Everything I did was scrutinized. When my edging wasn’t plumb and perfect, I had to do it over again. If tiny heads of new weeds had pushed through between the marigolds and the begonias, I was scolded as lazy and irresponsible. The flower beds had to be raked smooth, the clods of earth battered with a hoe until they lay like sand. Otherwise I earned no right to play. I never took to that job. I couldn’t. The judgements rinsed all the joy away.
After I left that home I laboured at a handful of jobs that called me to the land, but I never picked up a hoe or a shovel or turned a bed of earth. I preferred cutting, sawing, trundling and carting. That was all messy work by nature, and there were no ghosts of perfection lurking around the edges.
In every place I called home through the years the most I did was cut the lawn if one existed. There were sometimes houseplants, and I tended those, but there was nothing in the maintenance of small pots and planters to stir up the resentment I still carried from the lawns and flower beds of my youth.
Then we came here.
When we first saw this place, it didn’t seem like much. Just a cabin in the trees overlooking a lake, a mountain humped up behind it like an overseer. It called to us, though, and we found a way to make it ours.
Both of us had spent a lifetime searching for home. Both of us had been orphaned by circumstance, fostered away to those who didn’t understand the cleft that forms in your soul when you’re swept away from love. We had each struggled mightily to heal that rift, and here we had a chance to settle and focus.
At first we did the easy things. We graduated to building a set of steps and some lattice work around the bottom of the deck. In our second summer we renovated the living room. We tore out the old carpeting and laid down flooring, then painted. The place became an extension of ourselves.
The soil in the garden had been left untended for years. There were twitches of grass and weeds and leftover bulbs that shot up leaves but never flowered. The soil was dusty and dry. In the hands it was hard and unpromising.
We weeded that soil last year, then turned a shovel in it for the first time. A spume of dust rose when the lump of earth landed. But as we added nutrients and raked and smoothed the soil with our hands, we could feel it come alive again. We bent to work, planting impatiens and begonias and ferns. When I plunged my fingers into the earth and felt the soft, cool richness of it, I felt richness in myself, too. We did up pots of geraniums. We planted juniper. When we were done we stood side by side, hand in hand, surveying our work with satisfaction.
This woman and I had taken to the land again. We were one with it. We were planted. We were home.
Wind Is the Carrier of Song
. . .
WIND IS THE carrier of song. There’s a push from the west that sends cumulus banks over the top of the mountain, and in it is the plunge and roll of surf five hundred miles off. The wind in the reeds and grasses sings a higher register. It’s the whistle of river valleys and the descant sweep of air across the delta.
Days when the wind blows from the north there’s the keening pitch of the barren lands and the basso rumble of thunder in the peaks of a place where even the wind is lonely. Easterly flows bring the slicing soprano born in the unfinished aria of plain and prairie. The south is a contralto, warm, luxuriant, rising off distant beaches.
My people say the wind is Mother Earth brushing her hair. If you’ve ever seen the dance of branch and stalk and foliage, you’ll know it’s an apt image; the tresses of her, alive with motion, singing with spirit.
They also say the wind is eternal. Within it are borne the sighs and whispers of ancestors. Within it is the exhalation with which Creator blew life into the universe. To take the wind into us, to fill our lungs with it, is to hold time as a breath. Every living thing is joined in this way. We breathe each other. When I feel the wind on my face now, at age fifty-three, I feel time and story and song.
In 1955, when I was born, status Indians were still not allowed to vote in Canada, even though we’d volunteered by the thousands to fight for the country in two world wars. We were exempt from conscription, but we went anyway. Our soldiers returned as decorated heroes to a country that did not recognize our people as full citizens.
In the legislation that regulated our lives, the Indian Act, it stated that a person was defined as anyone other than an Indian. We were not people. Our humanity was dismissed. We needed to get permission to do things that our non-native neighbours took for granted.
It used to be that we were not allowed to gather in public. We were not allowed to hire a lawyer, organize politically or leave the reserve without permission. The houses we lived in were not ours. They were owned by the government, as was the land they sat on. We were paid, dutifully, the five dollars annually that was ours by treaty. We were supposed to get ammunition, too, but that never happened.
Things changed after 1960. We finally gained the right to vote, the right to free assembly, permission to organize political groups. We were able to travel to and fro without restriction. We’d become citizens.
All of this happened without my knowledge. I was like most other Canadians, oblivious to the events shaping the lives of my native neighbours. My adopted family did not see the need for me to mingle with my own people or learn my history. Like everyone, I got only the accepted version of Canada.
In 1969 a future prime minister penned the White Paper on Indian policy. Jean Chretien wanted to scuttle anything that allowed us to identify ourselves as valid nations of people. He wanted to repeal the Indian Act, dismantle the bureaucracy that maintained it, abrogate the treaties, pat us on the head and send us out into the mainstream. It’s called assimilation. He called it forward thinking.
I was thirteen, almost fourteen at the time, worried about girls, fitting in, girls, belonging, girls, wearing what was cool. No one told me what Chretien proposed. No one told me what it meant. No one told me how it might affect me. No one offered anything but a resolute marching on behind the flutter of the flag.
That White Paper changed everything. Instead of going away, my people became more present. We began showing up at universities and colleges in greater numbers. It wasn’t long before we had doctors, lawyers, teachers, journalists and politicians. Our political organizations gained strength and vision. We became a force for change in our country.
By 1973 I was on the road, busy trying to survive. Life was about the search for security, meaning and definition. Like everyone else I concentrated on myself and my needs. Only when I reconnected with my native family did I open my eyes. What I saw was a people empowered. I saw a people dedicated to showing that self-government was not something to be granted, it was something we were born with. I saw pride and focus and healing. I saw how much history I’d missed. My people’s and Canada’s.
The two were intertwined, and I undertook to unravel that history, to see each strand clearly. I understood how blind my self-centredness and self-concern had made me, how little I understood of the real story. In this, I was just like everyone else.
What I learned made me proud of native people, proud to be a part of the great, grand story that is my people’s history with Canada. What I learned, in the end, made me proud to be Canadian. We’ve endured it all together, and we’ve become stronger because of it, even if we don’t readily see that.
The wind is the carrier of song. When it blows across this mountain lake, it bears the essence of the land and its people. The essence of time past, time present, time future. It is our breath. Everyone’s. Ahow.
All the Mornings of the World
. . .
THERE ARE MOMENTS here when the light fills you. When the sun floods across the peak of the far mountain and throws everything into a veil of red, you can feel the light enter you, lift you, become you. On storm mornings when grey is the desolate cloak of the world, you can feel the light slip between your ribs, roil there, become your breath.
For a long time there was a shade of grey, a specific tone of light that
rattled me. It resided at the edges of particular mornings, and I could feel it like a chill, spearing its way inside me. I was always a little afraid of mornings, a little skittish at dawn for that reason.
The feeling was never constant. That was the perplexing thing. It happened only sometimes, surprising me with its intensity. I thought for a time that I was crazy. I’d heard of phengophobia, the fear of daylight, but that didn’t explain the woe that certain shade of light created in me. It was a purple feeling, sad, heavy and lonely.
Through therapy, I got to the root of it.
The feeling goes back to a day in 1958, when I was two. My family struggled with an awesome burden. They’d had the Indian stripped out of them by the residential schools, and they felt ignorant and powerless. They’d been reduced to spiritual beggary, kneeling at the feet of the nuns and priests to beseech direction and fulfillment. Direction came in the form of rigorous discipline, harsh punishment and instilled religious fear.
They were told their way of life was dead; the new world had no room for Indians, only for obedient servants of the white God. They were told that their beliefs were wrong, and that nothing in their worldview held any more. They were told that to live as savages was an abomination they needed to be cleansed of. They were washed in the blood of the Lamb, astringent, scouring and lethal.
In the bush where we lived, my family wrestled with demons. They drank to exorcise those demons, to mute the ache of whips and beatings and abuse.
One day in February of 1958, everything came to a head. There was a load of furs to be sold. We were camped across the bay from Minaki, a tiny railroad stop along the Winnipeg River, 150 miles north of Lake of the Woods. The adults left us kids at camp to head to town.
My sister Jane remembers that there was a good supply of firewood and food, so at first it was okay. But days passed. The firewood dwindled and the food was gone. I was crying from the cold and hunger. Still the adults didn’t return. As the days stretched on, the elder two kids, Jane and Jack, got worried. It was deep winter in the North, and without firewood we would freeze to death.
So one morning they piled Charles and me on a toboggan, covered us with furs and blankets, and pulled us across the snow and ice. It took hours to cross that bay. It was a grey morning, cold and bleak. My sister says it was only the effort of pulling us that kept her and Jack alive. I lay on my back on the toboggan with only my face stuck out in the freeze. My brother pressed up against me for warmth.
When we reached Minaki, my sister and brother hauled us up to the railroad station. The wind was bitter. We found a corner away from the cut of it and huddled there together. By the time the Ontario Provincial Police found us, we were nearly frozen. They turned us over to the care of the Children’s Aid Society.
The woe that was triggered by the pallid light of dawn was the despair of a toddler, abandoned in the bush. It was the cry of a child, helpless, hungry and afraid. It was the grief of a separation never understood, never explained and never resolved. When I touched it again, I wept.
My family has never acknowledged the truth, and they never will: they got drunk and forgot about us. Owning that hurts too much, and dealing with hurt was not something they were taught in those schools supposedly meant to save them.
Me? I wake up now to the glory of all the mornings of the world. The seamless blend of light and air lifts me up, healing me.
The Forest, Not the Trees
. . .
IN THE MOUNTAINS just before sunrise, the world is an ashen place. Trees loom in the near distance like phantom sentinels. There are bears about. The berry bushes are bent and torn by their feeding. A few careless neighbours have had their garbage strewn about their yards. It’s a bear’s world now—all shadow and quiet and solitude.
In this vapid light things lose definition. Only the road jutting through it gives the bush perspective. Otherwise, it’s thick and tangled, unvanquished.
I used to fear the bush. That’s a hard thing to say when you’re Indian. But there was a time when the forest at night or in the gloom of pre-dawn terrified me. Vague terrors hunkered in the stillness. It took years to understand why.
When I was very young, our family home was mostly a canvas army tent held up by spruce poles. Boughs lined the floor. As a baby, I was swaddled in a cradleboard with moss and cedar. My siblings watched over me when the adults were away. My protectors were my older sister, Jane, and my eldest brother, Jack. My brother Charles was only two years older than me, a toddler himself. Our grandmother was busy taking care of the camp or chasing after our older cousins. So we were a unit, the four of us kids.
It should have been idyllic. But it wasn’t.
My family members were filled with bitterness from their residential school experiences, and that unhealed energy erupted often in drunkenness and violence. When we were adults, my sister told me how she used to carry me when the four of us went to hide in the bush at night, while the adults raged and drank and fought at the nearby fire. In the mornings we’d creep out of the bush and return to the camp to eat and drink.
My father was an outsider. He was an Ojibway from Pine Falls, Manitoba, and because he was perceived to be alien he was hated by my mother’s family. They beat him up when he came around, chased him off. We four kids were tarred with the same brush. We were terrorized. My brother Jack fought back as best he could, but he was just a boy. Jane watched over Charles and me, sneaking us out of camp whenever it looked like things were about to boil over again. But she couldn’t protect us all the time.
One day my aunt Elizabeth broke my left arm and shoulder by jumping on me as I swung in a moosehide harness between two trees. I wasn’t yet a year old. When I was a little older, she took me out into the bush alone. Jane followed her secretly, and she watched in helpless horror as my aunt tied me down and whipped me with tree branches until I was raw.
My uncle Charlie tried to drown Charles and me. He took us by the throats and held our heads underwater, bringing us up gasping and crying before ducking us down again. He was holding us down hard when another Ojibway man who happened to be passing by knocked my uncle down and stopped him.
There were other horrors to be endured, but those two marked me for life. My left arm is still damaged, and I still can’t swim with my head submersed.
Those experiences made me afraid of the bush. I was fine in the daytime, but when night fell and darkness reigned, my terrors returned. I was small again, helpless, beaten and afraid.
I’m almost fifty-three now, and I’m no longer afraid of the bush at night. Therapists and counsellors talked me through those terrors and the lingering trauma they caused. My family still suffers. They never talk about those days. They choose to live in the belief that sufficient time passing makes crimes irrelevant. But it doesn’t.
I have post-traumatic stress disorder from the events of those days, and things still trigger me. I still wrestle with childlike reactions to perceived threats, sudden changes and the feel of unsafe territory. I still work to overcome those fears, to heal myself, to embrace the forgiveness that allows healing to happen.
See, I forgave my family a while back. I understand that they are not to blame for the institutional pain that was inflicted on them. They are not to blame for the effects of history.
In the light of each new day we are given justice in equal measure, to dispense at our will, and its root is forgiveness. In the light of each new day all things are in balance. Harmony comes when you can see the forest, not the trees.
Living Legends
. . .
TODAY THE DOG and I stopped to inspect the heavily laden branches of a mountain ash tree. The red berries were swollen and plump. The branches were bowed under their weight, and we could see the bears would come to feed very shortly. The splotches of red were magnificent against the green.
The berries were not uniform in shape. Some were stretched into funnels. Others were oblong, elliptical or round as balls. Some were clumped together, while other
s hung alone from the branches like commas, punctuation in the story of that tree. Seeing them, I remembered the tale of the mountain ash.
In the Long Ago Time a winter descended that was like no other. The cold crept under the robes of the people like fingers and held their wigwams in a fierce grip. The snow piled higher than ever before. In the darkness, as their fires ebbed, people could hear the frozen popping of the trees and the eerie stillness that followed. Nothing moved in that great petrified world.
Hunting became difficult. Everywhere creatures sought deep shelter from the cold, and hunters returned from their journeys ice-covered, shivering and empty-handed. The people had made do with their stores from the summer before, but there was worry in the camps as the cold seemed to settle upon the land. They needed fresh meat to supplement their dwindling supplies.
But soon it was impossible to walk for more than a few minutes without freezing. Everyone kept to their wigwams, praying for an end to the cold. The wind howled mightily through those long, terrible nights, and there was talk of Windigos and supernatural monsters eager to feast on the shrivelled corpses of the people.
Then, one day, the people emerged to a morning bright and calm. It was still horribly cold, but the arctic wind had ceased. All around them, though, lay the bodies of animals who’d frozen in the night. Rabbits, foxes, marten, skunks and birds. The people wept at this calamity, and they asked their Wise Ones what to do.
The teachers told them to take the bodies of the fallen animals to the tree that served them best. Back then, the people fashioned their bows and arrows from the wood of the mountain ash. Their survival depended on that tree. The elders told them to take a bead of blood from each of the animals and drop it on the branches of the mountain ash.
One Native Life Page 15