One Native Life (20 page)
One day in February of 1958, everything came to a head. There was a load of furs to be sold. We were camped across the bay from Minaki, a tiny railroad stop along the Winnipeg River, 150 miles north of Lake of the Woods. The adults left us kids at camp to head to town.
My sister Jane remembers that there was a good supply of firewood and food, so at first it was okay. But days passed. The firewood dwindled and the food was gone. I was crying from the cold and hunger. Still the adults didn’t return. As the days stretched on, the elder two kids, Jane and Jack, got worried. It was deep winter in the North, and without firewood we would freeze to death.
So one morning they piled Charles and me on a toboggan, covered us with furs and blankets, and pulled us across the snow and ice. It took hours to cross that bay. It was a grey morning, cold and bleak. My sister says it was only the effort of pulling us that kept her and Jack alive. I lay on my back on the toboggan with only my face stuck out in the freeze. My brother pressed up against me for warmth.
When we reached Minaki, my sister and brother hauled us up to the railroad station. The wind was bitter. We found a corner away from the cut of it and huddled there together. By the time the Ontario Provincial Police found us, we were nearly frozen. They turned us over to the care of the Children’s Aid Society.
The woe that was triggered by the pallid light of dawn was the despair of a toddler, abandoned in the bush. It was the cry of a child, helpless, hungry and afraid. It was the grief of a separation never understood, never explained and never resolved. When I touched it again, I wept.
My family has never acknowledged the truth, and they never will: they got drunk and forgot about us. Owning that hurts too much, and dealing with hurt was not something they were taught in those schools supposedly meant to save them.
Me? I wake up now to the glory of all the mornings of the world. The seamless blend of light and air lifts me up, healing me.
. . .
IN THE MOUNTAINS
just before sunrise, the world is an ashen place. Trees loom in the near distance like phantom sentinels. There are bears about. The berry bushes are bent and torn by their feeding. A few careless neighbours have had their garbage strewn about their yards. It’s a bear’s world now—all shadow and quiet and solitude.
In this vapid light things lose definition. Only the road jutting through it gives the bush perspective. Otherwise, it’s thick and tangled, unvanquished.
I used to fear the bush. That’s a hard thing to say when you’re Indian. But there was a time when the forest at night or in the gloom of pre-dawn terrified me. Vague terrors hunkered in the stillness. It took years to understand why.
When I was very young, our family home was mostly a canvas army tent held up by spruce poles. Boughs lined the floor. As a baby, I was swaddled in a cradleboard with moss and cedar. My siblings watched over me when the adults were away. My protectors were my older sister, Jane, and my eldest brother, Jack. My brother Charles was only two years older than me, a toddler himself. Our grandmother was busy taking care of the camp or chasing after our older cousins. So we were a unit, the four of us kids.
It should have been idyllic. But it wasn’t.
My family members were filled with bitterness from their residential school experiences, and that unhealed energy erupted often in drunkenness and violence. When we were adults, my sister told me how she used to carry me when the four of us went to hide in the bush at night, while the adults raged and drank and fought at the nearby fire. In the mornings we’d creep out of the bush and return to the camp to eat and drink.
My father was an outsider. He was an Ojibway from Pine Falls, Manitoba, and because he was perceived to be alien he was hated by my mother’s family. They beat him up when he came around, chased him off. We four kids were tarred with the same brush. We were terrorized. My brother Jack fought back as best he could, but he was just a boy. Jane watched over Charles and me, sneaking us out of camp whenever it looked like things were about to boil over again. But she couldn’t protect us all the time.
One day my aunt Elizabeth broke my left arm and shoulder by jumping on me as I swung in a moosehide harness between two trees. I wasn’t yet a year old. When I was a little older, she took me out into the bush alone. Jane followed her secretly, and she watched in helpless horror as my aunt tied me down and whipped me with tree branches until I was raw.
My uncle Charlie tried to drown Charles and me. He took us by the throats and held our heads underwater, bringing us up gasping and crying before ducking us down again. He was holding us down hard when another Ojibway man who happened to be passing by knocked my uncle down and stopped him.
There were other horrors to be endured, but those two marked me for life. My left arm is still damaged, and I still can’t swim with my head submersed.
Those experiences made me afraid of the bush. I was fine in the daytime, but when night fell and darkness reigned, my terrors returned. I was small again, helpless, beaten and afraid.
I’m almost fifty-three now, and I’m no longer afraid of the bush at night. Therapists and counsellors talked me through those terrors and the lingering trauma they caused. My family still suffers. They never talk about those days. They choose to live in the belief that sufficient time passing makes crimes irrelevant. But it doesn’t.
I have post-traumatic stress disorder from the events of those days, and things still trigger me. I still wrestle with childlike reactions to perceived threats, sudden changes and the feel of unsafe territory. I still work to overcome those fears, to heal myself, to embrace the forgiveness that allows healing to happen.
See, I forgave my family a while back. I understand that they are not to blame for the institutional pain that was inflicted on them. They are not to blame for the effects of history.
In the light of each new day we are given justice in equal measure, to dispense at our will, and its root is forgiveness. In the light of each new day all things are in balance. Harmony comes when you can see the forest, not the trees.
. . .
TODAY THE DOG
and I stopped to inspect the heavily laden branches of a mountain ash tree. The red berries were swollen and plump. The branches were bowed under their weight, and we could see the bears would come to feed very shortly. The splotches of red were magnificent against the green.
The berries were not uniform in shape. Some were stretched into funnels. Others were oblong, elliptical or round as balls. Some were clumped together, while others hung alone from the branches like commas, punctuation in the story of that tree. Seeing them, I remembered the tale of the mountain ash.
In the Long Ago Time a winter descended that was like no other. The cold crept under the robes of the people like fingers and held their wigwams in a fierce grip. The snow piled higher than ever before. In the darkness, as their fires ebbed, people could hear the frozen popping of the trees and the eerie stillness that followed. Nothing moved in that great petrified world.
Hunting became difficult. Everywhere creatures sought deep shelter from the cold, and hunters returned from their journeys ice-covered, shivering and empty-handed. The people had made do with their stores from the summer before, but there was worry in the camps as the cold seemed to settle upon the land. They needed fresh meat to supplement their dwindling supplies.
But soon it was impossible to walk for more than a few minutes without freezing. Everyone kept to their wigwams, praying for an end to the cold. The wind howled mightily through those long, terrible nights, and there was talk of Windigos and supernatural monsters eager to feast on the shrivelled corpses of the people.
Then, one day, the people emerged to a morning bright and calm. It was still horribly cold, but the arctic wind had ceased. All around them, though, lay the bodies of animals who’d frozen in the night. Rabbits, foxes, marten, skunks and birds. The people wept at this calamity, and they asked their Wise Ones what to do.
The teachers told them to take the bodies of the fallen animals to the tree that served them best. Back then, the people fashioned their bows and arrows from the wood of the mountain ash. Their survival depended on that tree. The elders told them to take a bead of blood from each of the animals and drop it on the branches of the mountain ash.
People prayed over that ritual. They beseeched Great Spirit for a teaching, for a way of knowing that would guide them. They made offerings of tobacco. They sang songs in honour of the deep cold. And the next day the cold abated. When the hunters went out to seek food, they saw that the blood of the animals had turned into bright red berries on the mountain ash. Birds and other creatures were feeding on them. From then on, whenever a hard winter was on the way, the mountain ash bore more berries than usual, and the people could prepare.
According to the old story, the plentiful berries on the ash tree the dog and I stopped beside meant that I’d have to lay in lots of firewood and make sure the cabin was prepared for a long chill. When the Storytelling Moons of winter come, we’ll need full cupboards and a good supply of books and music, the other things we require for our survival. The mountain ash berries were telling us that.
. . .
THE STARS ARE FLUNG
across the heavens tonight like seeds of light. As they wink and glimmer in their bed of darkness, I can feel that ancient light fall upon my face.
I had a philosopher friend once who told me the root of the word “universe.” Universe, he said, was actually two words in the original Greek. The first part,
uni,
meant one, and the second part,
versa,
meant song. One song. Standing here with my face pressed upwards, I can feel the hymnal pulse of that.
My love for music has always sustained me. Over the years, in the soundtrack of my life, there have been cellos in moments sublime and pure, French horns and clarinets in times when life was joyous, blue notes in the lesser times, moody piano rolls in periods of reflection. There’s a song for every memory.
I always wanted to play music, too. I wanted to recreate the fabulous sounds I heard in my head and felt in my hips and my soul. There was a kid named Brian Walsh in the eighth grade who played guitar and sang, and when he wowed everyone at the talent show, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. But when I asked for a guitar I was laughed at, told I couldn’t carry a tune in a pail and had no rhythm. It was ridiculous, they said, to even try.
But the desire remained. Guitar players became my focus. At live concerts I watched them closely. When I listened to records I sometimes sat in the dark and followed the guitar parts with my hands. I could see myself playing, imagine myself creating music and enjoying the freedom that it represented.
I finally got a guitar when I was in my late forties. Those first chords were hard. My fingers ached and my wrist got sore. I fumbled about a lot, but as soon as I strummed a clean E chord and heard the root note of the blues pressed out through my fingers, I was hooked.
I spent hours every day teaching myself to play. I read books, watched videos, joined Internet guitar groups and downloaded the songs I wanted to learn. I put my ear close to the speakers and listened intently, trying to unlock the secret to making music happen. I could feel the music in me, and more and more I reached for that feeling through my hands.
But that childhood judgement haunted me. I doubted my new ability, doubted the possibility of a tuneless, rhythmless me ever being able to play. I got into the habit of watching my fingers, hunching over the guitar as they moved through chord progressions and runs and scales. I figured that if I watched my hands closely enough, I could force them to make the right moves.
After about a year of this, I played for a friend. He sat and listened, and when I was finished he nodded and clapped me on the back for a good job. He was a guitar player himself, so his praise was good medicine.
Then he told me to play the same thing with my eyes closed. I was stunned by what followed. Even though I’d played that song hundreds of times before, I fumbled it badly. It was unrecognizable as the song I’d learned.
“You need to learn to play without watching your hands,” he told me. “You need to trust the music that’s in you. When you watch your hands, you’re not making music. You’re only making sounds. Music needs to be free to be music.”
I became a better guitar player after that. Learning to play without watching my hands lent my music a grace it never had before. I’m no professional, but I can carry a tune and the music happens naturally.
Life’s like that, really. When you bend into it deliberately, controlling every move you make, it’s hard to find the flow. You can learn the right moves, follow the progression accurately, but there’s no spontaneous joy in it, no glee.
There’s a song in all of us. On nights when the stars cajole you, it strains against your ribs and throat. The trick is to trust it. Close your eyes, feel it there and let it out.
Universe. One song. Your music joined with the music of everything.
. . .
THERE ARE MORNINGS
here when the quiet fills you. You walk the line of lake, cautiously not wanting to break the spell of it. There’s mist on the water, and it drifts up off the rock, enveloping you.
In this stillness you swear you can hear the sounds of drums on distant hills. You close your eyes, and in the push of breeze there’s the wail and chant of singers. This fusty shoreline holds in its smell something ancient, eternal, vast. You need only breathe that smell into you to become it.
There’s nothing in your experience to match this deliberate taking in. You who have fought so hard to find a place here, a definition beyond what the skin implies, have never encountered such frank acceptance of being. Against the push of land, the sweep of it, you fit easily, like another shoot of grass. There’s the sense in you that
this
is what it means to be Indian.
