A Quality of Light (34 page)

“Sometimes I don’t want to grow up, Johnny.”

He nodded. “Yeah. It’s a bummer. Here we are almost high-school
grad-you-eights,”
he slurred in a country bumpkin vernacular.

I laughed. “Doesn’t seem like it. I saw Alvin Giles the other day and I could look right into his eyes. Wasn’t all that long ago all I could see was his belt loops.”

“Yeah, I know. I went over to the old school one night last week. Ran the base paths on the diamond we first played on.
Remember how it seemed like a huge distance from first to second? I ran it in about five strides. Funny, eh? Time and distance? How they shrink each other? Ever wonder what would have happened if we hadn’t met or even if we hadda met and didn’t like each other?”

“Nah. We were supposed to meet, Johnny,” I said with certainty.

“Yeah. I guess. So why are we here?”

“I gotta tell you what I’ve decided. About my life. What I’m gonna do. Where I’m gonna go.”

“You know all that?”

“Yeah. The first part, anyway. I’m going to Bible college in Red Deer, Alberta, and Pastor Chuck and I are checking out a church for me to get ordained in if I want to preach when I’m finished. I’m leaving right after graduation. What do you think?” I asked, eager for his feedback.

“What do I
think?”
he said, his eyes burning and his voice rising. “Haven’t you learned anything all this time you’ve been spending on the Rez? Haven’t they taught you anything about reality?”

I put my hands on the rock to steady myself. “Johnny, all I’ve been learning up there has been about reality. That’s how I know this decision is the right one.”

“According to your mother, your father, your esteemed church leader,” he spat. “What about your elder? What does she think about all this?”

“She thinks it’s good. And no, it’s not according to them. It’s according to me.”

He glared at me. “Well, then, you
really
wanna know what I think?”

“Yeah.”

“I
think
you’re a fucking
apple,”
he said, standing abruptly. “You don’t even know what that is, do you?”

“No. What is it?”

“I figured you’d latch right onto it. Your church being so heavy with the metaphors and all. Think about it, Josh. An apple? It’s red on the outside and white on the inside. What does that tell you?”

“You think I’m bullshit.”

“You’ve been bullshit from day one. All this Jacqueline told me this and Jacqueline told me that. All this now I know where I came from shit you been spewing for the last two years. You haven’t got a clue where you came from. If you did you wouldn’t be heading into an institution that’s been
killing your people for years!”

“What are you talking about? The church has always been there to help people.”

“Yeah, right. You ever heard of residential schools? You ever heard about outlawing spiritual practices? How can you outlaw what’s spiritual, Josh? Ever heard of any of that?”

“No.”

“No,” he mimicked, with a whine. “Your problem is you’re still stuck in the romantic idea of what it means to be an Indian.”

“And you’re a realist?”

“Yeah. I’m a fuckin’ realist. You’ve still got the blinders on, Josh. You’re still a cultural bumpkin, man. You haven’t learned anything.”

“And you have?”

“Yeah, I have.”

“From where?”

“I’ll tell you where. From
real
Indians, Josh. Real Indians. The ones who are doing something about all the shit that’s come down in five hundred years. The ones who recognize it as shit. The ones who don’t wanna swim around in it any more. I’m learning from
warriors.
And from books. You ever read
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee?
You ever heard of Wounded Knee?”

“No.”

“Figured. Well,
Bury My Heart
tells the truth, pal. The
truth.
It talks about brutality, murder, rape, theft, kidnapping, brainwashing, misappropriation and denunciation. The real principles this country was founded on, Josh, not the
one nation sea to sea
horse-shit the textbooks give us.
Bury My Heart
is about real history. It’s about the real nature of the whiteman.”

“Johnny, you’re a whiteman.”

“Fuck you.”

“What?”

“I said
fuck you!
You’re the fuckin’ whiteman, Josh!” he shouted, jamming me in the chest with his finger.

“I’m an Ojibway,” I said firmly.

“Then why don’t you fuckin’ act like it? Why don’t you learn about your own religion? Your own spirituality? Your own ceremonies? It’s not like you don’t have a choice here. You’re a man. You’re a warrior.”

“That’s right.”

“What?”

“You’re right. I am a warrior. Don’t you see what I’m trying to say here? I’m going because it’s what I
believe
, what I
choose
to believe. I choose. It’s not Pastor Chuck, it’s not my mother or my father, not Jacqueline, not you, not the honor of the people. It’s me. I was created to be me. Everything that’s happened to me in my life has been the grace of God helping me become who I was created to be. Sure, Jacqueline has helped me. Sure, I’ve been to the sweat lodge, smoked the pipe in ceremony, made offerings. Sure, I’m learning the Anishanabek way. But you know what? You know what the very bottom line of that way is, Johnny? The bottom line you won’t find in any books?”

I looked away across the wide sweep of land. What I was about to share was something I’d never expressed to anyone. It had all existed until that precise moment as fragments, shards of emotion, thoughts and awarenesses, the scree and talus of a Brobdingnagian scarp of faith that was the backbone of my life. I thought carefully. It was essential to say it right. For him. For me. When I faced him again he’d lost the whiteness of anger, although it remained, grave, pensive, on guard.

“The most fundamental human right in the universe,” I said measuredly, “is the right to know who you are — Indian, white, black, yellow. We all come into life bearing the right to know who we are. No one has the right to keep you from the constant process of discovering yourself. No one knows when we’re born what the Creator has in mind for us. Crazy Horse’s mother didn’t know who she had crawling around the floor of her teepee. Sitting Bull’s
mother didn’t know. Louis Riel’s mother didn’t know. My mother didn’t know. Neither of them.

“When my parents adopted me and began teaching me their ethics, beliefs and ideals, they were helping to shape me, helping me to
become.
But when they didn’t recognize that I needed my Indian sense of myself as well as theirs, they were actually denying me that human right. As much as they loved me and sought to protect and nurture me, they were denying my God-given right to know who I was. When they recognized that, they allowed me to search for that Indian self, despite fearing that I’d leave them, despite the fear that I’d resent them and walk away, despite the fear that I’d come to deny all they taught me. They allowed me that fundamental human right. They offered me choice,” I continued as he gazed levelly at me.

“And that’s the other part of the bottom line. Choice. The most precious gift you can offer another human being is the power of choice. That’s what our parents are supposed to do. Teach us that we have choice in everything. To choose good from bad, right from wrong, strong from weak, and to help us learn how to make good choices. Friends are supposed to do that too. Lovers. Wives. Husbands. Because we’re all teachers, Johnny. All of us. When we ask someone to think as we think, to act as we act, to react as we react, we’re not teachers any more — we’re wardens. Choice is the mortar that allows you to build on the foundation of that human right. It’s how you become who you were created to be. God, the Creator, Allah, whoever, lets us choose too. We can choose to follow His way or we can choose not to. We can even choose
who
our God is going to be.

“All I know, Johnny, is what I’ve been given. I don’t know your books, what they hold, what they teach. I only know my life and what I feel. And I might be wrong. I might get through school and into a church and find out I’m dead wrong, that I was supposed to go left when I went right, that I was supposed to be somebody else. But you know what?” I asked, smiling at him.

“What?” he asked.

“It’s okay to be wrong. It’s okay to take the power of choice and
pick the wrong path. Because that’s the other way you learn who you are. You just have to be brave enough to pick another path. Right now, right or wrong, I’m choosing to go where I feel I need to go.
For me.
Being Ojibway? Being Indian? It’s the truth you carry inside you. The truth you carry anywhere, through anything. Once you’ve got it it’s yours forever. Even in Bible college.”

He looked at me for a long time, staring without malice, without anger. Just a cool look that spoke nothing of his inner workings. When he sat down again, dangling his feet over the edge, I thought he’d come back to himself, back to the Johnny who was my friend, my fellow dreamer. My blood brother.

“You know what’s amazing? What’s really fucking amazing about the pretty little speech, about your fucking rampant idealism, about the cutesy way you wrap the ideological around the inane, the Ojibway around the whiteman?” he said bitterly. “That you sound like you believe it. Like you expect
me
to believe it.”

“I do believe it,” I said.

“Horseshit! They want you to believe it,” he replied, sneering at me.

“They?”

“Yeah,
they.
They, the whiteman. They want you to take it all hook, line and sinker. What is it Christ is supposed to have said — I will make you fishers of men? Well, guess what, pal? They fished you in. You’re beached and landed, man. Beached and landed. Do you know why they always sent the missionaries in first? Why they always allowed the priests and the zealots to invade before the rest of them came? Because they knew what they had. They knew the subversive power of the Word. They’d seen it work before in Africa, India, Asia. They sent their emissaries, their scholared clergy first because even if they were killed they weren’t really losing anything. There was always going to be another Word thumper coming along. Another starry-eyed pedant, gesticulating and murmuring Scripture. They knew that if they could rob a people of their belief system they could control them.

“So they sent these kind, humble lackeys to break their trail. And I will give them this. I’ll give them the fact that some of those
priests and missionaries were kind, maybe even good-hearted, but they were still nothing more than proselytizing stooges setting the people up for the kill. They killed belief, ritual, ceremony, self-respect, dignity, cultures and honor. Why? Because they believed their way was the only way. They believed everybody was created to be exactly like them. Anything different was less, was pagan, heathen, savage. So they didn’t have the ability to offer choice. Choice was never part of it. They came and they preached and they set them up for the kill. They bred fear and subservience to a God of wrath and vengeance. The God they said was responsible for the death of their way. Their heathen, savage way.

“And you want to be a part of that? You’re blind, pal. You’re blind if you can’t see that your involvement with the church sets you up to continue the spiritual slaughter of your people Not the Kanes but
your
people. Your blood, your history, your culture, your identity. They’re setting you up. They
want
you to stand in a pulpit as an example that assimilation works. That it’s okay to desert yourself, pretending to be someone else. That it’s okay to strap on the wrappings of their way, losing yourself, forgetting yourself.

“They want you to be a fisher of men, Josh. To fish other Indians in. To get them hooked and landed too. Because you know what? Colonization doesn’t have an end point. It can’t be satisfied. It’s not enough to colonize a people. If that was it all the horseshit would have ended a long time ago. No, it’s got to go on until everything is colonized, the land, resources, air, water, all of it raped, depleted and spent. That’s what they did in Europe. That’s all they know. That’s why they had to come here. Not because of some lofty romantic ideal of widening their knowledge of the world. No. They needed to find another place to go. Some to escape, some to recreate the same madness in a place with more room. That’s why they came. Because they’d already soiled their own bed.

“You know what it says in Genesis — and I will give you Dominion over the birds of the air, the fish of the sea da da da da da da? That’s what it’s all about. Dominion. Control. Supreme power. Their God gave them that. Their religion gives them permission to go wherever they want and exercise
dominion.
From the
Latin
dominus.
Dominus means God, Josh. Their religion gives them the power to be God! That’s what they believe. And as long as they believe that, nothing is sacred. No land, no people, nothing. Old colonizers never die, they just go and settle somewhere else.”

He said all of it with a stridence and cadence I’d never heard from him before. Fervor — the first time I ever experienced fervor in a human voice. When he finished he spat over the edge and sat there immobile, sepulchral.

Perhaps in all friendships there comes a moment when the tug of individual lives, destinies and beliefs is so insistent, so pervasive that the weave of its fabric is tested. Those moments that test its tolerance arrive unannounced, threatening the permanence of everything, the warmth of fabric, the elegance of structure.

“I don’t know any of that, Johnny,” I said quietly, humbled by his oration. “But maybe I should. Maybe I need to look at all of it before I make a decision. There may be questions I still need to ask, answers I need to get.”

He didn’t respond for a long time. He sat and doodled on the rock with the small chunk of granite, sighing deeply every now and then, shaking his head. Watching his private struggle, I felt the powerlessness that’s part of all relationships, all loves, when you know for dead certain that there’s nothing you can do until an armistice descends on the battleground. When he spoke again it was
sotto voce.
He spoke, looking across the expanse of horizon, and I strained to catch it all.