The Redemption of Oscar Wolf

by James Bartleman

  Why didn’t you write a book of non-fiction to deal with these tough moral issues?

  A novel takes the reader inside the heads of the characters and when a character laughs, the reader laughs, when the character suffers, the reader suffers, when the character rages against the injustices of humankind and Divine Providence, the reader does likewise, and so on. And most important, the novel leads the reader to make connections and links between the fortunes of the protagonists and himself or herself and thus to broaden his or her understanding of the big issues we often think about only after midnight with our heads under the covers. Non-fiction, even creative non-fiction, cannot do that.

  What led you to begin the novel with a journey and a fire?

  The train and canoe journey is a metaphor for the travel in search of redemption Oscar will follow throughout his life. The fire leads Oscar and his benefactors in Port Carling to ask themselves questions about Divine Providence that are developed in the course of the novel. I began thinking about the journey and fire when I recalled two stories related to me by my mother when I was a boy of nine or ten back in the 1940s.

  In the first, she told me that one magical night, when she was a girl about my age in the late 1920s, she attended the wake for a beloved member of the Rama Indian Reserve. Throughout the evening and into the night, she sang along with the others the old Christian hymns in the language of her people. She left with her father for the railway station and boarded a passenger train at midnight, arriving at Muskoka Wharf Station at the bottom of Lake Muskoka at one in the morning. Father and daughter then travelled some twenty miles by canoe to the Indian Camp located within the village limits of Port Carling where her father trapped beaver and muskrat along the Indian River and worked as a handyman at a guest house in the white village. Throughout the journey, the hymns the people sang at the wake repeated themselves time and time again in her head as she looked up at the stars on that wonderful late April night that she never forgot.

  In her second story, she told me that one night in the early 1930s she was spending the summer as usual with her family and the other members of the Rama Indian Reserve at the Indian Camp, selling handicraft and fresh fish to tourists to support themselves. One predawn morning, the fire bells of the three village churches began to peal, summoning all able-bodied men to fight a fire that had broken out in the basement of the village general store. Her father and the other Native men joined the white men of the village to fight the fire, but it spread and destroyed the entire business section. Her mother said at the time that she was certain the fire was the work of an arsonist because late in the night before the fire, she had been walking along the path leading from the Indian Camp to the business section when a man ran into her in the dark and knocked her over. She thought his behaviour was suspicious since he reeked of coal oil and did not answer her request to identify himself, but instead got up and ran off.

  Are all of the characters fictional?

  The villagers are fictional but several of the Native ones are based in part on members of my own family. Perhaps unconsciously, I drew on the life experiences and personality of my mother in creating the young Oscar. And Stella, the mother, resembles to an uncomfortable degree my mother’s mother. Pursued by inner demons after spending her childhood and early adolescence in the tuberculosis sanatorium at Gravenhurst, she took out her frustrations on her daughter. She beat her mercilessly, even hitting her with a two by four. She once drove her into the river in front of the family shack at the Indian Camp where, to my mother’s revulsion and shock, a four-foot water snake wrapped itself around her body. Jacob is loosely based on my great-grandfather Fred Benson, a veteran of the Great War, who was gassed in the fighting in northern France and came home to the reserve to die, and my grandfather, Ed Simcoe, whom I remember well as a kind and compassionate person. In an act of heroism, Ed entered a burning guesthouse during the fire that destroyed the business section of Port Carling to try to rescue a tourist girl trapped in her room. He brought her out but she died of her burns.

  Ed also did what he could to protect my mother from her mother, taking her with him in late April of each year when he left the reserve for the Indian Camp, just as Jacob did with Oscar. Although a child barely able to see over the top of the cookstove, my mother lit the fires and prepared meals of bannock and fried fish for her father. From the age of six to twelve, she attended the Port Carling elementary school in the months of May, June, and September. The other months of the school calendar she attended the Rama Reserve day school. She made many good white friends in Port Carling but was subject, as was Oscar, to the overt hateful racial discrimination shown to Indians from others at that time in Canada’s history.

  And Obagawanung? Did it actually exist?

  The Native village of Obagawanung was located, as described in the novel, on the banks of the Indian River at the site of the future Port Carling in the District of Muskoka. Its chief was a shaman and veteran of the War of 1812. Vernon Wadsworth, part of a survey team from Toronto that visited Obagawanung in the early 1860s, described him and his village in two excerpts from his memoirs as follows:

  I met the Indian Medicine Man of the Ojibway Tribe, named Musquedo, at Obagawanung Village. He was then eighty years of age but strong and vigorous. He had a flag pole in front of his hut with an emblem on top to denote his vocation. He invited me to a white dog feast and other pagan ceremonies. He had a large silver medal conferred on him for bravery at the battle of Queenston Heights in 1812 in which he participated on the British side with other Indians of the Georgian Bay district.

  The Indian village … consisted of some twenty log huts, beautifully situated on the Indian River and Silver Lake with a good deal of cleared land about it used as garden plots, and the Indians grew potatoes, Indian corn, and other vegetable products. They had no domestic animals but dogs and no boats but numerous birchbark canoes. The fall on the river there … was about eight feet, and the fish and game were very plentiful. Musquedo brought us potatoes and corn and we gave him pork and tobacco in return.

  When the first settlers from the Old Country arrived in the 1860s to take possession of their lands, the chief, with the help of a visiting white man, sent the following heartbreaking petition to Governor General Lord Monck to let his people stay:

  Father, we the Indians known as the Muskoka Band of the Ojibway Tribe living at our Village Obagawanung, being in the straits between Lakes Rosseau and Muskoka, desire to convey through you to our Great Mother the Queen the renewal of our dutiful and affectionate loyalty.

  Father, we are in trouble and we come to you to help us out. We believe that your ears are always open to listen to the complaints of your Red Children and that your hand is always ready to lead them in the right path.

  Father, many winters have passed since we settled here and began to cultivate our gardens. We have good houses and large gardens where we raise much corn and potatoes….We live by hunting and taking furs. We hope you will grant the wish of your Red Children, and do it soon, because the whites are coming in close to us and we are afraid that your surveyors will soon lay out our lands here into lots.

  The governor general rejected their appeal, and the people were forced to abandon their homes to make new lives elsewhere.

  You were a Canadian diplomat for thirty-five years, from 1966 to 2002, serving in Colombia, Australia, and South Africa as well as a half-dozen other countries. Are you Oscar the diplomat?

  Not at all — although there are several similarities between us. Like Oscar, I am a direct descendant of a Native veteran of the War of 1812. John Simcoe, who was the grandfather of my great-grandmother, fought with the British against the Americans during the War of 1812, including at the battle for York in April 1813. Like Oscar, I had a white beneficiary, in my case an incredibly generous retired American businessman who funded my university studies. Like Oscar, I served as a member of Canada’s Department of External Affairs. Unlike Oscar, I managed to stay out of trouble and went o
n to serve in a dozen overseas postings in a career lasting more than thirty-five years.

  Like Oscar, I was posted to the Canadian Delegation to the United Nations, but in my case only for one session of the United Nations General Assembly in the fall of 1966 as a staff member on the committee dealing with decolonization. It was a privilege to have been present during that session at the eighteenth anniversary commemorations of the signature of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10 in the presence of its principal drafter, John Humphries, a Canadian on the International Staff. I was later posted as a junior officer to the Canadian embassy at Bogota, Colombia, as was Oscar.

  There was no Claire in my life. Nor was there a Rosa, but I did take a television journalist to the hot interior of the country near the Venezuelan border to spend a few extraordinary days with an anthropologist friend who was living with a group of Cuiva Indians on the shores of the Meta River. I was able to confirm that the reports I had received about Indians being hunted down by settlers who wanted their lands were true. The journalist returned with a film crew, prepared a documentary shown in the United Kingdom, but unfortunately the Colombian government did nothing to end the killings.

  During a posting in Australia, there was likewise no Anna, but I did meet with Aboriginal stolen children survivors, and had the privilege of being hosted by Aboriginal people in their community in the Northern Territory.

  Like Oscar, I was assigned to the Canadian mission to South Africa, but in my case as High Commissioner in the post-apartheid era. Like Oscar, I was brutally beaten, but by a common criminal and not by the security police, in an assault that nearly cost me my life and led the government to cut short my posting. Before I left, however, I was privileged to speak to President Mandela and other members of the African National Congress about life in the apartheid era. During a lunchtime meeting with Archbishop Desmond Tutu in Toronto some years later, the Nobel Peace Prize–winner described to me a visit, organized by the Canadian government, that he had made in the apartheid era to the Osnaburgh Indian Reserve (now called Mishkeegogaming First Nation) on Lake St. Joseph on the headwaters of the Albany River in northwestern Ontario. Words could not describe his distress, he told me, when he saw the condition of the people. They were worse, he said, than anything he had witnessed in South Africa in its darkest moments. I knew exactly what he meant since I had visited Mishkeegogaming First Nation many times and knew well the people, and I thus made it the setting for the final scene of the novel.

  Did you ever run into anti-Native sentiment in your years in the Foreign Service?

  Not at all. Like Oscar, I worked with strong, gifted sometimes idiosyncratic colleagues who would never have thought of discriminating against anyone on the basis of race, religion, or cultural background but expected everyone to carry out their fair share of the burden of work. Moreover, I was a private person and very few of my career colleagues in the Department knew my background.

  Then why did you portray Stuart Henderson, the Canadian ambassador to South Africa, as someone who supported apartheid?

  Canada’s ambassador to South Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s was not a career officer. His deputy at Pretoria, Gordon Brown, who would later go on to become an ambassador himself, described him in his memoirs as someone who “was convinced of the need for the blacks to live separately from the whites.” (Blazes Along a Diplomatic Trail, Trafford Publishing, Victoria, 2000.)

  Does the Manido of the Lake actually exist and what role does it play in the novel?

  The Manido of the Lake, although only appearing four times, occupies a central place in the plot. It is the incarnation in the form of a stone statue of the Creator who put Oscar on Mother Earth to do all manner of foolish things and make it laugh from time to time in a world dominated by the white man.

  The Manido exists to this day at the northern end of Idlewylde Island on Lake Muskoka, where it is known locally as Indian Head Rock. Native relatives and friends who came to our old home in the 1940s in Port Carling to share a meal of fish and wild meat and to spend the evening talking with my parents used to terrify me with their stories of the bearwalker, the Windigo, witches, and the most feared monster of them all, the seven-headed serpent with eyes the size of dinner plates that had been devouring unlucky Native fishermen on Lake Muskoka since time immemorial. Only the Manido of the Lake, they would declare in hushed tones, had the power to protect the fishermen from destruction and guarantee a good catch of fish. My grandfather would never think of travelling on Lake Muskoka without making an offering of tobacco and uttering a prayer to the Manido.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to first thank my wife, Marie-Jeanne, and my son Alain for reading and providing their unvarnished opinions on the manuscript.

  I owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Brian Osborne, Professor Emeritus of Geography, Queen’s University, and Dr. Graham Brown, Principal of St. Paul’s College, University of Waterloo, for their encouragement and helpful comments on structure.

  Ed Willer, a colleague in the Foreign Service, provided his comments, for which I am grateful, on the chapter dealing with South Africa. Ed served there during the apartheid era and was responsible for representing the Canadian embassy at funerals in Soweto and elsewhere of African National Congress militants killed by the South African security services.

  Lorenz Friedlaender and Ken Harley, likewise friends and colleagues from the old days in the Department, read the text and provided helpful factual suggestions. Ed, Lorenz, and Ken should not, of course, be held responsible for my portrayal of life in the Department in the post-war years.

  I am most grateful to Don Antoine for his vivid descriptions of the Canadian campaign against Germany in Italy in the fall and winter of 1943. Don was a sergeant of 48th Highlanders of Canada and was mentioned in despatches and wounded in the fighting.

  And finally, I thank Lieutenant-Colonel (retired) John Beswick, an officer of the Royal Canadian Dragoons during the war, for his patience in briefing me in depth on the fighting in Italy.

  Copyright ©James Bartleman, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  Editor: Allison Hirst

  Design: Jesse Hooper

  Epub Design: Carmen Giraudy

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Bartleman, James, 1939-

  The redemption of Oscar Wolf [electronic resource] / by James Bartleman.

  Electronic monograph issued in various formats.

  Also issued in print format.

  ISBN 978-1-4597-0983-6

  I. Title.

  PS8603.A783R43 2013 C813'.6 C2012-906547-1

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and Livres Canada Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  J. Kirk Howard, President

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