One Native Life

by Richard Wagamese

  It can’t work any other way, he said. By trying to be the ultimate Indian, I was missing the most important part of the journey, the human part. Slow down, he said. Be gentle with yourself.

  I gave up trying to be Super Injun that day. I began to seek out ceremonies and teachings that would nurture my humanity. I struggled with drink and the effects of the deeply buried hurts of my childhood, and even though that sometimes took me from the path, I never forgot what John Rock Thunder said.

  I’m still learning to be a good Indian. But that’s because I’m still learning to be a good human being and a good man. Politics could never teach me that.

  The Country between Us

  . . .

  THERE ARE TIMES when something as simple as the rain that freckles slate grey water can take me back to it—that feeling I remember from my boyhood when the ragged line of trees against the sky filled me with a loneliness that had nothing to do with loss. The land sometimes carries an emptiness you feel in you like the breeze.

  It’s not a sad feeling. Rather it’s a song I learned by rote in the tramp of my young feet through the rough and tangle of the bush that shaped me. I come to the land the same way still, expectant, awake to the promise of territories beyond the horizon, undiscovered and wild. All those years in cities never took away that feeling of tremendous awe.

  When I rejoined my native family after twenty years, it was the land that framed our reconnection. It was a balm for the awkwardness of strangers who bore the same blood and history and wounds.

  It wasn’t easy coming back. I had little of the Ojibway left on me and they had no experience with the urban world I knew. But all of us felt a kinship with the territory we called our home, and it was there, among the muskeg, rock and spruce of the northern land, that my family found a way to scrabble past our differences.

  We went camping the second summer I was home. We drove to Silver Lake on the gravel road that leads to Grassy Narrows and found a place above a wide sweep of beach.

  There were five of us: my uncle Archie, my mother, my stepfather, my brother Charles and me.

  I watched as they erected their canvas tent, cut saplings with an axe for the frame, bound the frame with long strips of bark and lined the floor with cedar boughs. When I put up the small orange hump of nylon that was my pack tent, they laughed.

  As we stood on the beach, my uncle told us stories about the lake and the land across the bay from where we stood. He told us about the portages the people used according to the season, moose or deer or fish drawing them at different times. He’d learned those routes as a boy, he said, and he could find his way from there to White-dog, a hundred miles away.

  My brother and I took off in the canoe to find the first portage for ourselves. It was a calm, perfect afternoon and the paddling was easy. We talked some, but mostly we concentrated on looking for the landmarks my uncle had described. We found the portage without a problem. We hauled our canoe up and over the half-mile distance to a long narrow lake edged with wild rice. At the far end we found the stone marker for the next portage. This one was shorter and steeper. The lake we came onto was an almost perfect bowl, encircled by walls of pink granite where eagles nested. We paddled slowly around that lake, neither of us inclined to talk.

  There were no vapour trails above us, no drone of airplanes. We were back in the bush five miles or more, and there were no outboard motors to be heard. There was only the land, the symphony of it, the orchestral manoeuvres of wind and rock and sky. I could feel the presence of my people, the staunch heart of them beating here for millennia, and I felt joined to them.

  We paddled back as evening fell. Both of us were touched by the opportunity to experience history, and we talked about how it must have felt in pre-settlement times to make this same paddle back to a camp set up above the beach. We could smell woodsmoke as we approached, and we saw the fire burning in the middle of our camp.

  It was an idyllic scene, the Ojibway world unchanged, unaffected. But when we beached the canoe and walked to the camp, we found the others in lawn chairs, watching a ball game on a battery-operated television.

  I laugh about it now, that collision of cultures, but back then it confused me. I was so desperate to reconnect, so needy for definition that the cultural anachronism was jarring. I wanted my people to be as tribal as I dreamed them. But time and circumstances had made that impossible.

  All Canadians have felt time disrupt them. Everyone has seen the culture they sprang from altered and rearranged into a curious mélange of old and new. So the country between us is not strange. We all carry a yearning for simpler, truer times. We all crave a reaffirmation of our place here, to hear the voices of our people singing on the land.

  Learning Ojibway

  . . .

  I WAS TWENTY-FOUR when the first Ojibway word rolled off my tongue. It felt round and rolling, not like the spiky sound of English with all its hard-edged consonants. When I spoke that word aloud, I felt as if I’d truly spoken for the first time in my life.

  That first word opened the door to my culture. When I spoke it I stepped over the threshold into a new way of understanding myself and my place in the world. Until then I had been like a guest in my own life, standing around waiting for someone to explain things for me. That one word made me an inhabitant.

  It was peendigaen. Come in. Peendigaen, spoken with an outstretched hand and a rolling of the wrist. A beckoning. Come in. Welcome. This is where you belong. I had never encountered an English word with such resonance.

  I felt awkward speaking Ojibway at first. There’s a softness to the language that’s off-putting when you first begin. It’s almost as if timelessness had a vocabulary. But with each enunciation that one word gained strength, clarity. I had the sensation I was speaking a language that had existed for longer than any the world had ever known. The feeling of Ojibway in my throat was permanence. I stood on unknown territory whose sweep was compelling. Peendigaen. Come in. With that one word, I walked fully into the world of my people.

  I learned more words after that. Then I struggled to put whole sentences together. I made a lot of mistakes. I was used to English structure, and I created sentences that were awkward and wrong. People laughed when they heard me, and I understood cultural embarrassment. It made me feel like quitting, as if staying with English could spare me the laughter of my people.

  Then I heard a wise woman talk at a conference. She spoke of being removed from her culture, unplugged from it and set aside like an old toaster. But she remained a toaster, she said, and the day came when someone plugged her back in and the electricity flowed. She became functional again, and the tool of her reawakening was her language.

  She spoke of the struggle to relearn her talk. She spoke of the same embarrassment I felt, of being an oddity among her own. She spoke about the difficulty in getting past the cultural shame and reaching out for her talk with every fibre of her being. And she spoke of the warm wash of the language on the hurts she’d carried all her life, how the soft roll of the talk was like a balm for her spirit.

  Then she spoke of prayer.

  Praying in her language was like having the ear of Creator for the first time. She felt heard and blessed and healed. It hadn’t been much, she said. Just a few words of gratitude, like prayers should be, but the words had gone outwards from her and become a part of the whole, a portion of the great sacred breath of Creation. She understood then, she said, that our talk is sacred, and speaking it is the way we reconnect to our own sacredness.

  We owe it to others to pass our language on. That was the other thing she said. If we have even one word of our talk, then we have a responsibility to pass it on to our children and to those who have had the language removed from them. We learn to speak for them. We learn to speak so we can serve as a tool for someone else’s reconnection.

  I’m still far from fluent. I still spend far more time using English, but the Ojibway talk sits there in the middle of my chest like a hope. When I use it—
in a prayer, in a greeting, in a talk somewhere—I feel the same sensation I did with that first word at age twenty-four—the feeling of being ushered in, of welcome, of familiarity and belonging.

  An English word I admire is “reclaim.” It means “to bring back, to return to a proper course.” When I learned to speak Ojibway I reclaimed a huge part of myself. It wasn’t lost, I had always owned it; it was just adrift on the great sea of influence that is the modern world. Like a mariner lost upon foreign seas, I sought a friendly shore to step out on so I could learn to walk again. My language became that shore.

  I introduce myself by my Ojibway name, according to our traditional protocols, whenever I give a talk. I can ask important questions in my language. I can greet people in the proper manner, and I can pray.

  For me, peendigaen, come in, meant I could express myself as who I was created to be. That’s what this journey is all about—to learn to express yourself as whom you were created to be. You don’t need to be a native person to understand that.

  The Animal People

  . . .

  LAST WEEK WE SAW wolves on the ice. There were two of them, a large dark male and a smaller, dusky-coloured female. It’s the beginning of winter, and the ice has just set on the lake a few miles down the road from our cabin. I spotted them out of the corner of my eye, two dark dots on a sheet of white.

  They lingered a few days. It was the sun, I think. The last vestiges of autumn sun warmed the flat pan of the lake, and the wolves lay there soaking it in, before the cold fingers of winter pushed it from the sky. Transients, headed through this territory on their way north into the back-country for winter.

  There’s a lot of animal life in the area. Black bears, bobcats, muskrats, beavers, even the odd rumour of cougars sliding out of view through the pine trees. But seeing the wolves made me smile. There’s a primeval connection to Myeengun, as the wolf is called in Ojibway. It pulls at my consciousness, even though I don’t fully understand it.

  I’ve always been an animal guy. I never had a pet when I was small, but I was always drawn to the dogs and cats in my neighbourhood. I was a Young Naturalist for a while; that was a mail-in club for youngsters eager to learn outdoor skills. When I was a kid, it was the closest I could get to native teachings.

  Back then, I didn’t have the benefit of the animal stories told by our traditional storytellers. I didn’t know that Ojibway people regard animals as their greatest teachers. I never knew as a kid that Ojibway people referred to four-legged creatures as Animal People. It wouldn’t have struck me as odd, though. I think I’ve always regarded them in that way.

  Soon after reconnecting with my tribal family, I was walking with my uncle on the traditional land we’d once trapped on. It had snowed the night before, and a couple of inches lay on the ground. Sound was softened, and we moved like ghosts. Everywhere the detail of things was cut into sharp relief by the blanket of white. It was as if the land was magnified somehow, heightened. Seeing it that way was like seeing it for the first time. I was enthralled.

  There was a sudden set of tracks in the snow. They cut across our path and disappeared into the thick bush, like a thought. As I stood studying them, my uncle looked around us casually and asked no one in particular, “I wonder who passed here?”

  It seemed a strange question. He made it sound as if the tracks belonged to a person. His reaction puzzled me, so I asked him about it.

  He told me that when Creator sent Human Beings to live in this reality, he called the Animals forward and directed them to remain our teachers forever. Their teachings showed the Human Beings how to relate to the world and how to treat the earth. What the Ojibway know of ourselves as people, such as our need to live in harmony with each other, came to us from the Animal People.

  As we walked, my uncle told me legends and traditional stories: how the dog came to be man’s greatest friend, why the wolverine is a loner and why the raven is black. Each story was like a world, and entering them I felt bigger, sketched out more fully. I could see why my uncle said “who” instead of “what” when we passed those tracks in the snow.

  We are all related. That’s what my people understood from the earliest times. At the core of each of us is the creative energy of the universe. Every being and every form shares that kinetic, world-building energy. It makes us brothers, sisters, kin, family. Ojibway teachings tell us that we all come out of the earth, that we belong here, that we share this planet equally, animals and people. Walking with my uncle that winter day, I came to the beginning of understanding that.

  Finding the Old Ones

  . . .

  THERE ARE SILENCES that reside in you like a dream undreamed. I have found them at the edges of great precipices in the Rockies and on the glassine surface of northern lakes, watching the bottom over the bow of the canoe, the movement like flying. The quiet that descends at the end of a good talk can tell you more than all the spoken words. It’s a big old noisy world, and a remembered silence takes you away from that clatter, returns you to a moment when all you knew of life was where you stood—and it was enough.

  My life was full of noise for a long, long time. The internal clamour of a scared, lonely foster kid rang through everything I tried, everywhere I went. But when I was twenty-four I found silence.

  By then I’d spent a hard eight years searching for a place to fit. I’d been across the country a few times, worked at various things, quit and moved on, prowling Canada like a cat burglar searching for a point of entry.

  My brother Charles tracked me down through adoption records, and when we met he introduced me to traditional people. There was an elder he’d been travelling with who had an entourage of followers keen on learning traditional Ojibway spirituality. I’d never met traditional people before, and the idea of Indian ceremony was fraught with anxiety for me.

  Back then I thought that you had to qualify as native, Indian, Ojibway. I thought people were measured by the Indian-ness they wore on their sleeve. Nothing about me measured up in that regard.

  But they welcomed me. I was greeted kindly and made to feel included. They knew that I was one of the lost ones, one of the disappeared ones who were slowly making their way back to their original homes, their original territories, their original way of being. They understood the difficulty in that, and they tried their best to make the transition easier for me.

  Still I was anxious, and when I was invited to a ceremony I wanted to run the other way. Everything I’d heard of native ceremony was built on superstition and fear. I’d heard gossip about shape-shifters, bad spirits, Bear Walkers and hallucinatory visions. I’d heard of bad medicine, and I was fearful that my lack of anything remotely resembling Ojibway would set me up for the black powers.

  What I found was the opposite.

  We gathered in a circle in someone’s living room. We sat respectfully while the elder prepared, and as I looked around at the faces of those people I was struck by their calm. As one of the apprentices began to make his way around the circle with a large abalone bowl that held a pile of smouldering herbs, we all stood.

  The elder explained that we would purify ourselves with the smoke from that bowl. We would pass it over ourselves, smudge ourselves, to cleanse the detritus of living from our minds, emotions, bodies and spirits. In this way, he said, we would return ourselves to the innocence in which we were born, the humility that is the foundation of everything.

  We are watched over, he said. Always. We are guided and protected by our grandmothers and grandfathers in the Spirit World, our ancestors, the Old Ones who love us regardless. The smoke as it rises from the bowl carries our thoughts, feelings and prayers to the Spirit World, where they are heard.

  I watched as others smudged, and when it came my turn I did as they had done. I passed the smoke over my head and over my heart, the smell of it pungent and sweet, an old smell, ancient and comforting. When I closed my eyes to pass the smoke over my head again I found the silence I’d been searching for all my life.
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  There was only breath in it. There was only the slow beating of my heart like a drum in the darkness, and the presence of something warm, safe and eternal wafting around my shoulders, lifting me, cocooning me, sheltering me. There was only the feel of hands, wrinkled and lined by time, softened by rest and calm, that touched my face and offered comfort.

  In the depths of that incredible silence I knew there was more to me than I’d ever dreamed. I’d never needed to qualify, to prove myself worthy. I was Ojibway, I was Indian, and I was home.

  Man Walking by the Crooked Water

  . . .

  MY GRANDFATHER’S NAME was John Wag-amese. Our family name comes from an Ojibway phrase meaning “man walking by the crooked water.” It was shortened by the treaty registrar because Wagamese was all he could pronounce of it, but the name came from the trapline my great-great-grandfather established along the Winnipeg River. My grandfather walked it all his life.

  He was a bush man, John Wagamese. There was nothing he didn’t know of it, couldn’t comprehend or predict. The land was as much a part of him as his skin, and he wore it proudly, humbly and with much honour. In our patch of northern Ontario, north of Lake of the Woods, he was a legend. People still talk about how strong he was.

  He carried a moose carcass ten miles out of the bush one time, and on another occasion he fashioned a harness from the canvas of his tent and hauled 120 pounds of blueberries a day’s walk to the northern store for sale. He knew every inch of our traditional territory, and in my mind I see him walking it—a man walking by the crooked water.

  My grandfather’s life was the last truly traditional one in my family history. He never learned to speak English, never learned to read or write, never had a driver’s licence, but he knew the land like an old hymn. It sang through him, wild and exuberant and free.