A Quality of Light (36 page)

There’s a story about Columbus that says he was so taken by the spiritual nature of the people he stumbled upon that he believed them to be created in the very image of God.
Du corpus in Dio
, he was reported to have written to his queen.
In Dio.
And from that came the word
Indian.

Proponents of the story insist that Latin phraseology is the real root of the word
Indian
rather than the awkward folksy notion that a seasoned navigator like Columbus could have harbored the thought that he’d landed in India. How he could have subjected them to the slaughter he did after that initial revelation was beyond my comprehension.

As I read and learned over the course of the long winter of 1973 and on into the languid spring of 1974, I shared my findings with my parents. They were as shocked as I was. They had grown up, as I had, in an educational system that taught the romantic notion of settlement, the scenario that featured the chiseled, bronzed countenances of Indians aiding their white brothers in adjusting to this new land in return for the favors of a Christian God, a worldly education and the munificence of civilization. Indians were the stalwart guides of the explorers, staunch, unblinking allies in war, the benevolent purveyors of corn, squash and furs, while the renegade factions among them were quickly brought to right by the firm, guiding hand of their white brothers. We had no idea of the
details of Cortez’s genocidal sweep of the Aztec, Pizarro’s carbon-copy attrition of the Inca or the reincarnation of those methods in the colonization of North America. The idea that kidnapping, mutilation, rape and savagery were the founding principles of the continent’s settlement astounded us. We were saddened, angered, and we sought solace in the ways we’d learned — the security of our faith and the ministrations of Jacqueline Kakeeway.

She listened as the three of us poured out our hurt over this newfound knowledge. She was the balm for our confusions and the remedy for the rise of political bile we felt inside us.

My parents took their first sweat lodge ceremony early in the spring of 1974. It was a special healing lodge for the three of us, along with Pastor Chuck. We were to sweat out the impurities of resentment, vitriol and malignant sorrow. We were to pray for the power of forgiveness, to sing the praises of a nurturing creation, seeking its continued guidance and teachings, and we were to meditate on our most inner selves, mingle with our hurt and anger to discover why we had them. They lasted the whole four rounds, and we emerged from the womb of the lodge rejuvenated, whole, recommitted to the principles of the faiths we followed and were learning.

It had never once struck me as strange that my parents and my religious mentor would eagerly participate in a ritual so distant from their structured worship. We had learned, through the process of my reculturalization, that the underpinnings of faith, worship and spirituality remain constant throughout the length and breadth of God’s world. We knew that praise was the gleeful noise of recognition. That prayer was the soft murmuring of a humble and contrite heart in the face of creation. That meditation was the heart in rapt anticipation of guidance, direction and insight. And that devotion was not so much to the God of our choosing as to the semblance of the God we discovered in ourselves, its growth and manifestation in our lives.

Our hurt and our anger had sprung from the realization that history had duped us and through its deliberate obfuscation had made us complicitors by our mute acceptance of it. We, like most people, had been innocent victims of a parade of misinformation
that had started with the first scrunch of sand beneath a booted foot in the land of the Tainos. Our resentment was fueled by the awareness that the land we loved so dearly, the three hundred and twenty acres we had come to refer to as our hereditary farm, had never been ours to claim. The thieves’ road that had begun in the 1400s had wended its way even to the heart of our cherished farmland. To deny that one salient fact was to shrug off history, to tacitly endorse its layered lie.

Our profound sorrow was driven by the recognition that we could not reorder history. For the remainder of our lives we would have to struggle to pacify ourselves with the desire to avoid recreating its vices in our own worlds. We claimed all of this for ourselves within the skin of the sweat lodge. Claimed it, owned it and let it go. And that, perhaps, is why I have never questioned Pastor Chuck’s or my parents’ quiet readiness for the ritual. Because, I believe, all spiritual warriors carry within themselves an ecumenic compass. It is lodged in the most private chambers of the heart, its pointer tremulous, sensitive to the pull of unseen redemptions.

My redemption began on December 29, 1890, when the Seventh US Cavalry, in an act of retribution for the debacle of Little Big Horn, murdered two hundred native men, women and children on the frozen banks of a creek called Wounded Knee. With the Gatling guns sweeping the writhing bodies, echoes embedding themselves like bullets in the trunks of the trees and cordite burning the nostrils of the soldiers, the blood of a people seeped through the ice and snow, sealing itself forever in the articulate bosom of the earth. This land is a palimpsest, but it requires the eyes and ears of the enlightened to hear its songs and see its scars. For the earth holds its dead in its arms forever and the songs of the people are borne on the sibilant voices of creek and river, the whisper of the grasses, the conversation of wind and leaf and tree, the stoic reticence of rocks. As I read the story of that slaughter when I was eighteen, felt wrath and fury kindling inside me and then tempered those flames with the spiritual qualities of the sweat lodge and the faith of my raising, I realized that a part of me had died and a part of me was born that frigid winter morning. I realized
that history, when you know it, can either include you in the massacre or empower you to survival.

My innocence vaporized like small talk and was replaced by the harder rhetoric of maturity. That’s what died on the frozen creek that morning of 1890. A people’s innocence and mine.

Part of my heart is buried at Wounded Knee. Fragments of it are buried wherever the people were murdered, in murder’s hundred nefarious ways, in the name of a conquest euphemized as settlement. Places called Batoche, Sand Creek, Sainte-Marie Among The Hurons and Hochelaga.

We all have our Wounded Knees — that was the seed of my redemption. The knowledge that our hearts reside in places where slivers of our innocence are buried. Emerging from the sweat lodge, I knew that when my body is returned to the arms of the earth you will bury my heart at Wounded Knee. You will inter it on the shore of Georgian Bay, lay it to rest in the middle of three hundred and twenty acres of farmland, consign it to the dust of anonymous battlefields and entomb it beneath a granite cenotaph that stands in the middle of the Hockley Valley, inscribed and elegized with the swirl and swaggle of letters formed by heart and hand. Everywhere I lived and everywhere I died.

I discovered healing that spring. Healing is understanding, and I knew two things for absolute certain after the experience of the sweat lodge. I knew that the problems of the world, both worlds, were spiritual as opposed to political and that their lasting resolution needed to come from spiritual ways and means. And I knew that I needed to continue on the path I had been directed in order to effect, in some small was, a migration to spiritual resolution. There would always be someone, Indian or not, taking the same painful path to their own redemption, kneeling at their own cenotaphs, harboring their own confusions. So I
would
become a preacher. A spiritual warrior. I would minister from the arch of a bridge that spanned two worlds, whose supports and columns rose from the bedrock of a shared acknowledgment of the sacred, the divine and the eternal.

For such is the kingdom.

G
ood-byes have a residue that you carry into everything that follows. It shows itself in peculiar places as your life and your world meander through their course. You’ll find it in the face you swear you recognize, the snatches of song through the window of a passing car, the sudden slam of a screen door in summer, the perfect stillness of a child in slumber and the sudden ballet of cats’ feet across a stretch of snow. That’s the joy of living inhabited lives — the recurrence of the profound in the ordinary.

We graduated from high school in June of 1974. In the faces of my classmates were only traces of the children we’d been five short years before. We were men and women now, bulkier with time, fleshed and muscled with learning, weightier with courage. Our class was smaller, diminished by academic ennui, the call of farm and family, death, relocation. As the small roll of paper was slipped into our palms there wasn’t a one of us who knew the person we would eventually be.

Ralphie was going to Minnesota on a hockey scholarship, where he would star and be drafted by the Chicago Blackhawks before a knee injury would return him to Carrick Township, lessened like all home-town heroes who never get beyond the population sign, where he would marry, raise children and die of a heart attack when he was forty-two. Connie Shaus married Victor Ringle, and they work a farm near Neustadt. Lenny Weber earned an agricultural degree at the University of Western Ontario and is making a killing at experimental farming on the family acres. Allen Begg set fire to a neighbor’s house and in fear of serving time ran away and was never seen in Walkerton again. Chris Hollingshead became a Walkerton fireman, where it’s said his tremendous height allows him to work without a ladder. Mary Ellen Reid became the first woman in Bruce County elected to the Ontario legislature. We see each other now and again, and she is still the genteel, refined
woman she became after the debacle of our freshman year. As I moved from person to person at the graduation, hugging them, laughing and offering the usual promises to stay in touch, the residue of those good-byes settled easily into my psyche, to emerge and re-emerge suddenly and unexpectedly throughout my life. There was only one that remained to be said.

Johnny and I had become less and less involved with each other’s lives over the course of that final year. A few times I had tried to let him know the reactions I was having to the books I borrowed but he merely shrugged. We’d go out now and then for movies, bowling and pizza, but each of those occasions was like a cursory statement, a nicety performed for propriety’s sake. He’d never revealed any plans for college, work or travel, and I was curious to know what he had in mind. We arranged to get together for a few hours the Sunday after graduation and a week before I was scheduled to leave for Red Deer and a summer job with a wheat farmer outside nearby Airdrie.

He arrived in late afternoon. He’d filled out, tall, muscular and agile with a prowling leanness. He wore a red bandanna around his head. His long blond hair flowed down to the middle of his back, and he’d taken to wearing a scruffy beard. He smiled, chatted with my parents for a few minutes, declined the supper invitation he knew he always had, clapped me on the back and shepherded me out the door and across the yard towards the equipment shed. He seemed quietly jubilant, simmering with intent, and a throwback to the Johnny I’d known years before. Seeing him, a man, in the middle of the area where we’d invented the game as boys brought the realities of time crashing down around me.

“I’m leaving, Josh,” he said, staring at me with the characteristic fire.

“Where are you going? You got a job?” I asked, not entirely surprised by the suddenness of the information.

He leaned on the rail fence and looked out over the acres. When he looked at me again it was with the face of a zealot. “Out there,” he said, gesturing with one arm.

“Out there where?” I asked, slightly guarded.

“Wherever,” he said and turned to look back across the land. “Wherever the people are.”

“The people? Indian people, you mean?”

“Yeah. Our people, Josh. They need warriors right now. You hear of Kenora?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s gonna be the Wounded Knee of Canada, Josh. The Ojibway Warriors Society is going to take over a piece of land the town stole and turned into a park. They’re gonna march in with guns and reclaim it. Me, Staatz and a couple of his brothers are gonna head up there and I want you to come too,” he said.

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Because you’re an Ojibway. And you’re a warrior. You believe that, don’t you?”

“Yeah, of course I do. But I don’t believe in guns and I don’t believe in violence. And besides … I’m leaving too.”

He looked at me hard. I could feel his life force like I did at that first meeting, only now it was a different energy, pointed and unrelenting.

“You’re going to the Bible school. After everything you learned about the truth of things, you’re still gonna follow through and capitulate. Surrender,” he said derisively. “Hasn’t anything sunk in? Doesn’t any of what you’ve learned mean anything?”

“Yes. It means that there’s a function for people like me. The ones who’ve had to struggle to reclaim themselves. The ones who’ve had to learn how to heal the rifts inside them. Who’ve had to ask themselves whether they’re red or white, or even just who they really are.”