There’s a picture of us in my mother’s photo album. I’m young with long hair, trying as hard as I can to look the part of the Indian. My grandfather is sitting on a bed in light-blue pajamas, his nose bent from being broken, eyes sparkling above the fists of cheekbone beneath his wind-wrinkled skin, his hair in a severe brush cut and his bush man’s hands clasped almost shyly in his lap. There was never a question about who the real Indian in that photo is.
I met him when I was twenty-five. I’d never even known I had a grandfather. The arthritis had confined John to a nursing home by then, and I went to see him whenever I could. When I entered his room for the first time, he looked at me with a toothless smile. He held his hand out at about the height of a small child, nodded and welcomed me home. I’ve never forgotten that—how strong the language of love can be.
Through an interpreter, I asked my grandfather questions about our history, about our traditions, about the world he knew in the bush. He was generous, and he loved to talk. As he did the land came alive for him again. In his mind’s eye he was the young man of local legend, striding through the bush filled with purpose. Now and then I’d sneak him in a beer or two. He’d sip them and tell me about the old days.
My world was foreign to my grandfather, and hearing him talk of times when simplicity was a virtue and independence meant always mending your own net, I learned how foreign that life was to me. But it was mine, accorded to me by history, by family, by the recollections of an old man wearied some by the trail and eager to pass on his stories.
I became an Indian at twenty-five because of John Wagamese. I still had the long hair, the beaded vest, the moccasins, the turquoise rings, the Hollywood trappings of the Indian that I’d taken on in my city life, but I wanted the Indian look I saw in that photo of my grandfather. A look that said, “All that I am is here.” In the years since, I’ve sometimes been fortunate enough to feel it on my face.
My grandfather died in his sleep the year I was thirty-two. When I heard the news I lay in my bed and stared at the sky outside my window for a long time. I wasn’t sad for him. His life had been a celebration. I wasn’t bitter and I wasn’t angry. What he had given me I could never lose.
To honour my grandfather, I took a walk out on the land. Standing there, looking out across the broad sweep of the country he loved, what I felt for him was everything, love and joy and grief and loss. I knew that feeling had an Ojibway name, but I hadn’t found the language for it yet.
A Raven Tale
. . .
MY PEOPLE TELL a story about a raven who dreamed of eagles.
It seems a young raven grew fascinated with the majestic flight of those great warrior birds. To this young raven, eagles were immaculate creations. When he looked at the stubbiness of his own wings, he was dissatisfied. When he examined the sooty black of his feathers, he felt ugly and ill-defined. He wanted more than anything to soar and to feel the admiration of his fellow ravens. Every day he watched the eagles drift over the pine tree where he sat, and every day he dreamed of being an eagle.
One day this young raven began to practise soaring. He leapt from his perch in the pine tree and held his wings out straight and aimed for the highest branch of a neighbouring tree. It wasn’t that far, but he wavered in the air. Still, he made it. The young raven felt huge.
Every day after that he flapped to a private part of the forest to practise. He disappeared, alone, to work on increasing his strength and his range. He got stronger. He grew better able to hold the air in his short black feathers. His flights began to feel long and elegant. He could bank and turn and spiral in weightless glides across the roof of his forest world. But it wasn’t enough. He needed to be seen.
So one day, when he was sitting in a clutch of his fellow ravens, the young raven took off. While they watched he flapped higher and higher. They called to him to come back, but he climbed and climbed until he was a small black dot in the sky. Then he began to soar.
He held out his stubby wings and felt the currents of the air. As he banked into a lazy spiral, he could see his family and friends below flapping about in excitement. No raven had ever soared before. No raven had ever come close to being an eagle. He felt incredible pride, and he banked even more steeply to show off his new-found power.
But raven wings are not meant for soaring, and he tired quickly. Far above the ground he fought hard to hold the air. He trembled. He wavered. He shook. He grew fearful. The world began to spin. The long spiral became a crazy spin. His friends watched in horror as the young raven dropped like a stone from the sky.
Well, lucky for him, he crashed into the highest branches of his favourite pine tree. The heavy limbs broke his fall as he tumbled through them. Finally, he landed with a thud on the ground at the pine tree’s roots. He was bedraggled and dazed, missing a lot of feathers, but he was alive.
Later, he told a wise old raven about his adventure. He told her how he’d dreamed of being an eagle and had been dissatisfied with his lot in life as a raven. She listened, then sat for a long while considering his words.
We’re all born with gifts. That’s what she told him, finally. As the eagle is blessed, so too are the ravens. That’s the truth of the world. The trick is to seek out your own gifts, make use of them and learn to soar in that way.
That young raven paid attention to the Old One’s words. He stayed closer to the ground after that and began to accept himself as a raven. He discovered many marvellous things, developed exciting skills and abilities. As he grew he passed those on to younger ravens. But he never forgot the lesson in his dreams of eagles.
That’s why, to this day, when you watch a raven fly you will see it flap, flap and then soar.
WHEN I HEARD that story for the first time, I thought it was a charming little folk tale. It called to mind campfires, sparkly-eyed children, dark nights, a hand drum and the drone of an old storyteller’s voice. I didn’t realize it was an appropriate and timely teaching.
It was the early 1980s, and I was trying hard to make it in radio. I worked as a newscaster on the old CKO All News network in Calgary. I spent all my spare time listening to the other radio newscasters, and every night I practised trying to sound like them, bringing their ebullient, professional timbre into my own delivery.
I got good, but every newscast was a huge effort. Trying to sound like those I admired made reading the news twice the work. When I got a job with CBC Radio a year or so later, my trainer listened to me a while, then told me to quit working so hard. Just be myself, she advised. I’d read better and sound more genuine.
Well, she was right. We had a successful program on CBC. I went on to work at a few major market stations and eventually became a program director at one of the first native stations in the country. All by being myself and using my own gifts.
That’s the trick of it in this life. There are a million shiny things around us, and it’s easy to get distracted. Drink it all in, but make it your own. Find your own chunk of the sky, then flap, flap, soar. Flap, flap, soar.
Shooting Trudeau
. . .
WHEN THE SUN shoots through the gap that forms the green V of these mountains, it becomes a spotlight. It picks out particular stands of trees on the far shore of the lake, and sometimes it catches a clutch of ducks, the paddling ring of them iridescent.
My people call it wash-ko-nah-shpee-ming—light in the sky. There are legends told of it and teachings accorded to its properties. In traditional times, those days before settlement, spiritual societies gathered to welcome the light’s arrival each morning.
For me, this is meditation time. The dog and I walk the lakefront and marvel at the light that makes things so new and different each day. Some people are like that, too. They seem to rearrange the particles of air around them, letting you see ordinary things in new and luminous ways.
I met one such man in the spring of 1983.
I was thirteen when Pierre Trudeau came to power in 1968. Earlier that year, I’d watched on tel
evision as he snared the Liberal leadership after four votes. When he became prime minister, riding on a wave of Trudeaumania, I was caught up. He was a rebel, and part of me responded to that, just as it did to the charismatic bon vivant.
I knew little of politics then. I didn’t know how the Canadian model of federalism affected my life as a native person. But I did know a poverty of the spirit, and whenever light broke through the opaqueness of my world, I leaned towards it hungrily. Pierre Trudeau, with the gallant rose in his lapel, the whirl of girlfriends, the sports cars and the vaunted intellectual savoir faire, was a shimmering beacon of hope for me. When he invoked the War Measures Act in the face of FLQ insurrection, I imagined him a modern knight in defence of the realm.
I had no idea about the 1969 White Paper on Indian policy and its proposed destruction of all things Aboriginal. I had no clue about the intentions of the Indian Affairs minister, Jean Chretien, and his prime minister. If I’d been more aware of these things, I might have had a far different image of Trudeau, the man. But politics for me then bore no colour.
I became a journalist in 1978, the year before Trudeau was defeated by Joe Clark. When Trudeau returned to power and began rattling the sabre of constitutional change, I watched carefully. I’d become more astute by then, understood how government worked and how its rhythms affected me and my people. Bringing the Constitution back to Canada, wresting it away from the Crown, was a significant breach of the trust surrounding treaties, which had been signed “the Crown in the right of Great Britain.” The act was as brutal in its way as the White
Paper had been, and Indians crossed the ocean in waves to appeal to the British House of Lords and the Royal Family.
Notwithstanding, Trudeau and the Queen signed the document over to Canada in 1982.
In March of 1983, Indians were invited to meet with the provincial First Ministers and the Government of Canada to haggle over their representation in the new Constitution. Delegations of us travelled to Ottawa to see history made. I was one of the hundred or so journalists covering the event. For me, with a Grade Nine education and a history of homelessness and poverty, to sit in a press room with the leading journalists of my time was unbelievable.
The biggest thrill was the press conference on the second day. My organization, Saskatchewan Native Communications, was on the list of questioners, and we had grabbed seats in the front row. The editor of the newsmagazine, Joan Beatty, was too nervous to take photos or to ask questions when our turn came, so I did it. While Trudeau fielded questions from the gallery I snapped a whole roll of film. Crouching, leaning, aiming my wide angle and zoom, I photographed the man I’d seen as such a symbol of bold individuality in my youth. My shot of Trudeau leaning forward, cupping a hand to his ear to hear a question, later became the newsmagazine’s cover photo.
When I stood to pose the three questions I’d prepared, I felt a fire spring to life within me. For five minutes I stood face to face with greatness and held my own. He fielded my questions with dignity, nodding in recognition of their value. He answered respectfully, learnedly. I wasn’t just an Indian that day. I was a journalist, and I deserved his attention. When I sat back down I allowed myself to breathe again.
That was the day I knew I qualified as a journalist. When Trudeau looked at me, I knew I mattered. Seven years later, accepting a National Newspaper Award, I thanked him silently.
Pierre Trudeau was a hero of mine. I’m not ashamed to say that now, despite the politics. Some people are a light in the sky. They chase shadow from your world and grant you vision. Ahow.
The Medicine Wheel
. . .
THE RAIN IS a fine sprinkle on the trees this morning. When the sun pokes its head through the thin cloud, there’s a happy conjunction of energy everywhere around. The land breathes, and I can almost feel the huff of it, the great lungs of Mother Earth receiving and releasing. A rainbow links the mountains. Beneath its layered parabola birds wheel and dive. There are teachings in all of this. I walk here to make myself available to them, but it wasn’t always that way. It took a special man to help me see the necessity.
His name was Cliff Thompson. He was a huge bear of a man who laughed easily and loud, and he was a spiritual teacher from the Sioux tradition. A group of us were in the Qu’Appelle Valley in southern Saskatchewan, surrounded by sand cliffs, water, sage hills and rangeland as far as the eye could see. Cliff was teaching us about the native way of seeing the world.
When he spoke you could feel his passion. He talked of sun dances and spiritual ceremonies he’d been blessed to take part in. He spoke of the elders who’d graced him with teachings and of how his life had changed as a result. He spoke about the land as if it were a loved one, family, kin. The brown of him, his skin, his eyes, radiated affection.
On the second night we gathered in a darkened room. Candles were burning, and the sweet smell of burnt sage filled the air. In the centre of the room Cliff had set up an altar. It was round, the lines of it drawn by hand. It was painted in what I’d learned were the colours of the four cardinal directions. There were stones on it, roots, a pine cone, eagle feathers, a wooden bowl of water, a swatch of deer hide, antlers, a hand drum and a red stone ceremonial pipe. In the hushed lighting of the candles, the altar seemed to breathe. None of us spoke. We were awed by the quiet power of those articles, and we sat humbly awaiting the teachings.
He sang a song with the drum. He prayed, then asked us to stand while he smudged us with the sacred smoke from an abalone bowl, using a huge eagle-wing fan. We sat again, and he closed his eyes and breathed. The energy in the room unsettled me some, this huge fibrillation of power all around me.
When he began to speak the flicker of the candles lent his words a timeless feel. Closing my eyes, I could imagine myself back a thousand years with that same light dancing on the skin of a teepee, the land hushed around us.
He spoke of the Medicine Wheel. There were no flip charts, handouts, diagrams or detailed texts, just the power of his words. This was the way the teachings were offered in traditional times, each person discerning what they could and carrying it with them.
As Cliff talked, I opened up. Within the great wheel of energy, he said, everything is related. Our journey is many journeys, because everything we do affects something or someone else. Learning to travel with dignity, with humility and with respect for the creative energy in all things is the heart of the Indian way. That’s what he taught us.
There is life force in everything. Everything is alive, animate, moving and, even if we can’t see that, we can learn to feel it. When we do, we come to true awareness of our ongoing state of relationship. That awareness lies beyond the brain. We feel it in our spirits, our hearts. It is there that the teachings live and learning occurs.
“Medicine” is a sacred word, “something that joins you to the world.” The Medicine Wheel is a process of coming to know your feelings. Learning to travel with your feelings as your guide is an arduous journey that few have the courage to make. Knowing and wisdom, though, can come only from that trek. Simple truths shine in the sun of every new morning. The world awaits us.
Coming to Beedahbun
. . .
THE MOON on the water is a pale eye. It hangs suspended, like a dream upon awakening. The lake bears it effortlessly, and the scrim of trees along the skyline thrust up like fingers to tickle its belly. You’d swear you can hear the chuckle of it against the morning adagio of shorebirds.
My people call this time of day Beedahbun, first light. In traditional times, Ojibway medicine societies gathered in the vesperal quiet for prayer and ceremony. They gathered to celebrate the light in the sky. Those morning rituals were a celebration of energy, a recognition of the harmony we often live in so blindly. For me now, it’s meditative time. I feel Ojibway standing at the edge of a mountain lake watching eagles and ospreys soar and dive.
I discovered the whole Beedahbun thing one glorious week in the autumn of 1985. I was struggling to survive then. M
y first marriage had ended badly, and I found myself sleeping on my mother’s couch. I was drinking too much, to try to kill the pain of it, and it took a while to get my feet under me again.
Northern Ontario in early fall is a spectacle. There’s a change happening all around you. When you take the time, you can see it in the animals, in the plants and trees, on the face of the water. I’d found a job as a marina helper on the Winnipeg River, and I sat every morning watching the sun break over the water. While I drank coffee and waited for the first boatloads of fishermen to arrive, I let myself fall into the lap of those mornings. In the heat of the day, when the fishermen napped, I sat under a huge pine tree at the edge of the bay and tried to write.
The words that formed in me were melancholic, aching words that assembled themselves as poetry. I’d always felt my strength was the straight-ahead clarity of journalism. The few poems I’d tried up to that point were sentimental and heavy-handed. But something clicked under that pine tree. It heartened me and eased my pain. When the Wawatay News in Sioux Lookout agreed to print my poems, I was thrilled.
A man named Simon Frog read those poems in the paper. Simon was cultural development officer for the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, and he was working with Ojibway elders to encourage native youth to write, to tell the stories of their people, to continue the grand line of storytellers. He had a workshop set up on Manitoulin Island at a place called Beedahbun Lodge, and when he read my poetry he wanted me to take part in it. Naturally, I agreed.
There were a handful of us at the workshop. Some were from remote reserves like Kasabonika Lake, Big Trout Lake and Lac Brochet, Manitoba. Others, like me, were from the cities. We were guided by a pair of published poets, Paulette Jiles and Robert Bringhurst, and a dozen Ojibway elders from across the Nishnawbe Aski territory.
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