One Native Life (19 page)
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.
. . .
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.
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. 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.
. . .
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.