One Native Life

by Richard Wagamese

  Walking the dog in the early morning by the lake, washing the dishes right after supper, getting our morning coffee ready the night before, making the lunch my partner will eat at work each day: all of these things root me just like the more traditional rituals of prayer, smudging and sweat lodges.

  For part of my childhood Sunday nights were a ritual. It was 1965, and times were a little slower back then.

  I was living in my second foster home, with the Tacknyks, and those Sunday evenings were the first thing to give me a sense of family, togetherness and sharing. Everyone gathered in the living room. The lights were turned low. The telephone, if it rang, was never answered. I still recall the excitement as the old Philips TV in the corner sprang to life.

  It began with Supercar. The heroes were animated puppets riding in Supercar, a machine that could dive under water and fly through the air at jet speed. We watched it every week. Then, as the credits rolled, we arranged the TV trays that dinner would be served on. We did that quickly, because a big show was coming up next.

  It was Walt Disney. Every week Disney offered up amazing journeys with Spin and Marty, Flubber, Sammy the Way-Out Seal and the usual gang of Mickey, Minnie, Donald and Goofy. It was a charming program. Everyone, regardless of age, could sink themselves into it and disappear for an hour.

  Next came the Ed Sullivan Show. Once the dishes were cleared for washing up later, we sat and watched the entertainers presented each week. There were still vaudeville performers around then—tap dancers, magicians, ventriloquists and singers. They were show people, raised on the boards and taught to work a crowd, humble and generous in their art. The show was captivating. I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, too, along with Elvis, Liberace, Ethel Merman, Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop, and the great Edgar Bergen.

  But it was after that weekly spectacle that the night became truly magical, because at nine o’clock Bonanza came on. It was the highlight of the week for everyone. We rode the West with Ben and Hoss, Little Joe and Adam. As we covered the length and breadth of the Ponderosa Ranch each week, we could almost smell those pines, feel the sway of horses beneath us. The Cartwrights gave us adventure and romance and the feeling of family. We never missed it.

  We all had our favourite characters. Mine was Little Joe, with his beautiful paint horse. And we all had our favourite episodes, which we talked about and argued over. Mine was a hilarious story called “Hoss and the Leprechauns.” Every week we were lifted out of our lives and swept away.

  Later, alone in my bed, I would go back over all that I’d seen. I drifted off to sleep filled with images of hope, warmth, community, adventure and the generosity of spirit. I couldn’t wait for the replay of that ritual in seven days’ time. Those few hours in front of the television made me forget that I was a foster kid, a displaced person, filled with hurts I hadn’t found the words for yet.

  Television has changed now. The old innocence and humility are missing. There are no Ed Sullivans, no grand production numbers with dancers and orchestra, no chorales or entertainers who learned their chops in small vaudeville theatres, no Red Skeltons, Maurice Chevaliers, Carmen McRaes or Cyd Charisses. There’s certainly no one like the Cartwrights.

  When you gather with others for the sublime purpose of being together, the strength of that ritual binds you, shapes you, maybe even saves you. I learned that as a foster home kid, and rituals still hold that charm and power. We’re tribal people, the whole magnificent lot of us, and we shine brightest when we honour the rituals that join us.

  The Kiss

  . . .

  I FELL IN LOVE when I was seven.

  Her name was Wilhemina Draper, and everyone called her Billie. She was the most popular kid in our class. She had brownish-blonde hair cut in a bob and big blue eyes that sparkled when she laughed. She could outrun everyone, and she learned how to skin-the-cat on the monkey bars before any of the boys would even try it. She fished and even baited her own hook. She smiled at me in class one day, and that was all it took.

  I was the Indian kid from up the block. I was a foster kid, and that made me different. All the other kids in my class had real parents and real families, and they were part of real neighbourhoods like the families in the books we read in school. They had Dick and Jane and Bobbsey twins kinds of lives. My life was far from that. I existed on the fringes.

  Not that my foster family treated me badly. I don’t recall a harsh thing being said or done to me in that home. But northern Ontario in the early 1960s was hardly a comfortable place to be Indian. I wore the feeling of being different like clothing. I understood, even then, that familial love transforms you, makes you bigger somehow, elevates you. When I was seven, I craved that raising up.

  Billie Draper smiled at me, and I felt like I belonged, like I fit. That smile erased everything. Up until then, school was all about being the only Indian kid, about the teasing and name-calling and schoolboy fights that went with it. With that one smile, the clouds in the heavens parted.

  She lived at the bottom of a steep hill. From my house at the top of that hill, I could see her pedal her bike around the neighbourhood below. One day I pedalled my bike down that hill as fast as I could. When the pavement levelled out I slowed down some, and when I reached Billie’s house I faked a crash to the sidewalk. She saw me fall. I’d counted on that. When she bent over to check on me, I reached up and pulled her into the wettest, sloppiest kiss ever given. She screamed and ran back into her house. I was left dazed and happy on the sidewalk, staring up at a sky suddenly blue.

  The story of that kiss spread like wildfire. Every boy wanted to kiss Billie Draper, and I was the class hero for about a week.

  I was adopted out of the neighbourhood a year or so later, and I never saw Billie Draper again. But I never forgot that kiss or the smile that drove me to it. What I needed most back then was someone to tell me that I was okay, that I counted, that I belonged. I was in that foster home because my parents had been sent to residential school and never developed parenting skills. They couldn’t offer the nurturing and protection I needed. I was in that foster home because someone had fractured the bonds that tied me to tradition and culture and language and spirituality. I became one of the lost ones, one of the disappeared ones, vanished into the vortex of foster care and adoption.

  We talk a lot today about healing the wounds of residential schools. The government is paying out large sums of money to the survivors and setting up programs for them to discuss their pain and anguish. But there are other generations besides the ones that experienced the trauma first-hand. There are people like me, who had to endure a life of separation, of cultural displacement. We need to take care of those people, too.

  Somewhere out there, right now, is an Indian kid like I was, wandering around someone else’s Bobbsey-twin neighbourhood wondering why he’s there and who he is. Somewhere out there is an Indian kid looking for the smile that will make the clouds go away. He’s our responsibility, all of us.

  In Apache Territory

  . . .

  I SAW MY first movie in a theatre in 1964. Back then a movie cost a quarter, and for an extra fifteen cents you could get popcorn, a handful of jujubes and a pop. In Kenora, the mill town where I lived, the movie on Saturday afternoon was the only place to be. Every kid in town wanted to be there.

  My foster mother handed me the money wrapped in Scotch tape, so I wouldn’t lose it. It sat in my pocket like a molten lump. I fingered it all the way downtown, the edges of that tape already ragged and threatening to unfurl. There was the smell of sulphur and pulp in the air, and I knew that something magical was about to occur.

  The theatre was pandemonium. Little kids were yelling, throwing popcorn and wrestling in the aisles while older, more sophisticated kids were holding hands, nuzzling, waiting for the curtain to fall and the lights to dim so they could get deeper into their first romantic entanglement.

  I sat watching the jumble of action around me. There weren’t a lot of outings for me as a kid. There was
n’t much extra money for things like movies. So I drank up every ounce of that experience.

  When the curtain fell it silenced everyone. Every kid in that theatre settled down, awed by the power of the descending dark. When the screen lit up in a glorious sheen, I fell head over heels in love.

  Back then, afternoon matinees were double bills with a cartoon and a newsreel thrown in. That day I watched Bugs Bunny and laughed. I don’t recall any of the newsreel, but the first feature was Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear. Yogi, as the Brown Phantom, swung down from the trees on a rope to steal picnic baskets from the tourists at Jellystone. Cindy Bear got blamed for being the park menace and was shipped off to the zoo. Yogi and Boo Boo had to travel to St. Louis to rescue her, and it all ended happily after a wild dose of adventure.

  The second feature, Apache Territory, starred a cowboy actor named Rory Calhoun. In it, a wagon train was attacked by Apache Indians. There was heavy drama as night fell and the hardy pioneers were threatened by the evil savages. Everyone in that theatre sat hushed. You could feel the tension. When the denouement came, and the good guys in the white hats won the day and rode off boldly into the sunset, that was something to cheer about.

  I was transported by that movie, taken away from my mill-town life and dropped into a world of light and sound and colour so intense I never wanted to leave. It was as if a dream had been thrown up on beams of light. I’d walked into thrilling new territory.

  It didn’t matter to me then that there were racist overtones to the movie, that my people were belittled, made cartoons of. It didn’t matter to me that there were snickers and finger pointing when we kids tumbled out into the light of day. All that mattered to me was how I felt. My imagination was fired up and my insides quivered from the excitement of seeing life splayed out on a fifty-foot screen.

  Apache Territory was a standard western, a B movie with B-list actors, writers and directors. It had room only for tried-and-true characterizations, and the story played well to B-movie audiences. I didn’t know then how great a portion of the national demographic believed what those movies said.

  We have Indian producers and directors today. Native people are depicting their lives as they live them, and even Hollywood, when it takes the risk of presenting a movie about Indians, does that respectfully for the most part now. When our children see their people on the silver screen today, they see a more genuine image.

  In 1964 it was all about the dazzle. It was all about the magic of being entranced. They don’t have curtains at movie theatres any more. There are few double bills, no fifteen-cent snacks. I miss the old-fashioned thrill of it all, cartoon Indians or not.

  The Flag on the Mountain

  . . .

  SOMEONE HAS PUT a flag up on the mountain. It flaps and waves high above the lake, up where they helicopter-logged a few years back. Getting it up there must have taken gumption, and the scarlet and white, hard against the green, is a statement to that grit. Seeing that flag takes me back, as everything out on the land has a tendency to do.

  Victoria Day, 1965. I’d just been adopted and moved from northern Ontario to Bradford, a small town an hour’s drive from Toronto. By the time the holiday rolled around, I’d been in my new home about a month. I felt as though I’d been plunked down on Mars. There was nothing left of the world I had known for the first nine years of my life.

  Bradford was on the edge of the Holland Marsh. There, the land was flat, treeless, devoted to the reaping of vegetables. The water flowed through irrigation canals all brown and muddy. There was no bush, no pink granite outcroppings, no cliffs overlooking a lake, no open vistas. Life among the Martians felt restrictive and colourless. There was a gaping hole in me that I had once used the land to fill.

  In the school where they sent me, I was the only Indian kid. In fact, I was the only brown face. The Martians were pale, with names like McLaughlin, Reid, Carpenter and Wesley. Sitting in the tight, formal rows of Bradford Elementary School, I was weird, exotic and more than a little uncomfortable. In the class photo from that year, I stuck out in the sea of white faces like a fence post in a field of snow. It was lonely, but there was no one to tell.

  I didn’t know how to move in Bradford. It was a loopy feeling, like in a dream when every placing of your foot is weightless. The edges of my body had become blurred, and I couldn’t find a space to hold me. Even the language, the colloquial urban schoolboy rap, was new and hard on my ears.

  Then one day the teacher announced the upcoming Queen’s birthday, as we called it then. She went on to explain that Bradford would raise the new Canadian flag for the first time on the Friday before the holiday weekend. There would be a band, the mayor would speak, and a special ceremony would mark the raising of the brand-new Canadian symbol, which Prime Minister Pearson had pushed through Parliament several months earlier. The school wanted someone very special to raise the flag, the teacher said. The principal and the mayor had chosen me. She said my people represented the original face of Canada, and they wanted to honour that.

  But when the day came, I was nervous. There was going to be a news photographer at the ceremony, and my picture would be in the paper. I was dressed in new clothes, and my shoes were shined. My adopted parents instructed me severely in how to behave. Up in front of that big crowd, I sat in my chair barely able to listen to the speeches. Then someone called my name.

  The band struck up the first notes of O Canada. My hands grasped the lanyard. As the song began to swell, I hauled on that rope. The flag inched up the pole, then caught in the breeze, fluttered and began to wave. As I watched it gain the sky I did feel honoured. I was filled with a crazy sense of possibility, as if that flag could make anything happen.

  Right then, I believed that Canada was a wish, a breath waiting to be exhaled. I believed that the song was a blessing, the flag its standard. I believed, as I had been told by the teacher, that my people were special, that I was special and that the blessings of that song and that flag fell equally on my shoulders. The true north, strong and free.

  Since then I have learned that the national anthem can be a dirge at times, a wail, a cry in the night. I have learned that hidden in the thunder of the trumpets and the snap of the drums are common voices hollering to be heard. The flag is a symbol of the separation between red and white. It’s hugely ironic because of that.

  But I love this country. I love that flag. The majority of native people do. Every land claim, every barricade, every protest is less a harangue for rights and property than it is a beseeching for the promise offered in that flag, represented by it. Equality. A shared vision, a shared responsibility. A wish, a held breath waiting to be exhaled. The flag above the lake flaps in the breeze of this mountain morning, over everything, over everyone.

  The Way to Arcturus

  . . .

  WHEN IT GETS DARK, I stand outside our cabin and lean my head back to look at the stars. Some nights they seem so close you could swear you were suspended on a bed of them, all just beyond your fingertips.

  I’ve always been a stargazer. In the North where I spent the early part of my boyhood, the summer skies were clear. The northern lights often set the horizon ablaze in crackles and snaps of colour.

  I hadn’t heard my people’s legends of the Star People then. The world of foster homes was a white world, and I lived in the absence of legends. The only stories I had, school-book tales of dogs and families, never really rang true for me. A part of me craved the revelation of secrets, and the sky was deep with mystery. I loved sinking myself into it. I hadn’t read yet about light years or the rate of expansion of the universe or galactic clouds or even the Milky Way. Instead, I was transfixed by something that far exceeded the scope of my one small life. Magic existed in the holes between the stars. I could feel it.

  When I moved south after I was adopted, the sky was overpowered by the harsh city lights, and the stars seemed farther away. It was a curious feeling, being lonely for the sky. Of all the things I missed in that new souther
n world, the sky, the stars and space are what I remember missing most.

  There was a field down the street from where I lived in Bradford. It had been the pasture of an old sheep farm before the city encroached and drove the farmer and his family away. The field was marked with orange plastic flags on wooden stakes in preparation for the development to come. But after dark it was wide and open and perfect for looking at stars. I’d sneak out at night and go there to stand under that magnificent canopy. Even though their light was dimmer and there were far fewer than I was used to, the stars eased me some, lightened my burden.

  One night a man showed me how to find Arcturus. He was a fellow stargazer, a neighbour who lived down the street. Neither of us knew the other’s name, but we’d see each other at the field. Each of us would stand silently in that patch of open and look up. Sometimes he’d lie down on his back and put his hands behind his head, and it wasn’t long before I was doing the same. He’d trace the path of satellites across the sky with one finger, and I adopted the same trick.

  The night he showed me how to find Arcturus, the sky was as clear as I’d ever seen it there. The man stood a few feet away, his face pointed up at the sky, and asked me if I’d heard of it. When I said I hadn’t, he began to talk.

  Arcturus is called the Bear Watcher, he said, because it follows the Great Bear constellation around the poles. Arctis is Greek for bear, and it’s where the word “arctic” comes from. Arcturus is about thirty-seven light years away from us and the fourth brightest star in the sky. He told me all that while looking up and away from me. I felt the awe in his words.