by Thomas King
Mark Twain said, “It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart, the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you,” but I know better.
I don’t need any help. I can do the job all by myself.
One day I was covering major news events with my own byline, and the next I was sitting at home watching Murder, She Wrote reruns and Murdoch Mysteries.
I didn’t use the word “quit” when I told Mimi.
“Retiring? From what?”
“Work.”
“Thought you wanted to save the world?”
“Can’t save it from people,” I told her.
“That sounds like despair.”
“And I’m tired.”
“And that sounds like depression.”
WRITING-ON-STONE PROVINCIAL PARK.
Just north of the Alberta-Montana border. Sunday, July 10, 2016. A makeshift camp had materialized on the Milk River. Four tipis, seven men, six women, five children. They had been there for about two weeks when a group of tourists hiking through the park noticed the smoke from the cooking fire and reported it.
The camp was the idea of Annie Littlechild, a Cree from Wetaskiwin. She had left a clerical job with Shell Canada and decided to try to live as her ancestors had lived. The rest of the encampment consisted of a mismatched assortment of Natives from Rocky Boy and Wetaskiwin, Siksika and Bella Coola, along with a German university professor who had written a book on Karl May.
The Toronto Star had commissioned me to write a story about the camp, take photographs, a human interest piece for the Life section. I remembered coming in off the trail that morning and seeing the camp for the first time. It wasn’t going to win any authenticity awards. The tipis were new, unbleached canvas, fresh out of the box. Someone had strung a clothesline between two cottonwoods. The line was so loaded that the jeans in the centre were touching the ground. There was a beat-to-shit gas generator off to one side and a crude firepit made out of river stones.
Even if you squinted and suspended your disbelief, it wasn’t a nineteenth-century diorama.
I did interviews, took pictures of the adults in front of the tipis, followed the kids when they went to the river in search of bugs and minnows. I helped with the chores, ate with the group, listened to their stories. I had expected that these would be sad narratives of alcohol and drug abuse, of poverty and desperation, but for the most part, the people in the camp were ordinary, working class, from offices and factories.
They weren’t looking to change the world, Littlechild told me that first night. They were just trying to make sense of their lives and how such lives could be lived.
I was more skeptical than I needed to be. How were they going to manage basic water and sanitation? Where would they get their food? What would they do when winter arrived and turned the land to ice?
I had asked much the same questions when I covered the occupation of Alcatraz years before. There had been a lot of bravado on the Rock, clenched fists and drums, political speeches and visits from celebrities. Press coverage and the prison’s proximity to the amenities of San Francisco had turned the protest into a media romance that helped to hold the occupation together long after it had fallen apart.
Here on the Alberta prairies, out of sight of television cameras, movie stars, and sound bites, the Writing-on-Stone camp looked to have as much a chance of surviving as a picnic in a thunderstorm.
I DON’T SEE Oz until it’s too late. The little man appears in the doorway and is across the room in a flash.
“Hello,” he says. “You are here.”
“I am.”
“You are not here yesterday.”
I don’t feel like talking, but that is not going to stop Oz. “We went to Budapest.”
“Budapest?”
“Early in the morning,” I tell him. “Then we came back.”
“The same day?”
“Yes.”
Oz rubs the side of his nose. “What good luck.”
“Luck?”
“Today, there are no trains.” Oz arranges his knife and fork so they are parallel to each other. “They have closed the station in Budapest.”
“The refugees closed the station?”
“No, no,” says Oz. “The government closed the station. There are too many refugees, and there are too many angry people.”
The server comes by, and I decide that I’m hungry after all and won’t wait for Mimi. I order the ham dish. So does Oz.
“You saw the refugees?”
“Yes,” I say. “It was sad.”
“To see them is sad,” says Oz. “To be one is . . . bouleversant, but this is not strong enough.”
“Shattering?”
“Yes,” says Oz. “Shattering. Moria. Zaatari. Calais. Mae La. Dadaab. To be a refugee is to be shattered.”
I follow Oz to the buffet. There is a good selection of fruit today and some small pastries with raisins.
“So, what will you do today?”
“I don’t know. You have any suggestions?”
Oz takes two of the pastries. “You have seen the clock?”
“We’ve seen the clock and the Kafka courtyard and the castle and the statue of the boy and we’ve been to Golden Lane.”
“And, of course, the bridge.”
“We walked through the old Jewish quarter and saw the cemetery, but we didn’t go in.”
Oz stops in front of the yogurt. “Have you been to the KGB Museum?”
I’m tempted to tell Oz about the medicine bundle and Uncle Leroy.
“When you were in Budapest, did you go to the castle?” Oz waves a serving spoon in my face. “There is a museum. In the basement of the castle. The Hospital in the Rock. Filled with wax figures. My favourite is a German officer sitting on a toilet with his pants around his ankles.”
“Wax Nazis?”
“Doctors, nurses, patients, soldiers,” says Oz. “A history lesson in wax.”
We finish with the buffet and go back to our table. It’s only eight thirty. I don’t expect to see Mimi for another hour. Now that I have food in front of me, I’m no longer hungry. What I really want to do is go back to the room, crawl into bed, and stay there for the rest of the day.
Instead, I sip my coffee and wait for Oz to finish his meal. Through the window, I can see the sun in full throat, and I can hear the sounds of motor scooters as they zip up and down the narrow streets.
“Tell me,” I ask him as he eats the last of his pastry, “what do you know about Wild West shows?”
THE SECOND DAY I was at the Littlechild camp, park rangers, with their official voices at the ready, showed up and told the people that they would have to leave or face a fine and jail time. Littlechild was friendly but firm. This was Indian land, she told the park people. They weren’t bothering anyone. And they weren’t going to move.
Oh, and would the rangers like to join the camp for lunch?
The next morning, I had walked to high ground so I could get a good shot of the camp and the river and the sky floating above the land. I had just finished setting up the camera when the RCMP arrived in four patrol cars, trailed by a rented cube van. Everything was much too far away for me to hear what was being said, but you could tell that the cops had not come to negotiate a treaty.
There was a brief confrontation, after which the officers moved in quickly and arrested everyone. Littlechild tried to take refuge in one of the tipis. I watched as she was dragged out, handcuffed, and shoved into the back of one of the cruisers.
Then, quickly and efficiently, the police moved on the camp itself. They broke down the tipis, gathered up the sleeping bags, the folding chairs, the barbecue, and the generator, and threw everything into the back of the cube van.
The raid lasted less than an hour.
There was little I could do. So I did nothing. And, in the time it took the police to arrest everyone and dismantle the camp, I didn’t move.
SOMEWHERE IN MY CAREER as a photojo
urnalist, I had written a feature story about Wild West shows for Saturday Night, and what I had enjoyed most about the research were the photographs.
I had used four in the article.
One had been a candid shot taken during the 1901 Pan-American exhibition in Buffalo, New York. It showed Indians on horseback, sporting full feathered headdresses, getting ready for a race.
Or a raid.
The second photograph, taken in 1905, was a re-enactment of the death of Custer. This image was staged and probably shot in a studio. Custer is standing upright with a raised sword in one hand and a pistol in the other. At his feet are three dead Indians, the inference being that George Armstrong did not go down without a fight. A fourth Indian stands in front of the lieutenant colonel and is in the process of driving a knife into Custer’s chest.
It wasn’t Sitting Bull. Not that it mattered.
In any case, whoever the Indian was, he had a full feathered headdress just like the riders in the first photograph.
The real Sitting Bull was in the third photograph I used. It had been taken earlier, in 1885, and showed him standing side by side with Buffalo Bill Cody. Cody has one hand over his heart, as though he’s in the middle of making the Lakota chief a promise, while his other hand rests on his rifle. Sitting Bull stands next to the famous frontiersman, in full headdress, his eyes closed as though he’s asleep or simply bored with the whole process of myth-making.
The last photograph I used, which was undated, showed a group of thirty or so Indians in full headdresses standing with Buffalo Bill in front of a backdrop of tipis and tents. There were two Native children in this one. They were wearing feathered headdresses as well.
In all four of the photographs, the feathered headdresses were the markers, the sign that these were Indians and not Chinese workers at the Three Gorges Dam or coal miners on a coffee break in West Virginia.
A few of the Indians in the Wild West show photographs didn’t have headdresses, and I had to conclude that there had been only so many headdresses available, that if you came late for the shoot, you’d have to settle for a single feather or a leather headband.
THE STORY OF UNCLE LEROY and the medicine bundle delights Oz. “He paints the house with cow shit?”
“He does.”
“Then he must join the Wild West show?”
“Captain Trueblood’s Wild West Emporium.”
“And comes to Europe?”
“Paris, Athens, Amsterdam,” I tell him. “We have the postcards.”
“And he comes also to Prague?”
“Yes.”
“And he sees the astronomical clock?”
“Probably.”
“So far from home. But he returns?”
“No,” I say. “He never returns.”
“To be a refugee.” Oz shakes his head sadly. “A very hard life.”
I had never thought of Uncle Leroy as a refugee. But, of course, that is exactly what he was. Forced off the reserve, dragged through an assortment of countries and languages. Homeless.
The old man in Keleti station with the vacant eyes. The women huddled in the corner. The child with her stuffed monkey. The young men with angry faces, ready to fight.
“But tell me more about this bundle.”
“What do you want to know?”
“What is inside the bundle?”
I had never seen the bundle, and neither had Mimi. Not even Mimi’s mother had been alive the last time the bundle had been opened.
“Could be anything,” I tell Oz. “A stone, a tooth, a feather, a piece of cloth, a bone of some sort.”
“And this is sacred?”
“No,” I say, “it’s more a family history, a collection of stories.”
“Bones and stones?”
“They remind us of stories.”
“And now you make a new bundle.”
“My wife’s idea.”
“To replace the bundle that has been lost.”
“Yes.”
“Nylon? With a zipper?”
“One of the women on the reserve did some beadwork on the pouch,” I tell Oz. “It looks pretty nice.”
“Of course,” he says, “of course. Cultures are living things. They must continue to change or they will die. This is true, is it not?”
I don’t disagree with Oz, but there is still something about a nylon medicine bundle that bothers me.
“And what do you put in this new bundle?”
I run through some of the items that Mimi has gathered so far. A piece of honey nougat wrapped in gold foil that she bought at a shop in old-town Nice. A glass button we found in Venice in Piazza San Marco after an acqua alta. The stone from my grandfather’s village in Greece. A cork from our first bottle of wine in Paris.
“I have a friend,” says Oz, “in Copenhagen. She makes a scrapbook of the places she visits.”
“Sort of the same idea.”
“But for the bundle, there is a ceremony?”
“Don’t know,” I say. “Probably.”
“A song?” says Oz. “A dance? The burning of sage?”
“You’d have to ask my wife.”
“I should tell my friend,” says Oz. “A ceremony would please her.”
I check the doorway. Mimi is going to be late for breakfast again.
“But there is much to do.” Oz stands and buttons his jacket. “And I have promises to keep.”
I’m tempted to finish the stanza, but instead I smile and wish the little man a good day.
“Tomorrow,” he calls back to me from the doorway. “Tomorrow, the Bees and the Bears.”
LITTLECHILD’S CAMP WASN’T the first such attempt to get back to a simpler life. In June of 1971, just as federal marshals were removing the last of the protesters from Alcatraz, I flew in to Edmonton to do an article on a bush camp that had been established in 1968 on the edge of the Brazeau Canyon Wildland, in the shadow of the Rockies.
The Mountain Cree Camp.
Cree elder Robert Smallboy and 140 people, more or less, from the Ermineskin Band just down the road from Wetaskiwin.
The camp was large and well established. I took pictures, talked with the leaders, ate with the people. The idea for the camp was a simple one. To sidestep the contemporary world and the havoc of alcoholism and drug abuse. To try to stem the epidemic of suicide.
Which is pretty much what Littlechild had wanted.
But unlike the Littlechild camp, the Mountain Cree Camp was larger and much more isolated. Even though the Crown claimed the Kootenay Plains as federal land, officials chose not to move on it. The Littlechild camp was much smaller, but it was in a provincial park, and the potential threat that a small band of Indians posed to the sensibilities of tourists was not to be tolerated.
And 1971 was a world away from 2016.
Not that Robert Smallboy fared much better in the end. On a trip to Banff in the winter of 1984, he was forced to spend the night in the snow after hotels in the tourist township decided that, while Indians on horseback riding in the Banff Indian Days parade were tolerable, a single Indian wanting to rent a room for the evening was not.
The night was cold, and he wound up with frostbite in his toes. The toes turned gangrenous, and by the summer of that year, he was dead.
I GO TO THE BUFFET and get a second pastry. I doubt that these are recommended for diabetics, but they’re small, and the trick is to eat them slowly. With coffee. Mimi’s mother read an article that suggested coffee inhibits the rapid absorption of sugar.
I don’t believe this. More than likely, it’s the Institute to Confound and Demoralize hard at work. Nevertheless, the possibility is a comfort.
The breakfast room is empty now, and as I sit alone at the table, I imagine that I’m back in Guelph, sitting on the sofa watching football. The little girl from Keleti station is sitting next to me, her monkey in her arms. Muffy the Wonder Dog is on my lap. Together, we watch the Toronto Argonauts lose another game. The girl wants to know why the players don�
�t have guns, and I tell her that football is a game and that if the players had guns, they would kill each other, and that would be war.
Maybe, the girl tells me, we should take guns away from soldiers and give them footballs instead.
I have these moralistic daydreams from time to time. They never last long, and they have little lasting effect.
Eugene sits down next to me with a thud. The twins stand near the window with their hands linked, rocking back and forth, as they sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”
So full of good intentions, says Eugene. As long as you don’t have to do anything.
I watch the staff as they clear away the breakfast buffet.
Didi comes over and leans against the chair. You want to sing Row-Row?
Singing always makes me feel better, says Desi.
Kitty doesn’t say a word. She fidgets in the doorway and chews off her fingernails.
It’s going to be a nice day, a day for walking around and seeing the sights. I stand up, leave a tip, and head for the stairs.
I bump Eugene with my shoulder as I go by. Just because I can.
Mimi is sitting in the chair by the window. She sits very still, and at first, I think she might be asleep.
“You know what I’m thinking?” she says.
“You missed breakfast.”
“I’m thinking that this is what it feels like to be rich.”
I sit on the bed and wait. Mimi looks out the window at the bridge and the tourists and the river.
“We can fly anywhere we want, stay at a nice hotel, eat at a decent restaurant, see the sights, and fly home. Bada-bing, bada-boom.”
“Budapest isn’t our fault.”
“And if we see something upsetting, we can just ignore it.”
“You’re going to have to eat.”
“How many times?”
“How about we leave the guidebook behind for the day.”
I go to the bathroom and inject myself with insulin. Eight units. Because of the pastry. In case coffee therapy is a myth.
“How about we just wander?”
Mimi is waiting for me when I return. She stands by the bed, her jacket in hand. “How many times?”
“Arabic.” I slip the camera into my pack. “I looked it up. The Syrian refugees speak Arabic.”