One Native Life

by Richard Wagamese

  He told me to look at the Big Dipper, find the star at the end of the handle, then hold my hand out in front of my face, bend the three middle fingers in and put my little finger on that star. Where my thumb sat was Arcturus.

  When I did it I smiled. For the first time the stars seemed reachable. All through the years of my boyhood, whenever I felt particularly lonely I would hold out my arm, fold my fingers, find Arcturus and feel comforted.

  What the nameless man gave me that night was wonder. There were secrets everywhere, and I could reveal them for myself if I had the desire to search. I did. I wondered. Soon I was reading everything I could about the universe. I learned about planets and nebulae, quarks and quasars, red giants, blue dwarfs and black holes, and I encountered Einstein’s assertion that “my sense of God is my sense of wonder at the universe.” Years later, when I sat in traditional circles and heard the elders and the storytellers talk about the sky and its mysteries, these weren’t foreign ideas.

  We all need someone to offer us wonder. We all need someone to share the Great Mystery of the universe, to allow us to see into it even a fraction. Then, when we’ve discovered it for ourselves, we need to offer it to others. That’s how the world opens up for us. It’s how we learn to see possibility in a universe of change. Finding Arcturus is a simple thing to do. I still do it, and every time it’s like that first time. Because, well, how often do you get to say you just discovered a star?

  Upside Down and Backwards

  . . .

  I DO MY WRITING in the dimness of morning. Outside, the world is a shape-shifter. Light eases things back into definition. Their boundaries are called from shadow, beginning to hold again, and the land shrugs itself into wakefulness, purple moving upwards into pearl grey.

  It’s good to be up and working at this time. I can feel the power of life around me, and as the letters form on the screen, race each other to the sudden halt of punctuation, I understand where the need to write comes from. It comes from this first light breaking over everything, altering things, arranging them, setting things down into patterns again and tucking shadow back into folds behind the trees. It comes from the need for communion, for joining with that Great Mystery, that force, that energy.

  I have always wanted to write. There isn’t a time I can recall when I didn’t carry the desire to frame things, order things upon a page, sort them out, make sense of them. But learning to write was a challenge, an ordeal.

  It was a different world in the early 1960s, harder maybe, colder, and the idea of Indians was set like concrete, particularly in the parochial, working-class confines of a northern Ontario sawmill town two hundred miles from nowhere.

  The school sat between the railroad tracks and the pipeline in a hollow between hills above the mill. We kids sat with the thick sulphur smell coming through the windows and the spume of the stacks on the horizon above the trees. In the classroom I was ignored, put near the back and never called upon for anything.

  They said I was slow, a difficult learner, far too quiet for a kid and lethargic. They said I hadn’t much hope for a future, and after they had held me back a year they just let me be. But I wanted to learn. I was hungry for it. I went to school every day eager and excited about the things we were supposed to learn.

  But I couldn’t see very well. No one had spent enough time with me to discover that. I was slow to pick things up because I couldn’t see the board. Even down at the front of the room, where they put me sometimes so they could keep a better eye on me, I could never discern the writing on the blackboard. Everything I learned I learned by listening hard to what the teacher said and memorizing it.

  When I was adopted, I was sent to my first big school. There were hundreds of kids enrolled in that school in Bradford, and it seemed as if I walked through waves of them on my way there that first day. Going through those big glass doors was terrifying.

  The Grade Three teacher wanted to introduce me to the class, so she asked me to write my name on the blackboard for the other kids to read. I went to the board, leaned close to it, squinted and began to write. I heard snickers at the first letter and open laughter when I’d finished.

  I’d written my name upside down and backwards. To the rest of my classmates it was strange and hilarious, but it was how I’d learned, and I felt the weight of their laughter like stones. Walking back to my seat that day I felt ashamed, stupid and terribly alone.

  But I had a teacher who cared. She walked me down to the nurse’s station herself and waited while I got my eyes tested. Astigmatism, the nurse told her. Terrible astigmatism. Then the teacher listened closely as I explained why my writing was wrongly shaped.

  I had taught myself to write by squinting back over my shoulder. When we were taught to write in script, I wasn’t given any attention, wasn’t offered any help in forming the letters. So I watched the kid behind me and I mimicked what I saw. What I saw was upside down and backwards, and that was how I had taught myself to write. I could spell everything correctly, but it was skewed.

  I got glasses very shortly after that, and from then on things were different. Once I could see what was written on the board, my ability to learn accelerated and I graduated from Grade Three with straight As. Even in penmanship.

  For that teacher I wasn’t an Indian. I was a kid in need. So she took the time to show me how to write properly. Every day, before and after school, she and I sat at a desk and worked through the primary writing books. I shaped letters time after time after time, until I gradually unlearned the awkward process I’d taught myself. Unlearning something is a lot harder than learning it. I struggled to break down my method, and at times it seemed I would never get it right. But I persisted with the help and encouragement of that teacher.

  I write on a keyboard these days. But there isn’t a time when I set pen to paper that I don’t remember learning how to write and what it took to get me there. I still shape my Gs and Ds wrong, though. I still write them back to front.

  Sometimes life turns us upside down and backwards. It’s caring that gets us back on our feet again and pointed in the right direction.

  Bringing in the Sheaves

  . . .

  I LEARNED TO drive when I was ten, on an old grey Allis-Chalmers tractor. My job was to pull the wagon while the men of my adopted family forked sheaves of wheat at threshing time. I had to drive carefully, so that the men on the top of the load were safe.

  Threshing time was big. Hereditary farms like my adopted grandfather’s still flourished in Huron County back then, and there was a strong sense of community along the dusty concession roads. Neighbours had been neighbours for generations, and folks looked out for each other. Help was always needed for one thing or another and, in those times, help was always there.

  Bringing in the crop was an event. People came from all along the line to pitch in. It gave the work the feel of importance, and I was proud to be part of it. The only thing I could do at my age was drive, and I took to it quickly. My driving had to be smooth and steady. When I turned I made sure I did it evenly, conscious of both the load and the men atop it. When the wagon was full I drove up the lane to the barn, where the threshing machine waited. I could hear the men chatting and laughing on the wagon behind me.

  When we stopped for lunch there was a virtual feast laid out for us. The women and girls had worked in the kitchen all the time we were in the fields. There was roast beef and mashed potatoes and four kinds of pie and ice cream for dessert. The talk was lively and quick, with lots of jokes and teasing. I watched it all with a kind of awe.

  As a foster kid I had rarely felt like a real part of family things. At celebrations I was ignored for the most part. There was always a sharp sense of difference, of separation, and I learned to see things from the sidelines. Being included felt wonderful to me, and I revelled in it. Those meals felt like a passageway into a whole new world. But what happened after those lunches is what sticks with me most today.

  The men gathered on the veranda.
They sat in chairs, slumped on the railings or lazed on the stairs. They smoked, drank a beer or two, talked and laughed. It was as if the work had created a different kind of space for them, filled them with a light that you could cup in your hands, relax into the warmth of the sun on your back. I felt manly in that space, allowed entry by virtue of my labour.

  I was a boy of ten, working for the first time, and in the loose togetherness of those people I got a sense of what it took to accomplish things. These were farmer folk, and threshing was something they took seriously. It wasn’t just work to them. It was purpose, a matter-of-fact need, and they just got down to it.

  You could tell the way they felt about the land. It was in their easy talk and the way they squinted earnestly at the fields, maybe rubbed a head of wheat in their palms, then sniffed deeply with their eyes closed. The land defined them, gave them substance, gave them breath.

  Years later, working with my people, I’d see that connection again. It was in the easy talk of the elders, the way they squinted earnestly at the land, maybe rubbed a bit of sage or cedar in their hands, then sniffed deeply with their eyes closed. The land defined them, gave them substance, gave them breath.

  It takes togetherness to accomplish things. Unity. A common purpose. That’s what I learned when I learned to drive.

  These days there’s a lot of talk about land claims and treaty rights. There’s a lot of anxiety about someone losing while someone gains. There’s a lot of concern about the land. But we’re all neighbours. That’s the plain and simple truth of it. Whether we live on concession roads, on paved avenues or along the hard line of the highways that shape the grid of this country, we’re neighbours. We’ve lived together for some time now, generations, and this work requires us to come together.

  The trouble is, many confusing things have been said and written. We’ve become victims of misinformation, and the time for straight talk, for an earnest leaning-over-the-back-fence kind of talk between neighbours, is here. You learn more by looking in the eyes of folks. I learned that in the fields of my boyhood.

  Land claims and treaty rights are old promises, made when the country was young. They’re not new deals based on greed. They’re not acts of revenge or retribution. They’re a request from one group of people to another for the honouring of a promise, a pact, a deal made square while standing on the land.

  This land defines all of us. It gives us substance. The honouring of a promise is as important to native people as it is to farmer folk. There’s no right or wrong in this. There’s only honour and dishonour. That’s the straight fact of it. There’s only the harvesting of a common future, neighbours rallying to get the job done, bringing it home, the drive smooth and measured so as not to topple anyone.

  My Nine-Volt Heart

  . . .

  I WAS GIVEN a radio when I was ten. It was an old General Electric transistor, brown with a vintage 1950s look, about the size of a pencil case. The radio was a reward for doing the chores assigned to me in my adopted home. I’d been there about a year, and that radio was the first thing I recall ever being able to call my own.

  I took it everywhere with me. It sat beside me while I trimmed the hedges and weeded the flower beds. When I did my homework it sat within reach in case a favourite song came up, and I even arranged a way to carry it in the handlebar basket of my bicycle. Every week at allowance time I ran to the corner store for one of the nine-volt batteries that kept it going.

  I heard the Rolling Stones for the first time on that radio. I heard Curt Gowdy call the 1966 World Series between the Baltimore Orioles and the Los Angeles Dodgers. China developed the H-bomb in 1967, the first heart transplant was performed in South Africa, the United States began bombing Hanoi, Jayne Mansfield was killed in a car crash and Muhammad Ali lost the heavyweight title because he wouldn’t fight in Vietnam. I heard all of that on my radio.

  It was as if the world had come within my reach. I was a ten-year-old kid in a small Canadian city, and it often didn’t feel like there was much going on. Through that radio I came to see life as larger, more brilliant, more complex. But what I remember most were the nights. I would huddle beneath my sheets with a penlight and that old radio, turning the dial and searching out signals from what seemed like an endless universe of sounds, then writing down the frequencies so I would never lose them.

  I discovered the blues out of Chicago: B.B. King, Ruth Brown, Big Joe Turner and the raspy, old-time sound of Robert Johnson. Another night I heard Lefty Frizzell, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, and the high lonesome sound of traditional country music on a station out of Tennessee. It was the 1960s, so I heard the great developing thunder of rock ’n’ roll from Detroit and Cleveland. Deep in the purple midnight of my youth, I heard jazz from Buffalo and Toronto. I learned the sounds of jubilation, melancholy and aching solemnity.

  I heard Mahalia Jackson sing gospel late one night as the rain spattered against my window. Another night, when the moon was full and the air didn’t seem to move at all, I heard Billie Holiday sing about the strange fruit hanging from trees in the southern U.S. The loneliness and loss in that voice touched something inside me, and I cried. And there is never a time when I hear Frank Sinatra sing “In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning” that I don’t return to my cave beneath the sheets.

  Everywhere I travelled on the dial of that little radio I encountered something that entered me. There were sounds and ideas, stories and images, people and places that my heart and ears had never before experienced. Because my life was sad then, I allowed the voice of that tiny General Electric radio to fill me. The nine-volt heart that beat in me then was a heart yearning for understanding, for inspiration and for a genuine connection to things.

  In my mid-twenties, I found a home for myself on the dial as a disc jockey, a program director, a newscaster, a commentator and an ad writer. Radio was a logical place for me to be, surrounded by the stuff that had shaped my world as a kid. Life called, and I went on to become a writer, publishing books and newspaper columns. Still, that nine-volt heart has never quit beating.

  The MP3 CDs I’ve composed most recently flow from jazz to rock to country to classical. I’ve heard a lot of music in my nearly fifty-three years. Some of it I cling to, some I reject, but I listen. I learn. I grow. That old radio taught me that there’s more to the world than what I can see, and I owe it to myself to seek it out. Learning that has made me a better man, a better person and, in the end, a better Indian.

  Wood Ducks

  . . .

  THERE ARE BIRDS on the lake today. Grebes and mallards and mergansers float by, intent on their hunt for the minnows that dart through the crystal shallows. On this rock overlooking the reeds, I experience the morning as a country, a territory you learn to navigate by feel.

  Red-winged blackbirds, jays and bluish swallows dart and wheel crazily, snaring insects in the slice of sun between the mountains. Against the treed rim of the far shore, loons offer their wobbly cries. In the reeds there’s a thin grey poke of heron, mute and patient. A pair of Canada geese skims in for a landing behind him.

  It’s spring now, the turn out of winter slow and lazy, as if the land is a bear sluggish from sleep. Something in this ballet of motion kindles a fire in me that first burned a long, long time ago. A tribal fire, even though at first I didn’t recognize it as that.

  I was eleven. I’d moved three times in the two years I’d been with my adopted family. I’d been in three schools, lived in three houses, learned to form friendships and then lost them three separate times. We were settled in a rented farmhouse on three hundred acres in Bruce County in southwestern Ontario. I ached for permanence.

  They’d tried to make me feel secure, but the constant moving had done the opposite. In the little-boy heart of me lived the fear of abandonment. I’d experienced far too many departures in my life, and I craved what I saw in the families of the kids I came to know—a rootedness, a knowledge that things in life remain.

  That first fall I
discovered the maple bush in the back forty. I went there to watch the colours change, to sit in the high branches of a big old maple and see the gold, scarlet and orange emerge against the punch of blue through the branches. I went back in winter to see the trees’ skeletal shadows against the ocean of snow, follow the animal tracks through the drifts around their trunks.

  When spring came, the land was soggy with mud. I couldn’t explore for the longest time, and I was frustrated. I waited eagerly for the footing to become stable so I could wander. I’d found peace in the bush, and I craved solitude and the feel of the land. Being out there had eased my fears, and it was only there that I felt truly alive and free.

  Finally it was dry enough that I could get out. I remember the energy of the land emerging from winter. It was exciting to watch. I saw woodchuck and fox kits, fawns, calves and, in the trees, the nesting activities of birds.

  I extended my range to the marsh that reached back from the old dam near the highway, flooding a low-lying section of bush. The water was about a foot and a half deep. With my gumboots on, I could wander anywhere in that bayoulike stillness. Muskrats, water snakes and swimming creatures of all varieties crossed the marsh on their rounds. I learned to wade without disturbing the water, to sneak through the shadows silently, and that’s how I discovered the wood ducks.

  They were the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen. The male was all green and purple, deep red, yellow, black. The female was a demure grey, with white at her throat and bluish wings. They were sitting on a half-submerged log, and I stopped and stood stock still to watch them. When they swam within feet of me, I marvelled.

  The ducks had a nest in the crotch of a rotted tree stump three feet off the water. I climbed a tree about ten yards away and looked down into it. The eggs inside were as beautiful as the parents, tan and cream and quiet. I could almost feel the baby birds breathing in that opaque stillness.