I was awestruck when I first spotted that impossible blue. I recognized it immediately, not as a memory but as an ache at my very centre. That incandescence awoke something inside of me, and when I felt it stir to life I wanted to cry.
When I described this to the elders later, they smiled. They explained that special colour represents both emptiness and fullness; it carries the possibility of everything. When the universe was created, it contained both those properties. So do our spirits when we are born. But as life happens, we gradually shut that boundless possibility down. Rules and judgement cause it to shrink. The storyteller in all of us can go into hiding, lying dormant within us. When I saw that special blue, my storytelling spirit was sparked to life again.
Over the next nine days, the elders showed me how to coax a flame from that ember of spirit. They told us about the rich protocol and traditions of storytelling. We talked about how vital stories and storytellers were to the lifeblood of our people at one time and how urgent it was for us to bring that vitality back in whatever creative form we chose to use. And every morning, I took myself outside, sat on that rock and watched the light break across the sky.
It’s twenty-four years later, and now I’m a seasoned storyteller myself. I’ve tried to integrate everything those elders taught me into a body of work that gets bigger each year. As often as I can, I get up in front of people and use the ancient tools. I connect to that impossible blue that lives within me, that area of both fullness and emptiness, and then I speak.
The Loon’s Necklace
THE CALL OF the loon, the great bird known as Mong in Ojibway, is heard throughout Ojibway territory. That call is so piercing and strong that in the Ojibway clan system, the Loon Clan carries the responsibility for chieftainship. Some people say that the loon is also a symbol of communication and of family. When you see a female loon on the water in the spring and early summer, with her babies on her back as she swims, you can easily see why.
The loon’s call is haunting and wild, an ancient trill that’s part honour song and part warning. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t fall quiet upon hearing it. We’re all susceptible to that common magic.
There is a traditional story about a man who had grown very old. He had lost his vision, which meant he could no longer hunt or fish to take care of his family. This knowledge made him sad. The man sat at the edge of the water one day, shedding tears. The ripples they created attracted a loon, who swam close to shore to investigate.
“Why are you crying?” the loon asked the old man.
“Oh, great loon,” the old man said. “Your red eyes are bright, and you can dive to find fish in the depths of the water. My eyes have grown dim, and my family is hungry. That is why I’m crying.”
“Take hold of my wings,” the loon said to the old man. “Hold very tight, and I will dive to the deepest part of the lake, where the water is purest. When we surface, you will be able to see again.”
The old man grasped the loon’s wings tightly, and the bird dove. Down and down she swam, to where the water was very cold and dark. The old man thought his lungs would burst. But he held on tight, as the loon had told him to do. Eventually the loon crested the surface, and the old man found he could make out the blurred outlines of trees and rock. They dove again. The old man was tired. His grasp loosened, and he was afraid he would slip off the loon’s back and drown. But he held fast, and the next time they broke the surface he could see clearly.
The man was overjoyed. He hugged the loon and cried tears of gratitude. “I am so grateful,” he said. “I will make you a gift of my most prized possession.”
The man was wearing a necklace of sacred white shells. He removed it, then placed it around the loon’s neck. In those times, the loon’s feathers were pure black. Every-where the shells touched her, though, her feathers turned white. Through her compassion for the old man, the loon got the white necklace and the white pattern on her back we see today.
Shortly after I had reconnected with my Native family, I stood in the darkness one evening on a northern beach with my uncle Archie. Arch had been a bushman all his life. He’d worked along Winnipeg River as a fishing guide, hunting guide and trapper. It was midsummer, and the sky was clear, filled with a million stars. As we watched for meteors, Arch told me how the constellations were named for the animals the Ojibway saw on their journeys. Then we heard a loon call. The sound wobbled out of the darkness and died out in echoes across the water. After a long silence, the call came again.
My uncle cupped his hands and blew into them. I’d never heard anyone do a pitch-perfect loon call before, and in a few seconds the loon responded from across the water. Arch cupped his hands again and blew another series of trills and dips. Again, the loon responded.
As they called back and forth, the loon drew closer to us. We could hear the bird approaching. I waited to see if my uncle would call the loon right to the beach, but he stopped suddenly and put hands in his pockets. There was silence then, as thick as the night. I imagined the loon swimming away in the darkness. I could see the outline of my uncle, his face tilted up towards the sky.
When I asked him why he’d stopped calling, he took his time answering. He sat down on the beach, and I sat down beside him. When he spoke again, his voice was hushed. “The loon calls to remind us that everything is alive,” he said. “A loon’s call reminds us to look outside ourselves, at the air, the land, the water, and brings us back into the natural order of things. There’s no need to see the teacher. We only need to feel the teaching.”
People pay big money trying to get to the heart of Native traditions. There are hucksters and sham artists everywhere adorned with Aboriginal motifs. The truth, though, is that the teachings are available to everyone. All we need to do is pay attention, and be open to them when they arrive. Next time you hear a loon, remember that.
The Puzzle
I’VE ALWAYS BEEN a thinker. As a kid, I sought explanations for even the simplest things around me. The adults I asked never seemed adequately armed, so I dove into the pages of books. I wanted to know how birds migrated without a compass, what made rain happen, why the planets move in ellipses. I sought answers to a plethora of questions about the world.
Age is a curious thing. As you mature, the questions that occupy you become more onerous. Queries about the natural world are replaced with harder questions like who should I be, how do I get there, why do people suffer and how do things change? These questions are so big that we tend to forget the reassurance that comes from simple answers.
I once asked a friend how he thought we should go about changing the world. How can we address the myriad issues that threaten us as a species? How could I, as someone just beginning to feel empowered as a First Nations man, find a way to improve the lot of my people? How could I get beyond the turmoil and struggles of my own life to help someone else? This was heady stuff, and I prepared myself for a long, challenging discussion. But what my friend said floored me.
As a self-employed contractor, my friend worked at home. His wife had a job outside the home, so he looked after their ten-year-old son after school. Once he’d picked his son up, fed him a snack and spent some play time with him, my friend would get back to work. Usually the boy would do his homework or amuse himself in his room. But one afternoon, on a day that was particularly hectic for my friend, the boy desperately wanted more of his father’s attention.
So my friend ripped a picture out of a magazine, a photo that showed the world from outer space. He tore the picture into tiny pieces, handed them to the boy and asked his son to put the picture back together. Thinking the assigned task would take forever, my friend settled into his work. But his son was back in five minutes, with the puzzle solved and glued to a piece of paper.
“How did you do that so fast?” he asked the boy.
“Simple,” the boy said. “There was a picture of a man on the other side. So I put the man together first, and the world came together just fine.”
T
hat simple parable from daily life has been a saving grace for me ever since. Put the man together first, and the world will come together just fine.
The enormity of the world’s problems can feel overwhelming. Resolution can seem impossible. But when we join together wholeheartedly, when the energy we put forward is calm, positive and centred, great change is possible. I’ve seen it work in my own life, and I’ve seen it work out in the world.
My people say that change is the fundamental law of the universe. Like the weather, it happens without any input from us. But we make change, too. We just need to do it one small piece at a time.
Reigniting the Spark
WHEN I WAS small, the world seemed pretty frightening. As a foster kid, and later an adopted one, I never felt like my feet were solidly on the ground. Kids know automatically when they’re being excluded. You get a bruised feeling in your chest that never really goes away. But there isn’t a time I can remember when the natural world didn’t offer something that captivated me, whether it was a cave buried in a cliff or a rushing river churning itself into rapids. It might have been the Indian in me that responded so strongly to those things. But I believe we’re all born with an inherent sense of wonder, and there’s nothing so devastating as losing it.
Not so long ago, some Ojibway people from a remote reserve in Ontario invited me to their community. My assignment was to introduce the members of their adult education class to traditional oral storytelling skills. The students were a small group of young people for whom public high school had been a failed experiment. They hadn’t been able to achieve their potential there, for one reason or another, and the band was encouraging them all to get enough credits to earn their Grade 12.
Just like the natural world, stories and storytelling have always been infused with a wild degree of mystery and magic for me. I am constantly amazed at the nature of the creative process—creating something from nothing, bringing people, places and ideas to life. And as a First Nations person, I’m constantly floored by the richness of my oral tradition. I feel the ancient thrum of it in my chest. When I write, even though I compose my words on a keyboard, nothing feels finished until I’ve read it aloud to myself, given it the freedom of the air. When I read my work aloud, I feel closely connected to a vibrant storytelling tradition.
I sought to bring that keen thrill to those students. I sought to ignite an ember from the old tribal fires that burned in our villages in that classroom so that we could all draw strengthand inspiration. But it was not to be. The students ranged in age from nineteen to twenty-two. They’d been out of school for a handful of years, and more than half of them already had children of their own. They were all more comfortable with computer games, music videos and satellite television than they were with their own cultural heritage.
Of all the things that a history of displacement takes away from people, the sense of wonder is the harshest loss of all. After we’d walked to a small lake on a brilliant November morning, I asked the students to find a private spot for themselves, to close their eyes, breathe deep, feel that morning around them and then tell the others in the group what they felt. Not one of them could do it. Instead, they engaged in horseplay, called out to each other expressing derision for the exercise. They missed the experience of that lake in the morning sun. Little wonder they had nothing to say about it.
Later, when I did my storytelling show for the whole community, only twenty of seven hundred on-reserve residents showed up. Of those, only a few caught the wild hilarity of my stories highlighting the gamut of the Native experience in Canada. The others sat squinting, unmoving, unsure what to make of this strange man cavorting in front of them. Putting on that performance was hard work, and when it was over I felt very sad.
The disconnectedness in that community didn’t lie just with the youth. It was all-pervasive. Life for the residents of that reserve had become drudgery, offering no hope for something different, no glinting light at the horizon. They couldn’t feel amazement at the magnificent place they called home. When you lose your sense of wonder, you’re incapable of seeing the magic everywhere in the world around you. The spark igniting the ingenuity, creativity and imagination that mark us as a species has been extinguished.
We can all relate to that feeling to some degree. Our day-in, day-out routines sometimes get us down. But for many of Canada’s First Nations people on remote reserves, the malaise feels chronic, self-perpetuating and final.
Wonder is what fuels us, what propels us to achieve. We need the light of our imaginations to make life worth living. When Native leaders identify their people’s most pressing issues, reigniting that sense of wonder should be foremost. We need to bring our people back from the inside out. Everyone deserves to experience the magic of a lake in the morning.
The Never-ending Story
EVERY MORNING, THE dog and I come back from our walk reinvigorated. We’ve trekked that road hundreds of times, and each trip is different. The light, the wind, an animal or two, migrating birds, trees in each new season: it’s kaleidoscopic. Walking on the land is a rush to the senses when you’re open to it. Each day reveals something new.
I’ve been a journalist for more than thirty years. I got my first reporting job in the spring of 1979, with a Native newspaper called the New Breed in Regina. I was a rookie, but I fell in love with the work. Since then I’ve expanded to radio and television and published a couple of non-fiction books. For the most part, it’s been an incredible journey.
But not always. My primary focus through all of that time has been First Nations issues. I was there when Native people sat down at a negotiating table with the prime minister and the premiers for the first time in 1982. I saw hope build in relation to those constitutional talks, and I saw it crumble when we returned home without a gain after three rounds. I witnessed a pope’s visit to a remote northern community. I’ve reported from behind barricades, covered protests, interviewed militants. I’ve spoken to wise and gentle elders. I’ve talked with medicine people and spiritual teachers. I’ve written about the birth of our national Native television network, the creation of an Aboriginal category at the JUNO awards and the emergence of Native role models in the arts, education, science and technology.
North, east, west and south: I’ve covered all of those cardinal points on the great wheel of the news. I’ve been proud to write about the forward and upward motion of my people. I’ve been empowered by their determination, pluck and resistance.
But there was always the other side, too. Over the past thirty years, I’ve done stories about suicide, alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence, the high rate of Native incarceration, the rise of street gangs, the loss of our traditional languages, the effects of residential schools and the urgent need for true leadership. In that sense, the journey hasn’t been so incredible.
When I left active journalism in 1993, it was because I’d grown tired of writing the same never-ending story. Sure, there were highlights, stories that showed how far we’d come as a people, but the heart-wrenching stories repeated in a nightmarish loop, as if in a broken news reel. For every groundbreaking venture, there was a deeply discouraging step back. For every new hero, there was another faceless victim. It became too difficult to witness the process over and over again.
Sitting on my couch a few evenings ago, watching the news, I was reminded how little has changed. I sat near tears listening to the story of a young Ojibway boy on a Manitoba First Nation who had died in a house fire—a house he shared with ten others, eight of them under the age of six. A nine-year-old girl had died in a fire on the same reserve months earlier. The house she died in was shared by fourteen people. The news footage showed the dilapidated houses on either side of the destroyed one. They were not much more than shacks, but that was the housing the people of the Sandy Bay community were forced to live in. The images were stark, and I’d seen them many times before.
In the early 1980s I travelled with a Native politician named Murray Hamilton to
visit some of his constituents in northern Saskatchewan. The living conditions on that reserve were horrendous. There was plastic nailed over many window frames. Thirteen people were crammed into one two-room shack with little furniture. Water had to be hauled from the nearby creek in nineteen-litre lard pails. I remembered that visit as I watched the story about the fire in Sandy Bay.
In 2009, the federal government announced that it had committed $400 million to address the crisis in Native housing. To the average person, that sounds like a lot of money, but it’s not. With 640 First Nations communities across Canada, it amounts just over $600,000 per community. The size of the average single family home in Canada is 1, 400 square feet, and the average cost of building it is $175 a square foot. So the average home costs $235,000 to build. That works out to just over two homes per First Nations community. When you factor in Department of Indian Affairs administration costs and the extra transportation expenditures for travelling to remote communities, that goes down to just one home per reserve.
Clearly, change is desperately needed. Not just from the federal government, but from First Nations politicians, too. We should not hear about this Aboriginal housing crisis only when tragedy happens. We shouldn’t have to wait until someone dies before all Canadians hear about conditions in Kispiox, Shammattawa, Pikangikum or Attawapiskat.
Every national Aboriginal organization has a communications department. When a crisis occurs, they issue press releases clamouring for government action and enlisting public sympathy. They spout off about the need for change. But these organizations know about the existing situation, and they have for years. If their funding dollars were put to more efficient use, the rest of Canada would know how dire the situation is, too. Native journalists need to be out there telling these stories honestly, directly and relentlessly.
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