Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada's Past

by Tantoo Cardinal

  Water-like, limpid, calm as silence, the chords for “Hearts and Flowers” begin their journey. Placed with care, every note of them, on the keyboard by Daniel Daylight, they float, float like mist. The bass sneaks in, the melody begins. Playing octaves, Jenny Dean’s hands begin at the two Cs above middle C, arc up to the G in a curve smooth and graceful, then waft back down to the F, move on down to the E, and thence to the D, skip down to the B and thus swerve back, up to the C whence they had started. The melody pauses, Daniel Daylight’s series of major chords billow out to fill the silence, Jenny Dean’s elegant melody resumes its journey. In love with the god sound, Daniel Daylight sends his/her* waves, as prayer from the depths of his heart, the depths of his being, right across the vast auditorium, right through the flesh and bone and blood of some three hundred people, through the walls of the room, beyond them, north across the Moostoos River, through Waskeechoos, north to the Watson Lake Indian Residential School and thus through the lives of the two hundred Indian children who live there, then northward and northward and northward until the sound waves wash up on the shores, and the islands, of vast Minstik Lake. And there, deep inside the blood of Daniel Daylight, where lives Minstik Lake and all her people, Daniel Daylight sees his parents, Cheechup Daylight and his wife, Adelaide, walking up the hill to the little voting booth at the little wooden church that overlooks the northern extremity of beautiful, extraordinary Minstik Lake with its ten thousand islands. And Daniel Daylight, with the magic that he weaves like a tiny little master, wills his parents to walk right past Father Roy in his great black cassock and into the booth with their worn yellow pencils. And there they vote. Frozen into place by the prayer of Daniel Daylight and his “flower,” Jenny Dean, Father Roy can do nothing, least of all stop Cheechup Daylight and his wife, Adelaide, from becoming human.

  Receiving, on stage, his trophy beside Jenny Dean from a human man in black suit, shirt, and tie—Mayor Bill Hicks of Prince William, has explained Mr. Tipper—Daniel Daylight beams at the crowd that fills, for the most part, the Kiwanis Auditorium in downtown Prince William, Manitoba. Both sides are standing, the Indian side with its two dozen people, the white side with its 250. And they are clapping. And clapping and clapping. Some of them, in fact, are crying, white and Indian, human and … well, they don’t look non-human any more, not from where stands exulting—and weeping—the Cree Indian, human pianist Daniel Daylight.

  Daniel Daylight sits inside Mr. Tipper’s travelling car. It is cold—not cold, though, like outside, of this fact Daniel Daylight is quite certain. He looks out through the window on his right and, as always, sees white forest rushing by; maybe rabbits will bound past on that snowbank in the trees, he sits thinking. Snow falling gently, it looks, to Daniel Daylight, like he is being hurtled through the heart of a giant snowflake. In his black-trousered lap, meanwhile, rests his trophy, a ten-inch-tall golden angel with wings outspread and arms wide open, beaming up at her winner through the glow of the travelling car’s dashboard lights. On the radio, the music has stopped and people living in the east of the country, explains Mr. Tipper, are discussing a matter that takes Daniel Daylight completely by surprise: the Indian people of Canada, it seems, were given, that day, the 31st of March, 1960, the right to vote in federal elections, in their own country.

  “You see?” Daniel Daylight says to Mr. Tipper, his English, and his confidence, having grown quite nicely in just two months. “We are human. I knew it. And you know why I knew it, Mr. Tipper?”

  “Why, Daniel Daylight?”

  “Because I played it.”

  *Like all North American Aboriginal languages (that I know of anyway, and there are a lot, fifty-two in Canada alone!), the Cree language has no gender. According to its structure, therefore, we are all, in a sense, he/shes, as is all of nature (trees, vegetation, even rocks), as is God, one would think. That is why I, for one, have so much trouble just thinking in the English language—because it is a language that is, first and foremost, “motored,” as it were, by a theology/mythology that is “monotheistic” in structure, a structure where there is only one God and that god is male and male only. Other world systems are either “polytheistic” or “pantheistic” in structure, having, for instance (now or in the past, as in ancient Greece), room for gods who are female or even male/female, systems where all of nature, including sound, just for instance, simply “bristles,” as it were, with divinity.

  LEE MARACLE

  Goodbye, Snauq

  IMAGE CREDIT: CITY OF VANCOUVER ARCHIVES, IN P35

  CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

  BEFORE 1800, “Downriver Halkomelem”–speaking peoples, my ancestors, inhabited the city of Vancouver. By 1812, the Halkomelem had endured three epidemics caught as a result of the east-west and north-south Indigenous trade routes. At that time, the Halkomelem were part of a group of five friendly tribes (according to court records in the case of Mathias vs. the Queen). Following the epidemics the Tsleil Watuth or Downriver Halkomelem were reduced to forty-one souls and invited the Squamish to occupy the Burrard Inlet. They did so. One group led by Khahtsahlanogh, from Lil’ wat, occupied what is now False Creek. False Creek or Snauq (meaning sandbar), known to all the neighbouring friendly tribes as the “supermarket of the nation,” became a reserve some fifty years after white settlement began. It was sold between 1913 and 1916, and Khahtsahlano, the son of Khahtsahlanogh, and his remaining members were forced to move. This sale was declared illegal in a court case at the turn of the millennium. Although the Tsleil Watuth and the Musqueam originally shared the territory, the courts ruled that the Squamish, because they were the only ones to permanently occupy the village, “owned” it. I am related to Khahtsahlano and the Tsleil Watuth people, and I had always wanted to write the story of Khahtsahlano. He was still alive when I was a child and was much respected by the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil Watuth people as one of the founders of the Allied Tribes of B.C., a group that sought redress for the illegal land grabs by British Columbia in the decades following Confederation. There is still an unresolved ongoing court case involving the Canadian Pacific Railway station at Terminal Avenue and Main Street in False Creek and the Squamish Band.

  Researching this story has been both painful and enlightening. For one thing, the formerly friendly tribes that once shared the territory are not quite so friendly with one another today. The Tsleil Watuth and the Musqueam sued the Squamish Band Council, all three claiming ownership of Snauq, and the Tsleil Watuth and the Musqueam lost. The case has convinced me that Canada must face its history through the eyes of those who have been excluded and disadvantaged as a result of it. Severely weakened by epidemic after epidemic and legally excluded from land purchases in the new nation of Canada, the First Nations people have had to make desperate and unfair decisions to assure their survival. The forfeiture of the right to Snauq is, hopefully, the last desperate measure we will need to take before we can be assured of our survival in Canada.

  Goodbye, Snauq

  Raven has never left this place, but sometimes it feels like she has been negligent, maybe even a little dense. Raven shaped us; we are built for transformation. Our stories prepare us for it. Find freedom in the context you inherit—every context is different: discover consequences and change from within, that is the challenge. Still, there is horror in having had change foisted upon you from outside. Raven did not prepare us for the past 150 years. She must have fallen asleep some time around the first smallpox epidemic, when the Tsleil Watuth Nation nearly perished, and I am not sure she ever woke up.

  The halls of this institution are empty. The bright white fluorescent bulbs that dot the ceiling are hidden behind great long light fixtures dimming its length. Not unlike the dimness of a longhouse, but it doesn’t feel the same. The dimness of the hallway isn’t brightened by a fire in the centre nor warmed by the smell of cedar all around you. There are no electric lights in the longhouse, and so the dimness is natural. The presence of lights coupled with dimness makes the place seem eerie. I t
rudge down the dim hallway; my small hands clutch a bright white envelope. Generally, letters from “the Queen in right of Canada” are threateningly ensconced in brown envelopes, but this is from a new government—my own government, the Squamish First Nation government. Its colour is an irony. I received it yesterday, broke into a sweat and a bottle of white wine within five minutes of its receipt. It didn’t help. I already knew the contents—even before Canada Post managed to deliver it; Canadian mail is notoriously slow. The television and radio stations were so full of the news that there was no doubt in my mind that this was my government’s official letter informing me that “a deal had been brokered.” The Squamish Nation had won the Snauq lawsuit and surrendered any further claim for a fee. The numbers are staggering: $92 million. That is more than triple our total GNP, wages and businesses combined.

  As I lay in my wine-soaked state, I thought about the future of the Squamish Nation: development dollars, cultural dollars, maybe even language dollars, healing dollars. I had no right to feel this depressed, to want to be this intoxicated, to want to remove myself from this decision, this moment, or this world. I had no right to want to curse the century in which I was born, the political times in which I live, and certainly I had no right to hate the decision makers, my elected officials, for having brokered the deal. In fact, until we vote on it, until we ratify it, it is a deal only in theory. While the wine sloshed its way through the veins in my body to the blood in my brain, pictures of Snauq rolled about. Snauq is now called False Creek. When the Squamish moved there to be closer to the colonial centre, the water was deeper and stretched from the sea to what is now Clark Drive in the east; it covered the current streets from Second Avenue in the south to just below Dunsmuir in the north. There was a sandbar in the middle of it, hence the name Snauq.

  I lay on my couch, Russell Wallaces CD Tso’kam blaring in the background—Christ, our songs are sad, even the happy ones. Tears rolled down my face. I joined the ranks of ancestors I was trying not to think about. Wine-soaked and howling out old Hank Williams crying songs, laughing in between, tears sloshing across the laughter lines. The ‘50s. My Ta’ah intervened. Eyes narrowed, she ended the party, cleared out the house, sending all those who had had a little too much to drink home. She confiscated keys from those who were drunk, making sure only the sober drove the block to the reserve. “None of my children are going to get pinched and end up in hoosegow.”

  My brain, addled with the memory, pulled up another drunken soirée, maybe the first one. A group of men gathered around a whisky keg, their children raped by settlers: they drank until they perished. It was our first run at suicide, and I wondered what inspired their descendants to want to participate in the new society in any way, shape, or form. “Find freedom in the context you inherit.” From the shadows Khahtsahlano emerged, eyes dead blind and yet still twinkling, calling out, “Sweetheart, they were so hungry, so thirsty that they drank up almost the whole of Snauq with their dredging machines. They built mills at Yaletown and piled up garbage at the edges of our old supermarket—Snauq. False Creek was so dirty that eventually even the white mans became concerned.” I have seen archival pictures of it. They dumped barrels of toxic chemical waste from sawmills, food waste from restaurants, taverns, and tea houses; thousands of metric tons of human sewage joined the other waste daily.

  I was drunk. Drunk enough to apologize for my nation, so much good can come of this … So why the need for wine to stem the rage?

  “The magic of the white man is that he can change everything, everywhere. He even changed the food we eat.” Khahtsahlano faced False Creek from the edge of Burrard Inlet, holding his white cane delicately in his hand as he spoke to me. The inlet was almost a mile across at that time, but the dredging and draining of the water shrank it. Even after he died in 1967, the dredging and altering of our homeland was not over. The shoreline is gone; in its place are industries squatting where the sea once was. Lonsdale quay juts out into the tide and elsewhere cemented and land-filled structures occupy the inlet. The sea asparagus that grew in the sand along the shore is gone. There is no more of the camas we once ate. All the berries, medicines, and wild foods are gone. “The womans took care of the food,” he said. And now we go to schools like this one and then go to work in other schools, businesses, in band offices or anyplace that we can, so we can purchase food in modern supermarkets. Khahtsahlano was about to say something else. “Go away,” I hollered at his picture, and suddenly I was sober.

  Snauq is in Musqueam territory, it occurred to me, just across the inlet from Tsleil Watuth, but the Squamish were the only ones to occupy it year-round—some say as early as 1821, others 1824, still others peg the date as somewhere around the 1850s. Before that it was a common garden shared by all the friendly tribes in the area. The fish swam there, taking a breather from their ocean playgrounds, ducks gathered, women cultivated camas fields and berries abounded. On the sandbar, Musqueam, Tsleil Watuth, and Squamish women tilled the oyster and clam beds to encourage reproduction. Wild cabbage, mushrooms, and other plants were tilled and hoed as well. Summer after summer the nations gathered to harvest, probably to plan marriages, play a few rounds of that old gambling game lahal.

  Not long after the first smallpox epidemic all but decimated the Tsleil Watuth people, the Squamish people came down from their river homes where the snow fell deep all winter to establish a permanent home at False Creek. Chief George—Chipkaym—built the big longhouse. Khahtsalanogh was a young man then. His son, Khahtsahlano, was born there. Khahtsahlano grew up and married Swanamia there. Their children were born there.

  “Only three duffles’ worth,” the skipper of the barge was shouting at the villagers. Swanamia did her best to choke back the tears, fingering each garment, weighing its value, remembering the use of each, and choosing which one to bring and which to leave. Each spoon, handles lovingly carved by Khahtsahlano, each bowl, basket, and bent box had to be evaluated for size and affection. Each one required a decision. Her mind watched her husbands hand sharpening his adze, carving the tops of each piece of cutlery, every bowl and box. She remembered gathering cedar roots, pounding them for hours and weaving each basket. Then she decided to fill as many baskets as the duffles could hold and leave the rest.

  Swanamia faced Burrard Inlet—she could not bear to look back. Her son winced. Khahtsahlano sat straight up. Several of the women suppressed a gasp as they looked back to see that Snauq’s longhouses were on fire. The men who set the fires were cheering. Plumes of smoke affirmed that the settlers who kept coming in droves had crowded the Squamish out. This is an immigrant country. Over the next ten days the men stumbled about the Squamish reserve on the north shore, building homes and suppressing a terrible urge to return to Snauq to see the charred remains. Swanamia watched as the men in her house fought for an acceptable response. Some private part of her knew they wanted to grieve, but there is no ceremony to grieve the loss of a village. She had no reference post for this new world where the interests of the immigrants took precedence over the interests of Indigenous residents. She had no way to understand that the new people’s right to declare us non-citizens unless we disenfranchised our right to be Squamish was inviolable. The burning of Snauq touched off a history of disentitlement and prohibition that was incomprehensible and impossible for Swanamia to manage.

  We tried, though. From Snauq to Whidbey Island and Vancouver Island, from Port Angeles to Seattle, the Squamish along with the Lummi of Washington State operated a ferry system until the Black Ball ferry lines bought it out in the 1930s.

  Khahtsahlano’s head cocked to one side and he gave his wife a look that said, “No problem, we will think of something,” as the barge carried them out to sea. We were reserved and declared immigrants, children in the eyes of the law, wards of the government to be treated the same as the infirm or the insane. Khahtsahlano determined to fight this insult. It consumed his life. We could not gain citizenship or manage our own affairs unless we relinquished who we were: Squ
amish, Tsleil Watuth, Musqueam, Cree, or whatever nation we came from. Some of us did disenfranchise. But most of us stayed, stubbornly clinging to our original identity, fighting to participate in the new social order as Squamish.

  Khahtsahlano struggled to find ways for us to participate. In 1905, he and a group of stalwart men marched all over the province of British Columbia to create the first modern organization of Aboriginal people. The Allied Tribes mastered colonial law despite prohibition and land rights to secure and protect their position in this country. He familiarized himself with the colonial relations that Britain had with other countries. He was a serious rememberer who paid attention to the oracy of his past, the changing present, and the possibility of a future story. He stands there in this old photo just a little bent, his eyes exhibiting an endless sadness, handsomely dressed in the finest clothes Swanamia had made for him. A deep hope lingers underneath the sadness, softening the melancholy. In the photograph marking their departure, his son stands in front of him, straight-backed, shoulders squared with that little frown of sweet trepidation on his face, the same frown my sister wears when she is afraid and trying to find her courage. Khahtsahlano and his son faced the future with the same grim determination that the Squamish Nation Band Council now deploys.