For Joshua

by Richard Wagamese

  But the only answer I heard were those same familiar words in my head. “Because there’s something wrong with you. There’s something wrong that makes you unlovable, that makes no one want you, that makes them give you away to someone else. If there wasn’t something wrong with you they wouldn’t let you go.” I heard those words—and I believed them.

  Sitting in the quiet hills above Calgary, I couldn’t remember much about the train ride. What I did recall was an old black man who worked as a porter on that train. He was very kind and when my new parents explained to him that I had just been adopted and was leaving the north to go to a new home in southern Ontario, he looked at me with eyes that were wet and shiny. He nodded thoughtfully, then rubbed my shoulders and said, “Anytime you need anything, you just let me know. Okay?” Then he smiled at me, nodded at my new parents, and walked away. But every time I saw him on that trip he always had something for me—a candy, a small toy, a drink, a story. He made that trip less agonizing and as I sat in the gathering darkness years later, I realized that he had known what I was going through. Displaced people recognize displaced people, and that old black man knew exactly what I felt and did his best to make it easier for me. I was thankful for him and sad that I’d never learned his name.

  The home I went to was another non-Native home. We lived in a town called Bradford in the Holland Marsh area of Ontario. That area is famous for its production of vegetables and the land is flat and treeless, with irrigation canals and ditches criss-crossing the landscape. The water in those canals and ditches is brown. I had never seen flat land before. Flat land without trees, rocks, or cliffs and no trails to follow other than the canals of brown water. I felt like I’d landed on Mars.

  But as we pulled into the driveway of my “new home” my thoughts were not of the landscape but of myself. I figured that I’d better not let them know there was something wrong with me. I’d better not let them in on my secret, or I could be sent to a place even stranger than this. I decided in the back seat of that car to say whatever they wanted me to say, to do whatever they wanted me to do, go where they wanted me to go without question or fuss. That day, that moment, when I made that decision at nine years old, was when I lost myself, when I became willing to be whatever I thought the people around me needed me to be, in order that I wouldn’t get sent away again, so that I wouldn’t be alone. That was the day I surrendered my life to fear.

  My new name was Richard Gilkinson and I recall sitting in my new room trying to figure out how I was supposed to be this new person about whom I knew no more than this. How I was supposed to be anyone at all, as afraid as I was. I was in that home for seven years and I never found the answers.

  But I learned to hide quite well. I hid my feelings. I hid my hurts and pain and fear. I hid the shame I felt over being who I suddenly was—the only Indian kid around, the only adopted kid, the only one who didn’t know who his parents were. I hid the anger I felt over this. I hid my resentment, and most of all I hid my fear. My hiding games were clever and no one ever found me. But then, neither did I.

  The Gilkinsons tried very hard to make me feel at home. They did everything they knew how to help me feel like I was a part of things. But I had a belly full of fear. I couldn’t tell them how afraid I was to walk out the door every day and be the only brown person I saw. I didn’t know how to do that. I didn’t know how to make sense of that. I couldn’t tell them how afraid I was that there was something very wrong with me, of how I believed that if I were lovable, worthwhile, and good that my real family would have kept me. I couldn’t tell them how afraid I was that when they found out how defective and unworthy I was they would send me away, too. I couldn’t tell them about the deep shame I felt about not knowing anything about myself, my history, my culture, my people. I couldn’t tell them how angry I was over the constant teasing, name-calling, and putdowns I endured at school. I couldn’t tell them any of that because I didn’t know how. All I knew then was that if I were to tell them all of the things that I was feeling then they too would send me away.

  Hours had passed while I took account of this younger self. As I sat in my circle that night I made the first tobacco pouch. It was in gratitude for the sky, really. It was so clear and endless that it gave me a feeling of security. The sky could see everything. There was nothing on the face of the earth that was so small and insignificant that the sky could not see it and I was grateful for that. I was grateful because it meant that I was here, that I was a part of life, of the planet, regardless of how unimportant and lost I felt. Thinking back over my early years, I made another pouch to follow the first. The second one was for the spirit of a young boy—a lost, frightened little boy who only ever wanted to feel like he belonged somewhere. I tied that tobacco pouch for the strength that boy showed, for the courage to survive the changes, the strangeness, the displacement. As the moon rose higher over the treetops around me and the shadows grew deeper I whispered the only Ojibway word I knew at that time, the word for thank you. “Meegwetch,” I whispered to the universe and the spirit of that little boy. “Meegwetch. Meegwetch, meegwetch.”

  There’s a photograph I recall. It’s the first day of school and I am a month away from being ten. There’s that curious amber light of a sunny September morning and I’m standing outside the house with my two adopted brothers on our way to the first day of school. We’re in Orangeville, Ontario. At a cursory glance you would see three healthy shining faces. Brian, the oldest, tall, red hair, freckles. Bryce, the second oldest, a little plump, freckles, wavy brown hair. And me. The new one. Short, severe brush cut, thick glasses, oversized hand-me-down jacket, green slacks, oxford shoes. All of us smiling. Three brothers on their way to school—this is what you see at first glance.

  But when you look closer there’s more. The two white faces seem amiable, eager, accustomed to this process. But the brown one’s smile is pinched, forced, ordered. Only in the eyes can you see the anxiety there. This will be my second new school in the four months since my adoption and I’m terrified all over again. I remember that morning. I walked all the way to that school as slowly as I could. I wanted to run away. I wanted to go anywhere but into that classroom where I knew twenty or more sources of agony were waiting. The photograph reveals that anxiety if you look deeply enough. I always saw it there whenever I looked at it.

  The other thing you see on a more focused inspection is the sharp outline of brown on white. I was the attachment, the afterthought, a grafted limb to the family tree. That was always visible. The only negligence my adopted parents were guilty of was ignorance of the fact that I was created to be, and would always be, an Ojibway. They could dress me in all the right white clothes, send me to white schools for a white education, and try to inculcate the right white values in me at home, but I was always going to be what I was created to be: Ojibway. No amount of discipline, punishment, religion, lecturing, or preaching was ever going to make me anything other than what I was created to be. They were ignorant of that. They believed that doing their best for me, providing for me, keeping me safe, teaching me to live the way they lived would recreate me in their image. But I was never meant to be white. I was meant to be Indian and I deserved to know who I was. But I was never given that. I was never given the opportunity to learn anything about my tribe, culture, history, language, philosophy, or even a craft or skill. I was given nothing to help me learn to live as the person I was created to be.

  That I was different was obvious enough to my classmates. Heading into my new school that morning I knew what to expect. The glances, the whispers, the outright finger-pointing, and the war whoops from the omnipresent class clown. Then, later, the teasing in the schoolyard, the taunts, the cruel humour of children. Later still, the fistfight with whomever was chosen to put me in my place. And later still, alone in my bed, the silent, bitter tears and the words again in my head—“See, you don’t belong here. You’re not good enough for them. You’re unlovable, unworthy, and unwanted. If they wanted you they wou
ldn’t treat you like this. If there weren’t something wrong with you they’d like you.”

  That’s what I always saw in that photograph. I never told anyone how I felt. I didn’t know that I could. I just suffered alone until alone began to feel more natural than any other way of being.

  By the time I was a teenager I was miserable. We’d moved three times. We’d lived in Bradford for three months before leaving for Orangeville. We stayed there a year, then moved to a farmhouse between Mildmay and Walkerton in Bruce County, where we stayed three years before moving finally to St. Catharines, Ontario. In every new town I went through the same agony of trying to feel like I belonged—in school, in church, in the neighbourhood. I was always the only Indian kid and I discovered very quickly that racism and ignorance has the same vocabulary no matter where you go. Name-calling, teasing, fighting, and constant putdowns were a part of my every day and I endured it all alone. I never told the Gilkinsons about any of it or how I felt in the face of it all.

  I experimented. I tried leading the class in grades. I tried being the best at sports, being the funniest, the most outrageous, the most unpredictable. I tried everything I could think of to displace the fear and inadequacy I carried in my belly. Nothing worked. The more roles I played the more confused I got about who I was supposed to be, and the more confused I became the harder I tried and the more I failed. The fear of being rejected, abandoned, and isolated was stronger than anything.

  By the time we arrived in St. Catharines I was thirteen. The moves left me feeling very insecure, as if my life could be disrupted at any time and I would wind up anywhere, seemingly on a whim. I was afraid to try to make friends because it always felt so terrible to have to move again and leave them behind. It felt like there was always another train station and another waving, weeping person letting them take me away again.

  It was 1969. The last tumultuous vestiges of the sixties were still very prevalent in the teen culture of Dalewood Senior Elementary School where I entered Grade 8. To be cool was paramount, as I suppose it still is. Unfortunately for me there were a few things blocking my ability to achieve coolness. First, the Gilkinsons were a very frugal family. Clothes were passed down from my two adopted brothers and in an era when jeans and T-shirts were in vogue, I showed up for school in lime green dress pants, a paisley rayon shirt, and oxford shoes. My hair was still in a brush cut and the glasses I wore were what my classmates referred to as “very Jerry”—meaning the Jerry Lewis character in The Nutty Professor. I was ridiculed from the moment I stepped into the parking lot that first day.

  Again, I was the only Indian. As the laughter followed me down the hallway to my home room I decided to do anything I could to stop the laughter. I smoked, swore, acted out in class, and lied about who I was. I chose to be the class clown and with every laugh I got I felt more like I was accepted. I began to believe that all I needed to do was get a reaction from people, that getting attention was the same as getting recognition. It wasn’t. My grades fell. I went from As to Ds in one term and the resulting outcry at home was loud and painful.

  But most hurtful of all was Lori. I guess all of us remember our first crush. For me it was Lori. She was a hippie, or at least as close to a hippie as her mother allowed her to be. She had long, curly brown hair that she wore under a variety of hats and she favoured the miniskirts that were popular at the time. She was beautiful—big, blue eyes, long lashes, and a smile that made her seem to radiate. When she invited me to a couple’s skate at the roller rink one Saturday afternoon I almost fell over. All of the guys were after her. When we glided out onto the floor that afternoon I felt a curious mixture of being superior to every guy there and of being inferior to the beautiful and popular girl with whom I was holding hands. I became infatuated very quickly.

  Lori was very “into” Indians. She had read many books about Indian people, drawn many pictures, seen many movies and television shows about them and she really wanted to “go with” a Native guy. I was the only Native person she’d ever met and she was determined to be with me. She told me all about this as I walked her home after skating that afternoon. When she asked me questions about my background and heritage I did the only thing I knew how to do: I lied.

  Because I hadn’t been given any exposure to my tribal identity at home, I got all my Indian information from the same place everyone else around me got theirs. I watched Westerns on television, read comic books, and went to the movies. From these I gleaned that Indians were bloodthirsty savages with a religion that was close to voodoo. We all rode horses, wore war paint, and must have been afraid of the dark because wagon trains never got attacked during the night. We were untamed, unruly, and needed the help of white people to survive. That was the extent of my cultural knowledge.

  By the time I got to school on Monday the word was already out. Guys who’d never bothered talking to me before were suddenly interested in me. Girls who’d laughed and pointed at me before began looking at me out of curiosity. I felt huge. I felt like I mattered. But no one knew that I had no clue at all about my tribe, my history, language, culture, and ritual. No one knew how afraid I was that, when Lori found out that I wasn’t really an Indian, she would drop me and I would be back to being “very Jerry” in no time at all. So I lied even bigger lies. I invented a language I called Ojibway—a guttural, grunting kind of talk with a lot of extraneous hand motions and gestures. I took great pains to write this new language down and commit it to memory. I gave Lori a name in that fictitious language. I told her about ceremonies I’d been to—the Sun Dance, the Rain Dance, the Ghost Dance. I told her about my grandfather the medicine man and the shamans from other tribes who had given me strong medicine so that I could survive in the city. I talked about life on a reservation and stories about life on the land. The more I lied the more she clung to me, and the more interest she showed the more esteem I garnered at school. With the respect came a hunger for more, and the bigger and more fantastic the lies became.

  I can almost laugh when I recall that performance. Almost. As I gazed upwards at the stars that night in the foothills I remembered the collapse. Lori had kept on reading about Native life while we were together and she began to detect wide variations between what I was telling her and what the books were saying and showing. I was showing her how to do a war dance and explaining the meaning of war drums to her when she’d finally had enough.

  “There’s no war drum. There’s just a drum and it’s used for many things—not just war. If you were really Indian you’d know that. But you’re no Indian,” I recall her saying. “You’re nothing but a phoney.”

  She dropped me. Word spread just as quickly this time and I remember the shame and embarrassment I felt walking down the hallway to jeers and laughter. “Big Chief Full-of-Shit” was scrawled across my locker and I was alone again. All of the life I’d felt flowing through me when I was with Lori was gone and in its place was bitterness, shame, and an anger I’d never felt before. I was angry that no one, neither the Tacknyks nor the Gilkinsons, had allowed me to learn anything about who I was. They’d never allowed me to learn about my tribe, my history or culture. I knew then, in the loss of Lori, that I was no one, that all the play-acting I did was just that, that I was a non-entity because I didn’t know who I was. I heard the same familiar words in my head one more time. “There’s something wrong with you. If you were lovable, worthy, wanted, adequate, she’d have kept you. But you’re not, she found out, and now you’re alone.”

  Not much changed after that. I lied even more at home, school, and church, and when I was found out in those lies I was punished, banished, or rejected outright. With each reaction I became more determined to be seen, known, recognized. I skipped classes and hung out in pool halls. And I ran away from home. I ran away because even then I thought that geography was a cure. The first time I fled it was just for one night, which I spent huddled in the cab of a parked truck outside of Vineland, Ontario. It was miserable, cramped, and cold, and I actually looked forwa
rd to going back to my warm bed.

  The second time I ran away, no one even knew. The Gilkinsons were away for the weekend and as soon as they were gone I took off for Toronto. I was there for two days, hanging out on the Yonge Street strip and sleeping on the couch of someone’s “pad.” I mooched enough to get a bus ticket back home, and was there clean and waiting when my parents arrived.

  When I was fifteen I had my longest run yet. I’d been putting money in the bank from a paper route I had, and I had saved more than three hundred dollars when I took off in February. I caught a bus to Miami Beach, where I found myself in the company of three old hippies who smoked dope and hung out on the beach. I loved that. There was a laid-back feeling to that lifestyle and I allowed myself to unwind from all the stress I’d created at home. For a while I worked as a busboy in a cafeteria but was let go when I couldn’t provide a U.S. Social Security Number. The money I earned was squandered on pot for my friends, movies, and lunches on the beach. I thought I would never leave. But when my new-found friends discovered I was only fifteen and a runaway, they contacted the Gilkinsons and I was flown home.

  Life was horrible after that. During the weeks I’d been gone I’d got a big taste of what the world was like. I’d got a sense of the freedom that was out there, and this knowledge made me eager to escape. I couldn’t tell anyone about the putdowns I endured at high school. The words were suddenly harsher, more explicitly threatening. In the early 1970s, rock and roll was king and the youth was swaying to the message of teen rebellion in the music. Everyone wanted to be considered aloof, distant, rebellious. I was far from cool and because I was different I was singled out for abuse. I so desperately wanted the abuse to stop, for the rejection to end. With every rejection from girls, every sudden silence in the hallway when I passed, every guffaw behind my back, I became more desperate for acceptance. I remember thinking that if being a rebel is what got someone recognized and appreciated, then I would be a rebel. My experience in Miami Beach had taught me a lot about rebellion.