As soon as we arrived we were paired up in tents. My tent mate, Paul, was a thirty-nine-year-old half-Cree man who’d been born in northern Quebec. He lived in Montreal, worked there as a pastry chef and had hardly been outside the city. Like me, he had been taken away from his people as a toddler. Unlike me, he had been in more than twenty foster homes by the time he was sixteen. He’d come to the camp to begin the journey back to tribal identity.
The first day of sessions we were asked to choose an animal name for the length of our stay. We were to tell the group why we had chosen that animal. I called myself Wandering Bear. I said that I admired the bear for his ability to live alone for great lengths of time, yet still enjoy family and togetherness.
When it came to Paul’s turn, he said that he was a skunk. He sat with his head down, staring at the ground, clasping and unclasping his fingers. He said he’d chosen a skunk because they’re scavengers, rooting around for whatever they can find.
“What’s lower than a skunk?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” one of the guides replied. “Two?”
From that day on Paul was Two Skunks.
In those ten days we learned to build fires without paper or matches. We learned to set gillnets, clean fish, shoot rapids in a canoe, snare rabbits, read animal tracks and make bows and arrows in the traditional manner. We each spent a night alone in the bush, building lean-tos from spruce boughs. We learned about the spiritual way that guided all those practices.
There were sweat lodge ceremonies, prayer and smudging circles, tobacco offerings, drumming circles and a lot of talk. Each of us spoke about growing up without a native identity. We shared stories of awkwardness, the struggle to fit in. We talked of where our trails had taken us and how we felt about where we’d been.
Two Skunks spoke so quietly we had to strain to hear him. Over the course of days he told us about the sexual abuse he’d suffered at the hands of a foster father. He’d never spent a whole year in any one home. When he was sixteen, old enough to be on his own, he went to the streets of Montreal. He sold himself there, to men. He drank and drugged. He stole and went to prison, where he sold himself again to survive.
He talked of hating his skin. He spoke of wanting sometimes to scrape it off. He felt betrayed by it. No one had given him any answers about where he came from, who his people were or who he was supposed to be. He spoke of never feeling honest or deserving or worthy. He spoke of the hole at the centre of his being.
But the elders took him in hand. They held healing ceremonies for him, which we all got to attend. They gave him permission to cry about it all, and he did. In the sweat lodge he prayed hard for the ability to forgive himself. Then he prayed for the forgiveness of those who had hurt him. At nights we talked quietly in our tent, and he spoke of the incredible feeling of light that was beginning to shine in him.
One day, he asked me to come along with him and an elder. We walked deep into the bush where Two Skunks made tobacco offerings and gave thanks for everything that had happened in his life. He thanked the universe for the gifts of those teachings. Then he put those offerings in the ground, returning them to earth, and sang a prayer song. I felt honoured to be there.
When the retreat was over we hugged and went our separate ways. He wrote me sporadically through the years. He joined a drum group in Montreal, started to learn his language and attended Talking Circles and sweat lodges every week. He wrote about feeling happy, about being connected, about finally feeling Indian.
Then one day a letter arrived from a woman who said she was Paul’s wife. She was Cree. They’d been married four years and had a young daughter named Rain. Two Skunks had died of complications from diabetes. He was only forty-four. But he’d become a traditional dancer and singer. He’d helped guide a traditional camp in her community, and he spoke his language fluently. When he died he was buried in the traditional way.
I sat with that letter in my hands for a long time. Then I went deep into the bush, returned it to earth and gave thanks for the teaching.
We heal each other by sharing the stories of our time here. We heal each other through love. In the Indian way, that means you leading me back to who I am. There’s no bigger gift, and all it takes is listening and hearing. Ahow.
Bringing Back the Living Room
. . .
IN OUR HOME NOW, the television is hardly ever on. There’s something about having the open land a step away that makes TV irrelevant. We watch the news, have our favourite couple of programs and I catch all the baseball games I can. But mainly, our TV is the picture window that looks out over the lake.
At night, walking with the dog down the gravel road, we can see many of our neighbours huddled in a ghostly blue glow. We return to our living room to read, talk and listen to music, everything from John Legend to Kitty Wells to Ravel and Buddy Guy. When the lights are low, that’s what we prefer.
In the winter of 1991, I got to meet Johnny Cash. I was an entertainment writer for the Calgary Herald then, but it wasn’t because of that I got to speak with him. It was because I was a native person. I wrote cultural columns for native papers. I’d sent the record company reps a handful of them and asked to talk to John when he came to town. He read them and agreed.
Johnny Cash was always concerned with the lives of native people. In 1964 he’d recorded an eight-song album called Bitter Tears (Ballads of the American Indian). That ballad was a sad one, John said, and his songs reflected that. The “Ballad of Ira Hayes,” “Drums” and “The Vanishing Race” were powerful songs directing the listener to the plight of the Indian in contemporary North America.
Only country music fans know those songs, except for the Hayes tune. But John was never far from the cause of native rights. When he read my pieces he wanted to talk informally, off the record, to learn more about the native experience in this country.
We met in his hotel room. He was passing through on a tour with the Carter Family, and though I’d review the concert for the paper, we agreed that our conversation was not to be used. As it turned out, I couldn’t have done it justice.
The occasion sits in me like a dream. I was guided into the living room of his suite and he walked in, tall, angular, his hair still black and combed back, his obsidian eyes intelligent and soulful. He shook my hand warmly and said the famous words: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” Then he sat down across from me and we began to talk.
I told him about my life, my family’s tragic history and the joys and pains of reconnecting to my native identity. I told him about land claims, treaty rights, racism, bigotry, the ongoing work that’s required for a people to emancipate themselves. He nodded lots and asked pointed, articulate questions.
Eventually, he made his questions personal. He asked me how I felt about all those issues. He asked me how it felt to be in my skin every day. He asked me what dreams I had for myself and how hard they might be to realize as a native person in Canada. And he asked what I would change about myself if I could.
We talked about ceremony and spirituality. We talked of sweat lodges, sun dances, sacred pipes and prayer songs. We talked about the land and how allowing it to seep inside you is such a transcendent experience it is nearly impossible to express. He was an Indian, Johnny Cash, if not in blood then in sentiment and spirit.
He told me about the early influence of gospel on his music. He talked about the teachings he’d gleaned and how, in the end, returning to them saved his life. He spoke of love, family, loyalty, communication and forgiveness.
We need to bring back the living room, he said. There needs to be a time in every home when families gather to be together, to hear each other, to see each other, to be in community. There needs to be a time when harmony rules and we fill a room with our collective light.
It used to take a guitar to do it, he said. Then a radio made the living room a gathering place. When television came along, we started to look at something other than each other. We began to separate, and it affected every neighbou
rhood, every community.
We need to bring back the living room. We need to make it a family room again. That’s what Johnny Cash said to me that day, and I will never forget it. I will never forget him. That connectedness, that harmony, is how you change the world. My friend John told me that.
Butterfly Teachings
. . .
IT WAS THE BUTTERFLIES, my people say, who brought the first human babies to their feet. Before that, the New Ones sat in innocence beneath a tree, watching the world around them with wonder. But Creator had planned more for them. Their destiny called for them to move throughout the world. These human babies were meant to walk upon their two legs, and as long as they sat under that tree their destiny could not be fulfilled.
So the Animal People came.
The weasels came to dart and dance around the human babies. The babies just clapped their hands and laughed. Then the fox came, and in her wily way tried to cajole the babies into following her. But the human babies merely hooted in glee. The crows came, and they hopped and danced about in hopes that the New Ones would stand and join them. But the babies never moved.
Creature after creature arrived. Each one tried to entice the New Creations from their seat beneath that tree, and each one came up short. There was a seemingly endless parade of Animal People, and the human babies marvelled at all of them. But they wouldn’t stand and walk.
Then, across the meadow, a brilliant cloud appeared. In the sunlight its colours danced and dipped and shone wildly. The New Ones watched this living rainbow approach, and they grew excited. The cloud seemed to float in all directions at once, and when it came near them the New Ones laughed like never before.
That cloud of butterflies drifted under the branches of the tree where the human babies were sitting. They fluttered among the leaves, dropping lower and lower until they were only inches from the New Ones’ heads. They hovered there. The human babies reached out their arms to catch them. But the butterflies inched a little higher.
The air seemed to tremble with butterflies. The human babies were entranced. Each time they tried to snare a handful of colour, the cloud drifted away. They stretched their arms higher. They thrust out their hands. But it was to no avail. When the butterflies danced just out of reach a final time, the New Ones lurched to their feet and raced after them across the meadow.
The Animal People celebrated quietly, then returned to their dens and burrows and nests. The human babies never caught those butterflies, but they kept on running, right into the face of their destiny. Sometimes you can still hear them laughing in the sunshine.
I HEARD THAT STORY for the first time at a gathering of the Three Fires. In traditional times, the Three Fires was an alliance of the Ojibway, Odawa and Potawatomi nations. We met for a week’s worth of activities geared towards perpetuating our traditional ways—what’s called Enen-damowin, or Ojibway worldview. For me, as a storyteller, it was a time to be guided in the principles and protocols of our oral tradition.
It was as if the butterflies were calling me forward to my destiny.
Sometimes you can get to thinking that the way you have come to know, the cultural, spiritual or philosophical way you accept as your own, is the only one with something to teach you. That was true for me for a while. I believed that there was value only in Indian things. It worked for a time. I found small glories in the expression of my native soul. I found people who were generous of spirit and I learned many things. But I had walled myself into a cultural wigwam, and as long as I sat there I couldn’t run across the meadow. So the butterflies came again.
This time the butterflies came in the flow of notes from a keyboard. They sprang from the big hands of a black man who had never seen a wigwam. His name was Thelonious Monk, and I heard him play a song called “Epistrophy” on late-night radio. I was standing at my sink washing dishes when the cascade of notes rinsed all my thoughts away.
Monk played with his whole body. You could hear that. He played each note as though he were amazed at the one that preceded it. It was sensual, challenging music, and it required your full attention to follow it. Once you did, there was a world of musical shapes, textures and possibilities to reach for.
I became a jazz fan. I listened to jazz and I read about the music. I read about the people. When I started to read about the history of black music, I saw where the butterflies were leading me. I learned about field hollers, spirituals, the blues and the call and response choruses of a people chained.
Above all, I learned that soul is a universal experience. We discern that whenever we clamber to our feet and chase the butterflies.
To Love This Country
. . .
SOMETIMES YOU BREATHE this country in, and the air of it is wild, free and open, like a ragged song.
I’ve heard that song in a thousand places.
In 1987, when I was a struggling freelance journalist. I tracked down a famous artist then ensconced in the Jasper Park Lodge and made arrangements to interview him. Driving north from Calgary, through Banff and then on through the glistening glory of the Columbia Icefield, I felt the power of the landscape all around me.
Twenty miles south of Jasper I stopped to rest. I walked through the woods towards the sound of waterfalls, and what I found there was magnificent. I stepped out onto a small table of stone above a chasm into which the water tumbled. In the shaded light of mid-morning, I watched the massive emerald and white and turquoise flume from mere yards away. It was like levitating. What I heard in its roar were spirit songs, the voices of my people in celebration of that pure fluid power. Later, in the living room of his suite, I spent the afternoon and early evening with Norval Morrisseau, talking about art and music and the spiritual and traditional ways of the Ojibway.
I spent the winter of 1996 plowing through prairie snow along the cliffs above the North Saskatchewan River. I was teaching in Saskatoon, and I walked there to clear my head. The wind was raw and cutting, and it was through tears that I saw the bend of that river, felt its muscle from three hundred feet away. I heard its sibilant call to Hudson Bay, the echoed shouts of Indians and voyageurs riding on the crystal fog of ice.
I stayed with my friends Anne Doucette and Michael Finley that winter. She owned a bookstore and he taught at the university. Along with their son and daughter and Anne’s mother, they welcomed me into their home. It was a sad time for me then, and walking eased the hurt. I’d plod through the winter chill, knee-deep in fresh prairie snow, and return to feel the warmth of welcome at their door. The light of their friendship was a song in itself.
In 1998, I spent five days in a canoe with an Inuk man named Enoch. We paddled a course of portages that the Algonquin people used to navigate their way through the territory north of Maniwaki, Quebec. There were a dozen of us in six canoes under the guidance of Algonquin guides and elders.
We paddled across a wide lake in a raging windstorm. Enoch and I battled mightily with waves higher than the gunwales of the canoe. Rain soaked us to the skin. In the shelter of a horseshoe bay, we drank black tea and felt the wind calm. That afternoon we shot a rapid, both of us energized by the challenge. We emerged into a long, flat cove where we fished and rested.
We camped that night on a mossy rock bluff surrounded by huge firs and pines. In the light of the fire I heard stories of an Inuk life. I heard music in the soughing of the wind through the trees, the soft slap of water at the foot of the bluff and the call of loons. The sheer loneliness that is the North and the comfort of a voice in the glow of firelight were grace notes all around us.
There is a song that is Canada. You can hear it in the bush and tree and rock, in the crash of a Pacific surf and the blowing of the breeze across a prairie sky. There are ancient notes in its chorus, voices sprung from Metis roots, Ojibway, Cree, Micmac and then French, German, Scottish and English. It’s a magnificent cacophony.
I have learned that to love this country means to love its people. All of them. When we say “all my relations,” it’s
meant in a teaching way, to rekindle community. We are part of the great, grand circle of humanity, and we need each other.
It wouldn’t be Canada with one voice less.
Firekeeper
. . .
THERE’S AN OLD cast iron wood stove on the corner of the deck. It used to heat this cabin, but it’s been replaced by a newer, more efficient model. So now it’s a firepit we sit in front of on long, cool summer nights or in the more clement evenings of winter and fall.
To sit there in the hushed air of evening is to be transported. Fire is funny that way. It connects us to a primeval part of our being. Our conversation always slows, stops sometimes, as we stare into it, watching the flames flicker and dance. Somewhere in our genes lives the memory of a fire in the night. Somewhere in the jumble of our consciousness is the recollection, dimmed by time and circumstance, of a band of us huddled around a flame for security, warmth and community. We all share that. No matter who we are today, we began as tribal people. That’s the truth that fire engenders.
I learned that in the mid-1990s. I was attending the annual spiritual gathering in Algonquin territory in Mani-waki. Our host was elder William Commanda, a globally recognized teacher, and we’d come from all corners, from all peoples, to share four days of ceremony, ritual and unity.
Each day featured an opportunity to sit with elders and spiritual teachers from a handful of First Nations. The time from sun-up to sundown was filled with guidance. The teachers showed us ancient spiritual ways, still alive and vital, and allowed us to participate in rituals that began in deep prehistory. Everywhere you could see acolytes sitting in humble silence at the knee of the carriers of knowledge. But the centrepiece of the gathering was the sweat lodge grounds.
Each teacher built a lodge and held ceremonies there throughout the day. With their apprentices, they made that ancient ritual available to as many people as possible. There were at least a dozen domed lodges, and the smell of smoke and sacred medicines, the sound of prayer and petitions to the Spirit World, was everywhere. It felt like holy ground.
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