Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada's Past (23 page)

At any rate, all this thinking eventually crystallized into this little story that I've had stashed away inside my head for a very long time, a story that, like too many of my stories, tends to be a little on the autobiographical side, shall we say. But its a story, nonetheless, that I've always wanted to record because it is, in point of fact, about a little Cree Indian boy who
changes the world with-and this at the risk of sounding just a touch self-important—the power of art. That is to say, it is about the “universally transformational” power of a simple, and perhaps forbidden, piece of music called “Hearts and Flowers,” and the boy who dares play it … on that fateful night when his people, finally, are recognized as human.

And
that
was the second, and final, reason why I chose to write about this subject
and
in this manner.

Hearts and Flowers

Daniel Daylight sits inside Mr. Tippers travelling car. It is cold—not cold, though, like outside; of this fact Daniel Daylight is quite certain. He looks out through the window on his right and, as always, sees white forest rushing by; maybe rabbits will bound past on that snowbank in the trees, he sits thinking. He has seen them, after all, on past Thursdays just like this one. It is dark, too. Not pitch-black, though, for that half moon hangs unhidden, making snow—on the road, on the roadside, rocks, ground, trees (mostly spruce though some birch and some poplar)—glow, as with dust made of silver, Daniel Daylight sits there thinking. Daniel Daylight, at age eight, is on his way to his piano lesson in Prince William, Manitoba.

Twenty miles lie between the Watson Lake Indian Residential School, where resides Daniel Daylight, and Prince William, where he takes his weekly lesson. The Watson Lake Indian Residential School, after all, has no one to teach him how to play the piano, while Prince William has elderly and kind Mrs. Hay. So his teacher in Grade Three at the Watson Lake Indian Residential School, Mr. Tipper, drives him every Thursday, 6:00 p.m. on the nose, to his piano teachers house, Mrs. Hays, in Prince William.

Orange brick and cement from the top to the bottom, held in by a steel mesh fence, then by forest (mostly spruce though some birch and some poplar), the Watson Lake Indian Residential School stands like a fort on the south shore of a lake called Watson Lake, 550 miles north of Winnipeg, Mr. Tipper's place of birth. Prince William, quite by contrast, is a town that stands on the south bank of a river called the Moostoos River, just across from which sprawls a village called Waskeechoos (though “settlement” is a noun more accurate, Mr. Tipper has explained on previous Thursdays, for no “village” can be seen, only houses peeking out of the forest here and there). Waskeechoos, on the north bank of the muddy Moostoos River, is an Indian reserve, Mr. Tipper has informed Daniel Daylight, not unlike the one from which hails Daniel Daylight: Minstik Lake, Manitoba, 350 miles north of Waskeechoos, Prince William, and the Watson Lake Indian Residential School. It takes half an hour for Daniel Daylight to make the journey every week, in Mr. Tipper's travelling car, from the Watson Lake Indian Residential School south through the heart of Waskeechoos and across the Moostoos River to Prince William, so he has time on his hands for reflection (so, at least, Mr. Tipper calls such thinking).

Daniel Daylight likes these trips. For one thing, he gets to practise what he knows of the language they call English with elderly and kind Mrs. Hay, with the waiters at the Nip House or at Wong's (where he sometimes goes for snacks with Mr. Tipper once he's finished with his lesson), and with friends of Mr. Tipper whom he meets at the Nip House or at Wong's. He enjoys speaking English just as he enjoys speaking Cree with the students at the residential school (though, of course, mother tongues need no practice, not like English with its vs that make one's teeth come right out and bite one's lower lip). Daniel Daylight, for another thing, likes to ride in “travelling cars” (as he calls them for the
v
in “travel”). Standing at the northern tip of a lake called Minstik Lake, the Minstik Lake Indian Reserve, after all, has no cars and no trucks, just dogsleds in the winter, canoes in the summer. A third reason why
Daniel Daylight likes these trips is that he enjoys being dazzled by the lights of a city like Prince William (for to him, the railway depot is a city of one million, not a town of five thousand) with its streets, its cafés, hotels, stores, and huge churches with tall steeples, whereas Minstik Lake, with its six hundred people, has no streets, no cafés, no hotels, just dirt paths, one small store, and one church. Daniel Daylight, for a fourth thing, likes these trips because Mr. Tipper's travelling car has a radio that plays songs that he can learn in his head. When it stops playing music, furthermore, it plays
spoken
English words, which, of course, he can practise understanding. Tonight, for example, people living in the east of the country (Mr. Tipper has explained) are discussing voting patterns of the nation (Mr. Tipper has explained), even though Daniel Daylight knows the word “vote” for one reason: it begins with the sound that forces one to sink one's teeth deep into one's lower lip and then growl. Sound, that is to say, thrills Daniel Daylight. Which is why, best of all, Daniel Daylight likes these trips: because he gets to play the piano. He gets to play, for elderly and kind Mrs. Hay, “Sonatina” by Clementi, which he now knows well enough to play page I from the top to the bottom without stopping. He gets to play, for the third time this winter, “Pirates of the Pacific,” with the bass that sounds like a drumbeat. He gets to play, this week, for the first time,
with
Jenny Dean, the duet—for four hands—called “Hearts and Flowers.”

“Jenny Dean is a white girl,” he has overheard someone say at the Nip House, just a few days before Christmas, in fact, when he was there having fries and Coca-Cola with Mr. Tipper. “Daniel Daylight is an
Indian
. A Cree Indian. Indian boys do
not
play the piano with white girls,” he has overheard one white girl whisper
loudly
to another over Coca-Cola in a bottle, “not here in our Prince William, not anywhere on earth or in heaven.” Daniel Daylight let it pass. He, after all, was eight years old, not thirty-one like Mr. Tipper; what could he have done to the girl who had made such a statement? Bop her on the head with her bottle? Shove a french fry up her nose? Scratch her face? Besides, neither Jenny Deans parents, Mrs. Hay, nor Mr. Tipper seemed to mind the notion of Jenny
Dean making music with a boy whose father was a
Cree
caribou hunter and a celebrated dogsled racer.

“There it is,” says Mr. Tipper. And so it is, for the travelling car has just rounded the bend in the road from which the lights of Prince William and the Indian reserve on this side of the river from the town can be seen for the first time. This first view of both town and reserve, to Daniel Daylight, always looks like a spaceship landed on Planet Earth, not unlike the spaceship in the comic book that his older brother, John-Peter Daylight, gave him as a Christmas present twenty-one days ago and that Daniel Daylight keeps hidden under his pillow in the dormitory at the residential school. Daniel Daylight likes, in fact, to imagine all those lights in the distance as exactly that: a spaceship come to take him to a place where exist not Indian people, not white people, just good people and good music. In fact, he can hear in his mind already “Sonatina” by Clementi, key of G, allegro moderato. He can hear “Pirates of the Pacific” with that drumbeat in the bass that goes
boom. He
can hear “Hearts and Flowers.” He has practiced all three pieces to the point of exhaustion, after all, in the one room at the residential school that has a piano, what the nuns and the priests call the “library” but, in fact, is a storage room for pencils and erasers, papers, rulers, chalk, and some old spelling books. Feeling on the tips of his fingers all the keys of Mrs. Hay's brown piano, Daniel Daylight sees the sign on the roadside that announces, “Waskeechoos Welcomes You.” Mr. Tipper's travelling car speeds past the sign, thus bringing Daniel Daylight onto land that belongs “to the Indians,” Mr. Tipper, for some reason, likes proclaiming, as on a radio. “Speed Limit 30 MPH,” Daniel Daylight reads on the sign that then follows. The road now mud, dried, cracked, and frozen, pot-holed and iced, the travelling car first slows down to a crawl, then bumps, rattles, slides.

“Indian people are not human,” says Mr. Tipper, dodging first this small patch of ice then that small patch of ice, “at least not according to the government. They cannot vote.” Daniel Daylight sits unsurprised—Mr. Tipper's use of English, white as a sheet and from Winnipeg as he
may be, is not always perfect, Daniel Daylight has simply come to accept. The young Cree piano player, in any case, does not feel confident enough, in either his grasp of English
or
his age, to say much in rebuttal. His father, after all, speaks maybe ten words of English, his mother just two or three; of his eight living siblings, older all than him, only John-Peter Daylight, who is three grades ahead of Daniel Daylight at the Watson Lake Indian Residential School (and perhaps Florence, who once studied there, too, but quit at just Grade Four), speaks English. No one on the Minstik Lake Indian Reserve where Daniel Daylight was born, for that matter, speaks the language, not even Chief Samba Cheese Weetigo
or
his wife, Salad. Like people right here in Waskeechoos (as Mr. Tipper has informed Daniel Daylight in the past), they speak Cree and Cree only. So how, indeed,
can
they be human, Daniel Daylight asks himself,
if
they don't even know what the word means or looks like on a page?

At the bridge that spans like a giant spider's web the muddy, winding Moostoos River, a bottleneck is fast taking shape. Built mainly for trains, the bridge makes room for car and truck traffic only by means of a one-way lane off to one side. The traffic light glowing red like a charcoal on this side of the crossing, four cars sit at its base humming and putt-putt-putting; the travellers from Watson, as happened last Thursday, will just have to sit there for four or five minutes, much too long for Daniel Daylight, who can't wait to play the piano with Jenny Dean. Preparing, in a sense, for conversing with elderly and kind Mrs. Hay when he gets to her house (for Mrs. Hay's Cree, of course, is like Mr. Tipper's—it does not exist), Daniel Daylight makes a decision: he will practise his English. On Mr. Tipper.

“Human, what it mean, Mr. Tip—” But Mr. Tipper does not let him finish.

“If a man, or a woman, aged twenty-one or older cannot vote,” says Mr. Tipper—who, from the side, resembles Elmer Fudd, Bugs Bunny's worst enemy in the comics, thinks Daniel Daylight—“then how on earth can he be human, hmmm, Daniel Daylight?”

“‘Vote'?” Daniel Daylight feels himself bite his thick lower lip with both sets of teeth, so unlike Cree which has no such sound or letter, he sits there regretting.

“‘Vote' is when a person helps choose the leaders that will make the laws for his country,” replies Mr. Tipper. He snorts once and then continues. “Every four years, in Winnipeg where I come from, for instance, the person who has the right to vote will go to a church or a school or some such building that has a hall, step inside a little … room—the
voting
booth, this room is called—take a small piece of paper on which are written the names of the four, five, or six people from that region or that neighbourhood who want to go to Ottawa to speak for the people of that region or that neighbourhood.” Daniel Daylight is having trouble keeping up with the torrent of words pouring out of Mr. Tipper's mouth. Still, he manages to catch what he thinks Mr. Tipper, in the past, has referred to as “the drift.” “The person then votes—that is to say, chooses—by checking off the name of the person on that list who he thinks will best speak for him and his needs, and the person on that list whose name ends up being checked off by the greatest number of people in that region or that neighbourhood is voted, in this way, into power, and that person goes to Ottawa to help our prime minister run our country, is what the word ‘vote' means, Daniel Daylight,” says Mr. Tipper. “You ‘vote' for your leader.
You
decide how
you
want
your
life to be in
your
country. That's what makes you a human. Otherwise, you're not.”

The traffic light changes first to yellow, then to green. Daniel Daylight has always taken pleasure in looking at what, to him, is an act of magic.
Thump, thump
, goes the travelling car as it crosses the bridge built for trains. The
thump, thump
stops. And now they're in Prince William (or in land that is human, as Mr. Tipper calls it, where people can “vote,” just like in Winnipeg)—paved streets, lights so bright Daniel Daylight has to squint, lights so bright it looks like mid-afternoon. On Mr. Tipper's car radio, the music is back; some sad, lonely man is howling away about being “cheated” by someone, maybe
his wife. To Daniel Daylight, it sounds, for some reason, like the Indians are being cheated.