The Redemption of Oscar Wolf

by James Bartleman

  “Yes, indeed, the kings and queens of England, especially Queen Victoria, have had special ties with our Indians for hundreds of years,” Evans said, continuing his monologue. “The treaties were signed in their names and today they never miss a chance to attend a pow wow and wear eagle feather war bonnets when they make official visits to Canada. But I suppose you know all that.

  “Now let’s get down to business,” he said, pulling up a seat beside Oscar, touching his knee and continuing to speak without pause. “You have a drinking problem, but it’s not your fault, you were born that way. Canadian Indians are like Australian Aborigines, incapable of tolerating alcohol. And that’s why you must promise me that you won’t touch a drop of any alcoholic beverage as long as you work for me at this mission.”

  “I’ll do my very best, high commissioner. I’ll do my best,” Oscar said.

  “And there’s something else, Oscar,” Evans said, after looking at him doubtfully and getting up and walking over to look once again out the window. “You don’t have a monopoly on moral outrage. A lot of us in the Department feel just as strongly about the racism in the world as you do. But we are diplomats sent abroad to promote Canadian interests and not missionaries trying to save the souls or change the ways of foreign societies. There will thus be no solo expeditions to remote settlements to find fault with Australia’s policies toward the Aborigines. I also learned a long time ago that in our profession, it’s always best to work with people to get them to change their ways and not just hector them to do better.”

  2

  Some months later, the high commissioner summoned Oscar to his office. The vice chancellor of the University of New South Wales had called to say he had learned there was a Canadian Aboriginal diplomat on staff at the Canadian High Commission.

  “Apparently there’s a lot of interest in Australian universities on the condition of indigenous peoples around the world, and he wants you to go down to Sydney and speak to an academic conference about the Canadian experience. Can I trust you to stick to the facts and not embarrass the high commission or the Canadian government if I let you go?”

  “You can count on me to support government policy,” Oscar replied.

  “I hoped you’d say that,” the high commissioner said. “And if you continue to think that way, maybe you’ll get your career back on track.”

  The following week, the university conference room was filled to overflowing when Oscar took the floor. Although the topic of his speech, “The History of Indian–European Relations in North America Prior to and after the Age of Discovery,” was unexciting, many professors and students had come to see a genuine North American Indian in the flesh. Oscar stuck to the facts, describing at great length the Beringer ice-age land bridge from Asia, Indian culture in the pre-contact period, the extinction of the woolly mammoth, projectile points, burial mounds, late archaic pottery, spears, bows and arrows, corn, potatoes, squash, the Hopewell tradition, and Iroquoian torture techniques. He went on to review the cultural and economic impact on the First Peoples of explorers, missionaries, traders, and settlers, listed all the Indian-White wars from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the role of Indian tribes in the War of 1812–1814, and brought his lecture to a close just as the Dominion of Canada was coming into being in 1867.

  Most people left before he finished speaking, and the first question by an attendee reflected the dissatisfaction of those who remained.

  “That’s all well and good, Mr. Wolf, but we know all that. Can’t you tell us something a little more personal? How have you suffered from this history of colonization?”

  “Frankly, I haven’t suffered personally,” Oscar said. “I went to a good school, served honourably in the army, went to university after the war, and joined the Department of External Affairs and served abroad at the Canadian Delegation to the United Nations in New York and at the Canadian embassy in Colombia before being posted to Australia.”

  “But surely there’s more to it than that,” someone said. “Don’t your people live in slum-like reserves just like our Aborigines? Aren’t they denied the vote just like the black people here? And what about those residential schools?”

  “If you want,” Oscar said, “I can describe to you how my own people have adapted to the modern world,” and he painted for them a rosy picture of the way of life of the people from the Rama Indian Reserve and the Indian Camp, emphasizing the first-rate relations they maintained with the surrounding white people and their communities. But as he was telling them about Jacob and his father and all the other Indian men who had had fought and died in Canada’s armies in two world wars, someone yelled, “For God’s sake, mate, are you just a yes man or do you have a mind of your own?”

  Oscar countered by rambling on about manidos, water monsters, witches, bannock, sucker moons, strawberry moons, Windigos, bearwalkers, starvation in the pre-contact period, Nanibush, the Milky Way, souls, shadows, Madji Manitou, the Creator, the muskrat, the grain of sand, Tecumseh, Louis Riel, the Amick, the Dump Road, and someone named Clem. The few surviving members of the audience got up and left before he finished his account of the anthropological significance of the white dog feast.

  The next morning, eating breakfast in his downtown hotel room, Oscar read in the Sydney Morning Chronicle a detailed account of his presentation that concluded with an editorial comment:

  Mr. Wolf’s lecture at the University of New South Wales last night was somewhat confusing. The gist of his talk seemed to be that Canadian aboriginals and the white people of Canada had found ways to establish and maintain harmonious racial relations. If that is what he meant to say, and if what he meant to say is really true, perhaps Australia could learn something from the Canadian model to apply in dealing with our aborigines.

  High Commissioner Evans will be pleased, Oscar thought, and he decided to celebrate. For the rest of the day, he took in the sights, visiting Harbour Bridge and Bondi Beach and dropping into art galleries to look at examples of Aboriginal art. He went into several museums and joined groups of schoolchildren examining wonderfully mounted skeletons of Aborigine people in glass cages alongside the bones of other animal species that had become extinct after the arrival of the first settlers in 1788, such as the King Island Emu, the Roper River Scrub Robin, the Grey-headed Blackbird, the Sharp-snouted Day Frog, the Desert Rat-kangaroo, the Crescent Nail-tail Wallaby, and the Tasmanian Tiger.

  Oscar was enjoying himself so much that the time passed quickly and he found himself in the late evening in the neighbourhood of Kings Cross, a part of the city where red lights lit up the entrances to all the bars. Oscar knew very well that members of the Canadian Foreign Service should not enter such establishments, but he was thirsty and went into one anyway, fully intending to spend only as much time as it took to down a glass of ice-cold Coca-Cola and depart. He sat alone at his corner table, breathing in the smell of cigarette smoke, testosterone, draft beer, sweat, cheap perfume, and air freshener, while thinking back with nostalgia to the bar in San Diego before the war where he used to throw drunks out onto the streets for a living. Then, out of the gloom came a tall, wide-hipped, dark-skinned woman about twenty years old wearing high heels, a blouse so low-necked that her ample breasts were almost entirely exposed, and a skirt so high up on her legs it would have been obscene had she not been a prostitute dressed for work.

  I hope she’s not going to sit down here, Oscar thought. I’m still a married man and I’m getting my life together.

  But the woman wiggled her rump and sat down, studiously avoiding eye contact with Oscar in case he should tell her to leave. Still looking away, she smiled silently to herself, reached into her rhinestone-studded handbag, and pulled out a package of cigarettes. Holding it up close to her eyes, she examined it with such great attention one might have thought she had never seen anything like it before. Her scrutiny over, she tapped the package with the index finger of her left hand until a cigarette popped out. She then extracted it delicately with her right
hand, lit it, slowly drew in the smoke, and, as she exhaled, took Oscar’s hand in hers and looked into his eyes.

  “Hello, John,” she said.

  Oscar did not answer because his eyes were fixed on a waiter carrying a bottle marked Dom Perignon approaching his table. He was well aware he should tell him to go away and bring him a glass of Coca-Cola. He also knew he should tell the prostitute to stop bothering him and leave. But at that moment, he thought only of the champagne and how much he wanted to taste it. He watched mesmerized as the waiter screwed off the cap, set the bottle and two glasses down on the table, and walked away. Oscar filled a glass, raised it into the air and gazed at it, still fighting his desire to take a drink. He had become a heavy drinker to forget Claire and to prevent a return to the depression that had plagued his life in California and in the early years of his wartime service. But it had not come back when he had given up alcohol as a condition of his posting to Australia, and now that he thought about it, neither had his brooding about Claire. He was cured, he was sure, and could drink again. He took a sip. It was a cheap sparkling wine but he didn’t care, for after the first swallow, he needed another drink right away.

  “Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?” It was the prostitute demanding he pay some attention to her. He would give her a drink and then tell her to go away, Oscar thought. It was the polite thing to do.

  But one glass led to another and soon the bottle was empty and the prostitute was still there. “Order another one and we can get to know each other as we drink it,” she said.

  Oscar looked at her more carefully and came to the conclusion his guest looked an awful lot like Rosa when he first met her on the bank of the Meta River in Colombia, when she still looked like the Indian princess of his dreams. He ordered another bottle and decided he wanted to get to know his guest a little better.

  “My name is Ann Kumquat, John,” she told him as they drank, but you can call me Anna. All my customers call me Anna.”

  His inhibitions and common sense gone, Oscar told her his name and said he was a first secretary at the Canadian High Commission in Canberra. “I gave a lecture at the University of New South Wales last night,” he added. “It got a glowing review in the Morning Chronicle and I think my high commissioner will be pleased.”

  “Why that’s fascinating, John,” she said, squeezing the biceps of his right arm with one hand and waving at the waiter to bring another bottle of plonk with the other.

  “I hope you don’t mind, but I call all my customers John,” she said as the waiter opened the bottle. “It’s easier to keep track of you that way.”

  After they finished the bottle, Anna took him upstairs, where she ordered yet another. Then, as Oscar repeated to her with great enthusiasm the entire lecture he had given at the university, she nodded attentively and gobbled down two buckets of oysters, a two-pound steak smeared with Vegemite, three orders of fish and chips with tartar-sauce, and two slices of toast. When he woke up the next morning, the money in his wallet and Anna were gone.

  After visiting the local branch of his bank and withdrawing a thousand dollars from his account, Oscar returned to the establishment, where the manager, after glancing at the money in his wallet, charged him a thousand dollars for five bottles of fake Dom Perignon, four buckets of oysters, a three- pound steak smeared with Vegemite, and five orders of fish and chips with tartar sauce. But he didn’t count the toast.

  “When do you think I could see Anna again?” Oscar asked.

  “She usually comes to work around ten o’clock,” the manager said. “She’s popular with the clients, and so if you want to spend time with her, you better get here early.”

  Oscar went to the bank and withdrew another thousand dollars, everything he had left in his account. And when he was in bed with Anna that night, he asked what had led her to become a prostitute and to steal money from her customers.

  “The answer should be obvious,” Anna said. “I want your money.”

  When Oscar went back to work, the high commissioner came by his office. “I just received an interesting call from the secretary to the Cabinet. He told me that the government was planning to announce the establishment of a Royal Commission on the Status of Aborigine Peoples to tackle the issues facing the indigenous peoples of Australia once and for all. It’s supposed to travel around the country to examine conditions on settlements, conduct consultations, and prepare a final report with recommendations. He also said he had read the story in the Morning Chronicle on your lecture with great interest, and had drawn it to the prime minister’s attention. They agreed that you could make a valuable contribution to the commission’s work by providing the commissioners with insights, based on Canadian practice, on how to uplift the Aborigines in this country. He wanted to know if you would be prepared to take a leave of absence and join their staff.”

  Oscar was delighted. Royal commissions, he knew, paid their employees high salaries and benefits, a lot more than he was making as a first secretary. If he could obtain the job, he would be able to see Anna as often as he liked.

  “Personally,” Oscar said eagerly, “as a Canadian and Aboriginal person, I’ve been deeply troubled ever since I arrived in this country by the way Aborigine people are treated. That’s why I made it a priority in my work to read as much as I could on Aborigine issues in case I was ever asked to be a member of an Australian Royal Commission on the Status of Aborigine Peoples. I even developed close relations with a young Aborigine woman in Sydney named Anna. I wanted to hear her story to better understand her people.”

  “That’s all very good, Oscar. You are certainly industrious. But I’m a little worried Ottawa might not let you go. It’s not often governments allow their officials to participate on commissions of other countries.”

  But Evans need not have worried. The Department was flattered the Australians would want one of its officers to work for them, and when Oscar left to join the commission a week later, the high commissioner shook his hand and said he would go far.

  The three members of the Royal Commission — Chairman Reverend Gregory Mortimer of the United Methodist Church, Father Adrian Murphy of the Roman Catholic Church, and Captain Mary Fletcher of the Salvation Army — held their first meeting in early June. As their first order of business, they asked Oscar to provide them a briefing on the situation of Aboriginal people in Canada. They had all read the press report on his talk in the Sydney Morning Chronicle and wanted to hear more.

  “I would be happy to do so,” Oscar said, “but I think you would learn a lot more if you were to visit Canada, talk to ministers and officials, visit an Indian reserve, and generally see for yourselves the model we have developed to deal with indigenous peoples.”

  The commissioners and their Australian advisers thought Oscar’s idea was a good one. Delegations of Australians and Canadians had been making fact-finding missions to each other’s country for years to share their experiences in governing their large, sparsely populated nations. It just made good sense to learn from the Canadians the secrets to their success in accommodating the Aboriginal peoples living in their midst.

  High Commissioner Evans welcomed the initiative and contacted the Department of Indian Affairs to make the arrangements. When he told them the idea for the mission had come from Oscar, and sent them a copy of the press report on Oscar’s talk at the University of New South Wales, they were delighted. They could not have written a better explanation of the state of aboriginal affairs in Canada, they said, in a message back to the high commissioner. And having noted in Oscar’s presentation on the state of bliss prevailing at the Indian Camp at Port Carling, they planned to take the Australians there as part of their visit to Canada.

  But before the delegation left for Ottawa, the first stop in its program, Evans asked Oscar to come to see him.

  “This initiative of yours has the potential to strengthen Canada’s ties with Australia, but it could go wrong if the visitors were to come away believing you had misled them. An
d so,” he said, after pausing a moment, “I want you to remember what I told you when you were posted here. As a civil servant who has sworn an oath of allegiance to Her Majesty the Queen, you are obligated to defend and promote the interests of Canada and to portray it in the best possible light at all times. Whatever you do, never say anything that might undermine the expert opinion of ministers and their officials during their briefings.”

  3

  The day after the delegation arrived in Ottawa, the minister of Indian Affairs hosted a lunch in their honour. Afterward, Deputy Minister Larry Happlebee chaired a series of briefings modelled on the talk Oscar had given at the University of New South Wales. They were, however, in such depth that it took them the rest of the afternoon to finish. The commissioners did their best to stay awake while members of their staff, including Oscar, took careful notes to be entered into the record. Happlebee then opened the floor to questions.

  “Thank you, Deputy Minister,” Reverend Mortimer said. “I’d like to start off by saying that the Aborigine people of Australia are complaining that they have no inherent right to their traditional lands. They say that it is unfair of the Australian government and courts to claim Australia belonged to no one when the settlers arrived. Some people are saying we should have followed your example and negotiated treaties with our Aborigine tribes. What do you think?”

  “You would be making a terrible mistake,” Happlebee said. “We negotiated treaties with tribes across Canada throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and it worked out well for us because the Indians were illiterate and believed anything told to them. And we never had any intention of honouring them anyway. It was just an easy way to take their lands without having to fight wars with them like the United States and South American countries like Argentina and Chile. But today, they’re launching lawsuits and we’ll have to give the country back to them if we’re not careful.”