Part Four - Kettle River

DANCING WITH GHOSTS: A CROSS-CULTURAL EDUCATION

Part Four - KETTLE RIVER

YEARBOOK

George Bernard Shaw, the Irish writer who grew up as a Protestant in Dublin, said: “If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best take it out and teach it to dance.”

As part of our extra-curricular activities in that school on the Cree reserve, we put together yearbooks. Individual photographs, groups, and candids of kids hamming it up, at school or at school-related activities. I used to take the yearbooks out with me when I returned to the city and to family over the summer months. People would leaf through them slowly, scanning face after face, lingering over the activity pages. One university-educated friend, a parent herself, who had possibly never lived anywhere other than south of Winnipeg, looked up at me with confusion and shock on her face.

     “What's wrong?” I asked, beginning to panic.

     “Nothing's wrong,” she said. “It's just the pictures. It's just that I've never seen Indians smiling before.”

CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION

So I began to suspect that maybe we still live “apart,” not knowing even our neighbours, let alone our fellow citizens. And that perhaps I had some valuable experience, having travelled, flown in, lived and worked on a reserve, which I could share with others. Perhaps I could be a bridge.

     I had already returned to the refuge of university and completed my Master of Arts in English, Canadian Literature, and a thesis The Indian, the “Other,” In the Canadian Quest for Identity: Four Prairie Novels of the 1970s. I looked at the way White writers incorporated First Nations and Metis characters into their stories as links, bridging us to the land, assisting the White protagonists and thence the readers to know who we are, to feel as if we belong. How they functioned as spirit guides, helping us forge a new Canadian identity through a sacred marriage to the place, the new home. "[T]he thesis suggests that some modern novelists see the necessity of learning from Indian characters both the shamanic metaphor--that man must learn to divine the mysteries of life and death--and the Metis metaphor--that we must learn to mix the ancestral presences we bring with us with those we find in the place--in order to re-establish contact with the spirit of the place. . . the sacred 'Wholly Other' within and without." [Abstract, Bridgeman, 1981] My preparation had included a look at “culture failure,” the failure of one generation to transmit its culture, its beliefs, to the next, and an attempt to define "identity." The focus was on White culture, how something seems to be missing. How counter-cultures and quests for gurus represent a frantic search for ideals to replace those which have been rejected, and for new lifestyles to match. How the only constant is change. How life skills involve the ability to sift the wheat from the chaff, to find the pony in the pile of horseshit, the sacred, the numinous, the holy buried beneath dogma and secularism. Not what we believe but that we believe.

     There are many roads leading to the same sacred centre. I never taught high school again. I proposed and assisted with the creation of a no-budget “talking heads” documentary called Mother Tongue in which educators from three or four Manitoba First Nations spoke of the importance of first languages in the schools. I published profiles of prominent First Nations individuals including broadcaster Bernelda Wheeler and MLA Elijah Harper, before the Constitutional crisis. In the city, I organized and presented informal workshops for small groups and private agencies, Cross-Cultural Communication, based on my observations from encounters with Cree people. Here are some of the things they taught me. Here are some tips on how we might be able to improve our communication with volunteers and clients.

     I found to my surprise that some White workers in the city were resistant. Especially a certain group of White women, of a certain age, as we say, with perhaps some training and experience within the helping professions. Women who considered themselves liberal. What seemed to upset them was the idea that First Nations people could be different. Could have different expectations. Could be responded to in a different way from White volunteers or White clients. These women wanted everyone to be equal and to be treated equally, by which they meant “the same.” These women seemed to believe that granting “the other” equality meant assuming they are the same as you, and assuming that you are the norm. It was as if they were giving "the other" a gift. “You're just as good as me; you are the same as me; therefore, I respect you. Imagine that!” I sensed some condescension.

     I had trouble understanding the people who were challenged by an acceptance of differences. It felt as if “they were seeing what they wanted to see.” Or, as if, without firsthand experience, or clear communication, it was easy to project the self, their own values, on to others. It was as if they had never had the benefit of a Mrs. H, pointing out facts about bathing routines. Perhaps they had never had the opportunity to observe, or they lacked the willingness to listen; perhaps it was easy not to notice differences. Perhaps, as Howard Adams points out in his “Schooling the Redman” chapter in Prison of Grass, they were used to being fed back what they wanted to hear. I guess it was the same way I felt challenged when that first student proclaimed: “I'm Cree; I am not Canadian.”

     That must be it. In cities where most of us are immigrants, everyone comes here from elsewhere. Immigrants apply to come to Canada, to become Canadian citizens, because they respect and want to live by our values and laws, to swear allegiance to our Crown. But this is not necessarily true of First Nations. They are not immigrants to Canada. They have a prior relationship to the land. They have cultures and civilizations which pre-exist "discovery" or Confederation. Most have legal relationships with “the Crown.” Their nationhood, their territorial rights, their inalienable human rights, are recognized in (but not derived from) national and international laws, treaties, constitutions. The way they have been treated in Canada since Confederation would not pass any human rights tests, yet Canadians seem oblivious or indifferent to this fact. Is it that we prefer to deal with First Nations people as individuals, to ignore the group rights, their status as nations, the confusing possibility of nations within a nation, that their continuing existence implies? To see them as the same as, not different from, ourselves?

     First Nations individuals may have different opinions. They, and their opinions, whatever they may be, deserve respect. And part of respecting is not assuming. Perhaps I had picked up that phrase on the reserve. The one which says: When you ASSUME, you make an ASS out of U and ME.

AFTER THE FALL

Like these resistant liberal White women, I had grown up in a virtually “apartheid” society, where no Indians were present in my schools or my community. Knowing virtually nothing about Canadian First Nations, their history, their languages, their cultures, their desires. Nothing about the treaties. Which treaty covered Oak River, my home town? Did the town sit in territory previously occupied by Plains Cree? Assiniboine? Dakota Sioux? I had learned nothing about the Indian Act except that it imposed federal government control over Indians and reserves in the 1870s.

     However, living on the reserve, I had learned some facts. The Norway House Cree had signed Treaty Five in 1875. And the relationship between Indians and the Crown (Canada) was governed by federal law, the Indian Act of 1876. It took me a while to recognize the differences between and the significance of these two separate documents, the treaty and the act.
     In His Majesty's Indian Allies, Robert S. Allen puts it this way: "[T]he English acknowledged that the Indians had a 'natural title' to the land which sprang from the right of soil or prior occupancy. But since they were considered a wild and heathen people, 'that live up and downe in troupes like heards of Deere in a forrest,' the English rationalized moral and legal justification for dispossessing the Indians." [p.16] Thus, the treaties dealt with the "natural title" and in Canada, the Indian Act, like the Doctrine of Discovery which sprang from papal bulls, and the American notion of Manifest Destiny, reflect the rationalizations attempting to justify dispossession and colonization. In some cases you still hear people say that "We won the war" (a fact which does not apply in Canada) is the justification for dispossession, that the victor dictates the terms. The rationalizations, which usually involve some form of "divine right" coming down from God through popes, kings, and/or superior civilizations and systems, are racism in action, the colonizing group's belief in their own superiority, translated into self-made legislation. The racist rationalizations are used to justify colonialism--"the control of one nation by 'transplanted' people of another nation--often a geographically distant nation that has a different culture and dominant racial or ethnic group." [dictionary.com]

     In recognition of "natural title," treaty negotiations arranged for ceding, surrendering control of access to their land to the Crown, to enable the Crown to manage immigration and settlement. The negotiating Indians were not naive. They bargained for something of equal value in return. Treaties guarantee that the federal government will provide the First Nations commitments such as housing, medical treatment, education, and treaty money, which usually included a gratuity per person at the time of signing and an annuity, fixed at the 1870s level, about $5 per head, handed out each Treaty Day by red-serge coated RCMP officers. Was the treaty money annuity a token, or was it meant to be a living allowance, indexed? Some treaties included the promise to “grubstake” a new way of life, training and starter supplies to raise livestock and begin farming. In the minds of the treaty-signers, they were permitting access to their ancestral land in return for government help to find new ways, to continue to live in dignity, now that the buffalo were gone. For some, welfare came to be seen as a form of treaty right because no other promised way to be able to support themselves has been forthcoming.

     In Big Bear's time, on the prairies in the 1880s, negotiations were pressured by fear of starvation. Supplies were withheld until treaties were signed, a passive-aggressive stance which was a kind of extortion, starving people into submission, a crime against humanity. Help was forthcoming only if the Indians agreed to surrender their freedom, go on to a reserve, stay there, and maintain the peace. Big Bear resisted because he could see that what the government representatives were agreeing to was not being lived up to after negotiations ended.

     Did the Indians own the land? If so, did they sell it? Cede it? Were the negotiations fair? According to Dakota tradition, I am told, land cannot be bought or sold. And the original understanding of treaty negotiations was/is: with the sacred peace pipe, to negotiate peaceful occupation and mutual usage of the land from the beginning to the end of time. Treaties in Manitoba were signed before the Indian Act was enacted in 1876, and before the influx of new settlers. The relationship between First Nations and the federal government was one of equality and mutual respect. The Indians had agreed to move over, to share. The relationship between First Nations people and settlers was based on mutual respect and assistance, with the Indians assisting the settlers.

THE BAIT AND SWITCH

The nation to nation treaty negotiations recognized aboriginal title and prepared for "mutual occupation and usage." However, then, unilaterally, the Indian Act imposed colonial status on Indians and on reserves. From being recognized as nations negotiating with the Crown, nations within a nation, the Indians became, with the sweep of a pen in Ottawa, subject, wards of the state. The Indian Act is a racist document, based upon assumed White superiority, imposed upon Indians without their consent or consultation. In the Indian Act, White officials determined that Indians were "lesser than," and would be expected to "improve themselves," to assimilate into White society, and to do so according to White rules. The legislation was a reduction, making them less than they had been, taking away self-sufficiency, self-government, self-determination. Such changes had never been part of any negotiations. Under what conditions would a people agree to give up freedom? To sign away their human rights? There are words to describe the dealers who suggest such bargains. Pimps. Snakeheads. Slave traders. Extortionists. Criminals. Are we not in some ways in Canada "living off the avails" of a crime? Are we not all accomplices?

Living on the reserve had helped me become aware of certain aspects, consequences, of the Indian Act. The house assigned to the school principal had been built originally for the Indian agent, a government-appointed White official paid to administer all aspects of life on reserve. The agent granted passes giving reserve Indians permission to leave, to work for wages, to seek medical treatment. The agent allotted housing, enforced the alcohol interdiction. The agent was the symbol of government control of all aspects of Indian life. Symbolically, in that community, the agent had been replaced by the school principal.

     Indians had originally been granted no rights of Canadian citizenship. Forget the nation-to-nation rhetoric which had preceded treaty negotiations. The goal of the Indian Act was to prepare Indians to assimilate, and as soon as they demonstrated that they had the skills to become part of the mainstream, they would no longer need special status. This was the bait and switch; this was not what First Nations had agreed to.

     In the early years, enfranchisement could be forced upon individuals. At first, there was no concept of "dual citizenship," Canadian and First Nations. As that first student's first claim emphasized, Indians were forced to choose between their Cree identity or Canadian citizenship. If they were enfranchised, the Indian Act said their Indian identity would be cancelled, replaced with rights of full citizenship. Before or until that happened, Indians did not even have the vote. This confusion of legal identity is one of the consequences of someone else, some external authority, determining who is and who is not an Indian. Partly in response to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Canadian citizenship was granted to Indians in1956 and the right to vote in federal elections was granted in amendments to the Indian Act in 1960.

    Indian status, the Indian Act decreed, was to be determined according to the British tradition, through the male line. White women marrying in and their children became Indians. Indian women marrying out and their children lost Indian status. This imposed system would not be challenged until 1985, after the Charter had guaranteed equality and prohibited discrimination based upon race or gender.

     Reserve land belonged to the Crown which held it in trust for the group. There would be no freehold tenure, no private ownership of reserve land. As Native economist Howard Adams famously put it: the Indian Act imposed life without capital within a capitalist society. Some unilateral amendments to the Act in the early twentieth century had given the government the right to amend the treaties by moving, leasing out, or selling reserve lands which were not being used. Unilateral amendment to a mutual agreement is a breach. However, if the other party refuses to hear your objection, what can you do? Attempt to appeal to a higher authority, the Crown (the King or Queen or their representative in Canada), or to an international forum.
     Although some treaties had previously negotiated access to traditional territory for hunting, fishing, and trapping, for subsistence purposes, anyone who tried to “capitalize” on these rights, in other words, to make money from the available resources, was denied. That was why, on the reserve, Indians could fish with a "square hook," meaning with a net, but it was illegal for Whites to do so. That is also why it was illegal for Indians to sell any game they hunted, or to sell any fish they caught unless they were properly licensed commercial fisherman. That is also why the argument that treaties never signed away "mineral rights" suggests a way to return potential "capital" to the equation, to find an untapped source of income for the people who had "in good faith" agreed to "mutual occupation."

     Indeed, even employment opportunities were limited by the law, the Indian Act. Indians could not seek or accept work without the Indian Agent's permission. People who ignored this part of the law were charged, convicted, and imprisoned. The Indian Act also prohibited access to government employment unless Indian status was relinquished. (I learned this from the man who drove the ferry across the Nelson River, after the provincial road to the big hydro dam at Jenpeg was extended into the community.) Enfranchisement was required before employment was permitted, relinquishing your Indian status to become the same as all other Canadians, expected to pay taxes, given the right to vote, denied the right to live on reserve. This law forbidding employment impacted an entire group, the men and women who volunteered to fight in World War I and II. So many Indian soldiers could not stand up, stand out, be recognized, because accepting army pay meant that they would be enfranchised, their Indian status cancelled, and their families forced to move off reserve. It was a Canadian “don't ask, don't tell.” Except that after the war, Indian veterans were denied the assistance offered other veterans unless they were enfranchised.

    Thousands of First Nations men and women had fought for a country which did not even allow them to vote. It was pressure from these veterans which forced the repeal in 1951 of those aspects of the Indian Act, the Potlatch Law of 1886, which had forbidden cultural gatherings and indigenous religious ceremonies. The ban on social and spiritual activities such as the potlatch, sundance, and powwow dances had been an effort to reduce cultural ties, to impose Christianity as another step towards assimilation. Individuals and family heads who sponsored potlatches had been arrested and imprisoned. Wearing traditional attire was criminalized; sacred regalia had been confiscated and burned.

     Indians were forbidden to will or inherit property. Later amendments to the Indian Act forbade hiring lawyers, a direct attempt to prevent court challenges and land claims. The 1960 amendments to the act brought elected chief and band councils to reserves. Indian Agents were phased out. Funding to manage the reserves still came from the federal government whose bureaucrats still oversaw band council finances.

     The Indian Act imposed external control on all social, political, economic, and spiritual aspects of the lives of First Nations individuals. Oppressive laws made by other people were an organized attempt to force the First Nations to change, to become someone other than who they were.

The Indian Act is a colonial manifesto, the opposite of a Magna Carta. The Indian Act is a law which makes Indians legally inferior, puts them into a child-like minority position as wards of the state where all the important points of their life are proscribed, controlled by outsiders according to British-Canadian cultural tenets. The Indian Act instituted a form of colonization upon the reserves. The Indian Act, written by Whites without consultation and imposed on Indian people, is a document spawned by racism, the unquestioned belief that the White way, Whites, were superior, that Indians were inferior, and that Indians and Whites would both be better off if the Indians were to become White, to assimilate into White society.

    The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms signed by Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Trudeau in 1982 resulted in many challenges to the Indian Act, to the ways it did not conform to the human rights and aboriginal rights acknowledged in the Charter. Laws reflect the values of the people who make the laws. The Charter made It illegal to discriminate on the basis of race or gender, yet you can still hear some people argue that the Charter only protects citizens under federal jurisdiction. Or that the Charter does not apply to people living on reserves. Can you believe it? Arguing for the right to discriminate? Reacting, out of fear or self-interest or a belief in one's own superiority, rather than “buying into” a higher ideal, the respect for human dignity and all that that entails.

My cross-cultural education had progressed. I had gathered crumbs of history through encounters with First Nations people on the reserve and in the city. I felt I had a better understanding about what the word racism meant, and how it impacted upon the laws of Canada and the lives of First Nations people. How racism was the foundation of the push for assimilation. How there must be other options, and how those options had to be optional, chosen by First Nations themselves. How the situation had to change, to improve. How there was still so much to be done.

     But what could I do about it? Other than feel that sense of solidarity? Try to be supportive? Politics and power grabs and government deception seemed to be problems. And they went unchecked because of a seeming general ignorance, of racism, of injustice. Or was it an on-going belief in White superiority? Did the majority of Canadians still believe that Whites were superior and that Indians should be forced to assimilate? And what if they did believe that? What could protect a minority group from the racist opinions of a majority? Were there any solutions? What government or government official or elected representative would ever risk relinquishing power, or the power to control resources, or money? Which voters would even suggest it?

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

Three years after leaving the North, I began a new job in the federal correctional service. Going through the standard screening with the preventive security officer at Stony Mountain, checking for possible conflicts of interest, checking for names of prisoners, the officer asked me to list criminals I knew personally. I could not think of many. A former student from the reserve whom I had visited in the Youth Detention Centre. Another I had visited in the Health Sciences Centre. No problem, he said, although he did make note of the names and suggested that there might be relatives in the prison population. A former member of the teaching staff of a southern school where I had taught more than ten years before, a man who had murdered his girlfriend. Check. He had been on this officer's caseload, and had transferred out west. An elder who did programming. Check. He was cleared for admission to present workshops. A member of the Citizens Advisory Committee who I knew had had a conviction many years before. Check. (He's a friend of the chief of police, I am told.) A writer who started his career while serving time for armed robbery in Kingston. Check. A couple of draft dodgers at university. Not a problem. He suggested a couple of possible names, but nothing rang a bell. I couldn't think of any more. Rumours of one or two former Oak River high school classmates, fraud and something else, but I doubted that they would have been federal offences.

     Okay. If you think of any more, let me know.

     Done. Selective amnesia.

SHOWER TIME

Pat (again, a name picked from the ether, to prevent any possible embarrassment) is a young guy, which on this tier in this penitentiary makes him somewhat vulnerable, even if he is six foot something and not weak. Youth makes him still impulsive, while he still feels invincible, immune to the risks of foreign substances inserted into his body through various orifices, including self-punctures through his brown skin. He is from Fort Chip in the Northwest Territories. “Skins,” he and his friends proudly identify themselves as, or “Bros,” short for brothers, a brotherhood.

     Speaking to him through the barrier which separates my job from his living unit I notice his teeth. Not the way their whiteness stands out. Rather, the way they look a yellowish-grey, fuzzy, as if moss is growing around the gum line. Recognizing a teachable moment when one speaks to me, I broach the delicate subject of personal hygiene. Toothbrush? Shower time?

“Shower? You never see me in there, do you?“

     Not that I can say I have noticed, as the showers, screened with simple white modesty curtains, are open to workers like him, cleaners, who have the freedom of the range when everyone else is out at work. “You never shower?” I ask in disbelief. Why not? I think, but I don't really have to ask. Showers are a fearful place of exposure. “Don't bend over,” as the saying goes. Places of vulnerability, especially for the young who might be easy prey, subject to pressure for debts incurred in relation to those above-mentioned impulsive and self-destructive choices. But, how can you live with yourself? my surprise seems to say.

     Pat just laughs. Everyone has his own wash basin and flush toilet in his own cell. “I take a whore's bath,” he says with pride.

     Although I laugh in surprise, I know instantly what he means. My curiosity is more literal. “I'm afraid to ask where you learned that expression!” I fear the worst.

     “Dusters,” he explains. He is an avid reader of “dusters,” western

cowboys-and-Indians genre fiction.

     Really? What would an Indian boy pick up from dusters, besides a colourful expression or two about “whore's baths”? Would he identify with the cowboys or the Indians? Or the whores? What are the Indian role models doing? Are his heroes always cowboys, Indian-hunters, or are they the enemies of cowboys and of the civilization for which those cowboys bushwhacked? Art and culture are mirrors; they help us see ourselves, aid in the process of identification. But what happens if the reflections are distorted, if the images we see are grey or fuzzy?

     What if the only familiar faces we see are the mugshots on wanted posters?

     What does a guy have to do to feel “wanted” around here?

KEEPING ALIVE

As my mother was alone and ill in British Columbia, I was able to transfer from the Prairie to the Pacific Region, and from multi-level to minimum security. I had to start learning all over again, policies and procedures, and cross-cultural communication. I had been forewarned. By my brother: “BC is three or four years behind Winnipeg, but after you've been here a while, you don't notice.” By others in the service: “They do things differently,” and ”They have different attitudes out there,” meaning institutional culture, regional differences.

     From senior staff I learned new catchphrases: “That was then; this is now.” And “Rules are made to be broken.” And from the inmates, especially old junkies battered from years in logging camps and winters on skid roads in the city. There the mantra was: “Places like this keep me alive.” He meant, without prison sentences, he would have been dead of an overdose ages ago. (Not to imply that he had no access to drugs inside, just that it was easier for him to choose to avoid them.) And it struck me how the same was also true for First Nations inmates, although there were fewer of them here in the Pacific Region population than had been so visible in the Prairie Region.

     But it was true. Places like Stony Mountain Institution kept First Nations spirituality alive. The new Charter had guaranteed the right to practice the religion of your choice, and policy meant that the service was obliged to provide suitable spiritual advisors and counsellors. Men who may never have seen a pipe at home, or attended a sweat, participated in cultural rituals during their incarcerations. You could actually see self-knowledge grow into self-acceptance and the very best kind of pride. I listened as one Elder responded to an inmate complaint that prison cut him off from nature. “Everything on the Earth is of the Earth,” the Elder said. “Touch your walls and you're connected to nature.”

     In the same way institutions like the prisons have honoured Native culture, the reserves themselves have preserved much that First Nations value. As long as the reserve is there, a First Nations person has a home or a home to go back to. “Why do people stay in those remote, impoverished places,” Southerners ask. “Why don't they just move to the cities and get jobs?” It is a question loaded with cultural assumptions. Maybe they wish to retain that connection to place, to the Earth which sustains them. Maybe, if they leave, they will have no way of getting home. Why do city people own cottages by lakes and rivers, paddle on long canoe trips, send their children to summer camps? Because there is something missing in urban life which requires an accommodation. Some connection which has to be renewed or, like a house plant we forget to water, it will shrivel and die. Maybe they want to remain close to their people, to family and friends, to the human relationships which sustain.

FRASER RIVER - COAST SALISH

Moving to British Columbia is a cultural adjustment for anyone. But where First Nations were concerned, differences from the Prairies stood out. First of all, apartheid is much less obvious in BC. First Nations reserves are right here, in the Lower Mainland, within what seems like town and city limits, in Hope, Chilliwack, Abbotsford, and Vancouver. First Nations people are much more visible. External symbols of First Nations cultures are different from those of plains culture—totem poles, dugout canoes, masks and carvings, button blankets, woven Salish blankets, woven baskets, dip nets, salmon drying racks, headbands and headdresses of cedar, feather, and mountain goat wool. These visuals stress the inextricable link between culture and landscape, culture and environment. Where prairie people lived off the buffalo, West Coast people gave thanks for cedar as their tree of life and for food which swam to their doors.

    At work, the first question I had to adjust was one I used in my introductory information gathering from new clients. “Are you Treaty?” Meaning, Have you got your Treaty Card, the registration from your Band which identifies you as an Indian in Canada? (One reason workers need to know this is because it determines who is responsible for health care costs.)

     “Treaty? What's that?”

     There are virtually no treaties in British Columbia. Registered Indians carry Status Cards.

     No treaties? How can that be? How can we three million plus non-Indigenous British Columbians be squatters, here without permission, without an agreement for mutual occupation? That just does not seem right.

At one work-related cultural event, an Elder asked me if I spoke Halkomelem?

     Halkomelem? (Spelling varies; Halq'emeylem) I could barely repeat the word. I had never heard it before. Halkomelem is the mother tongue of Hal's people, known as the Coast Salish, and living from the Fraser Canyon to the Fraser mouth in Georgia Strait, up the coast, down the coast around Puget Sound, and along the eastern edges of Vancouver Island. I had owned a Salish loom in Winnipeg but I thought it was Scandinavian. I left it in the back alley when I moved. I had been to Ireland; I could tell you the difference between “Red” Irish and “Black” Irish, but I had never heard of Hals or the Coast Salish people or the Halkomelem language.

     I was lucky, through work and contacts, to continue to have the opportunity to attend more functions in local Big Houses where many more Elders were present. The Big House is what people on West Coast reserves call a building which looks like a longhouse but is really more like a large community arena, with a dirt floor where the ice would be, and wooden bench seating in tiers up three of the four walls. There is a large opening between the rafters with a raised roof above it, a space for smoke to escape, but covered to keep the rain out. There is a large fire in the centre of the dirt floor. The fire provides heat and additional light; as the evening, the days, progress, younger men carry in huge chunks of wood from the woodpile out back, four-foot lengths of cedar and fir which produce a pirouette of sparks seeking the sky every time a log is tossed on the firepit.

     The purpose of all the gatherings in the Big House is for people to come together. The ones I attended were to introduce initiates. To watch them dance. To hear them sing. But other gatherings celebrate a life or the anniversary of a death or the installation of a grave post, or the transfer of a name to another member of the family. There is still a taboo about speaking about things that go on in the Big House, from the days when the dances were illegal and families who organized a potlatch were fined or jailed. And, I am lumping things together here which is another offense, Pan-Indianism. Because I attended these feasts in Coast Salish territory and in Gitxsan territory, lands and peoples separated by thousands of kilometres here in BC, and inhabited by people with different languages, different cultures, different histories, different goals and desires.

     In the South, in Coast Salish territory, where the people speak the Halkomelem language, the phrase used by the emcee at the winter dance is “You are called to witness.” At a specified time during the dancing, before the tables are carried in and laden with food for the feasting, the drumming stops and the family that is giving the feast, the dance, takes the floor and calls out the names of individuals in the audience, repeating each time “You are called to witness.” The witnesses are invited to come down with the family, and each one is offered a gift (blankets, clothing, household goods). Family members file past the honourees and hand them coins from the rolls of quarters they have brought for the occasion, as a payment for the important work the visitor is doing, by attending, and witnessing the event that occasioned the dance. In a symbolic way, the witnesses are being paid to remember what happens at this event, to report it in the future. It is a form of oral documentation. On this day in this place you witnessed this person do this. It is oral history, but more than oral, because it involves actions as well as words. But I hesitate to say too much, to make a mistake. When the witness is called, named, honoured, he or she may be offered the opportunity to speak. The talking stick or the microphone or both are passed, and the congregation waits for Elder wisdom.

     The most memorable one for me that I heard was an Elder who insisted: “We are here to help each other through.”

     Yes. I can buy that. Those are words to live by. Those Elders, and those celebrations in the Big Houses, legal again since the early 1950s and guaranteed in the Charter, let me see for myself Indians dancing again. Even once, the Skhway-Khwey dancers, special hereditary masks passed down matrilineally, inherited through the female side of the family, and brought out only for very special occasions.

     After one such winter dance, walking alone to my car in the parking lot, I climbed in and just sat there, gripping the steering wheel, sobbing. Sometimes Elders ask if people are all right because they know the power inside the Big House can be overwhelming. I could not articulate why I wept. Something about the sense of community, how those hundreds of people inside all belonged there, and knew that they belonged there. That the culture which has existed for at least ten thousand years still exists and is still strong.

Those words about helping each other through may have come from an Elder with whom I had subsequent encounters. En route to a gathering in a distant community, he riding shotgun, me driving the company van through dark tunnels, fumbling for the headlight switch, he nodded off somewhere past the first hour of the trip. After we got home safely, I teased him about his comfort level. He must have been confident in my driving if he was relaxed enough to fall asleep, eh? He responded with a smile: “Maybe I was praying.”

SKEENA RIVER - GITXSAN

One day in my office at work, in 1991, a First Nations inmate sat, silent, dejected; the provincial court judgment had just been released. Judge McEachern had ruled against the petitioners in the case Delgamuukw vs. Regina (the Crown). What was so depressing, what made First Nations people first so sad and then so angry, was the judge's insulting ruling that oral history does not count. That nothing the Gitxsan First Nation representatives had said, nothing they had presented to support their case, was worth anything compared to the paper, the documents presented in support of the Crown's case. It was as if the judge were proclaiming that nothing about your culture has any value; that your culture is inferior, White culture is superior, because I say so, because that's the way we do things here in Canada. It felt like an insult to all First Nations. As a White person, I felt ashamed.

     I did not know at that moment that later I would have the opportunity to visit Gitxsan territory, communities like Hazelton and Kispiox, along the Skeena River and its tributaries like the Bulkley and the Kispiox rivers, in northern British Columbia. At one ceremony in the Feast Hall, I witnessed Elders being gifted red and black blankets with white buttons while crowds dressed like mummers in Halloween masks danced a conga line through the room. One of the elders walking around the hall was Delgamuukw, a young-looking man with white hair, wearing a black vest stitched with a green frog design. The frog represents the family crest of the Frog clan to which he belongs. This feast I attended was before Judge McEachern's ruling from the Supreme Court of British Columbia was overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada which confirmed that BC First Nations who have never yet signed treaties do have aboriginal rights and that their own form of historic documentation, the oral history witnessed at feasts, the songs and recitations inherited, passed down from one generation to another, must be accorded respect equal to that of the written documents of the White settlers. Delgamuukw is hereditary chief of just one of the four main clans, the chief whose name is used in the short form to identify the court case.

     At that same feast in Gitxsan territory I met Antgulilibix, hereditary chief of another, the Fireweed clan. At the time, she was introduced as Mary and I did not know the role she had played in the McEachern decision. She was the Elder who attempted to testify by singing one of the ancestral songs into the record, as proof of the Gitxsan claim, as evidence that her culture exists, has existed for millennia, and has its own culturally-accepted methods for documenting and transmitting the history. Under ordinary circumstances, the song she sang in court would be sung at one of the gatherings in the Feast House, before witnesses, who would be expected to remember, and she would pass the song down, when she was ready, to a descendant identified as capable of fulfilling the responsibility. Antgulilibix' testifying in BC Supreme Court had happened in 1987, before I moved to BC, and I was not aware of her history until I saw a cartoon of the incident in an actual history text book. [Lutz, p.276] Evidently the judge had interrupted her song, had referred to it as “a performance” not appropriate for a court of law, and proclaimed that he himself had a “tin ear” oblivious to sound, meaning, or nuance. His comments were disrespectful, his ignorance seemingly deliberate. It was as if he was proud of himself for not being willing to listen or to learn.

     In that courtroom, Delgamuukw had tried to explain. “My power is carried in my House's histories, songs, dances, and crests. It is recreated at the Feast when the histories are told, the songs and dances performed and the crests displayed. . . In this way, the law, the Chief, the territory and the Feast become one.” [Regan, p.163] I do not know whether Antgulilibix lived to hear her song, her self, her culture vindicated when the Supreme Court of Canada overruled Judge McEachern, in favour of Delgamuukw, in 2006. Fifteen years after the original racist decision. One hundred forty-five years after British Columbia joined the Canadian Confederation. One hundred fifty-eight years after prospectors from around the globe had rushed into the homeland of the Halkomelem-speakers, seeking Fraser River gold, without making any culturally-appropriate arrangements for "mutual occupation," as even British law required, with the nations into whose territory they flooded. Two hundred and thirteen years after Alexander Mackenzie reached the Pacific Ocean, “from Canada, by land.”

RETURN TO the RIVER

After my mother died, and prompted by my up-coming tenth anniversary, when I would have been “locked in” until retirement, I left the correctional service. I went and camped out for a year on the ranch where my mother had grown up, in British Columbia's Kettle Valley.

The Kettle River

The book had fallen off the shelf, face down, splayed open at the message: The old has died and the new cannot yet be born. Wait for the door to open. She closed her office door and never went back. She moved to the ranch in Kettle Valley to wait.

     She tells herself she has moved to the valley because she feels empty and alone. Abandoned by a mother who died and left her, a mother she felt she really had never known, she had begun a quest to unearth her secrets, to try to get closer to her. To walk in her footsteps. Yearning to understand, to connect. Her sky-blue trailer sits beneath a canopy of Ponderosa Pine, practically underneath Ingram Bridge. The circle of her yard marks an O in the northeast quadrant of the X made by the river crossing beneath the trestle, in the V made by Bubar Road meeting the Crowsnest Highway. Parallel to the vanished tracks, the wavy blue line of the Kettle River flows past her door. If she crosses the yard, bending through the opening in the decrepit page wire fence, treks to the edge of the abandoned railbed, she can jump into the current below. If she walks downstream, under the rusty girders, where the bank flattens, the water laps gently at the grass, she can wade over to the island of snagged driftwood and alluvium nursing Red Osier Dogwood and young poplar, in medias res.

     At night when the highway traffic is sporadic, the ker-chunks from the bridge deck low and slow, the hum from the river fills her warm rooms. With trickle trills where the water meets the rocks and splits, laughing, into strands around them. As if the stones themselves are singing to her, as they too bathe in moonlight.

     She finds, accommodating herself to the new space, scanning for the proper spot for her desk, that she has to turn her back to the river. Otherwise, she is mesmerized by its murmur of dreamful ease. The Kettle waters call her, subverting her resolve to work, to dig things up, and write them down.

     The Kettle rises far to the north, in the Monashee Mountains, west of Nakusp. Like a goddess twisting and turning, her many arms inscribe her line into the hills, through the soil, revealing the story of the land layer by layer to the bedrock. Like a tree, the Kettle has many twirling branches. The West Fork, the Main, and the North Fork which enters the Main at Grand Forks in the Sunshine Valley. Along her way, she picks up smaller streams—Rock Creek, Nicholson Creek, Bubar Creek, Ingram Creek, Boundary Creek—enticing them to join her, braiding them into her thicker strand. She meanders with proper disregard across and back over the 49^th parallel and across again before she merges with the Columbia at Kettle Falls, Washington. The giant splash of the falls has been drowned behind the big dam that holds back the waters, releasing them slowly to the mother river, the Gorge, the blue Pacific.

     The people who live with the Kettle say: “In her summer mode, you have to lie down in her to get wet.” To lie down in her. Like the fish asleep at noon. Like the beavers who swim home through her. Deadwood floats past deep swimming holes, tube launches, canoe landings. Old bridge abutments mark what used to be the easiest fords. On calm days, her clear waters mirror the shining hills. If the cottonwoods shiver, she trembles. She repeats the whispers of the pines.

     The Kettle is named from the roiling cauldrons found in some of her arms, especially at the rapids up Deer Creek. Years, eons of cascading current have worn a hollow into the bedrock in which the white water appears to boil and bubble. The kettle in turn traps boulders that fall in, whirling them dizzily in the rush of the eddy. The gyrations of the granite fragment erode the inside of the kettle, rounding and deepening it. At the same time, the surging swirl tumbles the broken chunk of rock, smoothing its edges each time it crashes against the basin wall, toiling to sculpt it to an unnatural sphere. The rattle, the drumming of the boulder on the sides, on the bottom, of the kettle is drowned in the sound of the falls.

     The people who love this river collect these rock spheres, as big as bowling balls. The Indians used to cover them in leather and play games with them, they say. Uncle at the ranchhouse next door keeps his with the other artifacts he has found on walks over his family land or on horseback rides up into the rocky hills. He has stone tools used for hunting, tanning, cooking; griddle rocks and pestles; stone blades and scrapers; a jade adze, stone hammers, and a long polished rectangular slab ground to an angled edge at both ends. He has a seemingly endless collection of arrowheads, of every shape and size, from the whitest quartz all the way through blue, gray, charcoal-coloured flints and cherts, rust and blood-red jaspers, to black basalt. “Some of these,” he explains to her, “could have been here for 10,000 years. This, I found on the exact spot where I found my father, dead of a heart attack, when I was seven years old. This one was way up high, at the top of that ridge.”

     She tries to divine from Uncle the secret of finding arrowheads. “There is no secret,” he insists. “The only secret is that I don't look for them; I keep my eyes open, especially after a rain or when the soil has been tilled, and they just appear. Other people can walk right by and never notice them, but I just seem to see.”

     Mum could do that too. When they used to wander together out into the prairie fields, the rich flat glacial till dotted with granite erratics, they picked stones to add to their collections. The white ones, the sparklers for making fire, and unusual colours, seduced her, the wink of mica, magpie trinkets whose shininess caught the eye. It was Mum who found the arrowheads, scrapers, spearblades, the stone hammers the Indians used for pounding or for tethers.

     As a girl, she never thought to ask her mother whether she had collected rocks as a child, what kind of things she had found when she scoured the fields at home in BC, what living on a ranch was like. When Uncle was seven years old, in September, 1937, Mum would have been eleven.

     "Tell us about Grandpa, Mum. What was your Dad like?"
     "He died, when I was twelve years old."

     That was all she ever said. But this ranch, this valley, this river, was her father's world. The picture of him driving the team through the ford would have been taken right along here. He died in that field. He is buried up there, in that graveyard on the hillside, where the lilacs bloom every spring. A granite stone marks the spot.

     This is my Father's world

     And to my listening ears

     All nature sings and round me rings

     The music of the spheres.

     The rogue hymn had inserted itself by accident into the funeral service. She had not thought of the river or of the ranch at that time. She had waited, her eyes and ears alert, until the book had landed at her feet, until the door had opened.

     "Once you have dipped your feet in the Kettle," they say, "you always return."

     Return when empty. It is a life skill. In her frantic twirling and spinning, she had forgotten. But that is what she is doing now, by intuition. Breathing in, bathing in the numinous, in a landscape alive with the dead, shivering, whispering, drumming, singing to her. The river rocking her to sleep. The water lulling her to dream.

     The arms of her mother's chair cradle her as she sits working at her desk. Divining the secrets of the stones. Keeping her windows and doors open.

FRASER RIVER - PROTOCOL

The Indians in the Kettle Valley moved to the reservation at Colville, Washington, after the boundary was surveyed in the 1850s. But there are still many First Nations in British Columbia. At another southern gathering I attended, in a hotel, not a Big House, a federal Indian politician, Chief of the Assembly of First Nations at that time, himself a Cree from northern Manitoba, made a little speech. He started out by commenting on the ceremonial opening, the singing of O Canada, “our home on native land.” Then he made another little joke after being gifted with his blanket and handed his symbolic two-bit coins. Teasing and one-upsmanship are such a part of the multiple First Nations cultures.

     "Thank you," he said respectfully. "Thank you for inviting me into your territory. Thank you for blanketing me. Thank you for the quarters.

     But hey, haven't you guys out here ever heard of loonies?"

He can still joke. We can still joke. We have to be able to laugh. First Nations culture insinuates itself in many subtle ways. Every time I see a t-shirt walking towards me, or earrings, or a garden ornament, featuring Kokopeli, the Southwestern Trickster, I give a little snicker. They think of him as a musician, a flutist, but do they know that the hump on the Trickster's back is a large engorged penis he is burdened to lug around with him? That that's why he is associated with gardens, with seeds?

     It's a life skill, this ability to laugh, at ourselves, our imperfections, at our human condition. To believe in and respect each other, willing and able to learn, to work and live together.

TRUTH and RECONCILIATION

As part of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established to provide a forum for former students to speak and to educate the general public about what happened. Their mandate is clearly stated on their website, trc.ca. In February, 2012, the TRC released its Interim Report, They Came For the Children. Even as a former teacher, a former reserve resident, as a student of history, and as someone who had sub-contracted to work on part of the residential schools settlement, there are facts in this report which are news to me.

     I had been aware that, as part of the plan to assimilate the Indians, the government had set up the Indian Residential Schools System almost immediately, in place of the promised on-reserve schools. Indian children had been taken away from their families and communities to large industrial-style boarding schools where they were forbidden to speak their mother tongue. The schools were run by teachers and administrators employed under contracts negotiated with the churches. As the system was generally underfunded, relying on charity and missionary zeal, conditions were often abysmal. To make matters worse, some children were centred out for physical, sexual, or psychological abuse.

     I believed that the idea of residential schools was based on the racist assumption--that White culture, Western Civilization, was superior to First Nations cultures and, furthermore, that First Nations children, their communities, and Canada as a whole would be improved if First Nations were assisted to assimilate as quickly as possible into “mainstream” White Canadian culture. I recognized that these are racist assumptions.

     I assumed that these racist assumptions were probably held by the majority of White Canadians during the years the residential schools were in operation, from Confederation to 1996. Most Canadians also believe that education improves our opportunities in life. The more impoverished our beginnings, the greater the likelihood of improvement. And ever since treaties were signed in the 1800s, First Nations have been told “Education is the new buffalo.”

     I also believed that the First Nations had asked for schools to educate their children and that the federal government was obliged to provide them as part of the conditions signed in the nation-to-nation treaties by which the First Nations had agreed to "mutual occupation," to permit settlement in traditional territories and to accept permanent settlements for themselves on land reserved for Indians. This also, for the most part, is true.

     I also knew that the Metis were not part of the treaty-making process and that the federal government did not assume any legal responsibility towards them or their education. A Supreme Court ruling in January, 2013, may change this old understanding of rights and responsibilities.

     As an educator, I knew a bit about the history of education. In Canada, public schools were locally initiated, generated and paid for by local parents and taxpayers who were usually one and the same. As a student of history, I knew that, by law, outlined in the British North America Act, now called the Constitution Act of 1867, education is a local matter and thus is a provincial jurisdiction, paid for by municipal and provincial taxes. That in theory, taxpayers paid for education because an educated population was a benefit to all, not just to the individuals involved. And that this model of education supported by local taxes could not be applied to reserves for two reasons. First, the constitution clearly stated that all Indians, no matter where they lived in Canada, were the responsibility of the federal government. And second, because there was no tax base on reserves, as residents do not own and cannot sell the land. The funding for schools for First Nations children comes solely from the federal government. Once the treaties were signed and the Indian Act passed, the federal government, as sole funder, assumed it alone would determine how and what the First Nations students were taught, by whom, and where. He who pays the piper calls the tune. Money as the means of control. Money talks, and in Canada, it only speaks English or French.

     I also knew that in England, where most of the English-speaking Canadian ideals originated, children attended boarding schools and military schools from a very young age. They where separated from parents and sent to places where abuse, especially student on student abuse, was rampant. These old ways had lead to the values of a “stiff upper lip” and “what doesn't kill us makes us stronger” which we associate with Victorian child-rearing techniques. I also knew, as a teacher who has worked with many students for whom English is a second language, that “immersion” is believed to be the fastest and most effective way for students to learn a second language in a school setting.

     I also knew, from my years of teaching both on reserve and off, that many if not most teachers go into teaching believing that they are doing good, helping children develop, making it possible for them to reach their full potential, to become healthy, happy, contributing members of Canadian society. Teachers did not and do not intend to harm children. The instances where individual harm arises, cases of physical, psychological, or sexual abuse, are personal, crimes against the person, not systemic, and not, never condoned. I suppose, as a former teacher, I identify with other teachers, and I hate to see everyone tarred with the brush of abuser and criminal just because they volunteered to work within a system. I know there were and are good teachers, and that many residential school students developed respectful loving supportive relationships with the staff members who cared for them.

     Before reading the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Interim Report, I had heard the phrase “getting rid of the Indian in the children.” I took this to mean that the schools were given the mandate to train the children in the new ways, to prepare them to assimilate, to become a part of Canadian society. Although the phrasing certainly implies that “the Indian” part of the child constituted an undesirable element, I chose to read it as a focus on the future rather than on the past. I understood how taking the children away, “scooping” them, and placing them in schools far away, where visits were almost impossible and even returning home was difficult, was an emotional hardship for everyone involved. The children were fearful, the parents sorrowful, and the results of the separation succeeded in driving an even greater wedge between generations than we see in other families. For the message, sometimes voiced, sometimes unvoiced, was that your families and your homes represent the old ways and that you must abandon the old ways to prepare for the future.

     I did not fully appreciate the racist implications, the assumption that White culture is better. I never thought about possible ways to be or to become a strong culturally-based person able to function outside that mainstream culture, to integrate into a larger society without becoming subsumed by it, without assimilating and disappearing.

     But this is what I did not know.

     That the goal of separating the children from families and communities was not merely to educate them to enter Canadian society. The goal was, literally, by destroying First Nations culture, by assimilating First Nations people into mainstream Canada, to reduce government costs by eliminating the people to whom Canada was indebted. Once Indian children were assimilated, the government and bureaucratic thinking went, that chunk of the Canadian federal budget set aside for the education of First Nations children and the maintenance of people on reserves would no longer be needed. Taxpayer money would be saved by eliminating one drain on the federal budget, this fiduciary responsibility to Indians. First Nations would be enfranchised tax-paying citizens, no different from anyone else. In effect, the plan was to undermine the promise of the treaties by “disappearing” the people with whom the treaties had been signed. There would be no “Indian problem” because there would no longer be any Indians. This was a betrayal, a deliberate reneging on the letter and the spirit of the treaties signed with First Nations. This made the residential schools system an attempted genocide, an attempt to destroy a people by destroying their culture.