Part Two - Nelson River

DANCING WITH GHOSTS: A CROSS-CULTURAL EDUCATION

Part Two – NELSON RIVER

HOT DOGS

Nowadays, two generations later, I often feel homesick for the reserve, if I flick across reruns of old North of 60 shows, or homesick for the North, watching Adam Beach on Arctic Air. In winter I miss the smell of woodsmoke, or of the tanned moosehide mittens and mukluks sold by the crafters. Snowshoes and snowmobiles give me flashbacks. If I'm in the right place, in the summer, I may slip in to one or two of the big powwows held in or near Winnipeg, or anywhere on the Great Plains, from Texas to Yellowknife, or anywhere to which plains people have moved. Now I know that an Indian dance is not a performance. That in the past, dances brought people from far away together for political, economic, social, and spiritual reasons to one pre-arranged place, at one time. And that modern powwows, although each individual has his or her own agenda, are like giant sports days, except that, instead of baseball or track, the competitions are for different types of dances—circle, hoop, round, traditional, fancy shawl, jingle dress, grass, inter-tribal. Ribbon shirts, bristle roaches, eagle feathers on headdresses, fans, and bustles abound. The drum is “the heartbeat of Mother Earth”; the drum groups take turns singing and keeping time. There's always an emcee who loves the mic, calling out the schedule of dances, the names of prizewinners, of Elders leading the prayers, gathering everyone for the Grand Entry, the Veterans Honour Dance, the Final Procession, keeping the audience entertained with his own stand-up routine.

    It was at a powwow that I first heard this story, the First Nations equivalent of a Canadian Newfie joke or the “farmer's daughter” jokes which I collect. Jokes which used to be about making fun of the “other” but are recycled today as affectionate and self-deprecating.

These two Indians, “bush Indians,” as the term goes, someone somewhat less sophisticated, less experienced, less widely travelled, these two guys from ____ (insert name of rival town) are coming to a big powwow in the city, to what would in the past have been “enemy territory.” They are excited to see all the people, all the regalia, to hear the drums beating, the emcee insulting his friends. To see the long row of tents set up as the food court, their banners competing: Real Indian Bannock. Fry Bread. Indian Candy. Fishburgers. Buffalo Burgers. Hot Dogs.

     Hot Dogs? So it's true then? These people actually do eat dogs?

     The two buddies rush up to the hot dog stand. “Two hot dogs!” they order, shaking their heads and wrinkling their noses at the proffered raw onions and green pickles.

     “Hot dog,” they say, almost in unison, and manipulate the long bun to best insert it into their drooling mouths.

     One of them, taking a little longer to bite, finally satisfies his curiosity. He opens the bun and takes a peek. His eyebrows go up, his eyes go big. He turns to his buddy who is already swallowing, and asks suspiciously, “What part did you get?”

MOVING NORTH

Moving from Winnipeg north to a fly-in reserve in those years in the 1970s was a bit of a physical challenge. For one thing, there was no road. There were roads on the reserve but they didn't link to anything. Cargo went by boat up the 800-km length of Lake Winnipeg, past Warren's Landing, up the Nelson River, Playgreen Lake, to one of the docks in Norway House, either at the Fort or the government dock near Church Point in the Rossville townsite. People had to fly on scheduled flights, usually in a Queen Air, from Winnipeg. The landing strip was gravel, and there was a sign, on the road between the airfield and the river, that said “Watch for low-flying planes.”

     Flying in for the pre-screening interview was the first time I had ever been on a reserve and the first time I had ever been in an airplane. Over the years, I had to get used to the flying. Once, returning to the reserve alone, as I was the only passenger heading north, the pilot invited me to sit up front, in the co-pilot's seat in the cockpit. He gave me an impromptu lesson in VFR, visual flight rules, how to navigate without instruments from Winnipeg to Norway House. (This is many long years before the invention of GPS.) Follow the highway north to the lake at Hecla Island. North west along the lakeshore. When you can see George Island, head for it, north east, to fly across the lake. North to the mouth of the Nelson River where it begins its journey to Hudson Bay. Follow the river to the airport. With hands on the control yoke and feet on the rudder pedals, I manipulated the small plane, climbing, descending, turning. Bank. Flaps. Pitch. Yaw. Altitude. Attitude. Speed. But it wasn't enough; I never caught the flying bug. However, the experience at the controls did help reduce my anxiety. I recognized that my fear stemmed partly from ignorance of just how these machines got up into the air and what kept them there. There was also the element of fear of dying. So I was able to shrug. Whatever. We all die sometime. Just let it be quick. But I love the earth, this land, too much, to want to leave it for any frivolous reason.

    Once you were up there, on reserve, getting out of town could be just as much of an adventure. One time we sat on stools in the cavernous belly of an old World War II cargo plane, a DC-3, after heat had been pumped in at the airport from a giant Herman Nelson portable gasoline-fired heater. Then the large flexible hose from the heater was whipped out and the plane door slammed quickly, with a prayer, to keep the temperature up until touchdown in Winnipeg. One time the plane went the wrong way, north instead of south to Winnipeg, and we ended up waiting in Thompson Airport for the better part of a day. It was Academy Awards night and we were missing the broadcast. Then, when a flight finally became available, it went even farther north, to Churchill, to pick up other stranded fliers. The snow was so deep at the Churchill Airport that the only thing that was visible out our porthole window was one porch light above a drift-buried door. After new passengers were loaded, the secondhand smoke in the passenger cabin was so strong that everyone was flying high.

     People flew in to the reserve and waited for freeze-up. After the ice froze to at least a thickness of eighteen centimetres, winter ice roads were constructed across the northern end of Lake Winnipeg to connect to the Thompson Highway, north or south. When the snow had been ploughed and evergreen trees stuck into snowbanks to aid with visibility, cars and trucks could be driven in and out. One time we drove past a semi-trailer truck flipped on its side, jackknifed, along the edge of the ice road. “The driver was going too fast,” rumour had it; “he drove over his own wave and cracked the ice, and that's what caused him to jackknife and flip.” I shake my head. It is “another country,” and “there are more things in this heaven and earth” than Horatio dreamed of in his philosophy.

     So, it was all adventure--getting there, getting to know a boreal forest landscape of rock, lakes, and trees, totally foreign to me, and getting to know the people and the culture which the land sustained. “Muskeg” is the Cree word for the swampy land; “Muskego” are the people of the swampland, the Swampy Cree; “Moniyas” are the Whites, referred to as “transients.” For the Whites come from outside and leave. No one expected you to stay; you had to “learn fast.”

STAFF PARTY

From the darkness of the porch as I am knocking the snow off my boots, I can hear the guys cheering. Go! Go! Go! They are pumping, egging someone on. Not me, obviously. But as I slither into the kitchen, all I can see are their backs, the whole lot of them, all turned away from the bottle-laden table, encircling one guy, his blond hair haloed in the low-ceilinged kitchen by the pot light over the sink. The boss's arm is draped over the guy's shoulders, above the pumping buttocks, the slack-seated jeans.

     At the touch of the frozen fresh air from my entrance, the blond turns out of the embrace, around, something large and meaty in his grip, showering his buddies in the chorus line, a drunken smirk on his face. Seeing it is just me, his busy hands unable to salute, he gives a slight nod of the head and turns back to his business, targetting the yellow stream in the general direction of the stainless steel kitchen basins.

     Like one of the cringing yard dogs, I slink kitty-corner to the door leading to the living room where the “girls” have flocked--the wives and dates and hopefuls lingering outside the circle, hovering close to the free booze, waiting for later, for an anonymous fumble before some poor bugger nods off or passes out.

     “Get yourself a drink,” one of the women yells, and I smile, hold up my own bottle secreted under my parka, motion for the church-key, chug-a-lug.

     “I'm not going back in there, I don't care how much you pay me!” I try to joke to the abandoned wives and girlfriends.

     “Who's the new guy?” I ask, by way of an ice-breaker. Identification. Always start with a description.

     “The blond? Friend of the boss's.”

     “Cousin, I heard.”

     “New recruit.”

     “Her boyfriend,” someone nods towards a girl new to the group.

     “My fiancé,” she offers, which makes me think, Knocked up but still hopeful.

     It would be deluding myself not to notice how he has been welcomed. How he fits right in. How he has something I don't have. That cockiness that is always interpreted as confidence.

     The next time someone yells out “Are we having fun yet?” the new blond guy yells back, “Over here. Over here.” His buddies call him by their new pet name, Dipstick or Hoser, and pat him on the back, a welcome addition to the workplace.

CLASSROOM – LESSON ONE

As an outsider moving to a northern reserve to teach, my first interactions are with other staff members. But soon, the doors open, school commences, classes begin.

     The thing I love about teaching English is the opportunity to choose the content to use to focus on developing their skill levels in reading, writing, and thinking. Literature is my favourite medium to address both the academic and the personal development of high school students. The challenge is to identify topics that will interest them, to lure them into the subject, so they don't even realize that they are learning or that what they are doing is “work.” The classroom is like a gym, a place to develop and exercise intellectual muscles, critical thinking skills. I hang a little hand-stitched sampler of my motto: “Teach them how to think, not what to think.” Challenge them. Engage them. “Is that an opinion or a fact?” is one of my favourite questions. Well, this is the romantic approach. Teaching style has to match the teacher's personal strengths. The classic conservative motto would be more like: here's the book, here's the curriculum; here's the exam; memorize; read and weep. I exaggerate somewhat--hyperbole. As a teacher alone in the classroom, you have to stand up, to believe in yourself, your years of university, your teacher training, your permanent professional teaching certificate, your previous teaching experience, your knowledge of the variety of individual learning styles (visual, auditory, tactile), your love of your subject, and your love of teaching. For, as everyone knows, no one teaches a subject. We all teach students. I loved my subject, and I loved teaching students.

     At the same time you watch them develop, mature, climb Maslow's pyramid as they learn to master, to manage their needs, from the basic necessities of air, food, and water, through safety and security, love and belonging, self-esteem and confidence, to become creative, contributing, respectful human beings capable of reaching beyond. The ability to witness this growth must surely be the teacher's greatest joy.

     Yet, what I remember most about teaching on the reserve are the things my students taught me. I may have started out as a farmer's daughter, living in a de facto apartheid world, a Southerner who had chosen to work in the North as a kind of travel adventure. Sure, I loved Canada, but how much did I really know about it? Or about this community I was flying into? Those days were also a learning experience for me.

     I don't remember the exact topic of the English lesson. Maybe I tried to explain how living in new parts of Canada is interesting, exciting to me, how I hope to learn more about this homeland I love so much. I remember, two generations later, the exact first words the first student to speak ever said to me: “I'm not a Canadian; I'm Cree.” Matt was the first. (I'm going to make up names, to prevent any unintended embarrassment to the actual students.) Matt was the first First Nations person I met who rejected the idea of Canada and Canadian citizenship and identified only with his Cree nation.

     In my shock, I failed to probe him. Although I did not recognize it at the time, Matt's rejection of Canadian citizenship was a form of payback. For almost the first one hundred years of the Cree nation's relationship with the nation of Canada, from 1867 to 1956, Canada did not extend citizenship to Crees or any other Indians. If an individual wished to attain all the benefits of Canadian citizenship, he or she had to sign away their rights, their “treaty status,” their “racial identity” as registered Indians, in order to be “enfranchised,” to gain “rights” most of us never think twice about—the right to vote, to work for the government, to live where we choose, to purchase and consume alcohol if we choose, to marry whomever we choose without the threat of loss of rights, to pay taxes, to own property, to make a will, to hire a lawyer. The rejection of a new concept of “dual citizenship” is an understandable kind of reaction on Matt's part. “You didn't want us; now, we don't want you! Awas!”

     Matt and most of his classmates spoke Cree at home and had been speaking solely English at school for close to a dozen years. Not everyone in the class felt the same way he did about Canada, but all were in varying degrees equally proud to be Cree or part Cree, to be part of an ancient and on-going Cree civilization. It was from Matt that I first began to get a glimmer of understanding about what the term First Nations means. The Cree were a nation before Canada ever existed, with their own language and their own culture. They were and still are a nation, and proud of it. And furthermore, that the Cree nation, every First Nation, is composed of individuals who each have their own opinions.

NON-DENOMINATIONAL

At that school on the reserve, I worked within a provincial curriculum, guided over the years by administrators in the nearest city, Thompson, who were in turn guided from the provincial capital, Winnipeg, through the local principal. (Over the years, I served under at least three different principals, one of them, ironically, from Bradwardine, Manitoba.) A parent advisory committee offered the principals advice, although the committee never met with teachers. It was so many years ago that every school day, we were compelled to open with “The Lord's Prayer.” At school I hesitantly spoke up to suggest that, for me, and perhaps too for some of my Cree students, I felt “The Lord's Prayer,” compulsory, was an imposition on my right to freedom of religion.

     “What the hell are you talking about?” the principal retorted. “ 'The Lord's Prayer' is non-denominational!”

     Oh my God, am I here all alone? I was in my Bob Dylan “Desolation Row” stage.

    “ 'The Lord's Prayer' is Christian,” I replied meekly, leaving him to wonder, or not, whether I was telling him I was Jewish or atheist or Buddhist. He didn't give a damn, and he didn't see my point. One of his minions spoke up, pounding the nail in farther: “And furthermore, it is the law!” I think he, being from a more easterly province, had just read the Manitoba Schools Act.

A casual conversation a few days later with one of the parents on the advisory committee met with similar indifference. “Being forced to pray doesn't hurt the children,” she assured me. Okay. She was not the parent who lead resistance to the powwow-dancing group in town, on the grounds that it reflected a pagan past that was better left buried.

     It was years later before a high school student in the South, not yet burdened with student debt or the necessity to mollify principals or employers, led the battle to oppose compulsory prayer and the discrimination against individual students who objected. They were banished from the classroom, forced to stand outside in the hallway where they could contemplate the Christian assumption that if you aren't Christian, it would be better for you and for your society if you were.

My unsuccessful stand to remove compulsory prayer and Christianity from the public school classroom did have one long-term result. For the first time in my life, I was able to say out loud, in public, “I am not a Christian.” I had no idea how liberating that stance would be, regardless of the negative career impact. I had been “raised” an Anglican, had been baptized as an infant and confirmed as a teen. I could still recite the Apostle's Creed. However, I knew that the words were in my head, memorized, but that they were not in my heart. I lived camouflaged within a Christian-dominated culture, my values mostly consistent with my Anglican heritage, but there was a line between culture and faith, a division separating my heritage and my personal commitment. I did not attend church except for weddings and funerals, I probably had not taken communion since I was confirmed. I have never attended a Bible study group, although I do confess to having read the Bible as literature.

     My personal sins of omission also speak volumes about the way culture grows out of faith, but that the two are not synonymous, at least for some people. Culture can exist without religion. Or, as I heard it phrased on the radio the other day, there can be “good without God.” Although it is difficult to disentangle all the religious tendrils clinging to laws and by-laws, and choking social expectations, the liberation which resulted from “I am not a Christian” was surprising. Without a faith which tells you what to believe and how to behave, you are forced to make choices. Private choices, which deal with the body, or with personal relationships. Concepts like masturbation, fornication, adultery, orgasm, birth control, abortion, sacrament, marriage, monogamy, polygamy, divorce, profit-making, tithing, or charity become personal rather than proscribed, personal rather than public, personal rather than legal choices. Morality becomes a constant reaffirmation, actions based upon ethical beliefs about who has the right to choose, what they may choose, under what circumstances and situations, and who has the right to know.

     In teacher training we learned to recognize the different types of reasons we use when making decisions about morality—obeying orders or expectations, fearing punishment, assessing self-interest, desiring to conform and to be accepted, respecting authority by obeying the law and keeping the peace, doing what is best for society, and following higher ethical principles such as justice and respect. [Kohlberg] The pressure to conform and the desire to be accepted by their peers, to belong, are strong in most students of high school age. Literature can open doors for discussion about options and alternatives. Situational ethics perhaps, for it is more difficult to think for yourself, to make your own decisions, than to try to live by society's dictates. Making your own decisions is more like driving without traffic lights or road signs. You have to focus on your destination, your goals and purpose. At every intersection, you have to make the assessment. Which route will take me there most directly, most quickly, most safely? You have to decide for yourself based on your own values, and act accordingly, over and over again.

     Even years later, after I left the classroom, when the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was being discussed in Canada, some Canadians were having trouble distinguishing between “freedom of religion” and “freedom from religion,” the idea that a Canadian can not be assumed to believe or forced to believe in a monotheistic supreme being and a rewards-and-punishments afterlife. However, at the time, the monotheists had the most votes and God sneaked into the Preamble: “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.”

To testify to not being Christian also led me to change some of my actions. I try not to ask students for their “Christian” names. I try to avoid using religious terms, especially the word “Christmas.” Save Christmas for the true Christians, I feel, although I insist on celebrating the yule season, the solstice, with evergreens as the pagan symbol of life amidst death which they always were, before Christianity appropriated them. Pagan and Proud, as the t-shirt says. I select greeting cards which stress the season, or ones which feature doves and emphasize Peace. I light candles and string lights as symbols of hope, of life, in the dead of winter, as they have always been. We can retain the rituals, the gift-giving, games and gatherings, threshold ceremonies, festive dances, flowers for weddings and funerals, all the little joys which celebrate our connections, to each other, to the greater Mystery. Nature and the elements, the environment, the cycle of seasons, the land itself, can bring us all together because they are shared experiences which connect us, which welcome all without imposing any one belief, while rejecting the idea that any one individual or group is superior. As Canadian artist Douglas Coupland puts it, speaking of identity, “This wonderful collective bond of landscape.”

I did not know until many years after the fact that I probably would not have been hired to teach on that reserve if I hadn't answered an interview question with “I was raised as an Anglican.” I did not mean to be deceptive. Nor did I realize that when the churches withdrew from teaching in the residential schools, they did so only after deals had been made guaranteeing a sort of equal representation on the public school teaching staffs for teachers from the different faiths. Thus, although it seems as if it should be illegal, the religion of an applicant determined whether or not there was a position available. That was why, in the community, a nun was principal of one of the three schools and teachers were slotted on the roster according to their Catholic or non-Catholic status, de facto if not de jure.

     Years later, when I was being interviewed for possible employment with the Correctional Service of Canada, the interviewer asked about religion. I believe he was trying to sniff out religious fanatics motivated to work in prisons to rescue society's rejects and save sinners. But by that time, I had a practiced answer: “I'm not religious, but I do consider myself to be spiritual.” I keep the "Pagan and Proud" to myself.

OTHERED

As part of a reading and critical thinking exercise for an English lesson, I clipped an article from a Winnipeg paper which reported upon the success of the local Cree-language radio station on the reserve. Broadcasting from the community, the modern technology was being used by trappers to keep in touch with home, by families to send messages from town to those who were “on the land.” As a by-product, the use of Cree in telecommunications was helping to maintain the numbers of people who continued to be fluent in the mother tongue.

     But the reaction of the students reading the article surprised me. “Who is this 'they'? Do they think we are all trappers and live in wigwams or trapper cabins?” I read the article as a news report, informing the Southerners and city dwellers of innovations in the North. The students read it as “othering,” evidence that outsiders saw them as somehow different, maybe backwards, living in almost the same way the Cree lived when the first Hudson's Bay Company traders arrived three hundred years before. “Don't people know that we also speak English, that we live in houses with telephones, drive snowmobiles, trucks, and cars, that some of us have jobs in schools and hospitals, or as commercial fishermen, whatever?”

     I sensed a certain tension in the class. Students were asserting that “We're not that different.” At the same time, there was ambivalence. They wanted to be the same. Or they wanted to be seen at least as equal to the modern people elsewhere, especially in the South.

    I also realized that living as they did in the largest reserve community in the province, going to school with their siblings and relatives, people they had known all their life, sprinkled sparsely with the fairer heads of students whose parents were teachers or doctors or police officers, these students rarely experienced any form of prejudice or discrimination by other races. They certainly did not experience the antagonism expressed against First Nations people in the cities, although one boy, sent south for medical treatment, reported that his landlady had asked him not to sit on the front porch, to avoid being centred out by her neighbours. Indeed, most of the children of White families on the reserve were sent out to school, or the parents transferred out when the children reached school age, because, they said, they feared for the development of their children's English language skills.

    How were these local reserve and off-reserve (Metis) students going to cope when they did go out, for further education or seeking employment, especially when they do encounter discrimination?

     Along with ensuring that they master the same curriculum as the southern students, along with encouraging them to read, one of my goals was always to encourage students to feel good about themselves. About their backgrounds. About their bi-lingualism. “Never be afraid to speak up, to express your opinion.” “Accents are in,” although most of the students did not really have accents. “There is something the matter with people who feel that they are superior and that you are inferior.” I wanted to make sure that they knew, the way we try to bully-proof all students, that “It's not you, it's them.”

     That there's something wrong with them, the people who bully and hate.   
     Don't be intimidated. Stand tall. Stand together. Solidarity.

     Celebrate the fact that we are all the same but different.

CAREER DAY

Another day in class, a member from the local RCMP detachment, in uniform, the yellow stripe down his pant leg, came to speak about careers in the RCMP. At that time he was speaking mainly to the males, although the class was fairly evenly balanced by gender. Also, at that time, he was happy to tell them about the newly-devised program for Native policing. The force was looking to recruit First Nations men to fill Special Constable positions on reserves.

     “Why would these students choose to apply as Special Constables rather that apply through the same channels as everyone else in Canada?” As I asked the question, I did wonder whether there was some racism involved. Were the RCMP assuming that Native students could not compete with all the other high school graduates who wanted to become Mounties? Or worse, did the RCMP assume that Native students did not have the basic academic qualifications to apply through the usual channels? This classroom should have been proof that times were changing. Native students were graduating from high schools in their home communities. Or, worse yet, did the RCMP, like so many others, including Whites in the North, believe that, by definition, the education received in northern, rural, or Native high schools was inferior to that received elsewhere? I notice only now that I failed to stress the equal opportunities for females who may have been interested in a law enforcement career, as the RCMP had already begun hiring females.

     The officer spokesperson did have an answer to my question about why a special program for Native policemen. It seemed that the proposed Native constables were seen as a sort of liaison officer position between police and community. The reason they were designated as “different” was because, for regular RCMP officers, there was a rule against policing in your home community, where you might be more likely to encounter personal or familial conflicts of interest. The Native constables would be expected to police their home communities, where they could be valuable two-way conduits of communication and relationship, like the Metis guides of old. The speaker even suggested that this idea was a reaction to feedback the force got about why Natives did not apply. Because they did not want to leave their home communities for the purposes of training or seeking employment.

    It was true, and is still true, that family ties are strong in Native communities. Employment within a capitalist system demands the willingness to sever family ties, or at least to downplay the value of familial connection and responsibilities, in order to pursue personal career and financial goals. It's part of White culture, the strong work ethic, and the belief that work comes before play. Employment contracts specify an allotted number of days each year an employee may be absent from work to attend to family responsibilities, often specifically, to attend funerals. Everyone working in a reserve school knows that family and community events take priority over school attendance. And family and community ties play a big role in student career choices.

     In the ensuing forty-odd years, the Native constable program has been fazed out and Native applicants enter the RCMP the same way as everyone else. I would feel this were a good thing, if it were not for the class-action lawsuits being filed by female officers, finally standing up, in solidarity, to protest the personal and systemic discrimination they faced in a force that was supposedly “integrated.” Every legal response from the force reported in the media seems to be an attack upon the victims, questioning the credibility of the defendants, making the force sound like a macho domain of men who feel entitled and superior. Of course, this is a by-product of the adversarial positions proscribed by our legal system. A winners versus losers attitude which, I fear, appeals to sexists, to all those who feel themselves superior. Who are also likely to feel superior toward different groups, to discriminate against others for more reasons than gender. Because the truth about abuse is that it is not about the victims. It is about what is wrong with the abusers. And with the systems which attract and protect them.

     What do statistics say about the careers of First Nations recruits in the RCMP over the last forty years? Because news reports suggest that the discrimination behind that thin red para-military line is not limited to sexual harassment.

ELDERTALK

Before moving up north to teach, I had listened to a few Native speakers and educators talk about their experiences to our “cross-cultural education” class. Then, in the school, in the community, one of those same Native educators came to present an in-service. Thinking about those mysterious Sioux on the reserve once sharing a name with Oak River, my home town, I tried to ask a question about the sundance. The Elder's young assistant, with two long braids resting on his chest, shot me down instantly. Nothing to do with the Cree in whose territory we were sitting. And my question indicated I didn't have a clue what I was talking about—dancing, sun, pain, sacrifice. Pan-Indianism, I learned, is a common mistake among those of us who know nothing. Indians are not all the same. The languages are different. The cultures are different. The rituals are different. Sioux rituals have nothing to do with Cree rituals.

     Okay.

     After the session broke up, I went up to introduce myself to the Elder, to remind him that I had met him a few weeks earlier at the training session in Winnipeg.

     “I'm sorry,” he smiled at me. “All White teachers look alike to me.”

     I believe he was smiling. I know he was teaching.

     Contrary to some definitions, I do not believe that Whites have a monopoly on racism and ethnocentrism.

I did understand the respect for Elders. Didn't my own Elders attempt to instruct me all the time? Didn't my BC grandmother counsel me “to dress for the weather, not the climate,” and didn't she share a story with me about the importance of passing high school mathematics? How she had failed mathematics in her senior year and thus had been denied admission to Oxford? I certainly needed to hear that one when I did.

     And didn't my other grandmother from Bradwardine stress the familiar scripts. “Do unto others the way you would want them to do unto you.” “Play nice; don't hurt.” “Two wrongs don't make a right.” “If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.” "Mind your manners." As children, we may argue, “That's not fair!” or we may think secretly, “That is hypocritical.” But as adults we realize that these are simple rules which help us live together. We must learn not to confuse our opinions with facts. We must learn that, although it is all right to think for yourself, it is not necessary to share all negative and destructive thoughts. That to do so implies that you think your feelings are more important than the feelings of others your words will hurt. We pretend that our values come from the Bible, from religion, from church, but the conduit is almost always through our Elders in one way or another. In the way my BC grandmother, who attended an Anglican church service three times every Sunday, wrote in my autograph book “May the Peace of Allah abide with thee.” In the way my Manitoba grandmother said she could only think of one verse, “Don't worry, Dear. An oak tree was once a nut too.” It made her laugh, but she refused to write it down. We compromised. “Love many; trust few; always paddle your own canoe.”

     “Books Are Our Elders Speaking” was one slogan I used to attempt to make a connection between “school and book learning” and the teaching methods usually associated with oral traditions. Each time we re-read something we read previously when we were younger, we see different things in it, in exactly the same way that different listeners hear different things in the same Elder's story, or listeners hear different things when they hear the same story told at different times. I wish I had thought to introduce treaty documents as appropriate tools to explore text and subtext, point of view, verbatim versus concept-based note-taking, the gaps between what was intended, what was said, what was understood, and what was written down. And between what was agreed and what was lived up to. The ethics of written documents signed by people in good faith who could not read them. The weight of oral history and alternate methods of remembering and recording.

During my years in classrooms in reserve schools, many Elders came to speak to students. Some of them were there to instruct in the Cree language. Pee Pay Po Paw, and the syllabic shapes which captured the sounds.

Peyak Neso Neyo Niyanan One Two Three Four

Atik Caribou

Atim Dog

Chaschako Pelican

Chi pay Ghost

Iskew Woman

Iskoches Spark

Kakako Raven

Kinosew Fish

Kiwetin North Wind

Kona Snow

Masko Bear

Nichimos Sweetheart

Niska Goose

Nohkom Grandmother

Okimaw Chief

Even to present such a list is a distortion, in roman orthography, informed by the tendency of the English language to begin with nouns, with the naming of things. Students have difficulties with articles (a, an, the) because Cree does not use them; they have trouble with gender because it is communicated in a different way in the Cree language. Cree divides objects into animate and inanimate. Assina, rock, is animate. The earth is alive. For an English-speaker, it's a whole new way of looking at things. An animate universe, imbued with spirit. A world view preserved in a language.

     Astum. Come here. A PeSees. A little bit. Awas. Get lost.

     A teacher's primer.

Some Elders came to class to speak of their years in residential schools. They remembered the big signs at the front door—“No Indian spoken here”—and how they were punished if they forgot, if they ran up to a sibling at recess and spoke in Cree. They remembered feeling hungry, and joked constantly about “meatless Fridays.” Some complained about the half-day system, a half day in classroom and a half day working to produce the food, bring in the wood, etc. This meant that a person could attend school for eight years but achieve a Grade Four equivalent. Some expressed gratitude for the English they were taught, and some, for the instruction in Christianity which they received in residential school. Some of them spoke of children who were hidden away, protected, not only because their parents could not bear to give them up but also because they had been recognized as gifted and their parents could not accept that they be sent to places designed to erase the Cree culture from their brains.

     Although I have never personally heard an Elder disclose being abused, I have no trouble accepting the truth of the painful stories which are finally being shared. We have already listened to and paid money to children similarly abused in church-run orphanages elsewhere in Canada and in Ireland. When children are vulnerable, pedophiles and sadists will take advantage. Some Elders remembered the homesickness, missing their families, and the difficulties of adjusting when they finally did get home.

     The actual building which housed the K-12 community school we were in had been a residential school at one time but the children who had been removed from their parents and home community to attend came from smaller reserves farther inland such as Cross Lake. Other local children attended as day students. Even if not all the families remembered the school as a residential school, the building was old and had been there for some time. Once, during a Grade Twelve discussion on irony, I asked if students could come up with examples from their own lives.

     “How's this?” one guy asked. “This classroom that we sit in for Grade Twelve is the same room I sat in for Kindergarten.”

     He got it.

NO WHITE CULTURE

Did you hear about the farmer's daughter, tap dancing, who slipped, and fell into the sink?

Back in the classroom, it was the students making the jokes, challenging the status quo. “White people don't got no culture” was another early lesson offered to me. The context must have been some sort of English literature discussion. Perhaps a Duncan Campbell Scott poem? “The Forsaken,” a two-part story of an Indian woman, shows her as a young mother, sacrificing herself, fishing to feed her starving male child, and as an old woman, left behind to die. Start with the text, the facts of the story: What happens? Who are the characters? Who made what decisions? What was that person's motivation, his or her moral reasoning? Who is the "persona" telling the tale? What is the setting? How do you know? As a reader, do you believe it? What themes do you think the poet is trying to convey? What makes you think that? What literary devices does he use to get his points across?

     Beyond the story: Historically, did the Chippewa do this to the elderly? Do you detect any anachronisms in the poem? Any culturally inappropriate details? What do you know about Duncan Campbell Scott?

     Opinion: What values are reflected by the persona telling the story? What makes you think so? Note the link between diction (vocabulary) and ethnocentrism. What attitudes are expressed in the poem, towards females, towards death, towards Indians, towards religion? How do you know, what evidence supports your opinion? Is this a story about elder abuse? What might be the attitude of a policeman or an Indian agent if they came upon this scene? Would their attitude be different from Scott's? From the old woman's? From the chief's? How and why?

     Themes: What is meant by the term “noble savage”? Cultural appropriation? Is it possible for Scott to tell a true story about another culture? What is ethnocentrism? What is racism? What about this poem makes you suspect that the writer may have been a racist? What is the difference between fact, fiction, opinion, and truth? What might be the relationship between truth and beauty? Between Chippewa culture and Scott's culture? Is this poem an example of cross-cultural miscommunication? What if the old woman volunteered to stay behind because that was best for the rest of the group? What if her action was a kind of sacrifice, the way soldiers sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the nation? Which is trump? The survival of one individual or the survival of the group?

“White people don't got no culture.” I sensed that the boy who offered the challenge needed more information. He seemed to be having difficulty making comparisons between his Cree culture, the contrasting culture in the poem, and what he knew of White culture.

     Although he spoke English and most likely went to church and had been taught by White teachers for twelve years, what he knew of White culture was probably somewhat limited. Television was just arriving; the radio station broadcast in Cree. Most people did some shopping in Thompson, farther north, where they often complained about being followed around stores by floor-walkers. One Native teacher told me how her credit card was refused at one store, on the suspicion that it had been stolen. Most students knew someone, older siblings or parents, who had been sent “outside” to high school. The Whites the student had most exposure to, the transient Whites in his community, were working at the hospital, working at the police station, working at the hotel, the Bay store, the other store, the airport, working (with one exception) at the five or six churches in the community, and working at all the schools. (There were two elementary schools feeding the high school. It was and probably still is the largest reserve in the North.)

     The way these familiar Whites lived seemed to vary very little from the way everyone else lived there in the North. Those Whites who lived on the reserve felt entitled; we ordered in alcohol by mail, refusing to accept that the Band regulation making the reserve dry (an alcohol-free zone) applied to us. (After all, we had no vote on the reserve.) More of the Whites had vehicles, but that's because we had jobs, disposable income. The Whites had flush toilets and hot running water, but that's because the employers supplied housing. Locals used outhouses, and water was heated on the stoves, or with electric immersion heaters stuck into buckets of river water. Some transients voiced their feelings that this technological backwardness was outrageous and proof of the community's inferiority. I felt that what you do with your shit, especially communal shit, or how you construct and finance infrastructure, has more to do with economics than with culture or intelligence. I was somewhat defensive about outhouses since I used one at home until I left for university.
     Defensive is a good word. When this student threw down the gauntlet of  “White culture,” my first reaction was defensive.

     “Yah, but . . .” I blubbered, the first and ALWAYS giveaway of a childish response.

WHITE CULTURE

Let's go back to the text, use this poem as document. White culture is: the English language, poetry, story, narrative, literature; history and economics, Forts, traps; religion, God with a capital G; social roles, women as nurturer, self-sacrifice; gender roles, her son the chief, the values you've already identified.

     White culture is: Christmas, I suggested, reaching, grasping first for ritual and religion. (They celebrated Christmas gift-giving at home, and twelve years of Christmas concerts at school.) It would have been more honest to say White culture is Christianity. The poem's title is a Biblical Christian allusion, as is the repetition of "three days," making the old woman a dying god, a Christ-figure. What are the implications of presenting a story of Chippewa culture through the looking-glass of Christian imagery?

     White culture is: English (or French) language. One of the teachers was constantly snapping at students to “Speak White!” More than one or two teachers had first languages other than English or Cree, but all classrooms functioned in English. Does Scott incorporate any Chippewa words? Why or why not? Does such an inclusion change the poem in any way? For whom do you think he wrote this poem?

     White culture is: O Canada; it is parliament in Ottawa, the legislature in Winnipeg, the Band Office in town--a democratic system of representative government, with elected prime minister, premier, and chief.

     White culture is a nuclear family (father, mother, two point five kids) living in a house, a single-family dwelling. Does the poem suggest a rejection of extended or multi-generational family? An end of a nomadic way of life? The dying of a culture, of a race?

     White culture is: ancestral heritage (most often, at that time, British, or at least European) and the rituals and regalia which come with that heritage. In my case, English royalty, crowns, royal weddings, kings and queens wearing ermine-trimmed velvet robes, princes and princesses, castles, navy, army, and mounted police ancestors, farming, hunting, gardening, etc. Cree ancestral heritage includes chiefs, elders, shamans, medicine men, wigwams, shaking tents, story-telling, hunting, snaring, trapping, trading, moosehide clothing, drums, powwows, dancing. (I was not too clear about the differences between Swampy Cree and Plains Cree.)

     White culture is: medicare, a health care system symbolic of the belief that together we help each other, that no one suffers just because they are too poor to pay for medical treatment; welfare, old folks homes, day care, and schools. If these had been available to the Chippewa woman in the poem, would the story have had a different ending? So what really is dying?

     White culture is: European (or Euro-centric, which includes American) art and literature; radio, television, and movies; and classical or folk, country and western, or rock and roll music. Freddy Fender was big on the local radio station at that time, “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights“ and “Before the Next Teardrop Falls,” and the local boys playing for school dances, proudly calling themselves Cree Nation, were a great rock and roll band.

     White culture is: the work ethic, working for pay, technology, and industrialization. Although most Whites owned canoes or motor boats, the only logical means of transportation in muskeg (other than snowshoes when land and water are frozen), it was frequently heard in staff rooms that “These people never even invented the wheel.” Wheels and the cogs they expanded into seemed to represent the superiority of an industrialized people and, by extension, evidence of inferiority of “Stone Age” people. I was so ignorant that I did not recognize how this was an example of judging one world by the standards of another. Or how the theory of the evolution of cultures--Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Industrial Age--was a self-serving example of European ethnocentrism, the belief that the way Europe did things is the superior way, that the way Whites see and interpret things is the right way. The very definition of racism. The Euro-centric viewpoint has tended to be applied to all other groups on the globe by the expansionist and dominating Europeans who still argue and publish books showing that because they did dominate, that is proof of their superiority. Obviously they were inferior in their ethical treatment of other human beings. And in their compartmentalizing, separating economic from environmental and spiritual concerns. And in their romanticizing, distancing "others" by placing them high upon pedestals or far away, into the forests and wilderness.

     Ethnocentrism permeates the public education system. When geology teaches that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” we use false logic to apply the mantra to human cultures, to tell ourselves that everything develops along the same pattern, from simple to complex. That complex is the best. That even when we are totally ignorant of the complexities of another culture, we assume ours is more complex and thus better.

     Do patterns recur, or do we just choose to see patterns because it makes it easier to process information? Does history repeat itself, or do we merely perceive cycles after the fact, as a way of organizing too much information? I hadn't heard Mark Twain's take on cycles: “History may not repeat itself but it certainly rhymes.” Nor had I yet learned to challenge “the myth of progress,” the corruption of the theory of evolution. The corruption implies that everything later is an improvement upon what went before it. Not necessarily true. Natural selection simply means adaptation; adaptations are only ways of responding to specific circumstances, specific environments; they are not, by definition, an improvement, a better way, superior to all others. Are kangaroos superior? No. They are just different.

     Ethnocentrism was definitely a problem for me; I was having difficulty not judging others by my own values or by patterns I had been taught to see, in my colonized Euro-centric university-educated Canadian culture. And, I was having difficulty identifying the values of others, the invisible values which are learned assumptions seldom spoken or shared outside the group. What if the survival of the group was more important than extending the life of one individual? Who would be brave enough to say that, to risk being labelled as an “elder abuser” the way Duncan Campbell Scott's poem seems to accuse the Chippewa?

     But at the time, I was on a roll. White culture is Food! Ice cream. Chocolate bars. Potato chips. Pop. All big sellers at the Bay. White people eat meat and potato-based meals with fresh vegetables, dessert, and tea or coffee. Brilliant, I thought, thinking of the White co-op which existed on reserve in the early years, Whites pooling their resources and volunteering their time to order and fly in and sort and distribute fresh vegetables for which there was no local demand at the Bay. Once, on a school trip down to Winnipeg, one of the parent escorts was famous for her reaction when the group dined out at the Old Spaghetti Factory. When the waiter placed a heaping bowl of green lettuce salad in front of her, she proclaimed loudly in Cree to the amusement of all the students: “What? Does he think that I am a cow?” Once, as a treat for a St. Patrick's Day supper, a White friend had special-ordered in from Thompson a frozen rabbit to make Irish stew. The local girl clerking at the Bay checkout doubled over with laughter. These crazy White people paying good money for something any boy with a loop of wire could have brought to their door, still warm and fur-covered. Whites grow wheat and grind it into flour to make their bread and desserts. White culture is plain white bread and soda biscuits.

     “What?” The student who instigated the challenge cried. “Now you're even taking our bannock away from us!”

     “Well,” I asked, “what did your people use for flour? Wasn't bannock brought by the Scots fur traders and introduced to the First Nations?”

     What this debate led me to suspect is that, with the sole exception of their Cree language, these people lived a virtually White culture. That they were practically already assimilated. Of course, I was mistaking surfaces for depths. The really important things I could not see. And even if I had been able to identify the strengths of Cree culture, the students and their families would have been, from previous bad experience, suspicious. “Everything the missionaries learn about us, they tell us is wrong and take it away.” For public schools in the twentieth century, the goal was “to teach the skills for the new modern world.” The students could and did spout what they were hearing at home. “The past is the past; it is not the school's job to go there.” And the people at home divided into congregations on Sundays, attending the five or six different Christian churches which serviced the community.

    “Teach them how to think, not what to think,” I kept telling myself.

     What did the students take from this cultural challenge? I cannot say for sure. The boy who instigated the debate certainly never lost his pride. I suspect that he interpreted “culture” as the “traditions” which make people seem different. Like the ethnic costumes at Folklorama. Whereas I saw culture as including everything, the way we live and grow together. He probably realized that my list of White culture contained externals only, outward and visible signs. That I knew nothing of the invisible, the world view, the ethical and spiritual, of the way his people still thought and felt, of what truly made them Cree. Of what they accepted and what they rejected about the dominant culture which had surrounded them.

     What are you doing here? I should have asked myself.

     When students did ask me the same question, my answer was: I'm here to help prepare you to take over this job, and all the other jobs filled here by us transients, I implied.

     Not realizing that that itself was a cultural shift. From "living" to "making a living." That jobs, ways of “making a living,” are inextricable parts of capitalism. Not realizing that I was offering these students, saying it another way: To prepare you to assimilate further into the mainstream Christian Canadian democratic constitutional monarchic capitalist system.

     Again, I was an unwitting accomplice.