Merv has been a cowboy, a rancher and an outdoors-man all his life. At sixty-seven, his time on horseback is over now, and there’s a note of sadness when he speaks of it. But he’s always on the land, and he clearly loves it. He’s a real raconteur, telling stories with zip and verve. Ann was a businesswoman. The border collies are named after her favourite activity. Arthritis in the knees has slowed her down some now. She can’t ski, can barely climb stairs, but she remains vital and fun. When the four of us get together to float around the lake, fishing, talking, barbecuing, time takes on a different quality. We fall together easily, joined by the harmony of the natural world.
And there are other neighbours: Annie the weaver; Muriel and Pete, the local oldsters; and Rick and Anna Gilbert. He’s an old-time fiddler and she’s a Mississippi Cajun with an accent you can cut with a knife. All of them cherish the privacy the lake affords.
We’re here, around this mountain lake, because the land has the uncommon ability to make everything make sense. We breathe easier here. We’re here because life, when you listen to it, asks you to move a little slower, take a little more time, reach out a little more often to those around you.
We’ve learned to be neighbours here. We make eye contact. We wave. We share things. We help each other. We learn each other’s stories and make them part of our own because, in the end, it’s all one great, grand tale.
The Doe
. . .
THE LAND IS a sacred being. The land is healing, and she returns you to original form. She eases her way into the cracks and crevices of you. She seeps into the gaps that worldly understanding leaves, soothes the raw spots, the urban rasp you’ve come somehow to accept as natural. She reconnects you to the web of creation, as familiar as a soft voice in the darkness.
That all came startlingly clear one recent morning. It had rained the night before, and there was a palpable freshness to things. Colours and shapes were sharpened by the cut of the air and sound carried magnificently. The dog and I set out for our morning walk, awed as always by the ever-changing face of our surroundings.
A quarter mile down the gravel road is a sweeping turn that’s made tighter by the thickness of the bushes and trees that push out to its borders. When we came around the arc of it, a deer stepped out of the bush and stared at us. I commanded the dog to sit, and she dropped to her haunches immediately. The deer stood twenty feet from us, ears swivelling and nostrils flaring for scent. None of us moved beyond that.
She was a mule deer, a doe, and she had a satiny summer coat of tan with a thin ridge of black along the top of her neck. She was mature, with the confidence of several years behind her. As the dog sat staring at her, she raised her head slightly and continued to watch us in return. Satisfied that there was no danger, she moved closer.
The dog is a terrier, a hunter, a chaser, but she sat at the edge of the road quietly, enthralled by the appearance of this magnificent creature. She didn’t bark, she didn’t growl or whimper at the opportunity to run and chase and play. Instead, she sat with her head tilted, studying the deer. The deer looked at her, then at me, and edged closer again.
A timelessness descended on that moment. It took me back to moments from my boyhood when wandering the bush was like meditation. It was a return to the time when there were no barriers, when, as my people say, there were just the animals and all was harmony. Behind us we could hear the loons on the water, the nattering of squirrels in the trees and the crows and ravens in their garrulous conversations high in the branches. Everything was still. As I breathed, it was as if I could feel the air move between us.
In Ojibway the deer is called Way-wash-ka-zhee, the Gentle One, and its medicine power is nurturing. I said her name quietly in my language and eased my hand up towards her. She stepped closer. The dog maintained her silent sit. Slowly, the deer eased forward until she was eight feet away from us. I saw her sharply then, felt her curious, gentle power.
The sound of a truck on the gravel broke the spell. The deer startled, but she looked back at us as she broke for the depths of the bush. In that glance was a knowing, a recognition of a peace encountered and carried forever. There was no threat, no difference, only a crucial joining, a shared breath of creation.
See, we don’t become more by living with the land. Instead, we become our proper size. It takes unity to do that. It takes the recognition of the community we live in. This world. This earth. This planet.
Rules for Radicals
. . .
WE LOVE TO SKI. Sun Peaks Resort is a short drive from our cabin, and we head there as often as we can in the winter months. As soon as we are on the chairlift with our feet off the ground, we’re exhilarated.
We enjoy the view as much as the action. It’s spectacular from the top. You can see right across the Rockies, and your imagination sends you soaring. The plummet down the runs affords other panoramas.
Skiing is about freedom. It’s about surrendering to gravity and transcending it at the same time. It’s the joy of a headlong rush and the sublime ease of a traverse through the trees in the crystal burst of brilliant, fresh powder.
So it was hard one day when the protesters came. There’s a land claim issue at the resort, and a band of young native people, dressed in camouflage, arrived with drums, pamphlets and megaphones. They stood at the base of the mountain and harangued the families gathered to enjoy the hill. In their masks, balaclavas and mirrored sunglasses, they were unapproachable and aloof. They looked hugely ironic against that fresh, open landscape.
No one listened to them. No one paid any attention except the Mounties, there to make sure there were no confrontations. There weren’t. The dozen or so protesters marched through the resort village, singing a drum song, waving flags and being ignored. Later, as we were taking off our gear in the parking lot, they marched past in a bedraggled line and disappeared into a small rusted bus.
It was a sad sight for me. I understood their cause. I understood their politics. I understood their motivation. I just didn’t agree with the process. In my early twenties I became a militant. I had discovered my people and reconnected with them. The people I met were angry. Native politics was in a boil. The American Indian Movement was making big headlines in the United States, and that energy had filtered into Canada. There were occupations, marches and other forms of protest.
As a displaced person, I was eager to fit in. I needed to be seen as native, so I adopted the politics. I pulled it around me like a cloak. I became red-minded. I grew my hair, dressed like I thought an Indian should and read the literature that the angry young people I met recommended: Vine Deloria’s God Is Red and Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. After that I read Karl Marx, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I studied the writings of Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale to educate myself in the politics of struggle.
Back then I believed that once I had the rhetoric in place, the passion would follow. Everyone around me was angry, and I believed that to qualify as a native person I had to be angry too.
Then I came across Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. His book contained less than what its title suggested, and at first I was disappointed. Then I read it over again, and I started to understand that radicalism isn’t necessarily the mechanics of anger. Instead, it is the need of a people to invoke justice in the system through a certain generosity of spirit. It is, as Alinsky suggested, a process of communication.
I didn’t know what that meant at first. Back then I was sold on the energy of the movement. The movement was all about bringing down the system, which was to blame for everything my people had suffered for hundreds of years. Change had to be brought about abruptly. My head was filled with the politics of retribution.
But Alinsky said something marvellous. He encouraged the younger generation to hang onto laughter, the most precious part of youth. Out of that, he said, we could find together what we were lo
oking for—beauty, love and the chance to create.
His words resonated with me. I was angry because I thought I was supposed to be, because it was the Indian thing to do. By Alinsky’s definition, that was method acting. Deep within me, where I truly lived, was a wish for peace. It took some doing, but through hard work and listening to the bona fide teachers in our native circles, I got in touch with that wish.
It’s not necessary to bridge gaps between communities. Bridges rust and collapse. If, as a people, we work earnestly to fill those gaps with information, filling it in layer by layer with our truth, the gaps eventually cease to exist. Saul Alinsky taught me that. Life, like skiing, is about surrendering to gravity and transcending it at the same time.
Scars
. . .
THERE WAS A time, my people say, when the animals prepared to abandon humans. A time before time, when the role of animals as teachers was being ignored and they decided to leave the Human Beings to their fate.
It wasn’t an easy choice. The animals had come to love their human brothers and sisters, their fanciful ways, their dreams, their painful desire for learning. The humans were like cubs and kits and hatchlings. The animals doted on them and taught them to survive. But the Human Beings outgrew that love and began to follow their own path.
This hurt the teachers greatly. They’d been instructed by Creator to introduce the People to the world, and being held in disregard caused them anguish. They knew the consequences of such a course, and when they could not halt the Human Beings on their path, the animals prepared to leave.
But the dog told the Human Beings about the plan, and they changed their ways. The animals returned to their role as teachers, and the destiny of the People was changed forever. Animals live around us still, and in their examples lie the teaching ways of harmony, balance, sharing and sacrifice.
I GOT A HAIRCUT the other day. For a few years now I’ve gone without the long hair and braids I wore for years. I’ve grown accustomed to shorter hair in my early fifties. It feels good, calming. The things my long hair represented exist within me now, and there’s no need for outward symbols.
This time around I asked for a brush cut. As the barber shaved close to the sides and back, I enjoyed the feel of the razor. When it was over I held a hand mirror up to examine his work in the big mirror on the wall.
I could see the back of my head clearly. What I saw were scars, irregular white scars in four or five places. I knew they were there. I’d just forgotten about them, and seeing them so starkly was shocking in a way. I put my hand back there and ran my palm over them and remembered.
I got the first scar when I was seven. I’d been told not to climb the big birch tree that sat over a boulder near my foster home. But it was a challenge to all the kids in the neighbourhood to scratch our initials into the trunk. The kid whose initials were the highest was champion. I climbed that tree one day with a penknife in my teeth. I made it past the last set of initials and inched upwards another foot or so on the thin branches. But one branch broke, and I crashed down the length of that tree and cracked my head on the boulder. It cost me seven stitches and grounded me for a week or so.
I got the next scar when I was ten. I was playing pick-up hockey without a helmet, and a high cross-check ended in five stitches and a ban from playing for months. Back then the hottest stars in the National Hockey League went without helmets, and I wanted to mimic their speed, finesse and courage.
When I was nineteen I was helping a friend paint his house in St. Catharines. I climbed an extension ladder to paint the gable ends on the third floor. He’d told me to secure the ladder at the top, but I was in a hurry. A gust of wind caused me to lose my balance, and the ladder slid along the roofline. I crashed onto the veranda roof. That was worth five stitches and a good chewing-out from my very worried friend.
The other scars have a less elegant history. In a bar fight in Winnipeg in the late 1970s, a baseball bat to the back of the head cut me for nine stitches. Another time, drunk and staggering, I fell backwards onto the boulders along the river outside Calgary. That slip-up brought me six stitches and a slight concussion.
There are scars on different parts of my body, too. There’s a long curved one above my left knee where a knife grazed me. That was in Thunder Bay in the 1980s. On my right knee is a leaf-shaped scar where I landed on a broken wine bottle in Toronto in 1974. Above my left eye, concealed by my eyebrow, is a scar from a police baton wielded during a protest in 1978.
There was a time, my people say, when the animals prepared to abandon humans. As a species, we’ve never been too great at listening. It’s always taken a crisis to get our attention and return us to order and balance. I learned too often through injury. Sometimes the scars were visible, other times they were buried in my spirit. The second kind were slower and harder to heal.
I live more gracefully now. Around me in these mountains are animals that run and jump, crawl and fly, swim and dive. In their examples I see the way I choose now to live in the world.
My Left Arm
. . .
SOME MUSICIANS ARE like surgeons. They wield their soulfulness like a scalpel, slicing through the fat of life to reveal the glistening bone of truth. It’s why we return to them, that neat laying open to what lies beneath.
There’s an economy to such honesty. Only the very special ones have it. Miles Davis had that for me. When his horn cut through the air I felt exposed, and the pure, vibrato-less keening of his trumpet was a healing force. That driving, unwavering note, triumphant and clear, became something I sought to create in my living.
My life had been the opposite of triumphant for a long time when I first heard Miles. My family lived in the bush when I was born. They were seasonal gypsies, moving about our traditional territory according to need and game. All the generations after those of my great-grandparents had been placed in residential schools. There, the process of excising the Indian had robbed them of their souls, and they returned hollowed out, incapable any more of relating to the land in a holistic way. They moved about it like ghosts prowling a mourning ground. They struggled to maintain the last vestige of a traditional Ojibway life as they waited for the land to heal them.
It didn’t. It couldn’t.
Rather, they became embittered, angry and drunk. By the time I was born, our tribal life had mutated into something ugly, and we kids were neglected, often abandoned and abused. The great spiritual way of the Ojibway had been expunged by the nuns and priests, and in its place was terrible hurt vented on those closest to you.
When I was still a toddler, my left arm was shattered and torn from its socket, the shoulder joint broken. It was 1955. The doctors at the hospital in Kenora had little time for another Indian kid from the bush, and they attended to me in only the most cursory way. As a result my left arm hung backwards. The palm of my hand was turned outwards, and it atrophied and shrunk.
By the time I was five my arm was next to useless. When I was seven the Children’s Aid Society finally stepped in. They sent me to the hospital in Thunder Bay, where doctors rebroke my shoulder joint, turned the arm around so it would hang properly and attached a tendon taken from my ring finger to my thumb. My thumb muscles had atrophied, and the tendon allowed my thumb to move normally.
It was advanced surgery for 1963. My left arm was suddenly mobile. I could flex my elbow and my fingers, and for the first time I could play like an ordinary kid. But the muscles were gone and would never grow back.
My left arm was a stick arm. As I grew it stayed the same, except for its length. I was ashamed and secretive and hid it as best I could. I refused to wear short-sleeved shirts. I kept my jacket on even in the hottest weather. In photographs I always tried to turn my right side to the camera.
For me, my left arm was the sign of my inadequacy. It revealed the indisputable truth of my inability to ever measure up, to be normal. To hide it was the only way I could feel secure, and that security was fleeting at best.
I never
knew what had happened to my arm. It wasn’t until I was in my forties that the truth came out. Up until then it was a mystery how my arm had been ruined, and I created elaborate falsehoods about the origins of my handicap. With each denial, the acceptance that nurtures healing receded further into the distance.
My left arm remained ugly to me until I learned to see it differently. It took a therapist to get me there. Together we penetrated the dense clouds of memory, working through the name-calling, insults and pitying looks. I learned to appreciate the things that I had learned to do despite the great wounding. I’d become a good athlete. I’d learned to play guitar. I’d learned to type. I’d ridden horses, canoed, fished, hunted, worked at heavy labour and performed the day-in, day-out acts of living.
We heal. Indian and non, we heal. But we must risk being vulnerable to get to the glistening bone of truth— that we are responsible for our own healing. No one else can get us there, and there isn’t enough money anywhere to buy it for us.
After all these years, I think my left arm is beautiful. It’s no longer a sign of my inadequacy. Rather, it’s a sign of my enduring spirit, my ability to win out over adversity, to become all that I can be, to survive. It’s the pure, triumphant note of my living.
Planting
. . .
WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN, I had chores to do. My main job was to take care of the grounds around my adopted home. I mowed the lawn twice a week, weeded flower beds and edged them, watered plants and raked, hoed and shovelled whenever that was ordered. There was always something that needed doing, and it seemed to me that the land was a problem to be solved.
One Native Life Page 14