One Native Life (11 page)
But the science of the earth is a different creature from the science of numbers and theorems. It’s a discipline of coexistence. It’s the knowledge and acceptance of the mystery that surrounds us—and the awareness that allowing it to remain a mystery, celebrating it rather than trying to unravel it, engenders humility and a keen sense of the spiritual.
My mother is the best bannock baker going. When her bread comes out of the oven every Indian in the bush comes running. Her bannock rises elegantly. It is spongy and soft and tastes golden, like the colour of the crust. With jam or a thick smear of lard, washed down with strong black tea, there’s nothing like it in the world.
She gave me some on my first visit home. To me it tasted of reconnection, warm and welcoming and oddly familiar. It still does, actually. I wanted to learn to bake it just like she did. She laughed when I told her. To my mother’s way of thinking, the thinking of a bush-raised woman, men didn’t bake. But I was insistent, and she undertook to teach me.
I’d been raised with the Western science that calls for precise measurements and a decisive experimental process. I clung to the security of numbers. But what my mother taught me that day had nothing to do with grams or ounces, teaspoons or cups. Instead, she told me to take a couple handfuls of flour, a splat of lard, a splotch of baking powder and a nip of salt. Then to swash it with milk or water, pat it about until it felt warm and soft, and bake it until it looked good. Once it was out of the oven you gave it an earnest slap to settle it and left it on the counter to cool. The splotch, splat, nip and slap process was odd— but it worked.
That first bannock was glorious. I watched it rise like a little kid would, with my face pressed to the glass. When it cooled enough to cut I sheared off enough for the two of us. It was the first Indian thing I’d ever done. It was the first time in my life I could remember receiving Indian teaching, and it was the first time I had physically expressed myself as an Indian person. It was unforgettable.
When I tasted it I smiled. My mother was a good teacher, and the texture of that first Indian bread was sublime. With marmalade and butter melted into it, my bannock was a rip-roaring success. We shared it with my stepfather and uncles, who were waiting patiently in the living room. Watching the men of my lost family enjoy a tribal thing that I had created was as poignant a moment as I’ve ever had.
I still bake my bannock the same way. Friends marvel at my non-methodical manner at the stove. I laugh and tell them it’s native science, and it is.
When I bake bannock I feel Ojibway. The process evokes images of bush life, an open fire, a lump of dough on a stick and a circle of people gathered in community to share fresh bread. Knowing that I hold an Ojibway skill, a part of our science, instills pride in me. And when the plate is passed around to the usual lip-smacking, finger-licking compliments from non-native friends, I smile to think that our Indian science is being shared.
Sure, it’s an easy thing, something a child could do, but passing it forward is what matters. Our cultural survival depends on it. There will always be someone seeking to recognize themselves in the sure small ways we do things. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that out.
The Birth and Death of Super Injun
. . .
I GOT MY
first writing job in 1979, as a reporter for a now defunct newsmagazine called
New Breed
based in Regina, Saskatchewan.
I lied to get that job. I was almost twenty-four by then, and directionless. When I saw the job advertised on the board at the Native Employment Centre, I wanted it right away. I loved words and stories, and I carried a dream of writing, though I did not bear the knowledge of how to make that happen. This job could mark my entry.
It also meant working with my people. I wasn’t Metis or non-status, but being Aboriginal seemed enough at the time. So I lied. I told the editor, John Cuthand, that I had graduated from a two-year journalism program in Ontario and I was on the road searching for a place to settle. That was on a Wednesday. He was busy, so he told me to return on Monday to do a couple of rewrites for him.
I was ecstatic but scared. So I did what I always did when life confounded me—I went to the library. I asked the librarian for all the books she had on journalism and reporting. For five days, I sat there reading and doing writing exercises. I learned about journalistic style and ethics and what editors looked for in news copy. From opening to closing I sat in the library writing and rewriting. I stoked the fire of my desire with every scribbled page.
When Monday came I appeared on time and was ushered into the back with a handful of newspaper stories from mainstream papers. John sat me at a typewriter and asked me to milk them down to a few hundred words apiece. I’d failed typing in high school, so I sat and pecked out one letter at a time. It took me an hour, but I finished the assignment.
John hired me on the strength of my writing.
That job introduced me to the volatile world of native politics in the late 1970s. The constitutional reform that would entrench our rights was still three years off, and governments regarded us as problems rather than as citizens. There was a lot of unnecessary wrangling over the delivery details of rights and programs most Canadians took for granted.
As a reporter I saw dire poverty up close and personal. I saw people who’d been damaged by the forward thrust of history fighting to maintain an identity in the thick flow of change around them. I saw young people desperate for a cultural linchpin and elders, stately and graceful, reduced to being old and ignored. I saw how cruelly a nation could forget one of its founding peoples.
The stories I wrote for
New Breed
awakened me politically. This was my first hands-on introduction to the lives of my people. I felt the flames of identity being fanned to life within me. Not only was I becoming a writer, I was becoming an Indian. But politics does not nurture identity, because rhetoric is not teaching. I absorbed all the things I saw and heard around me, and because I craved so much to present myself as a native person I became strident and irritatingly vocal.
I was a quick study, and I learned well. The questions I asked as a reporter grew sharper, more pointed and challenging, especially to native politicians. One day at a press conference I was pursuing an issue, pointing and gesturing, moralizing and editorializing. One of the leaders I was going after shook his head and said, “It’s like being attacked by Super Injun.”
Everyone laughed, and I was horribly embarrassed. But there was a man there that day named John Rock Thunder. He was an elder and a teacher, and when he approached me later he did it so skillfully that I was surprised to find myself alone with him in a small area off to the side of the conference room.
I had it all wrong, he said. He pointed to my beaded vest, moccasins, long hair and turquoise rings. Then he pointed to my heart.
“You want to be the ultimate Indian,” he said. “But you have to start from the inside.”
He went on to tell me that I had been created in a specific order. I was created to be first a human being, then a male, then an Ojibway Indian. I needed to learn how to be a good human being. In the process of that, I would learn how to be a good man. And through that process, I would discover I had been graced all along with being a good Indian.
It can’t work any other way, he said. By trying to be the ultimate Indian, I was missing the most important part of the journey, the human part. Slow down, he said. Be gentle with yourself.
I gave up trying to be Super Injun that day. I began to seek out ceremonies and teachings that would nurture my humanity. I struggled with drink and the effects of the deeply buried hurts of my childhood, and even though that sometimes took me from the path, I never forgot what John Rock Thunder said.
I’m still learning to be a good Indian. But that’s because I’m still learning to be a good human being and a good man. Politics could never teach me that.
. . .
THERE ARE TIMES
when something as simple as the rain that freckles slate grey water can take me back to it—that feeling I remember from my boyhood when the ragged line of trees against the sky filled me with a loneliness that had nothing to do with loss. The land sometimes carries an emptiness you feel in you like the breeze.
It’s not a sad feeling. Rather it’s a song I learned by rote in the tramp of my young feet through the rough and tangle of the bush that shaped me. I come to the land the same way still, expectant, awake to the promise of territories beyond the horizon, undiscovered and wild. All those years in cities never took away that feeling of tremendous awe.
When I rejoined my native family after twenty years, it was the land that framed our reconnection. It was a balm for the awkwardness of strangers who bore the same blood and history and wounds.
It wasn’t easy coming back. I had little of the Ojibway left on me and they had no experience with the urban world I knew. But all of us felt a kinship with the territory we called our home, and it was there, among the muskeg, rock and spruce of the northern land, that my family found a way to scrabble past our differences.
We went camping the second summer I was home. We drove to Silver Lake on the gravel road that leads to Grassy Narrows and found a place above a wide sweep of beach.
There were five of us: my uncle Archie, my mother, my stepfather, my brother Charles and me.
I watched as they erected their canvas tent, cut saplings with an axe for the frame, bound the frame with long strips of bark and lined the floor with cedar boughs. When I put up the small orange hump of nylon that was my pack tent, they laughed.
As we stood on the beach, my uncle told us stories about the lake and the land across the bay from where we stood. He told us about the portages the people used according to the season, moose or deer or fish drawing them at different times. He’d learned those routes as a boy, he said, and he could find his way from there to White-dog, a hundred miles away.
My brother and I took off in the canoe to find the first portage for ourselves. It was a calm, perfect afternoon and the paddling was easy. We talked some, but mostly we concentrated on looking for the landmarks my uncle had described. We found the portage without a problem. We hauled our canoe up and over the half-mile distance to a long narrow lake edged with wild rice. At the far end we found the stone marker for the next portage. This one was shorter and steeper. The lake we came onto was an almost perfect bowl, encircled by walls of pink granite where eagles nested. We paddled slowly around that lake, neither of us inclined to talk.
There were no vapour trails above us, no drone of airplanes. We were back in the bush five miles or more, and there were no outboard motors to be heard. There was only the land, the symphony of it, the orchestral manoeuvres of wind and rock and sky. I could feel the presence of my people, the staunch heart of them beating here for millennia, and I felt joined to them.
We paddled back as evening fell. Both of us were touched by the opportunity to experience history, and we talked about how it must have felt in pre-settlement times to make this same paddle back to a camp set up above the beach. We could smell woodsmoke as we approached, and we saw the fire burning in the middle of our camp.
It was an idyllic scene, the Ojibway world unchanged, unaffected. But when we beached the canoe and walked to the camp, we found the others in lawn chairs, watching a ball game on a battery-operated television.
I laugh about it now, that collision of cultures, but back then it confused me. I was so desperate to reconnect, so needy for definition that the cultural anachronism was jarring. I wanted my people to be as tribal as I dreamed them. But time and circumstances had made that impossible.
All Canadians have felt time disrupt them. Everyone has seen the culture they sprang from altered and rearranged into a curious mélange of old and new. So the country between us is not strange. We all carry a yearning for simpler, truer times. We all crave a reaffirmation of our place here, to hear the voices of our people singing on the land.
. . .
I WAS TWENTY-FOUR
when the first Ojibway word rolled off my tongue. It felt round and rolling, not like the spiky sound of English with all its hard-edged consonants. When I spoke that word aloud, I felt as if I’d truly spoken for the first time in my life.
That first word opened the door to my culture. When I spoke it I stepped over the threshold into a new way of understanding myself and my place in the world. Until then I had been like a guest in my own life, standing around waiting for someone to explain things for me. That one word made me an inhabitant.
It was
peendigaen.
Come in.
Peendigaen,
spoken with an outstretched hand and a rolling of the wrist. A beckoning. Come in. Welcome. This is where you belong. I had never encountered an English word with such resonance.
I felt awkward speaking Ojibway at first. There’s a softness to the language that’s off-putting when you first begin. It’s almost as if timelessness had a vocabulary. But with each enunciation that one word gained strength, clarity. I had the sensation I was speaking a language that had existed for longer than any the world had ever known. The feeling of Ojibway in my throat was permanence. I stood on unknown territory whose sweep was compelling.
Peendigaen.
Come in. With that one word, I walked fully into the world of my people.
I learned more words after that. Then I struggled to put whole sentences together. I made a lot of mistakes. I was used to English structure, and I created sentences that were awkward and wrong. People laughed when they heard me, and I understood cultural embarrassment. It made me feel like quitting, as if staying with English could spare me the laughter of my people.
Then I heard a wise woman talk at a conference. She spoke of being removed from her culture, unplugged from it and set aside like an old toaster. But she remained a toaster, she said, and the day came when someone plugged her back in and the electricity flowed. She became functional again, and the tool of her reawakening was her language.