led me to that one shining moment. Life is a crucible. If we can make peace with our experiences, come to see ourselves as valuable and worthy, we gain the ability to set our lives on a different, more nurturing course. We find the truest expression of ourselves in the people we love.
Looking at that ring, I saw the awesome potential of two spirits joined by the strength of a symbol. This is a sacred journey we’re on, and it’s the travelling, not the destination, that will be most important. Trusting one another, standing together, we’re ready to embark on this exciting new phase of our lives.
The Knuckle Curve
THE SUMMER AFTER Grade 7, my adopted family moved to St. Catharines, Ontario. I’d been happy on our rented farm in Bruce County, the happiest I’d ever be as a kid, and the city terrified me. I needed the land as an anchor, and the fields and woods I loved seemed very far away. I spent most of that summer pedalling around on my bike. It was lonely. The layout of the city was foreign to me. Whatever neighbourhood kids were around had their cliques already established. But I discovered Lake Ontario one sunny afternoon. After that, I went there often just to sit on the rocks and gaze at the wide expanse of water.
I didn’t know how to fit in when school started. I’d come from a farming community where cool was lemonade on the back porch and hip was what Grandfather broke in a fall. Once again, as in the other schoo
ls I’d attended, I was the only Indian kid. I was odd. I felt awkward and ugly and stupid. Most of the kids just left me alone, and if it hadn’t been for baseball, that might have been the whole story of that first school year in St. Catharines.
It was the fall of 1969, and the hapless New York Mets were making a run at the World Series. My team, the Boston Red Sox, had finished third and were out of the contest early. Now the Mets were on their way to becoming the Miracle Mets, and the baseball world was in a frenzy.
I snuck my transistor radio into my classroom. I ran the earphone cord up through the inkwell hole in my desk, then leaned forward on my elbow, with one hand over my ear. I was listening to the game when I looked up and saw Gerry Haycox staring at me from across the aisle.
Gerry was a big baseball fan, too, and at recess I lent him the radio. After that, we shared the risk of getting caught. The one with the radio would smuggle notes to the other whenever someone scored or something big happened. We were both cheering for the Mets, and it was hard to contain our glee when they did well on a play.
The World Series was the catalyst for our friendship. While other kids moved on to football or soccer or the other games of autumn, Gerry and I spent hours after school honing our pitching skills in his backyard. We’d take turns squatting in the catcher’s pose while the other hurled his best stuff. We worked on two kinds of fastball, the two-seamed “sinker” and the four-seamed “gas,” and both of us threw a passable curveball.
But the pitch we were desperate to master was the exotic-sounding knuckle curve. We’d never seen one, but we’d heard a pitcher named Dave Stenhouse had thrown a knucklecurve for the old Washington Senators back in the early 1960s. Knuckleballs are gripped with the fingertips, and the ball is pushed towards the plate rather than being hurled. Their lack of spin makes knuckleballs unpredictable, and the knuckle curve sounded absolutely deadly to us.
What we imagined was a pitch that sailed and floated like a knuckleball but had a vicious break like a curveball. A knuckle curve isn’t a knuckleball at all, actually; the pitcher just approximates the grip. But we didn’t know that then. So, hour after hour, we’d try to throw the miracle ball.
We’d each toss fifty balls, then switch, following the system we’d devised. You’d throw the sinker first, then the gas, then the curve. When you were ready, you’d start sailing knuckleballs. We’d cheer when a ball floated in and then dropped or darted unpredictably. We’d both get anxious when whoever was pitching announced he was ready to attempt the knuckle curve.
Fall turned to winter, and we still threw. We practised with snowballs on the street and in the schoolyard, wearing thin gloves inside our mitts. Our arms got strong and our aim got accurate. We could generally put the ball where we wanted by then, but we never unlocked the secret of the knuckle curve. In all that concentrated passion, though, Gerry Haycox became my best friend. We fell together because of the magic of baseball, and in the pitch-perfect love of that game we came to love each other, too. Of course, we never used that word for it. At fourteen, you don’t often throw words like that around.
The Haycox family welcomed me into their home. Every time I sat with them at supper and heard them laugh together, I wanted that for myself. My home life was a classic case of square peg, round hole. It’s not the pounding in that process that hurts the most; it’s the bits of you that get shaved away. I was scraped raw by fourteen, though I didn’t know how to tell anyone that. My adopted family were staunch white Presbyterians. They led a regimented, no-nonsense, linear life that brooked no disorder. Punishment was swift and harsh, and the wounds I suffered went far beyond the scars on my buttocks. Many times I wanted to beg the Haycox family to take me in, to shelter me. But I just watched them love each other and basked vicariously in the glow.
Once we started high school, Gerry and I grew apart. He went to Lakeport and I went to Grantham, so we saw each other only on weekends and holidays. The loss was another in a long line of them in my young life, and I felt it keenly. My high school days were marked by a deep sense of inferiority and shame. I did a thousand outrageous things and got into big trouble at home. When it all got to be too much, I ran away.
I went on welfare and tried to find a job. Mostly, I lived on the street. One night, in a cold drizzle, I stood at the head of Gerry’s driveway and looked at the lights of the living room. I heard laughter. I wanted to knock on his door and tell him what was going on. I wanted to trust him with my desperation and my loneliness. But, in the end, I just walked away.
I played baseball until I was fifty, for the sheer joy of it, but I never learned to throw a knuckle curve. When I catch a game on TV, I still pay strict attention to the pitcher, just in case he makes that miracle pitch. And sometimes, when the nights are long and the quiet is pervasive, I remember my friend Gerry Haycox.
The Word
WHEN I WAS growing up, the striking differences between Native people and mainstream Canadians were often remarked upon. During the 1960s and 1970s there were tremendous strides forward in Native life. We gained the right to vote, the freedom to gather in public and to practise our spirituality, the right to retain a lawyer. But every inch closer we got to authentic citizenship seemed to widen the gap between us and our neighbours. These days, it can seem sometimes that not much has changed. Conversations with so-called liberal thinkers, and I count numerous friends among them, almost always arrive at the “us and them” barricade. The barriers erected by the Indian Act, the reserve system, treaty rights, land claims and fiduciary wardship only buttress their arguments. Native people are different. We’re separate. We’re a problem to be solved.
In my day-to-day life, I seldom feel like a problem. I work hard at maintaining my property, staying above the waterline of debt and taxes and enjoying the fruits of my labours at the end of the day. Sounds awfully normal to me.
The truth is, the lives of Native and non-Native people are more alike than not. As an Ojibway man, I have been marginalized, analyzed, criticized, ostracized, legitimized, politicized, socialized, dehumanized, downsized and Super-sized. One day, I will be eulogized. What ordinary Canadian can’t relate to that?
In my younger years, I was uneducated, untrained, unskilled and unemployed. In the time since, I’ve been displaced, disenfranchised, disinherited, disaffected, disappointed, disconsolate, disqualified, disrespected, disquieted, dishevelled, disingenuous, dishonest, disinterested and sometimes discombobulated.
Struggling with my identity, I’ve been misinterpreted, misfiled, misjudged, misunderstood and misguided. I’ve been misinformed, misdirected, mismatched, misstated and misused. Occasionally I’ve been mistrusted and misquoted. These days, I’m mostly misgoverned and misrepresented.
Like most Canadians, I have been overtaxed, overburdened, overextended, overdrawn, over the barrel and overwhelmed. By contrast, I’ve been underfunded, underappreciated, and under the gun. Like my neighbours I’ve tried to be low-key and low-maintenance, to stay low-cal, low-cholesterol, low-impact and low-risk. Most of us know what it’s like to be low-income. Like many others, I’m an ex-athlete, an ex-smoker, an ex-drunk and an ex-husband.
As a Canadian, I’ve had to be ethnic, multicultural, nationalistic and culturally specific all at the same time. I’ve learned to be open-minded, politically correct, gender sensitive, globally conscious and self-aware. I’ve had to embrace the New Age as I approach my old age. I’ve gone from the Good Book to Facebook, from fireside chats to cyberchat, and from being offloaded to downloaded in one lifetime.
I can be Googled these days. I can be faxed, text-messaged, Twittered, Skyped and video-conferenced. I have a website, poor eyesight, the gift of hindsight and the occasional insight. I’m a multi-tasking, formerly metro-sexual, techno-geek with an iPod. I surf the net, play with the remote, rip DVDs, burn music and tear it up on weekends.
We can spend time deliberating on our differences. But in so many ways our lexicon is the same. Let’s start talking to one another, using whatever it ta
kes: metaphors and similes, tall tales and bad puns, honesty and tact. Let’s use language to unite us, not divide us. It’s really just as simple as that.
Trusting the Land
IT’S A HEADY feeling being alone in the bush, leaving everything that smacks of civilization behind. There’s real power out there, and it doesn’t belong to you. There’s nothing finer than sitting on a log for hours and quietly feeling the land around you.
I was twenty-four when I went into the bush for the first time. Oh, I’d camped before, spent time hiking the back country, canoed into the wilderness. But I had never been out on the land with nothing but what I could carry. I’d always followed the Boy Scout credo to be prepared, lugging lots of stuff along with me for security: axes, ground sheets, lanterns, gas stoves, fishing tackle, snare wire, wax-dipped matches, maps, rope, a compass, a space blanket, a hunting knife and a marine horn for scaring off bears.
Being out on the land with only the absolute essentials was daunting. But my friend Walter Charlie had convinced me that I had to break my dependence on things. Walt was an old bush man who’d been raised in an Ojibway trapping family. When he saw how ill at ease I was in the wilderness, how ashamed to know so little about our people’s traditional ways, he invited me to spend a weekend out on the land with him.
When I got to Walt’s place, he looked over the items I’d brought. Laughing a little, he sorted them into two piles. We left all of my usual implements in the car, and he stuffed the rest into a small rucksack. All that was in there was string, fish hooks, fishing line, a knife, a change of clothes and a blanket. That didn’t seem like nearly enough to me for the country we were headed into, but Walt was carrying even less. It was cloudy and threatening rain. I felt trepidatious, but Walt whistled softly as he led the way.
One Story, One Song Page 5