For Joshua (20 page)

I see them scraping hides, smoking fish, setting traps and snares, fishing, picking berries, harvesting rice, and stalking moose and deer against the spattered canvas of autumn. I see them in their tents, a pot-bellied wood-stove pipe angled out the top, spruce boughs piled three feet deep on the floor to keep out the frost, and a huge teapot burbling away on the top of the stove. They’re laughing, telling stories, mending nets, making snowshoes, or just sitting comfortably while that same North Wind blows icily across the landscape.

They’re not really there, of course. It’s just a stubborn particular of love, even hope, that allows me a glimpse at the life that resulted in us—you and me, my son. We are the sum of all of that and we are blessed to have sprung from it. In our blood flows the fortitude that saw them through
harsh winters, the humility that allowed them to share all that the land provided, the grace that saw them through drought, flood, and famine, and the staunch iron will that held up against the unimaginable onslaught of settlement, development, disease, poverty, and alcohol. Our hearts, minds, and spirits are a measure of all that they endured. They are in us, just as surely as my booted feet are planted on this point of land, seeing them as they were, as they are today, and as they always will be. A people, strong and purposeful.

Coming here, to the sheltering arms of family, is the closing of a circle, a journey ending where it began. Home.

I want to be able to tell you that I came off that hill outside of Calgary and my life changed completely. I want to be able to tell you that seeing myself as I was in the years before that Vision Quest allowed me to travel beyond the fear, guilt, and shame that had bound me all my life. I want to be able to tell you that I healed, grew, and evolved into a strong, proud man—a warrior. I want to be able to tell you that I never drank again.

But I can’t.

Fear is a hard foe to conquer. It’s insidious. Fear is cunning and it eats away at you from the inside where you can’t see it, where it can hide and work its sly damage to
your spirit. I didn’t conquer it on that hill. I only found out that I had it, that I had carried it forever. And that realization wasn’t enough to heal me.

Sure, my life changed after that Vision Quest. It changed dramatically. Under John’s direction I found more teachers, went to more ceremonies, learned more about the things in this world that we’ve come to call culture. And I became more and more Indian. Or at least I thought I did. But I still only learned these things in my head. I still only really committed them to memory and not to action. I didn’t change. I looked the part—in fact, I took great pains to surround myself with the stuff of native life. I had rattles, hand drums, medicine shields, eagle feathers, artwork, carvings, and the sacred medicines around me all the time. But that was to dress up the outside, so that other people who looked at me and how I was living could think, “He’s a real Indian.” But like the person I was before the Vision Quest, I still lived in other peoples’ heads and still made my choices based on what I thought they were thinking. I was still afraid to be me. I still didn’t know what that meant.

I became a writer. The Creator blessed me with the ability to put words on paper, or cast them into the air with a microphone, and I was successful. Thousands of people
across the country read my words. Thousands more heard me on the radio or saw the television programs I hosted and helped produce. Then, in 1991, I was given the honour of winning a National Newspaper Award for the Native issues columns I wrote for the
Calgary Herald
each week. The plaque had a line on it that read “Whose work is judged the best in the country.”
The best in the country
. Me, a Grade 9-educated ex-convict, who made “runs” for winos, slept under bridges, stole, defrauded and bilked people, had never held the same job for a year, couldn’t maintain a relationship with a woman or a friend, was suddenly judged “the best in the country” by a panel of experts.

I should have been honoured. But all I felt after I received that award was fear. I was afraid someone was going to find out about me. That I now had one more standard I could fail to live up to. That I wasn’t a journalist. I wasn’t a writer. I wasn’t a success. I was just a fluke, a fraud, a liar. And at the root of those fears was the one overwhelming fear I’d carried all my life: that they’d find out there was something wrong with me, that I was unlovable and unworthy and they’d reject and abandon me.

And so I drank.

I drank because it felt better to pull the rug from under my own feet than run the risk of having someone else
do it for me. I drank because I didn’t believe I deserved the success I was having. I drank because I was afraid I couldn’t maintain that success. I drank because rebuilding my life, starting over, was easier than keeping it going. I drank because alcohol always did for me what it had done the very first time, and that was to help me not to feel the feelings I carried.

And I drank out of guilt. John had introduced to me a way of being that was authentic, vibrant, and empowering. The more I absorbed of that way, the more I respected it. But when I drank again I felt guilty because I was disrespecting those teachings, I was dishonouring them, I was, as a friend once put it to me, “spitting in the Creator’s face, knowing what you know and doing what you do.” When I sobered up again, as I always did for short periods, I carried around a big pile of guilt over that dishonour. So guilt became my constant companion, too.

I became desperate. I needed more success in order to feel adequate, to place myself above the guilt and fear. So I worked. I worked hard. The reward of all that work was that I became “known” as a writer and I published my first book in 1994. Then I got drunk. For the next six years I achieved, then followed that achievement with a binge.
Always
. Two more books appeared in stores. I taught at a university. I was a guest speaker at other universities. And I had a beautiful baby boy to carry my name: Joshua Richard Wagamese. But none of this was enough to quell the guilt and fear I felt in my gut. For six arduous years I stood up and fell down, stood up and fell down. And I re-created all the ordeals of my youth.

In that time I was sent to jail, lived on the street, went to detox, got beaten up, wandered from woman to woman, woke up on riverbanks, in dumpsters, back alleys, and strangers’ homes. I cheated, lied, and stole. And always, always, I would get sober long enough to convince myself and the people around me that I was okay this time, that it would be different. But it never was.

Then one day I woke up on a riverbank and I wanted to die. I couldn’t stand the thought of another day in the misery of my life. I looked at the water flowing past me and I thought that if I filled my pockets with enough rocks I could end this seemingly endless cycle of injury and disappointment for myself and others. I could quit being a victim—and victimizing others. I could check out and no one would miss me. I wanted to die so badly it seemed like a logical choice.

But the drinker in me needed one more bottle.

As it turns out, the Creator needed me to go off on a search for one more bottle. I found it, although I had no money. When you drink out of desperation you can always find a drink. That’s the paradox of being a drunk like I was: even though the thing you need to feel better is actually killing you, you can always find it. Always. I found it with a group of desperate drinkers like myself and as we huddled under a railroad bridge, taking turns gulping down that whisky, I still had one eye on that river. Later, walking aimlessly about on my own, I lifted a bottle of mouthwash from a corner store and gulped it down as I stood in the middle of a bridge over that water. I was convinced it was finished, that I was finished, that I had no strength left for one more try.

But I was wrong.

I wound up in the hospital that day. I wound up connected to heart monitors and IVs dripping sufficient medication to allay the alcoholic seizures that were certain to follow. I was there five days. While I lay in that bed I had nothing to do but think. I thought about my life and how I had lived it.

I thought about John and how, when he died suddenly, I felt abandoned and utterly alone. Year after year I allowed memory to take me where it would and I watched myself
slowly disappear despite the show I was putting on for the outside world. So many unnecessary losses, so many needless hurts inflicted and endured, so many wrong turns, so many excuses and denials. Sometime during the course of those four nights in that hospital bed I became convinced that I could do what John had asked me to start doing on that hill so long ago: to accept who I was.

I had another Vision Quest in detox. I admitted that I was a drunk and that, in the condition I was in on that hospital bed, I was hopeless. I was defeated. That if I drank again I would die—with or without rocks in the pocket.

I found people who were just like me and I began to travel with them. Over time they showed me exactly what John had shown me, that I wasn’t bad, deficient, or unworthy—I was just a drunk who needed to stay sober in order to help himself. If I chose to do that, they offered to help me clean up the mess of my past and learn to use it as a tool for building a better future. Nothing was required but an earnest desire, and by the time I had been with them a month or so I had that desire.

The wonderful thing about that is that these were not Native people. Or at least, not all of them were. They were people who had lived with the same feelings about themselves that I had. They were just people. Just drunks
who didn’t drink, and they loved me until I could learn to love myself. With their help, I reconnected to the teachings John had introduced to me. I began to appreciate myself for surviving all I had put myself through and I found my way back to acceptance of who I was created to be. They helped me remember the most basic of our teachings: that we are gifted with our identities, and nothing is big enough to take that gift away from us. Ever. I was created to be a male Ojibway human being and those people helped me back to that recognition. They helped me back to learning how to honour it.

When I had been around them a long time and had investigated my life and shared it with people, something strange happened. I was walking down the street towards the library on a cold, grey morning, looking at the sky and thinking how magical life can be and how many benefits were being paid me for the work I had done on healing my hurts and wounds. I remembered that on the morning of my last drink, the sky had looked just as it did on the street that moment. I thought about that morning. And it hit me. All of a sudden it just dawned on me and I smiled—because it didn’t hurt anymore. My life was no longer a Technicolor nightmare. It was a black-and-white reality. A reality that didn’t hurt anymore.

And so I began to look at my Native life in the same way I’d looked at my drunkard’s life. I searched my past and admitted where I had been wrong. I investigated myself and found lots to toss away. And, consequently, a lot to keep and rebuild my life around. I found the me that existed under the rubble of all I’d caused to collapse. I found beliefs and values I never knew I had. I found understandings I never recalled being given. I found a peace in being a male Ojibway human being that I never knew was possible. I just needed an earnest desire to learn and it had been granted me.

What I learned on that search is what I need to tell you, my son. I need to tell you because there are many places where I fell, and by telling you I might help you avoid them. That’s my duty, my responsibility, and my honour.

For a long time our people have called this country home. This is where we fit, where we belong, and it is from here that our teachings sprang. We are who we are because of this land. When we stand upon it, even now, even with all of the changes that have scarred it, marred it, and made it less pure, we can feel the eternal connection that exists for us when our hearts are open. The sense of oneness that happens, the feeling of connection, is a result of hearts in
tune with the land—resonating with each change, thrumming with the energy of its ongoing creation, tingling with expectancy at the wonders of each new season and beating with the measured, eternal rhythm of the drum at the centre of all of it. That’s what makes us Ojibway people: the knowledge that the land is a feeling, and sensing it in the soles of our feet.

When we travelled about in the days long past, it wasn’t a search for permanence that drove us. For the one place on the land that we could call ours. It wasn’t a search for a territory we could control. It was for the
experience
of the land. We were bands of wanderers, perfectly at home wherever we were, at peace with the land and seeking an ever deeper relationship with it. Our travels gave us new perspectives, new ways of seeing, new teachings and a renewed sense of ourselves. The more we experienced of the land, the more we experienced ourselves. That’s not in any book, it’s not taught in any school, and there are a lot of people who will argue that we were just aimless, trying to scrounge survival from the land. But our people knew that we are who we are
because of
the land, and only through experience combined with teachings could we gain true knowledge. So we travelled. We experienced.

The cultural teachings of our elders, the tools of the pipe and drum and ceremony, are all meant to help us get back to belief in who we are. They are meant to centre us, to take us right back to our hearts. To the truth of us. When we get there, we discover that the tools are merely aids, and that what really matters is what we carry in our hearts.

I was confused for a long time, lost in pride, and I started to think about Canada as a nation. And that meant history. History told me that our people got a raw deal. It told me that we had had our land stolen from us. It told me that we had suffered through the tearing away of our culture, languages, and ceremonies. It told me that we had become second-class citizens on the land that once belonged to us. All I could see was that the settlers cared only for themselves. They were greedy and self-centred and could only see our people as a problem to be solved. Because of that we have suffered great injustices and hurts and someone had to be responsible for fixing things. Until that happened we had no choice but to be separate, to stand to one side and demand our due. That was how I saw Canada.