DANCING WITH GHOSTS:
A CROSS-CULTURAL EDUCATION
Part One – OAK RIVER
DANCING
My grandfather Harry was a silent man. After he retired from farming and moved into town, he used to wander down to Main Street in the mornings and stand in line with the other old men in the sunshine, along the front wall of the blacksmith shop, their back to the black of the cavernous workshed. Everyone knew. You didn't look in, you could not watch, as the light from the forge or the welder's torch would blind you. The blacksmith wore a heavy metal hood like an old diving helmet, with a glass window at eye-level that he could raise and lower, to see, to breathe. The men congregated outside to visit, to keep an eye on the traffic driving by on the street, the trains on the Canadian Pacific (CPR) branch line, the grain elevators across the track, to nod to the shoppers on the sidewalk, the farmers dropping off eggs at the egg-grading station, to comment to the office workers heading into Moon's for the morning coffee break.
Most likely it was the fire more than the socializing which attracted Harry. The fire and the ringing pound of hammer on anvil which made him feel at home, homesick even, for his own smithy, in his own big barn, where he forged the iron shoes for his own draught horses. For outside the blacksmith shop on Main Street, Harry was known as the mum one, the man who never spoke. He was a watcher, and a listener. Born "under Victoria," in the last decade of her long reign, at home, near Bradwardine, Manitoba, he died some five miles to the north, eighty-two years later. But before he died, he is reported to have murmured: "I saw Indians dance on the streets of Bradwardine."
Bradwardine was a town where Harry's father had settled, where my father had attended school, a town to which Harry and the other local farmers drove their grain in wagons to the elevators along the tracks of the Great North West Central Railway, later absorbed as another branch line of the CPR. The town is included today on a list of Ghost Towns of Manitoba.
Bradwardine, the name, which alludes to the Jacobite Baron Bradwardine and his daughter Rose, characters in Sir Walter Scott's first novel, Waverley, was chosen for the town in1884 by an outsider, a nameless official working for the Post Office Department in Ottawa. Possibly an immigrant himself, like the prime minister of that era, or someone from Ontario with a Scottish heritage, he had never seen the post office, or the townsite, or the prairie, or an Indian dance. Bradwardine became the post office for Harry's father, my Great-grandfather Bridgeman, when he arrived with a Royal Navy pension in 1891 having responded to the advertising campaigns in Europe promoting the federal government's offer of homestead land.
The Indians Harry remembered would have been Indians from the Oak River Reserve, twenty miles to the south, where the Oak River, when it does flow, mainly in spring, enters the Assiniboine River. The Oak River Reserve Indians are Sioux, but I only learned this later, after they re-named the reserve Sioux Valley. They have since added to that French name another by which they know themselves, the Dakota. They are relatives (but not descendants) of the Sioux people who crossed the Medicine Line with Chief Sitting Bull after the Battle of the Little Bighorn and before the Battle of Wounded Knee.
The dancing which Harry watched was not street dancing or square dancing or line dancing but rather some form of what we think of as powwow dancing today. Men, women, and children attired in picturesque regalia, leather vests, shirts, skirts, leggings, and moccasins, decorated with feathers, glass beads, dyed porcupine quills. The men wearing colourful ribbon shirts; the women clutching fringed blanket shawls. They would have danced to the beat of a drum and had probably been invited to put on their best cultural kit and to come to participate, perhaps someone even used the word “perform,” in a local community celebration such as Victoria Day or Dominion Day. For Harry to have witnessed this dance as a child, it would have been in the early 1900s.
However, by the time I was growing up, less than fifty years later, I never heard tell of Dakota or Sioux. There were no Indians in our home town, Oak River, some twenty-five miles upstream from the Oak River Reserve. There were no Indian children in our school. Aside from the Lone Ranger's sidekick, Tonto, the only Indians we ever saw were the reserve team who played in the senior men's hockey league, where the games were always fast and rough and violence was expected. I knew nothing about any of the people who lived on the Oak River Indian Reserve, or on any other reserve. Within a twenty-mile radius, there was Birdtail Reserve at Birtle, where there was a residential school, and a reserve at Elphinstone were Dad knew one of the fathers who managed the baseball team, a veteran like himself. Were these reserves also Sioux? I had no idea who they were, what they did, where they came from, what they used to do, what they wanted to do. Unlike my grandfather, I had never seen an Indian dance.
It was years and years before I recognized that the plain White nature of our classrooms, our school, our town, was anything but natural. That the cultural makeup of our prairie community was a form of de facto apartheid which resulted in my total ignorance of First Nations people. It was as if they had been “disappeared.”
My ignorance of my neighbours on the reserve was, I believe, fairly typical of my generation. There were just no opportunities for any cross-cultural interactions. What is not typical is the way, in later years, I have been able to fill in some gaps in my knowledge, to acquire an education which includes an awareness of those “disappeared” residents and an understanding of what was behind the failed attempt to separate them from our lives and erase them from our consciousness. A cross-cultural education almost like a dance in which the most difficult step of all is not “know thine enemy” but rather “know thyself.”
ESL
It is not really true that when we started school there were only White kids in the classroom. When I entered Grade One, in the early 1950s, Moon's son had just arrived in Canada. Moon ran one of the two cafes in our town, Oak River. For the first five years that I remember him, he worked alone and lived in the back of his restaurant. However, when he had saved up enough money, or the Communist government in China permitted it, or the federal government in Ottawa approved it, his wife and young son were able to join him in Canada. Mrs. Moon was a formidable woman who wielded the cleaver in the kitchen. Their son Pond was sixteen and spoke no English.
As ESL (English as a Second Language) had yet to be invented in Manitoba, the school principal did the logical thing with Pond. The janitor moved a larger desk in from the high school and the teacher sat Pond at the back of the Grade One and Two classroom for language immersion. He was very good to us six year olds, and we looked up to him as we did to all the big kids. Not to mention his connection to the man downtown who doled out ice cream and chocolate bars. Boys used to bring in turtles that they caught in the river and give them to Pond, believing that his family would want them to make soup. In schoolwork, of course, Pond progressed rapidly, moving from ours and through the other classrooms at high speed as his English grew more and more fluent.
Because he was already sixteen and could leave school, Pond made his way soon to Brandon, the big city, where he worked in one of the popular Chinese restaurants. Every time we drove the hour to shop in Brandon, we went there as a family, to the United Cafe, to have our lunch. Every time, after he had finished his fish and chips and before he paid the bill, my Dad would ask if “Tommy” were on shift. Whenever he was there, Tommy (Pond's chosen English name) always came out to speak to us, to shake Dad's hand, to send greetings back to his father, Moon.
My Dad was like that. He spoke to everyone. He was a veteran and he prided himself on the fact that he had volunteered to fight, to help the people of Europe stand up against a bully. He always defended the underdogs, the marginalized, those in need of a hand. I remember him making the drive more frequently than we realized, down to Brandon, to “the North Hill,” as we called it euphemistically, the mental hospital where so many of his veteran and Legion friends were sent, for mysterious treatments of their mysterious symptoms, not then labelled post-traumatic stress. Maybe Dad identified with the men himself. He had been wounded in Italy and thought he would die. And his heavy use of alcohol in those early years must have been, besides habit and culture, a form of self-medication, most likely also linked to his physical symptoms, bleeding ulcers.
Unlike his own father, my Dad liked to talk. I always admired his social ease with people, the way he could engage anyone, the sound of his laughter. The way, as an avid poker player, he taught us: “Trust everyone, but always cut the cards.” The way he linked the playing of games with the art of living, with “Cheaters never win.” He also expected us to communicate in certain ways. No "lip" (meaning no talking back), no smart-aleck remarks, no mimicking or making fun of others, even no talking about other people in a public setting. These ways that we were taught to "show respect" indicated one of his values: Everyone deserves respect. A person's behaviour may cause him or her to "lose respect" but everyone has it, no one has to earn it. It was only later that I realized how this attitude is not universal, how some people wait, withhold respect, usually until the other does or says something which matches the "withholder's" actions or opinions. Then he or she will say: "That's very White of you."
Although Dad has been dead for more than twenty-five years, just last month while I was visiting after a memorial service, a man who knew him in his younger days described a scene from seventy years ago. In a local pub, Dad's drinking companion, back braced against the lobby wall, slowly slid to the floor as his “legless” knees buckled. Dad turned and, glowering at the buddy down on the linoleum, began to sing at him: “Stand up, stand up for Jesus! Ye soldier of the cross.”
I suppose I inherited his literalness, and I too admired his irreverence, and the way he made his own decisions, based on his own values. Voting for people he thought would best represent “the little guys,” those whose voices would otherwise not be heard. The way he recognized Moon's isolation as the only Chinese person in town, and befriended him.
The lessons we learn about living in community are lessons first introduced at home.
BATH
When I think of lessons learned, I also think of Mrs. H, one of my elementary school teachers. When faced with the question on her Health Test about the frequency and necessity of bathing, I routinely answered with our family's standard “Once a Week.” Saturday night, before going into town, was bath night. Each time I gave this answer, this teacher gently corrected me by inserting the phrase “at least.” When I failed to pick up on her subtle hint, she called me up to her desk and pointed out her edit. “ 'At least' means,” she said, “that bathing once a week is a minimum, that some people bathe more often than once a week, that some people bathe once or even twice a day.”
Really? I had no idea. (In my own defense, this was in another century, on a farm in a rural setting, before electricity and hot running water were everywhere, and we did have other ways of cleansing ourselves besides total immersion.) In spite of my embarrassment, or perhaps because of it, this lesson was eye-opening, life-changing. For it wasn't just a simple answer to a Health Quiz that she was pointing out to me. She was making me realize for the first time that the way our family did things was not necessarily the way that all families did things, that there is variety, even with basic health rituals. And furthermore, that I was in error, leaving myself open to correction, if I continued to assume that our way was the only way. Or worse. That our way was the correct way. That other ways, that others, were wrong.
This inadvertent error on an elementary health quiz I consider to be my first formal lesson in cultural education. By pointing out cultural differences, this teacher opened my eyes to the risk of racism. For racism to me includes the idea that some people think that their way is the correct way. That their ways are superior to the ways of other people. And that by extension, they themselves are “superior.” And by definition, that other people are “inferior.” Those who believe in racism, in the superiority of some, of one group with shared beliefs or rituals, over others are racists. Racists insist that the inferior groups should correct themselves by accepting (or being forced to accept) “our superior ways.”
Mrs. H never told me that our family routine was wrong. She never sent a note home to my parents saying our family had to change. She never called me a savage; nor did she imply that our home was somehow “uncivilized” because of our bath routine. (One common “tell” for racism is some form of that word “civilization” and/or its antonym, “savagery.”) She was just “cluing me in.” She was opening my eyes, helping me learn to see. She was opening my mind, helping me learn to think. She was pointing out to me that cultural appropriateness can vary even within one culture.
It only struck me recently, when I was visiting a friend in an extended care ward, that if Mrs. H were to end her years in our health care system today, the staff would be assuring her that resources only permit that each resident receive a bath once a week. She was also an English teacher. At least, she would get the irony.
THE FARMER'S DAUGHTER
In the middle of the blizzard, the travelling salesman knocks at the farmhouse door and asks for shelter from the storm. “Could you spare a stranded traveller, sir, a bed for the night?”
The farmer scratches his head and then nods, agrees. “Sure. 'Tis not a night to be on the road. But I must warn you. I ain't got no daughter.”
“Thank you, sir. Thank you for the offer of hospitality. And for the tip. Can you tell me, sir, how far down the road is the next farmhouse?”
I grew up on a farm, and I'm sorry to say, I took the ubiquitous farmer's daughter jokes pretty personally. For “the farmer's daughter” is the butt of all the travelling salesman jokes, the innocent, youthful, female, rural, non-affluent, the subjugated, the dismissed, the disempowered, who are ridiculed and marginalized in mainstream society, by the representatives of aggressive capitalism, if you really want to push it. Farmer's daughter jokes are almost always about cross-cultural miscommunication. And before I got from that classroom of health quizzes, from that farm, to living and working on an Indian reserve, I met a few travelling salesmen of my own.
FOUL PLAY
For my summer holiday, I went to the city. My twin best friends, Lynn and Lee, had moved to Brandon and invited me to visit. 1066 12th Street, near the railroad tracks, the fairgrounds, the swimming pool behind the Tyndall wall.
In Brandon, the Town Fathers do not allow women to wear shorts in public places. We dressed up to go downtown. We wore gloves and matching pumps; we carried our vinyl purses like the Queen. We experimented with nail polish for fingers and toes, backcombed and peroxided our hair. We tried cherry-flavoured gloss and siren red at Woolworth's cosmetics counter, popping and blotting our lips in the mirrors. We fingered the satin and lace in the lingerie department, longing for boyfriends and breasts. We crowded into one curtained booth and pouted for the camera—four mugshots for a quarter. We bought two-piece bathing suits and suntanned on the dry summer grass. We played games with our shadows—imagining what we would look like with curves.
We used our nickels to call boys from the payphone beside the bus stop. The twins' father would not allow us to date. We made secret plans to meet Mike and Danny and Little Joe at the show downtown. Psycho was Restricted. We went to see a comedy—Some Like It Hot—about a sweet blond girl-singer and two cons on the run from gangsters and police, hiding out in her all-girl band. On the beach, Tony Curtis pretended to be an oil tycoon and, when asked for details, he held up a scallop Shell. Tony and Jack Lemmon walking in heels. They shared a railway coach dressing room with the girls and often appeared to be in pain. The men in the audience laughed. We observed carefully how Marilyn made herself up in the mirror. We marvelled at her beauty, at her breasts, at her sequined gown more see-through than seen.
The next matinée we met the boys at the bus stop and rode downtown with them. The movie was The Village of the Damned. Every woman of childbearing age was visited by some alien force. Nine months later the village was blessed with fatherless blond-haired children, strangely distant, with uncanny abilities to tap into the brains of mortals and to communicate telepathically amongst themselves. In order to protect the town, the civilization, Hayley Mills' father built a brick wall across his mind and entered the aliens' classroom with a bomb-fixed briefcase. A kamikaze mission to rid the world of the threatening cuckoos before the wall crumbled and they detected the plot.
When the bomb exploded, Little Joe got scared and grabbed for Lee's arm in the darkness. She got the giggles and ran to the washroom; she waited for us in the popcorn lobby as we made our way back to the sunlight.
Saturday night, we met the boys again to go for a walk. Itching for adventure, we reached over a stone wall and hawked some crabapples from a stranger's tree. But a police car cruised by and the boys vanished. We three walked on slowly, not laughing, trying to look innocent. The police did not stop.
In the aching heat of August, sleep was impossible. We took our transistors to the front steps and sat listening in the darkness. The streetlights filtered through the canopy of American elm and masked the stars of the night. We searched for the loudest rock station, the farthest away—CKY, Chicago, Cincinnati, San Francisco. Darkness was fading out when the newscaster's voice interrupted:
The nude body of Marilyn Monroe—movie star, sex goddess, comedienne,
actress—was found this morning at her home in Los Angeles where she
lived alone. An empty vial of sleeping pills was found near her bedside.
The telephone was off the hook. She was thirty-six years old.
Marilyn was last seen in The Misfits, co-starring the late Clark Gable,
and written for her by her estranged husband, Arthur Miller. She had recently
been fired from the set of Something's Got To Give.
The police do not suspect foul play.
NOBODY'S PERFECT
In Some Like It Hot, the final scene, Jack Lemmon, still in drag, drives away in the back seat of a limo with the old old man who has become infatuated with him, who has just proposed marriage. Jack confesses his little secret and the suitor doesn't miss a beat. “Nobody's perfect,” he says with a Jimmy Durante accent and a lecherous grin.
A perfect ending. A punch line. And so hilarious not only because of the sexual innuendo but also because such tolerance, such acceptance of the unexpected, of the unfamiliar, of the “imperfections” of another person, seems so rare as to be possible only in a comedy.
Usually, often, the gap between cultures, in this case male and female cultures, is like a crevasse in a glacier, often invisible until you step right into it, and then, fatal. Back then, we never worried that our female role models were an American, Marilyn Monroe, and a Brit, Queen Elizabeth, and that both our “culture,” at least, the entertainment part of it, and the technology which delivered it, were imported. That crack between our local culture, who we really were, and how we saw ourselves portrayed was a canyon without a bridge. It was a cleft as wide as the gap between races, between Canadians and the invisible indigenous peoples of Canada. Both a Canadian presence and a First Nations presence were absent from popular culture.
UNIVERSITY
In spite of hardship, the farmer did it. Maybe he sold a cow or butchered a pig. Somehow he scraped together enough money to send his only daughter to university. The daughter comes home to the farm for a weekend.
“Pa. Pa. I got something to tell you! I ain't a virgin any more!”
The farmer is taken aback. “Daughter,” he says. “Daughter, we've struggled and scraped to send you to university and you still say 'ain't'!?”
I always liked that one, even though no one in our family ever said “ain't.” And no one really had to scrape and sacrifice to send me to university. Yes, Dad did have to expose his private financial matters to another government agency, in order to prove need, and to ask for a Student Loan to match what he felt he could pay, to cover the cost of university tuition and my expenses, to move to and live in the city. It is more difficult for students from a rural area; they have double the costs of urban students, along with the stresses of moving, learning to navigate new territory, and making new friends.
I wasn't the first in our extended family to go. Of my eight older cousins, one was a teacher and one had a degree in something related to agriculture. But none of our aunts or uncles had gone to university, and girls were not expected, way back then, to prepare to support themselves. Dad's six sisters all became wives and mothers. Of their eight brothers, four tried farming at one time or another, while others worked in the air force, the police force, as a mechanic, an electrician, on heavy equipment, in construction, and in food services. Education and career expectations spring from a combination of generational and economic factors. But schooling was a relatively touchy subject for my Dad. His father achieved Grade Four. Dad had Grade Eight. He had liked school, was good at it, still enjoyed reading, but because he was #3 of fourteen living children raised on a quarter section (small) farm, he had not been able to go further, to pay to board in another town and go to high school. Poverty impacts both personal and cultural opportunities.
Dad had not had the option of high school because, after finishing the highest grade offered in Bradwardine, he left home permanently at age fourteen and was working until he signed up to join the army in World War II. Having Grade Eight limited the positions which were open to him in the military. What was worse, after the war, not having high school meant that he did not qualify for the opportunity offered other veterans to go to university. He did, however, qualify under the Veterans Land Act to get assistance to buy a farm. Which is how I ended up as a farmer's daughter. Luckily for me, I was the daughter of a farmer who resented not having more years of schooling, and was willing to help his children, regardless of their gender, to get it. I did not realize until many years later just what an advantage that was, to have the support of a parent who longed for, rather than felt threatened by, higher education.
GRADUATION
Back then, finishing Grade Twelve involved two celebrations. In the spring, before writing the final provincial examinations, the school graduating class was feted with an awards ceremony, a banquet, and a dance. Later, after the marks had been tabulated, high achievements awarded, and post-secondary plans finalized, indeed after those of us at university had been there for a good month already, the school division held its own commencement exercises. Mine was held fifty miles from the farm and Oak River, in the town, Minnedosa, where the school division was headquartered. For this event, where I received the award for highest mark in the division in Grade Twelve history, I attended with my best friend Leo, stayed at her place for the weekend, and went with her to a dance in her community.
At that dance, I met a young man from Brandon. He must have been at least sixteen because he would have had to drive the thirty miles to get there. I was seventeen, in first year at university. I had probably actually just dropped out of my first chosen faculty, Interior Design, and had picked up two new Arts courses three weeks into the first semester. (Interior Design had allowed me to enroll in Winnipeg, two hundred miles from home, rather that in Brandon which was closer, about fifty miles, in those pre-metric years.) I remember dancing with this guy in Minnedosa, and exchanging names and addresses. No big deal. The first weeks of university in Winnipeg had been a whirl of meeting many many new people. There were more people in the building I lived in than in all of Oak River. The Guess Who played at our Freshie Dance. There were five hundred men right next door in Tache Hall; we shared the dining hall and the auditorium. I thought nothing of meeting another new guy.
Surprisingly, I received a letter from this boy from the dance. We may have written back and forth once or twice. Then he said he was coming into the city so let's do something. The Friday he mentioned, I said I was already committed to babysitting for a family from home who had just moved in to a suburb near the university. “Maybe I could just drop by,” he suggested, and me, being the farmer's daughter, with almost no babysitting experience, said “I guess so.”
He dropped in. We watched TV. Television was a big deal because I didn't have one in my room on campus. There were no snuggles; we were just acquaintances. He went to the bathroom.
One child woke up, came out to the living room, said: “He's in my parent's room.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “He's just looking for the bathroom.”
He left before the parents returned.
I blanked this incident out for thirty years. I do know that the child's mother phoned me to inform me that jewelery was missing from her home. I could not believe it. She knew I had had a visitor and asked for details. I know I went from the phone to my room and brought back the letter and gave her the name and the Brandon address of the young man. I don't remember whether I apologized to her. Possibly not, as I was so stunned. Shocked. As if I too had been victimized. Punched in the gut. Betrayed into betraying others. Making me lose people's respect. I do not remember for sure whether the police talked to me. I may have written down my recollections of the evening and handed the paper to an officer downstairs at the desk on the main floor.
I was horrified. Someone who had trusted me had been ripped off because I was too naïve, too innocent, too stupid, to suspect the motives or actions of another. I had failed to cut the cards. Had this stranger targetted me? Did I have a big M on my forehead? Mark?
I was ashamed, aghast, at the way my stupidity must have embarrassed my parents, for the victims were from home, and everyone would have heard.
I would like to say that I became a little more skeptical, whenever I met a new “traveller” but I'm not really sure if that is true. I think the trauma was so great that I blocked the memory out completely. I know I never once discussed it with either of my parents. I never mentioned it to anyone.
But how is this teen trauma related to a cross-cultural education, to solidarity with First Nations? Certainly the con man was not a Native. It's something to do with me. About me. The innocent who assumes that everyone else is as honest as she, who fails to suspect negative or questionable motives in others, is betrayed and victimized. Raised in a home where respect was demanded, and the marginalized, the underdogs, were defended, where minorities were included, yet I played a role, unintentionally, in victimizing others, of helping, inadvertently, to cause harm to others. Guilty, even though I was unaware of the crime until later, after the damage had been done.
I was an unwitting accomplice.
DEMOCRACY
University was for me years of reading and writing in a place of luxury and indulgence. Meals prepared, maid service, my own office, a room with a view of one of the bends in the Red River. Walking everywhere on the University of Manitoba Fort Garry Campus. Film clubs. Social life. The river bank. Visiting artists and speakers—Leonard Cohen, Rene Levesque. With the exception of one compulsory science credit, I could satisfy my own curiosity, study only subjects which interested me. A double major in English and history, with a focus on Canadian studies. History of Art. Political Science. Psychology. French. Linguistics. And Geology, a life-long secret passion. Now, forty-some years later, I can still remember the name of almost every professor (except psychology, which changed every month), even those professors who taught hundreds of first-year students at one time in large lecture theatres. But the one I remember most was one whose class I dropped. Canadian history with Lovell Clark. It was a third year course; I was in second year and felt out of my depth. When the professor got sick, I feared I would not be able to catch up, so I dropped it. But I bought his book. The Manitoba Schools Question: Majority Rule or Minority Rights.
Before Lovell Clark, history was “who, what, where, and when” or “historical significance.” In Clark's class I learned to ask “why” something happened, what the impact had been, and whether what happened was “right or wrong.” It was in that class that I first heard that Louis Riel may have been more than a traitor hanged for treason, for leading two rebellions against the government. That the Metis had had their reasons. In 1869 they had presented their points as a Bill of Rights and the rights they articulated were incorporated into the Manitoba Act of 1870 by which Manitoba entered Confederation as a province, as opposed to entering as a colony, as Ottawa and London had intended. At least in a province, democratic systems offered citizens some control over local affairs. However, by 1885, as development had followed the Metis into the Northwest Territory where they had re-settled along the Saskatchewan River, the same abuses and the same protests were again ignored by Ottawa. The Metis were forced to stand up and defend their position, with tragic consequences. Shots were fired; lives were lost. Leaders were imprisoned, hanged, or exiled. The Northwest Territory remained governed from Ottawa as a colony for another twenty years.
The Metis in Manitoba had originally achieved some successes in their attempt to maintain some control over their own affairs. The Indians were not as effective in their negotiations. The treaties they were signing with the Canadian government in the 1870s acknowledged nation status and aboriginal title and prepared for "mutual occupation." By signing treaty, First Nations permitted access and settlement in their traditional territory. In return, they negotiated something of equal value--national assistance to re-establish themselves, to replace the lifestyle they had given up, that had been disrupted, with something of equal or greater value. It was not a battle, one nation conquering other nations. It was a negotiation, an exchange. As one party to the negotiations, the First Nations would expect, based on a sense of natural justice if nothing else, that they would be better off, certainly no worse off, than they had been before signing treaty.
Unfortunately, the other party to the negotiations saw things differently. The Canadian government saw the First Nations as an impediment to expansion and development. If the First Nations could be wooed into signing treaty, the impediments would be removed. Think of it as a courtship. Canada and the Crown are the suitors. The First Nations are the rich heiresses. "I love you; I respect you; I want you," the government negotiators whisper. But what they fail to disclose is that once you agree, once you sign that paper (according to the laws I made without your input) you become subject. What is yours becomes mine (property); nothing that is mine will be yours. I will provide food and shelter. And I will look after the children who, as the law says, are my responsibility.
After treaties were signed, the government unilaterally asserted authority upon its new subjects, drafting and passing the laws to assert the necessary control. This law, the Indian Act of 1876, resulted in the end of life as they had known it, of dignity and self-determination in ancestral territories the First Nations had inhabited for millennia. Indians who signed treaties and accepted reserves were reduced by the Indian Act to a status equivalent to a colony, confined to small tracts of land, with every aspect of their lives controlled from elsewhere without their input. Dependent. Subject.
The same attitudes of disrespect, of obliviousness to the rights of minorities, of "winner takes all" also allowed provincial legislators to renege on the cultural guarantees in the Manitoba Act. (Before our union, I said this, but now, I've changed my mind.) Dominated by the new majority of Canadians from Ontario, the legislature repealed the rights of French-language speakers and Roman Catholics to educate their children in their first language, the way they wanted, in separate schools, as the Manitoba Act had promised twenty-five years earlier. The province of Manitoba which had been created as “officially bi-lingual” became uni-lingual when the right to use French in the legislature, the legal system, and the schools was repealed.
What made democracy a justification for trampling on the rights of certain groups? Why should numbers (of votes) trump rights?
In Lovell Clark's history class, more than a dozen years before the Charter of Rights and Freedoms made this the law in Canada, I first learned that democracy was a separate idea from majority rule. Well, it may have been mentioned in first year political science, but here we could see the actual impact, in the very desks and classrooms with which we were all familiar. Just because the majority says something, votes for something, or votes to take something away, does not make it right. Hitler had been elected, we were reminded, in a democratic nation, starting with a minority government and then taking over.
If I learned one lesson in a university classroom, it was this one: Majority rule must not be used to deny the human rights of others.
After the hostilities in the Northwest in 1885, after he had been found guilty and sentenced to three years in Stony Mountain Penitentiary, Chief Big Bear was sent by train to Winnipeg. It is said that officials wished to impress him with the sheer numbers of White people, to underline that any thought of continuing to stand up to the government would be useless, that his Cree would have to sign a treaty, to abandon their freedom to wander, to accept a reserve.
A city of White people climbing all over each other, scurrying to make a living, like a hill of ants. It was the numbers argument. We outnumber you. We will overrun you. Resistance is futile. Majority rules. Might is right.
Big Bear had resisted accepting a reserve because he had detected the plot. He tried camping out in Montana. He and his people wintered at Fort Walsh in Saskatchewan's Cypress Hills. They wandered. For he could already see that negotiations were a sham, that what the Indians said made no difference, that the promises made in existing treaties were not being lived up to. That what the negotiators said did not match what the government did. That the government was not bargaining in good faith. That it was all a “bait and switch” and the Indians were being rooked. That First Nations were already being betrayed. Even though evidence proved that he had counselled his people against taking up arms, Big Bear was convicted and imprisoned in Stony Mountain. He caught tuberculosis and was released early to avoid the embarrassment of having a proud old man like him die in jail.
When majority rule is used to dominate, to impose the will of one group upon another, to deny the human rights of the other, to deny the right to self-determination, to take away the power of self-government which up to then the First Nations had always exercised, it is not democracy, it is racism.
PREJUDICE and DISCRIMINATION
Before I had the opportunity to immerse myself in another culture, before I went up north to teach, I taught high school English and history in southern communities. I always included a unit on First Nations in my English courses. We would talk about the difference between prejudice and discrimination. Prejudice is a belief; discrimination is an action. The class would be asked to share personal experiences. One day, the School Inspector was visiting and he chose to participate by sharing an example he had witnessed.
It had been a Sunday morning, at a small community church, where every family has a designated pew. Members of the congregation know their “assigned seats” intuitively, unless they are new and haven't had a faux pas pointed out to them. On this one morning, an Indian woman, not a regular member of the congregation but one known to most of the townspeople, chose to attend this service. She walked up the centre aisle and chose a seat in a pew on the right hand side, near the front. Every other person who entered the church, noticed her, recognized that their usual seating arrangements had been disrupted, and took different pews. By the time the service started, the woman sat alone on the right hand side of the church and the rest of the congregation sat jumbled together in the left-hand-side pews.
After this story, two boys raised their hands. They were best friends, both from town, one blond, one brunet, a Metis boy. They told how they had lucked into a job the summer before and how, on payday, the blond boy was paid a minimum wage rate and the Metis boy was paid $1 per hour, for all the hours they had worked together doing the same jobs.
“What's this?” they had both asked.
“$1 an hour is Indian pay,” the employer had explained.
Although they both needed the money, they both quit, one in anger, one in solidarity.
MATH DREAMS
Doesn't everyone have Math Dreams? Grade Twelve Mathematics? That old recurring nightmare? A letter arrives in the mail. Dear Ms B. We regret to inform you that new calculations have been made. We have found out that you actually failed your final Grade Twelve departmental mathematics examination and thus were ineligible to be admitted to university. Consequently, all your diplomas and degrees have been withdrawn.
Diplomas. Certificates. Degrees. House. All gone?
No? Not everyone? Maybe not the Engineers, but surely, everyone else? And the lesson is more than that general feeling of being a fraud. The lesson is really the same one, perhaps the only one I remember, from Grade Twelve Math. Sorry Mr. G. The lesson that says: If you make an error in copying the equation, in writing down the problem, everything which follows, everything, will also be wrong.
That's how I feel, how I felt, after reading the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Interim Report They Came For the Children. Before any residential school was even envisioned, there was an error in the equation, in the concept itself. Consequently, everything which followed was also wrong; everything thereafter simply compounded the original error.
The error, of course, was that the residential schools concept was based upon a racist assumption—that White culture was superior and that the children, the First Nations, and Canada as a whole would all be improved, would all benefit from helping the First Nations become “civilized,” by forcing them to assimilate into Western Civilization. And that the best way to assimilate was by total immersion, erasing the old ways and starting afresh with the new. And that the most efficient way to do this would be to start with the children.
MISSING THE POINT
Going back to the original problem. When you begin with an error, everything which follows will also be wrong. This simple truth motivates me to write, to add to the discussion. Because there has been so much laudable coverage of the residential schools question, of the terrible abuses encountered by some individuals, of the pain of separation, of the children who never returned, of the government's apology, of compensation, of the devastating and on-going effects of the system on individuals, families, communities, races. Yet still, everyone is missing the most important point. What started all this heartache? The racist belief which engendered the plan to “civilize” the Indians.
What is being done to identify that prime cause, racism, to acknowledge its destructive power, to exterminate that beast? To stop racism from continuing to destroy?
Do we really want First Nations peoples linked indelibly in our minds as “victims”? To focus on their victimization, and how they can and must overcome that? This too misses the point. Yes, certainly, victims need support and help to heal. However, it is not their fault, and they are not the ones who need to change. It is not them; it is us. Abuse is not the issue. Racism is the issue. The perpetrators of racism must be identified, held accountable, forced to accept responsibility, and to demonstrate an understanding of how what we did was wrong. If not, racists will continue to dominate and abuses of the rights of others will happen over and over again.
Hughes and Kallen, in The Anatomy of Racism: Canadian Dimensions, cite Webster: “Racism is the assumption that psycho-cultural traits and capacities are determined by biological race and that races differ decisively from one another; usually coupled with a belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race and its right to domination over others.”
In cross-cultural interactions, those “assumptions” and the belief in the “right to domination” trip us, plunge us into the abyss.
CROSS-CULTURAL EDUCATION
Before moving up north to teach, I took a couple of refresher courses including Cross-Cultural Education which was designed to prepare teachers from the south for some of the unexpected challenges they might encounter when moving north to work in Indian and Metis communities. Isolation. Language and second language issues, as many students do not learn English before starting school. Interpreting results of “standardized tests,” designed for urban America and used without adjustment, in rural and northern Canadian schools. Adapting the provincial curriculum to local conditions. Schools and local politics. Schools and local culture, including historic attitudes toward compulsory education. Useful information which made more sense later.
It was in this course that I first heard the term “ethnocentrism.” The Story of the Bath, about the form and frequency of bathing, could technically be an example of ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is the belief that one's culture, the way we do things, the way we live and grow together, is the correct way, the superior way. Ethnocentrism may simply be the result of inexperience, of living in a closed society, of never having been exposed to, or not being aware of any other ways. “This is the way we do things.” Sometimes, ethnocentrism stems from the racist belief, taught and learned, that “superior” actions are the result of superior intelligence, inherited through the blood, the genes. That superior actions (achievements) come from superior blood has been taught by many cultures for generations. What “our group” does, and what we believe, are superior. The belief that “Our way is the best way” is characteristic of ethnocentrism, as is the exclusion or rejection of alternate ways, the “he or she's not one of us” syndrome, or the “if you're not the same as me, you're not OK” syndrome. Ethnocentrism is really a failure to educate, to open eyes to differences, to teach tolerance and acceptance. Sometimes too ethnocentrism stems from an inability to empathize, to imagine one's self in the shoes of another, or an inability to identify another as a human being like one's self. Or an inability to love. “Love thy neighbour as thy self.” We do, and that's the problem.
Awareness of ethnocentrism makes us realize that different cultures may have different ways of doing things, of achieving the same or similar goals, and that even though something may be different, it can still be culturally appropriate. Especially in the field of education, ethnocentrism leads some teachers to believe, mistakenly, that people who are illiterate are less intelligent, or that people who developed systems of writing were and are superior to people who devised complicated systems of oral communication and oral literature. The error lies in seeing the self as “the norm” and in judging others according to that false norm. The mantra that “you have to speak English to succeed in the modern world” is another oft-repeated example of ethnocentric self-aggrandizing. As is the belief that people who developed specific kinds of technology, most commonly “the wheel,” were superior to people who developed other non-mechanical methods of transportation, of telling time, of making things. Ethnocentrism accounts for the mistaken association of “civilization” as some form of more “highly developed” technology. For the way some European immigrants assume that houses and other buildings constructed of stone (the old norm) are superior to buildings made of locally available resources such as wood. For the way Euro-centric people believe that their superior “Western Civilization” arose after humans developed agriculture, settled down, began to live in villages which grew into cities. The way people in cities often feel superior to people from rural areas.
Ethnocentrism acts as a kind of cultural blinkers, blinding us to other possibilities, making us think that the limited vision of what we can see is all that there is to see. Ethnocentrism is the opposite of cultural relativism, the belief that it is disrespectful and can be dangerous to judge an aspect of one culture by the values and expectations of another culture. Ethnocentrism, prejudice, discrimination, paternalism, abuse, bullying, imperialism, colonialism, sexism, ageism, classism are all spawns of racism, the belief in the superiority of one race, or one culture, or one group, or one individual over others.
In that cross-cultural education class, ethnocentrism was discussed, but racism was never mentioned. Although we may have discussed alternative ways for First Nations to relate to Canada, of separation versus integration versus assimilation, there was no mention of the possibility that forced assimilation might be a form of genocide, another term that was never mentioned. “Education is the new buffalo,” the chiefs negotiating treaties in the 1870s believed, and they had negotiated for schools on reserves which would help their people prepare for a new way of life, after the buffalo were gone. Nor did I ever hear it hinted that the disappearance of First Nations people from our communities, that exclusion of First Nations people or First Nations points of view in history books, in the curriculum, in the media, might be indicative of racism. Nor the suggestion that ignoring the pleas, the requests, turning a blind eye, a deaf ear, might also be forms of racism. Nor did anyone ever say that some people might resent you because you are White.
Because I'm White? Wouldn't that be racist?
The DISAPPEARANCE OF 'RACISM'
Academics debate definitions still, which is probably why the word “racism” seems to have disappeared. Because using the word “racism” results in an argument about definition rather than a look at actions and their motivations and consequences. The word “racism” does seem to have become taboo. No one says it anymore. It's one of those pointing words--one finger points at someone else, and three point back at you.
Making the word “racism” a taboo only serves to help avoid the issue and to help society continue to deny that racism is a problem. We seem to feel more comfortable pretending that racism doesn't exist in Canada. We hide in the definition of racism as Skinheads and White Supremacists who talk about blood and commit violence against victims who are visibly not White. So unless we're bashing or stomping or murdering others we perceive as different and thus inferior, we evade the racist label. Of course, White Supremacists are racists. But they're a fringe kind of racist. Young White males who would otherwise find acceptance as gangsters or goons or pimps or bikers, anywhere their anger and anti-social tendencies could be put to use. Charlie Chaplin said it so well: “Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural.” This violent fringe group of haters are not people with whom most of us identify. They do, however, provide a convenient escape for us. I am not like that; therefore, I cannot be a racist.
Wrong.
If we think that we are right and that the ways other people do things are wrong, we, for all intents and purposes, are racists.
If we think that the way we do things is superior, and the way other people do things is thus inferior, we are racist.
And racism is wrong.
Perhaps another reason that the word “racism” seems to have disappeared is that our understanding of and attitudes towards “race” have changed. Today we profess that races do not exist. Influenced by sociologists and psychologists, we are slowly becoming used to the proposition that there is only one race, the HUMAN RACE. Instead of the seemingly outdated ideas of racism, anti-racism, or race rights, we have learned to refer instead to HUMAN RIGHTS. Human rights counter racism and ethnocentrism. Human rights is an umbrella term which includes aliases such as civil rights, women's rights, feminism, labour rights, minority rights, equal rights, anti-bullying, or the rights of indigenous peoples.
The Preamble to the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins: “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world . . .“ Then it lists thirty “rights.” Yes, but, you may say. Yes, but, human rights did not exist until 1948 (a very good year) and are a result of the Holocaust. Certainly the move to formalize, to write down, was a reaction to the horror of concentration death camps. But the belief in fundamental justice, and the the desire to codify and record, to document orally or literally, are characteristics of our race. And having the rights written down does make it easier to see, to hear the voices of the disappeared and the dispossessed as they call for help.
All groups marginalized by historic injustice, exploited or ignored, help us see both the need for and the benefits of being mutually supportive, moving in solidarity with others, standing up and speaking out for rights and respect. For is it not our common goal, to figure out how we can best live together, as neighbours, as allies, as fellow human beings, in this land, on this planet?
Yet racist attitudes thrive. Maybe some people will have an issue equating “feelings of superiority” with racism. We can accept that racism means that individuals of one race or group feel superior to people of another group. The contrary is less universally accepted—that those who feel superior are by definition racist. Think of it as a mathematical equation. An equation can be read backwards and forwards. Racism = Feeling Superior. Therefore, Feeling Superior = Racism. I offer this as metaphor. To try to argue it as logic would be an unfortunate ethnocentric reading, a cross-cultural misinterpretation.
Or perhaps we could equate racism with righteousness, as in self-righteousness. The belief that our way is right, that “we” are right. That other ways are inferior. A word like “snobbery” makes self-righteousness seem somewhat less threatening, an individual quirk rather than a cultural characteristic. But is it not still the same thing, whether it is on the personal level, on the cultural level, or on the national level? A snob is self-righteous. Self-righteousness is feeling superior. Feeling superior is racism, however we may try to evade the truth.
Racism is both a personal and a cultural flaw. The belief that anyone else, any individual or group, has the right to tell another person, other people, what to do and how to live their lives is a racist tenet. It fails to respect the right of the individual to self-determination and dignity.
It fails to RESPECT.
Think of the implications for individuals, for groups, for nations.
It's not you; it's me.
CANLIT
My teen years had been bolstered by all the national pride and promotions surrounding Canada's centennial in 1967. Indeed, at fifteen, I had been awarded a summer trip, as part of an escorted group of Manitoba high school students, Centennial Travellers, to Montreal where I was billetted with a French-speaking family in Longueuil. I tasted my first slice of pizza (instant addiction) and ate my first Spaghetti Bolognese supper. Madame S taught me the proper etiquette--”Do not cut the strands. Hold your spoon in your left hand; use it as a brace and with your right hand, twist the spaghetti around your fork.” We drove to Sorel to visit Madame's relatives in a traditional farmhouse on a long lot fronting the Richelieu River, exactly matching the history book descriptions of the New France surveys. We attended smoky coffee houses with a stool, a mic, and a folk singer spotlighted on stage. We toured Old Montreal, the nave of Notre Dame de Bon Secours in the harbour and the gilded Notre Dame Cathedral, the botanical garden, Le Musee des Beaux-Arts, St. Joseph's Oratory. We visited the aquarium, the Plains of Abraham, and a nunnery displaying Montcalm's skull in Quebec City, the Parliament Buildings and National Art Gallery in Ottawa, the old building, where Tom Thomson's West Wind took your breath away at the door. I memorized the words to “Mon Pays” in French--”Mon pays ce n'est pas un pays c'est l'hiver.” And I had returned, for Expo '67. It was a celebration of Canada, with an all-inclusive slogan: “Unity in diversity.”
But it had taken a few years for the nationalism, a bit of the pride and self-confidence, to trickle up to the university. I took my first Canadian Literature class when poet Dorothy Livesay offered a special summer course in 1972. She had personal knowledge of many of the poets and novelists, having lived in Winnipeg when her father worked for the Free Press, as well as in eastern Canada and on the West Coast. We studied Isabella Valancy Crawford's “The Canoe“ and Pauline Johnson's “The Song My Paddle Sings.” We read Margaret Laurence short stories set in Neepawa and Riding Mountain National Park, fifty miles from home. And Frederick Philip Grove, who had taught in Rapid City, twenty miles from Oak River, where we had regularly visited one of Dad's veteran friends. Grove's daughter is buried there. Although the story of his true identity, as a fugitive German, was just coming out, his stories spoke to us of our place, of snow and prairie roads and farm workers, of cultures familiar to us. In that class, the setting of Grove's novel The Master of the Mill was identified as Keewatin, Ontario, a previously unknown fact. We also read Layton and Klein and Cohen. Because I was in love with Montreal and with Cohen since his concert on campus my first year, I wrote my paper on “Suzanne” with its references to “Our Lady of the Harbour” and ”she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China.” I could just as easily have chosen “Dance Me To the End of Love” or “Sisters of Mercy”; his “Democracy” and “Anthem” (“There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.”) and “Hallelujah” came later.
Dorothy Livesay was living CanLit, the embodiment of literature as the art of seeing your self set in your environment, your culture, a connection which had been impossible previously for Canadian students to make. In the past, literature, the curriculum, the canon, was determined in England or America and taught by outsiders who believed that everything good happened somewhere else and, if you just imported it, you could be enlightened in its reflected glory. Literature was seen as product, not process. Before CanLit, Canadian novels never made it to the "approved texts" list; reading was about strange people from unfamiliar places. The fact that none of these people were Canadian was an unvoiced insult. If Canadians did exist, they did not matter. They were invisible, lesser than, inferior. The colonized mind was as much a problem in literature as it was and is in politics.
After the Centennial, after Livesay, I began to understand literature as the study of the mastery of language as a way to explore what it means to be fully human here and now. In CanLit, finally, we could see Canada and Canadians. Through the pleasures of narrative, we can learn how other human beings cope with different kinds of challenges in their own lives and cultures. Later I would see the impact on the students when they got hooked on Farley Mowat's Lost In the Barrens. Although they knew how some Northerners referred to Mowat as “hardly know-it” because of his imaginative liberties, they loved reading a story with Cree characters set in a landscape which they recognized, about familiar activities such as trapping and hunting, and with conflicts, man versus nature, White versus Indigenous, Indian versus Eskimo, with which they could all identify. CanLit untwists the educational misstep, breaks down the dance moves into a manageable one-two-three, and helps students learn that the purpose of literature, oral or written, is, by creating characters we recognize and plots with which we can identify, to entertain and to teach at the same time.
I never thought of it then, how being invisible, being excluded, ignored, by the media, in the curriculum, is also a form of racism. Out of sight, out of mind; if I cannot see you, you do not exist. Invisibility sends the racist message: You're not good enough; you do not matter. Nor did I fully appreciate that helping students learn academically, watching them mature socially and emotionally, prompting them to integrate what they learn from books and from the discussion of literature depends upon how well you understand child development (physical, intellectual, social, spiritual), how well you know yourself, and how familiar you are with those all-important connections between place, culture, and identity.
But this is getting ahead of myself. I'm not there yet. Suffice it to say that, in cross-cultural education, it is also the teacher who learns.
