Once the paint went on, the garage looked amazing. But we still had problems with the floor. The poured concrete wasn’t level. The cost of pouring a whole new floor would have been huge, so we mixed cement and levelled things as best we could by hand. Once we’d sanded it smooth, we laid a layer of floor padding over a vapour barrier, then for three agonizing days knelt and pressed free-floating laminate into place. When we were finished, the place was stunning.
Nowadays, Deb’s studio takes up the back end of the garage, near the new picture window. She’s already fashioned some awesome art pieces she’s given away as gifts. We have a second refrigerator out there, a work-out machine, weights and a warm, inviting sitting area with a TV, a stereo, as of a, a rocker and a wing chair.
The far side of the old garage, where the quirky little door used to be, is my space. We put a loft bed there for when company comes, and I’ve set up an office under the bed’s frame. I’ve got a long work shelf suspended by metal hooks, where my computer sits, and a slimmer shelf for my books and files. I face the wall when I write, but that’s how I like it—the outdoors is too distracting for me. When I sit at my desk, all I can see is what’s in my imagination.
A favourite picture of my wife sits right in front of my monitor. It was taken on Gabriola Island the first summer we were together. As I’m writing, I see that wonderful smiling face, and I am convinced that magic is alive in the universe. On the wall, there’s a picture of the two of us standing beside a thousand-year-old cedar tree. Hanging beside that are the two eagle feathers we tied together as part of our marriage ceremony. I’ve also mounted a quote from the writer George Eliot: “I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.”
My medicine box sits at the far edge of my desk. It holds the sweetgrass, cedar, sage and tobacco that we use to bless our home. There are rocks in that box, too, and gifts of tobacco I’ve been given for making presentations. A portable electronic keyboard, my guitar and my djembe sit beside the loft ladder. A music stand awaits the next batch of guitar music I’ll try to learn.
A collection of my published titles is displayed on the narrow shelf above me, along with a photo of Deb and me on a roller coaster and an editorial cartoon of me from the Calgary Herald that makes our friends laugh. That shelf also holds a dictionary, a thesaurus, a manual for writing screenplays, CD copies of my radio commentaries and a stack of CDs that I’ll be reviewing for my music column on the Internet. Directly above hangs a white eagle feather that belonged to the grandmother of a friend from the Sechelt Nation. I am surrounded in my writing space by the things I love and that sustain me. When I sit in that space, I feel creative and empowered.
The Creator meant for me to write. Not to think about it, not to plan for it, not to wait for inspiration, but to write to honour the gift I was given. So I come here every day and I write something. Once I’ve done that, I use my space in other ways: to browse the Internet, do research, play my guitar or drums, read, or listen to Brahms, or Miles Davis or the Reverend Gary Davis. Sometimes I just lean back in my chair, swivel around and gaze at the fabulous space my wife and I have built together. An art space. A space for creativity. A part of both our worlds, and a part of us joined together, for the common purpose of finding joy.
Making the Clouds Disappear
DRIVING BACK FROM Kamloops on the Paul Lake road, you rise up out of a twisting little valley onto a great stretch of tableland called Skidan Flats. It’s a sagebush meadow, free range land where horses are sent to graze the summer grasses. On the north side of the road, there’s always a herd of cattle, long-horned and lazy. Above the humped shapes of mountain that ring the road is the incredible azure bowl of the sky. Whether we’re returning from a trip out of town or just our usual shopping and supplies jaunt, the view always astounds us.
I can’t understand how people can speed through here. Deb and I tend to dawdle, and it irritates the drivers racing through at 120 clicks. But whisking through that stretch seems like cheating yourself. We always get a thrill as we top that rise. The light can dazzle you with its moods and shadings. The sky is so huge and perfect from that vantage point you feel you could be launched into it at any second.
When I was a foster kid in Kenora, Ontario, I spent a lot of time alone. The other kids in my neighbourhood had regular families, but I never knew from one week to the next whether I’d be staying or be sent off somewhere else. Other kids intuit that kind of desperation, and they steer clear of it. It didn’t help that I was the only Indian kid in the neighbourhood, or that northern Ontario in the early 1960s was very small-minded. I got used to wandering around by myself, and the truth was I liked it that way.
Deep in the bush, about twenty minutes from where I lived, I discovered a table rock. It was a slab of pink granite that jutted out of moss and blueberry cover into a clearing. The rock was rutted some by the weather, but it was mostly flat, and it had a slight angle that made it easy to lie back on. With the sun pulsing down and the heat of it radiating against your back, that rock was a great place to stretch out. Nobody else knew about the rock, it seemed, and it became my own private refuge.
Lying on that table rock for hours at a time, I was introduced to the wonders of the sky. Gazing up into the heavens, I felt as though I was levitating, free of gravity. Sometimes I’d bundle moss under my head. Other times I rolled my jacket or sweater into a pillow. When you stare at the sky long enough, you come to feel that you’re a part of it. As a foster kid who never fit in anywhere, I treasured that feeling.
So I surrendered myself to the sky. I’d tell myself there were pirate ships in the clouds skimming past high above, great bears or carousels or the fiery exhalations of a dragon. Sometimes, when a wispy cloud appeared, I’d hold my arms up in front of my face and blow sharply on my wrists. Then, keeping my eye on that small cloud, I ’d rub my wrists together, making a counter clockwise circle. I’d concentrate, and eventually that little cloud would vanish right before my eyes. I always laughed when that happened. I felt like the world’s greatest magician.
I knew it was really just the wind. I was cognizant of the everyday science all around me. But for that brief moment I slipped free of rules and knowledge and accepted belief. I allowed myself to believe I truly had magical powers.
I was often scared after I left northern Ontario for my adopted home in the south. I’d lost my table rock, but I still had the sky. Whenever things were bad or confusing or hurtful, I could always find a place to stretch out, gaze upward and feel the sky fill me. Even as I got older, that always helped me hold on.
I’m a grown man now, living in a grownup world that’s short on every day magic. There are bills to pay, chores to be done, problems to be solved. But when I take the time to wander out and find a quiet place in the sunshine, I can still make clouds disappear. I can still free myself from rules and the accepted order of things. And whenever we crest that hill and drive onto the tableland of Skidan Flats, I remember the sky’s promise to me. We all have that magic within us. Look up. Look up.
Heroes
FOR A LONG time, I’ve been of the m ind that heroes are for children. Once the world settles down around your shoulders, and responsibility becomes your mantra for day-by-day living, heroes get left behind. Sure, as a baseball fan I have players I admire, and as a rabid musicologist I have musicians I love listening to, but for a long time there hasn’t been a distant figure who has touched my life in a meaningful way. I’ve just become too busy for heroes.
Life is a succession of practical tasks. Life is stubborn, plodding routine. Life is an eyes-on-the-horizon march towards success and security. There’s little time for the dreaming, the idolizing and the vicarious basking in glory that heroes demand of us. Heroes are the province of childhood recollections and dinner table tales. So I was surprised when I found myself watching the 2008 Democratic
presidential nomination race with great interest. Normally I’m blasé about U.S. politics. Like all Canadians, I’m inundated with American news, and I sometimes feel I know more about what’s going on south of the border than I do about our own domestic situation.
But the presidential primaries caught my attention. For one, Hillary Clinton was in the race, and I desperately wanted to see a woman assume the mantle of power. Women are a lot like Indians, really. They know how it feels to be marginalized, prejudged, undervalued and over scrutinized. So I wanted her to do well. Maybe I could score a vicarious victory from her achievements.
But I was even more interested in Barack Obama. When he secured the Democratic nomination, then squared off against Republican John McCain in their November showdown, I couldn’t have been happier. If anyone understand show race affects your ability to secure a just place in society, it’s a black person, and Obama’s race for the White House held a lot of importance for me. I wanted him to win. I wanted to believe that there is still room in this world for someone to do the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the extraordinary, the historically outrageous.
It’s not just Native people who share that wish. Women, people of mixed race, people with disabilities, the homeless, the mentally challenged, gays, lesbians, people who are under-educated and unemployed, the elderly, immigrants and youth all want to see an underdog rise up, not only to challenge the status quo but to give it a good licking. As a First Nations person who’s watched and waited for an inspiring politician to rise from our ranks and lead us to equality in Canada, I saw Obama as a beacon in the darkness.
Obama’s quest continued the journey begun by Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln wanted emancipation for black people. He wanted freedom and equality to be more than just poetic phrases in the U.S. Constitution. His vision was justice for everyone, and it took a war to get the ball rolling. The theme was continued later in the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. Reverend King’s crusade was for the everyday rights of all people. He expressed that in a clarion call to black consciousness, but his message was for everyone. He was a pacifist who held out the possibility that salvation could come from the people themselves, if we would only heed the message. Many of us did, and things changed.
I was a boy in the 1960s. I remember the tumult of the civil rights movement. I remember the permissible racism of the white neighbourhoods where I lived—Aunt Jemima on the pancake box, the waist-coated Negro coachmen on numerous lawns, the references to Brazil nuts as “nigger toes” and black men referred to as “boys” in the colloquial conversations of men I was supposed to admire. There were “good Negroes” like Sammy Davis, Jr., Nipsy Russell and Jackie Robinson, but I recall the fear “bad Negroes” like H . Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael evoked in my adopted white parents. Their fear was transferred onto every black person they encountered after the riots in Detroit and Watts. I remember looking at my own brown skin and wondering how that applied to me.
I couldn’t frame the equation properly then, but life offered me that chance eventually. The older I got, the more aware I became of being treated as different, out of place and wrong. My white home was no shelter from that racism. My adopted parents continued to try to carve me into their own image, never thinking that the constant nicks and gouges were causing me pain.
I became a high school drop-out, a welfare case, an unemployed, homeless alcoholic and eventually a card-carrying First Nations activist. Along the way I met people of all stripes who showed me that it isn’t just skin that polarizes us—it’s attitude. Having labels applied to you is tiring. Fighting my way through terms like “lazy,” “shiftless,” “stupid,” “backward” and “drunken Indian” was arduous, and the journey was seldom illuminated by models of change.
When I started to write the stories of my people as a journalist, I ran up against many historical barriers. The story of the relationship between whites and Indians was rarely told. Instead, Canadians believed what the history books told them, that grand tale about Europeans conquering the wilderness and establishing a 1/22/2011 shining nation from sea to sea to sea. They knew the names of the “explorers”—Radisson and Groseilliers, David Thompson, Alexander Mackenzie—but not those of the Indians in the canoes.
So Barack Obama’s quest was my quest, too. His crusade for justice, for representation, for recognition was not just for black people but for all of us who have had to fight to be seen, heard and valued. Watching it unfold, I felt the hope Obama expressed in speeches and debates. He represented the power of one man to keep moving forward despite old hurts.
The image of Obama, arms raised in victory, showed me and marginalized people everywhere that triumph is not only possible—its time has come. We all needed that lesson, because heroes ought never to be relegated to our past. For people of all ages, heroesought to be part of the fabric of every day.
Born to Roam
I DON’T TRAVEL very well these days. I get called out all the time to speak at conferences, run workshops, do readings or lecture at universities. Most of these trips are only a few days long but, I can never wait to get home. I feel troubled by not being able to see the lake, get out on the land or feel the quiet all around me. Even when I’m ensconced in a nice hotel with all the amenities, I still long for our woodstove and plank floors. I guess I’ve become a homebody.
It wasn’t that long ago that my life was like a sappy country song. I was always on the road again, looking at the world through a windshield, as that old truckdriving song goes. White-line fever raged in me, and home was always just over the horizon. Life was about moving on.
I did a lot of hitchhiking during my late teens. There was a gypsy feel to being young and free on the side of a road with just a backpack and a sleeping bag. I felt like a hobo king, a Kerouac, the kind of ramblin’ boy Tom Paxton sang about. It always seemed to be summer. I could hit the road at the drop of a hat, and I often did. I ate at creaky truck stops and small clapboard diners along the highway. I’d meet other kings of the road at the hostels where I stayed; we’d share drinks and stories and a few guitar songs around a fire. Family was a never-changing set of faces.
I was a railroad gang labourer for a while. I picked pine cones, planted trees, stoked wheat, cleaned floors, washed dishes, shovelled feed, cleaned fish and lugged construction materials in every part of Canada except the Maritimes. Every job put just enough money in my pocket for me to hit the road again.
Later, I hit the road a lot as a reporter and a documentary producer. It was the late 1980s by then. There were always issues and questions and ideas I wanted to investigate, and being on the road made that possible. The road was my university, and I majored in people. I met miners, engineers, firefighters, nurses, teachers and scientists. I sat with them in grand old homes on cultured estates and dark shacks on remote reserves. Whatever the state of their homes, most of the people I met had settled in somewhere, and I started to crave that myself.
When Debra and I first moved in together, we lived in a condo on a busy street in Burnaby. Part of me still wrestled with slippery feet. Part of me still believed there was promise just over the rise ahead. But Deb was patient and gentle, and I gradually felt more comfortable walking in through a door than out. When we moved here to the mountains, that feeling grew stronger.
I’m fifty-three now, and these old bones have grown more attached to languishing in front of the fire than to racking up the miles. I don’t enjoy food much when I travel, and I can’t relax enough to read. I get ornery in airports, grumbling a lot and putting on the impassive Indian face that makes Deb laugh. Only when I’m home do I feel content.
The years sneak up on you, and you’re different suddenly. You realize there’s no more time to be wasted. You’re a hunter-gatherer, for Pete’s sake, I tell myself. You’re supposed to be out loose upon the land. You’re supposed to roam, sharing stories with others around a crackling fire. But the home fires are the only ones I care for any more. Call me an old coot, but I’ve never found a five-star joi
nt that feels as good as home.
NORTH
WISDOM
TO BE TRULY wise is to understand that knowing and not knowing are one. Each has the power to transform. Wisdom is the culmination of teachings gleaned from the journey around the circle of life, the Medicine Wheel. Circles have no end. We are all spirit, we are all energy, and there is always more to gain. This is what my people say. When the story of our time here is completed and we return to spirit, we carry away with us all of the notes our song contains. The trick is to share all of that with those around us while we’re here. We are all on the same journey, and we become more by giving away. That’s the essential teaching each of us is here to learn.
Today Is a Good Day to Die
WHEN I REJOINED my people as a young man and encountered traditional and cultural teachings for the first time, my feeling of alienation vanished. Suddenly I had ways of expressing who I was, and I took them up with the enthusiasm of a starving man. But in my frenzy to become as Native as I could be, I missed out much of the intent in the teachings I was given.
For a time after I’d learned the history of the settlement of North America and the displacement of our people, I was embittered and angry. Militancy among young Native people was growing then, and I eagerly embraced it, participating in marches and protests, office occupations and sit-ins. At the high end of that energy, there were some violent confrontations and stand-offs. I believed fervently that the things we were doing were justified and right. I believed that kind of action was the answer to the forced subjugation of my people’s identity, traditions and culture.
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