One Native Life

by Richard Wagamese

  People prayed over that ritual. They beseeched Great Spirit for a teaching, for a way of knowing that would guide them. They made offerings of tobacco. They sang songs in honour of the deep cold. And the next day the cold abated. When the hunters went out to seek food, they saw that the blood of the animals had turned into bright red berries on the mountain ash. Birds and other creatures were feeding on them. From then on, whenever a hard winter was on the way, the mountain ash bore more berries than usual, and the people could prepare.

  According to the old story, the plentiful berries on the ash tree the dog and I stopped beside meant that I’d have to lay in lots of firewood and make sure the cabin was prepared for a long chill. When the Storytelling Moons of winter come, we’ll need full cupboards and a good supply of books and music, the other things we require for our survival. The mountain ash berries were telling us that.

  Playing with Your Eyes Closed

  . . .

  THE STARS ARE FLUNG across the heavens tonight like seeds of light. As they wink and glimmer in their bed of darkness, I can feel that ancient light fall upon my face.

  I had a philosopher friend once who told me the root of the word “universe.” Universe, he said, was actually two words in the original Greek. The first part, uni, meant one, and the second part, versa, meant song. One song. Standing here with my face pressed upwards, I can feel the hymnal pulse of that.

  My love for music has always sustained me. Over the years, in the soundtrack of my life, there have been cellos in moments sublime and pure, French horns and clarinets in times when life was joyous, blue notes in the lesser times, moody piano rolls in periods of reflection. There’s a song for every memory.

  I always wanted to play music, too. I wanted to recreate the fabulous sounds I heard in my head and felt in my hips and my soul. There was a kid named Brian Walsh in the eighth grade who played guitar and sang, and when he wowed everyone at the talent show, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. But when I asked for a guitar I was laughed at, told I couldn’t carry a tune in a pail and had no rhythm. It was ridiculous, they said, to even try.

  But the desire remained. Guitar players became my focus. At live concerts I watched them closely. When I listened to records I sometimes sat in the dark and followed the guitar parts with my hands. I could see myself playing, imagine myself creating music and enjoying the freedom that it represented.

  I finally got a guitar when I was in my late forties. Those first chords were hard. My fingers ached and my wrist got sore. I fumbled about a lot, but as soon as I strummed a clean E chord and heard the root note of the blues pressed out through my fingers, I was hooked.

  I spent hours every day teaching myself to play. I read books, watched videos, joined Internet guitar groups and downloaded the songs I wanted to learn. I put my ear close to the speakers and listened intently, trying to unlock the secret to making music happen. I could feel the music in me, and more and more I reached for that feeling through my hands.

  But that childhood judgement haunted me. I doubted my new ability, doubted the possibility of a tuneless, rhythmless me ever being able to play. I got into the habit of watching my fingers, hunching over the guitar as they moved through chord progressions and runs and scales. I figured that if I watched my hands closely enough, I could force them to make the right moves.

  After about a year of this, I played for a friend. He sat and listened, and when I was finished he nodded and clapped me on the back for a good job. He was a guitar player himself, so his praise was good medicine.

  Then he told me to play the same thing with my eyes closed. I was stunned by what followed. Even though I’d played that song hundreds of times before, I fumbled it badly. It was unrecognizable as the song I’d learned.

  “You need to learn to play without watching your hands,” he told me. “You need to trust the music that’s in you. When you watch your hands, you’re not making music. You’re only making sounds. Music needs to be free to be music.”

  I became a better guitar player after that. Learning to play without watching my hands lent my music a grace it never had before. I’m no professional, but I can carry a tune and the music happens naturally.

  Life’s like that, really. When you bend into it deliberately, controlling every move you make, it’s hard to find the flow. You can learn the right moves, follow the progression accurately, but there’s no spontaneous joy in it, no glee.

  There’s a song in all of us. On nights when the stars cajole you, it strains against your ribs and throat. The trick is to trust it. Close your eyes, feel it there and let it out.

  Universe. One song. Your music joined with the music of everything.

  What It Comes to Mean

  . . .

  THERE ARE MORNINGS here when the quiet fills you. You walk the line of lake, cautiously not wanting to break the spell of it. There’s mist on the water, and it drifts up off the rock, enveloping you.

  In this stillness you swear you can hear the sounds of drums on distant hills. You close your eyes, and in the push of breeze there’s the wail and chant of singers. This fusty shoreline holds in its smell something ancient, eternal, vast. You need only breathe that smell into you to become it.

  There’s nothing in your experience to match this deliberate taking in. You who have fought so hard to find a place here, a definition beyond what the skin implies, have never encountered such frank acceptance of being. Against the push of land, the sweep of it, you fit easily, like another shoot of grass. There’s the sense in you that this is what it means to be Indian.

  They’ve called you many things in your time on this earth. You’ve been savage, red man, First Person, Aboriginal, native, indigenous, an original inhabitant. You’ve been labelled, tagged, defined, categorized, filed and absorbed; analyzed, probed, studied, examined, inspected and researched. Never have they called you by your name.

  When you were young, they called you Itchybum. On those long purple summer evenings, the game was Cowboys and Indians, except for them you were an Itchybum. An Itchybum was a joke, a cartoon in their minds, because that was all they knew. So you ran, hightailed it, really, through the backyards of your boyhood, pursued by miniature heroes intent on bagging you.

  In the schools they sent you to, they called you “special needs.” They called you slow, awkward and remedial because of the shyness born of displacement. In the home where they placed you, you were called “adopted.” No one ever translated that for you. They never explained the intent of it, never let you know that it means, plainly, to be accepted. All you came to know was that it meant being reassembled, rearranged, shaped into an image your skin made impossible.

  Once when a new cousin asked you at a gathering, “Did you used to be an Indian?” they laughed, and you didn’t know what to say.

  At school and in your neighbourhood you were a wagon burner, a squaw hopper, a bush bunny, a dirty teepee creeper and sometimes, because they didn’t know what to make of you, a chink. You didn’t know how to react. Shame made you keep those names to yourself, to feel the hurt like a bruise and say nothing.

  On the streets you ran to they called you a lazy, shiftless, stupid, drunken, welfare bum. They expected failure of you and, when you tried to keep pace, to learn, express and grow, they called you uppity, confused and immature. You need to learn your place, they said, but they never offered to help you find it.

  In the shops, foundries and camps where you went to work, they called you Jack pine nigger. In the fights and brawls that came of that, you learned scrapping was exactly what they expected. It anchored their treatment of you, made it valid. Again, you did not know what to say.

  You learned that labels have weight. You learned to drink so that you wouldn’t have to carry those labels or feel them stuck in you like arrows. And in your drunken stumble the shutters on their homes snapped closed, because you’d become exactly what they expected.

  When you found your people you became Ojibway. You became Anishinabe. You became S
turgeon Clan. You became Wagamese again, and in that name was a recognition of being that felt like a balm on the rawness where they’d scraped the Indian away. Ojibway. It resonated in you. It was a label that held the promise of discovery, of homecoming, of reclamation and rejuvenation.

  Oh, you struggled to understand its meaning. Applied to your life it was another burden, a tag you felt you had to earn. Everything you chose became Indian. Everything you allowed into your world was native. When the tag sometimes did not adhere, you did not know what to say.

  You were created to be three things, the Wise Ones in your circles told you then. You were created to be a male, an Ojibway, a human being. That is the truth of you, Creator’s gift to you, never to be taken away. One truth that carries within it many truths. Since then you’ve learned to look for those truths wherever they might be: in culture, philosophy, tradition, books, songs, stories, ceremony, ritual and spirituality.

  Standing in the mist off the water, feeling the land inhabit you, you understand now that what it means, this word “Indian,” is life. Life, with all its wrong turns, poor choices, mistakes, sins, sorrows, triumphs and small glories. Accepting that, wearing it loose as an old blanket, is what gives you grace, what grants you identity.

  You fit here. You belong. No matter what they call you.

  Walking the Territory

  . . .

  THESE ARE THE DAYS of summer’s end. Above the mountains clouds are a heavy grey, ominous with snow that’s a mere month away. There’s a washed-out feeling to the blue sky now, and the jays and other winter birds have begun to peck about the yard. Even loon calls in the thick purple night are urgent now. Autumn moons. Time to fly.

  The morning air bears a nip as the dog trots back from her foray in the trees, heaving fogs of breath. Mist shrouds the lake. The black water speaks of ice and the deep glacial dark of winter. Geese flap down the cleft of lake, angling south, and beavers fatten up on saplings near the shore.

  These are the days of melancholy, the air chilled and bruised. As you walk the territory of your living, you’re saddened some by the dimming of the light but thrilled at the power of change everywhere around you.

  In the autumn of 1986 I walked the northern territory where I was born. My uncle had told me where our camps used to be, and I rented a boat and motor and headed down the Winnipeg River. It was an important trip for me. I’d been reconnected with my native family for eight years by then, but I had no sense of my beginnings, and I wanted to see where it had all started. There was something in those territories I needed. Exactly what that was I didn’t know. I only knew that I needed to walk there.

  The summer boaters had all disappeared by that time. There was only me on the water. Powering down the length of the river, I was awed by the incredible combination of fullness and emptiness. The land had a haunting quality. Mysterious secrets lurked in the trees and rocks and bog.

  The water was dark, with a bottomless feel. I sensed the presence of big muskies and sturgeons and pike no farther away than the length of an oar. The day was overcast, with some breaks in the cover when the sun poked through. It illuminated rapids and swells and eddies, so that the spume of them glistened like frost against the hard black of the river’s muscle.

  When I found the cove across the bay from Minaki, I nosed the boat into it. There was only the ripple of the water and the wind in the trees. Everything else was silent. I cut the engine and allowed the boat to drift in to the thin gravelled stretch of beach. The land seemed to slip by, and there was the sense of time bending in upon itself.

  No one had been there for some time. That was obvious from the overgrowth on the narrow trail that wound up from the beach. The trailhead was barely discernible. Everywhere there were windfall trees and exuberant bursts of bracken and bramble and moss and lichen. I had never experienced such stillness.

  I didn’t know where to look for the campsite, so I settled into a steady prowling. The ground was rocky and hard to navigate. But I managed to cover a lot of it. The deeper I walked into the bush, the more I got the feeling of time suspended. Only my footfalls on the rock and twigs sounded in that thick unmoving air.

  I could feel the land around me. There were no edges to it, no limits, no borders. I stood in the middle of its relentless unfurling, alone, vulnerable, humbled by its magnitude.

  I walked for hours. Now and then I’d stop somewhere, sit against a tree and look around. Sometimes I just stood in the forest and felt its quiet power, its pervasive upwards thrust. I never did locate the old campsite, but I found something much more valuable. As I stood in that chill autumnal light, seeing my breath float into the dimness, I found the essence of my Ojibway self.

  In the shadow and break of the land, I could imagine my people living. I could sense the discipline they needed to survive out here. I could sense the fortitude, the strength of will, the grit and determination the land asked of them. And I could sense the deep spirituality that it engendered, feel it like an ember from those tribal fires glowing at my core.

  I boated later to other spots my uncle had suggested. On each trip to the place my history began, I gleaned more from the land. I never found a physical clue of my beginnings, but the fundamental psychic connection I made has never left me.

  I am and will always be Ojibway. Anishinabeg. It is the identity Creator graced me with. What I become in this world is framed forever by that definition, just as it is rooted in the land from which I sprang. As long as there is the land there will always be a home for me, a place my soul can wrap about itself.

  When we speak of land claims and treaty rights, this is what we mean. This way of returning to a place where history is a feeling, a spiritual presence that empowers, enables and sustains us. A point of contact with Creator. A prayer and a realization. When you walk the territory of your being, the truth is everywhere around you.