One Native Life (16 page)
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.
. . .
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.
. . .
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.
. . .
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.
A sweat lodge, in its simplest sense, is a sacred edifice. It’s shaped like a womb, and when you strip yourself down and crawl into it on your hands and knees, you return yourself to the innocence in which you were born. You return yourself to genuine humility. The darkness you sit in is a symbol of your unknowing, and the rocks glowing in the pit represent eternal, elemental truth.
It’s not a ceremony to be taken lightly. It’s not a sauna. It’s not some charming throwback. Instead, it’s a gateway to the truths within you and a path to the spiritual truths that govern the universe. It’s a place of prayer, of sacrifice, of enduring, of healing and if you’re fortunate, of insight.
An elder I had worked with previously arrived late one evening. He asked if I would be his helper, and I agreed. When the sun came up we began to build his lodge. He was patient and generous, taking his time in teaching me the traditional protocols of building a sweat lodge. I was deeply honoured. While we worked, he told me stories and talked about how the ceremony had evolved for the northern Ojibway.
When we were finished he asked me to be his firekeeper.
In the traditional way, acting as a firekeeper is an honoured role. You build the fire that heats the rocks used in the ceremony. Your prayers around that fire are the first prayers in the process. You prepare the ritual. You take care of everything so that the teacher can focus, and when the time comes you watch over the participants. You stand guard outside that lodge while the ceremony runs, attentive, ready to serve, and you pray along with the petitioners in the lodge.
Ernie liked a hot ceremony. His lodges asked the utmost of participants, and the heat in them was tremendous. Quite often people could not endure it and surrendered long before the usual four rounds of prayer and song and talk.
They would crawl out of the lodge when I opened the door, weak, spent and vulnerable. My job was to tend to them.
They were German, Finnish, English, French, Ojibway, Cree, Metis and Algonquin. But stretched out on the ground, struggling for breath, crying, ashamed, perhaps, they were just people, human beings in need of care. I cradled heads and offered water. I applied cool cloths. I spoke softly and encouragingly. I helped people stand and walked them to shade.
I did that for four days, and at the end, when there was just Ernie and me, praying and singing in the lodge, I offered thanks for that incredible privilege.
Up until then I had been adamant that native things stay native things. I had fought so hard to reclaim the displaced parts of myself that I believed no one else had a right to the things that define and sustain us. Our spirituality was
our
spirituality. Being a firekeeper taught me different.
We are all travellers searching for the comfort of a fire in the night. We are all in need of a place of prayer, of solace, of unity. Our fire burns bright enough for everyone.
. . .
THERE IS
a medicine bowl in our living room. Tobacco, sage, sweetgrass and cedar are mixed together in that bowl for prayer and blessings. With the touch of a flame, smoke climbs and billows around us and, when I close my eyes to pass it over my body, time folds in upon itself, transports me to a time beyond time. Some days I can’t remember how I lived without it, this easy ceremony.
I went to a Salvation Army church when I was a small kid. Sunday school seemed to fit me, and I was eager to return every week. The stories were captivating, and I loved to sing. We learned all the big-beat hymns like “Jesus Loves Me,” “This Little Light of Mine” and “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Something in the music called to me, and I responded.
When I was adopted, I was peeled away from that influence. I learned Presbyterian hymns after that, staid and proper and stern. I felt lonely for the lilt of the Army tunes. The Presbyterian canon meant strict regimentation in study, work and daily life. There was no room for choral glee.