DANCING WITH GHOSTS: A CROSS-CULTURAL EDUCATION
Part Three – The RIVER SHANNON
WHITE CULTURE – IRELAND
The Lone Ranger and Tonto walk into a crowded bar on the reserve. “Looks like we're surrounded, Tonto,” the Lone Ranger says to his loyal sidekick. “What do you think we should do?” And Tonto answers: “What do you mean 'we,' Kemo Sabe?“
So the class had challenged me about White culture and I had to come up with a better answer. I had to learn.
You know that expression? When the student is ready, the teacher appears. It was almost like that. As a student of cultures, I was ready to learn, and the opportunity to do so appeared. Or perhaps it was just Fate, finding another way to tap me on my shoulder, to get me up and moving, to teach me a lesson. Through contacts living and working on the reserve, I had the opportunity to fly to Ireland for the Christmas holiday. It is a long story, and the details of how I got there are less important than the details of what I learned there. Forget the heightened security, the hand frisks and pat downs, the long slow line-ups transferring from Air Canada to Aer Lingus, the snowstorm which closed Heathrow on the return trip. Sleeping with ten thousand other stranded travellers on the airport's marble floor.
Flying into Dun Laoghaire, to Dublin Airport. Dun is a fort (as in Lon DUN), Laoghaire sounds like "leery." DUB means black in Gaelic. LIN is a waterfall, or a pool into which water falls. The drive out, to Clara, County Offaly, through towns with names like songs or poems. Mul LIN gar. Tul la more. Lough something. Lough everywhere. Lough sounds like “loch” and means "lake," I am told. It does NOT rhyme with "slough," it does NOT sound like "Loo." That means something else. Although moving to the reserve, the smell of woodsmoke, had evoked comfortable memories of my own childhood, arriving in Ireland felt literally as if I had returned. Many people there, out of habit, greet strangers with “Welcome home!” Although I had never before been off the North American continent, I definitely experienced deja vu in Ireland. And everywhere I went it seemed that people told me “St. Bridget slept here!”
“WHO?” I kept asking. “WHO?”
Bridget had been my childhood nickname, a corruption of our family name, but I had never before met a woman named Bridget. I had heard of Bridget Bardot, who was famous, but I had never heard of the celebrated St. Bridget, one of the three patron saints of Ireland, along with Patrick and Columba.
Bridget had been my childhood nickname, a corruption of our family name, but I had never before met a woman named Bridget. I had heard of Bridget Bardot, who was famous, but I had never heard of the celebrated St. Bridget, one of the three patron saints of Ireland, along with Patrick and Columba.
The children were learning Gaelic at school; giant posters, next to the ones reading Guinness in Good For You! proclaimed OUR Language: It's part of who we are! The elders spoke with a musical lilt, and sang at the drop of a hat. Indeed, I had been warned to have a tune ready, as visitors are expected to “give us your song” almost as the price of admission to the pub. People cooked on an “aga” fueled by peat which had been dug with square shovels from the bog and delivered to the back door in sacks. It had its own smoke smell, not unlike but not the same as woodsmoke. It was Christmas so we ate Brussels sprouts, broccoli (which I actually saw growing in a garden, the first time ever), cabbage, potatoes with butter and parsley, bangers and mash, rashers of bacon, ham, colcannon, bubble and squeak. We peeled shrimp, and I got so hooked on Bailey's Irish Cream that upon my return to Winnipeg I pestered the Manitoba Liquor Control Commission to import it. Finally, after repeated requests, they informed me that they would be getting it in as soon as the manufacturers had devised a way to stabilize the cream for export. Yes! St. Bridget would have been proud of me, she of the magic cauldron, of the community pasture and the milk cows, of the church at Kildare, the Church of the Oak, or, more specifically, the Oak Door.
So I was fascinated by the outward and visible signs of culture in Ireland, but I also learned how woefully inadequate was my knowledge of Irish history. How my quest in the pastures and watchtowers was for stereotypes, Darby O'Gill and the Little People, played by that handsome Scots devil, Sean Connery. How blind I was to the invisible strengths, the underlying values and beliefs of a proud Celtic people. Celtic was the word. Wherever I went I was snapping photos of Celtic crosses. I know there are a lot of Celtic crosses in Canada, but I hadn't been aware of them at the time. It is a regular cross with a circle centred where the horizontal and vertical axises intersect. Some say it is a Christian cross representing the Tree of Life, enlightened by the pagan Sun.
The Celts I learned were one of the ancient peoples of Europe who had come from the east and had lived in Portugal, Spain, and France, and on all of the “British” islands, including Ireland, which was no longer a “British” island. Driven back they were, history tells us, by marauding Angles, Saxon, Jutes, Vikings, to the western regions—Cornwall, Wales, Ireland, and northern Scotland.
This is where I began to recognize the inadequacy of “my accursed human education,” including years studying history at university. I did not realize the differences between the peoples united as “British.” I did not know that a Scot was neither an Englishman nor an Irishman, and that to refer to Ireland as “British” was a great error, more than fifty years out of date even then, and an insult to boot, although even the National Geographic magazine made that mistake in that decade, the 1970s. The Celts had been in Ireland for a millennia when the Vikings began to intrude. The Vikings are the reasons some Irish have red hair, and the reason why the tinker children I saw begging outside the mall were blond and red-headed. The Viking invaders were followed by the Normans, and the English dominance was consolidated under the Tudors, the Henrys VII and VIII, and Elizabeth I. Resistance never ceased and was always strongest when England was engaged elsewhere, during the English Civil War and the French Revolution and World War I. Cromwell's repression of Catholic Ireland in the 1600s was especially brutal. English courtiers had been rewarded with title to Irish lands.
That's why the landowners, the English, were blamed for the Irish potato famine in the 1800s, for they had money and food and refused to share with the suffering peasants who were given the choice to die or emigrate. The Irish and their Catholic faith were considered inferior, as Dr. Swift had made so obvious in his satirical "Modest Proposal" as early as 1729. The fate of the Irish did not matter to their “superiors”; there was no sense of a shared humanity. Well, some of this I picked up later from reading Nuala O'Faolain, My Dream of You, so there may be a bit of bias here. But that sense of being victims, victimized by the beliefs and actions of others, and the anger that engenders, was evident. They had been invaded and conquered and colonized by people who considered themselves to be superior.
We listened to a traditional Irish band called the Wolfe Tones, named for a rebel hero from centuries before. And when a car backfired on a side street in Dublin, I watched the shopkeeper cringe and duck. She apologized; “It's the Troubles,” she said. There was trouble in England related to the on-going Troubles in the North, citizens split between those wanting independence and those who wanted to remain a part of the United Kingdom. In the North, they say, there are two religions. Anti-Catholic and Anti-Protestant. Postcards arrived in Winnipeg from “bomby” Belfast. So the cringing woman in the shop felt she had to explain.
“People don't know the difference,” she complained. “Dublin has nothing to do with the Troubles in the North, but when people don't know the difference, who knows what they may do? We fear retaliation.” And although it was true that Eire had nothing to do with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, it was also true that in Ireland, the Garda, heavily armed police carrying automatic rifles and machine guns, driving around in armoured police vehicles, were everywhere, not just at the airport. And a rash of robberies in the banks in small towns in the South were rumoured to be organized by supporters sending money to those fighting in the North. Rebel politics is “just a place for criminals to congregate,” the men in the pub suggested, the way we explain “gangs” in Canada. But that could have been just their party line, not wanting to scare the tourists.
You know that old movie Ryan's Daughter starring Robert Mitchum and Sarah Miles and John Mills? Beautiful. Beautiful country. Even at Christmas, everything was green. Grass. Ivy. Furze. Gardens. But Ryan's Daughter is about a British soldier suffering from “shellshock” posted to Ireland during World War I, to give him a bit of peace and time to recover from the horrors of the trenches. One of the subplots concerns gun-running, the Irish in America supporting the Irish in Ireland supporting the Germans in Germany, on the theory that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” I missed the nuances of power and politics at first. I didn't realize that the reason America took so long to enter World War I was because it couldn't make up its mind, it could have gone either way, siding with the Germans or with the British. Siding with the British would mean the loss of many Irish-American votes. But I was oblivious, being more interested then in other themes, the personal rather than the political, the weight of tradition and the social pressures of community on the daughter, the younger generation. The love story. The wounded hero.
There are things you miss, especially the first time. My first trip to Ireland, I never once thought about Sean O'Casey or William Butler Yeats, both writers I had studied, or even George Bernard Shaw. I must have walked along the River Liffey in Dublin on my way to the Guinness factory, but I never even thought about James Joyce or Leopold Bloom or Bloomsday. When I bought stamps or exchanged money at the main post office, I never thought about the strikers who had occupied the building during the battle for Home Rule. Probably not until I read Roddy Doyle's A Star Called Henry. Nor was I even aware that my own grandmother's grandfather was posted in Dublin at the time of his death in the 1880s, although he died aboard his ship somewhere in the West Indies. So many connections; so many missed opportunities.
For these are all parts of White culture. Ancestors. Ancestral homelands. Ancestral employment and residences. Values and rivalries and motivations. Literature and stories in film, and writers. History and politics. Faith and religion. Legend and mythology. Customs and rituals. Laws, by-laws, and police. Role models. Outward and visible signs.
Every night at six o'clock, the Angelus came on the television, and everyone was supposed to stop and pray. I missed Christmas Eve's Midnight Mass in the big church at the centre of the town because, with seating being limited and baby-sitters unavailable and me not being a true believer, I was nominated to stay at the house with the sleeping children. There was no Boxing Day. December 26 was called St. Stephen's Day. Mummers dressed in Halloween-like costumes and masks came to the door. I think they were given money. A light was always left on near the front door at night, “to aid lost souls trying to find their way home.” Ruined buildings were left in a tumble of fallen rock and rubble. If you used old stones in a new building, a special ceremony was required, speaking to the spirits of the ruins, asking them to stay, or inviting them to the new location. A Black Day was not a day when the shops are closed but rather a day when the pubs do not open. Twice a year, I believe, on Christmas Day and Good Friday. Perhaps it was just that our host was such a silver-tongued storyteller, had literally kissed the Blarney Stone, that I missed the twinkle in his eye as he answered all my questions.
We attended a medieval banquet in a stone castle, stabbing our capons with daggers, eating syllabub milk pudding with carved wooden spoons. Evidently forks are post-medieval. We visited Clonmacnoise Monastery on the River Shannon, where it is possible, fifteen hundred years ago, St. Bridget propositioned St. Patrick, on that long-ago first Leap Year proposal. He of course declined, being more interested in snakes himself. St. Patrick's legend is more familiar on this side of the Atlantic, but every kitchen in Ireland sports a St. Bridget's Cross, woven by her nuns from reeds from the river, and sold as a way to support the nunnery. Mine still hangs above the buffet, although I think tradition says it should be tacked to the ceiling, above you as you work at the kitchen sink, like a star.
So what does a trip to Ireland have to do with solidarity with First Nations people? Well, a trip to Ireland, a voyage into another culture, helped me see things I hadn't noticed or been aware of in Canada. In Ireland I saw and felt the connection between colonialism and racism. Ireland through history had been colonized, yet it still existed, proud, a role model of cultural survival. Irish history suggests that when pain goes unacknowledged and abuses and grievances go unaddressed, violence may be the only voice to which the colonial oppressor listens. Violence directed at the self or violence towards others. The Irish attempted to address their oppression through political channels and through literature, but in the end only armed insurrection succeeded, challenging the external authority of a conquering nation, fighting for the return of independence and self-determination. The Irish proclaimed that things which had been done in the past were wrong, and that those actions, those wrongs, were wrong because they were based on racist assumptions which denied the humanity and the dignity of the colonized people.
As Oprah always used to say, When we know better, we can do better.
So Ireland was a turning point in my cross-cultural education. In Ireland, Irish rebels and rebel songs proclaimed that racism is wrong, and that it is right, even expected, to fight against colonialism, to stand in solidarity against oppression, and with other oppressed peoples desiring respect for their rights as equal human beings.
WHITE CULTURE
Like a medium in which things grow in a laboratory, culture is the way we live and grow together. Of course, there is no “White Culture” because there are many White cultures. It's just that, in former British colonies, a lot of the customs and rituals of the dominant English have been established as the cultural norm. Or old French culture in Quebec, from before the French Revolution, when most of the Quebecois families emigrated to New France. It was true even in my own family. I really was not aware of my own personal and ancestral culture. Although both my grandmothers were English, born in England, I did not realize that my Bridgeman ancestors came from Cornwall, a Celtic region of Britain, where the last native-speaker of the Cornish language died in the 1790s. I did not realize that the way my father served pancakes, under a mountain of whipped cream, sprinkled with brown sugar or fruit, is called “Cornish pancakes” in Britain. I didn't even know I had Celtic blood, before I flew into Ireland, before I walked in the footsteps, slept in the places where Bridget slept. Our Celtic heritage had been whitewashed, overpainted, obliterated beneath the “English” mean.
So, instead of White Culture, let's just call it culture. What constitutes culture? What are its categories, the things all cultures have? Because certainly by now we've all slept in so many different beds that there is no one “pure laine” culture left, unadulterated, original. If such a thing ever did exist. The details, the emanations, for individuals and for groups, will differ, but underlying structures will be the same or similar. Start from the individual and work outward, rather than from outside, looking in. We are all the same but different.
We each enter this world as an individual infant, surrounded by birth rituals, a parent, parents, or family, with child-rearing practices, traditional ways of educating and acculturating the children, using some variation of observation, instruction, immersion, story, legend, and mythology. Children pick up attitudes, ethical tenets, philosophy, perhaps religion, spiritual practice, along with superstitions. Routine, ritual, ceremony make the child feel accepted and help develop the skills to anticipate and manage his or her needs. Every group has a type of shelter, clothing, and food preferences—getting, preparing, serving—related to the environment in which it lives. We learn a language and other methods of communication, ways to work, tools to work with, ways to socialize through play and games, ways to organize group interactions, initiation rites, courtship, marriage, and death rituals. And an attitude towards what happens afterward, physically and spiritually. What else is there? Is it not true that every culture, every people on Earth have these? We grow up immersed in the details of our family culture. We may or may not be aware that the family cultures of other people may or may not differ from our own. When we see alternate ways of doing things, when different bathing rituals are pointed out to us, we may choose to adapt or to adopt or to ignore. When we are aware of differences, we will be less likely to assume that any one way is superior.
Is it safe to assume that each individual and each culture feels, thinks, believes that he/she/it has a right to refuse, a right not to be forced to accept the culture of another group? And what is the connection between culture and place, now that we know groups of humans have roamed, moved, migrated over the continents for as long as people have been on Earth? They say that even the Celts may have started out somewhere near India. At least, some of the clues in the ancient languages suggest this. Perhaps computers reading genes will add to our understanding of the facts of the human story. However, the important truths lie elsewhere. In the crimes of racism and colonization, in the resistance of colonized nations, and in the assertion of their rights to determine their own future.
There are ways that we are all the same, and ways that we differ. And differing is all right. Sometimes, it seems, it's only the differences which set us apart, give us our identity. “Did you bring this snow with you?” they asked this Canadian in Ireland.
WHOSE RIGHTS?
Ireland at Midwinter was green and open, what the Celts call a “thin place” where the separation between this world and other worlds is a thin veil. I felt this especially at the old monastery, Clonmacnoise on the River Shannon, where some of the buildings, the stones that construct them, were stacked in the fifth century CE and where the high Celtic cross, which dates from the eighth century, is decorated with cartwheels identical to those in our barnyard at home. I had dreams after I visited the monastery. An earthquake. The world falling apart. Three white-robed priests standing along the long axis of a crooked Celtic cross. Pilgrims on our knees approaching them. When I get there, a hand waving over my head, fingers raised, an arm directing me to one side: “You're saved,” a voice says, “because your eyes are the colour of the Birr marble.” It was, or might as well have been, all Gaelic to me, but I asked our host.
“Birr marble? Why, yes. 'Tis a stone mined near the town of Birr, just down the road from Clonmacnoise. The Birr marble is green, with flecks of rust and red.”
Okay. I'll go a bit lighter on the Guinness.
But sometimes, there is one memory which makes me shiver. At the airport. Being patted down, my carry-on and purse being hand-frisked. The security guard noticing my month's supply of birth control. She looks up, looks me in the eyes, and says: ”Have a good time in Ireland.” I did not know then that birth control was illegal in Ireland, that it was against the law to have it, and to bring it in. What if she had told me that? What if she had confiscated my supply? What could I have done? How would my life have changed? Was I exempt, as a non-citizen? Or would I have been a victim of that old democratic system, where the larger number, the louder voices, outvoted me, imposed upon me their opinions, and forced me to exist according to their laws? Considered me inferior and without rights? Without the ability or the right to determine my own fate?
Now some of you may be thinking, Was she married? Because some of you, dear readers, may believe, consciously or subconsciously, that a woman has to be married to have sex. And/or to access birth control, which used to be the law in Canada. And that society has to approve, to permit it, before a woman surrenders her virginity. And even, that society has a right to approve whether, when, and with whom a woman has sex. And that the simple answer to carrying protection is that if you abstain, you do not need birth control. Right.
One of my friends on the reserve wore a t-shirt emblazoned with “I am a virgin.* ” And when you followed the asterisk, the star, down to the frayed hemline, the footnote said “This is a very old t-shirt.” I liked her attitude. And the way she used humour to poke fun at insulting gossip, at how some people seem to feel that they have a right to intrude into private decisions and individual beliefs, and to pass judgement upon them.
If the security guard at the London check-in counter for Aer Lingus had confiscated my birth control, had informed me of the law and applied it to me personally, I would have been angry. I would have lost my respect for the authority of the lawmakers. I would have rejected the imposition of their law upon me. I would have turned to the underground, to a Black Market. I would for sure have counselled my daughters not to be duped, to stand up for themselves. F the church. F parliament. F men in general. But always use protection. Make every child a wanted child. Make every woman a human being with rights.
But that's my culture. Personal. Let me not assume that what I believe should be forced on others.
Let me not, sweet St. Bridget, let me never use the word should.
MY LAST CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY
We finally got home to Winnipeg and to the North, after the blizzard in Europe, the accusations of taxi drivers and other stranded travellers: “Did you bring this snow with you from Canada?” I hand wrote an account of my holiday for my English classes. I was consciously attempting to make that connection between personal experience, communication, handwriting, and writing. And possibly, of travel as adventure. And, although it took more processing time, of travel as another way to learn to see and know yourself. Because travel helps us notice differences, ways we and our lives compare and contrast with the lives of others elsewhere. With different cultures, even amongst and between people of the same “colour” or “race.” For what I was still seeking was some way to respond to that first student's first challenge, “You White people don't got no culture.”
What I was seeking was some sort of answer to the question: In what ways are these students in high school on the reserve any different from my previous students in other high schools elsewhere? Is the student's Cree culture already the same as mine, my whitewashed Celtic culture? Are there really no cultural differences? I was curious to know what Cree culture was, but I understood that it was not my role to say. It would be up to Matt, to identify what made him “Cree and proud.” My role would be only to help him develop the skills to communicate as much or as little as he chose with whomever he chose to share. It would be my job to document my culture, my growth, the way cross-cultural challenges helped me become more aware of my culture. How I got beyond being neither British nor American and emerged a proud citizen of a supposedly kinder gentler but colder country.
UP RIVER
The Gunisao is a river, a tributary of the Nelson, one of those rushing northern rivers, cascading ever down over worn tiers of bedrock, tracing the line of least resistance, onward, into the arms of the Bay and beyond, to the Arctic or Atlantic oceans. The Gunisao's cold waters never rest, tumbling white and frothy over and around granite outcrops, undertowing deep blue beneath a placid veneer, or lying flat and steaming in the eerie calm of dawn. The records of its ever-changing water levels are inscribed in indelible lines like petrographs on the shore.
UP RIVER
The Gunisao is a river, a tributary of the Nelson, one of those rushing northern rivers, cascading ever down over worn tiers of bedrock, tracing the line of least resistance, onward, into the arms of the Bay and beyond, to the Arctic or Atlantic oceans. The Gunisao's cold waters never rest, tumbling white and frothy over and around granite outcrops, undertowing deep blue beneath a placid veneer, or lying flat and steaming in the eerie calm of dawn. The records of its ever-changing water levels are inscribed in indelible lines like petrographs on the shore.
In the North, the landscape, rivers like the Gunisao, are teachers. As it has been for millennia, rivers get you where you want to go. The Gunisao can get you away from headlights and traffic lights, from streetlights, airport beacons, the flashers on ambulances, school buses, police cars. The Gunisao takes you inland, far from civilization. InLand, into the Bush. For some people, the bush is where they make their living, trapping, or where they go to hunt for food. For others, the bush is where you go to get away, to camp. Not right into the bush, obviously, where you can see nothing but trees, and can find no direction indicators other than the sun and stars. You camp on the edge of the bush, between the known and the unknown, between the river and the trees. And the river takes you there.
Fishermen set their long nets where the Gunisao joins the Nelson. They never venture upriver to fish, nor to camp. The Gunisao only lets you go so far in a large motor boat. Those who are serious about camping, about getting out into the bush, travel in a canoe. Because a canoe, even the modern Grumman we were in, seamless aluminum, almost impervious to the ruinous caress of floating logs or submerged boulders, rides over top of many unseen dangers. Or a canoe can be led, like a dog on a leash, by laden paddlers walking it through white water. Or, in the worst cases, a canoe can be carried, its yoke resting on the shoulders of one man or two. Canoes this river allows through, one way or the other.
The last time I went camping, up the Gunisao, the Grumman had a small outboard motor on the stern. A canoe with a motor doesn't go much faster than good paddlers can paddle, but it makes the trip, although somewhat noisier, a little less exhausting. The motor takes you a little farther perhaps, than you would go on manpower alone. Of course, canoeists always carry paddles as well, for back-up, or for poling or steering, or sneaking quietly up on wild creatures drinking or fishing down at the shore.
But the river still tells you to stop before dark, to choose a good campsite, with flat open space to pitch the tent, and soft sand or boughs for the sleeping bags. Because you need light in order to gather deadfall for firewood, to cook and eat and wash dishes, and to stash the cache away from the tent and out of bearclaw reach. And then, in this land of almost-midnight sun, you wait for night to fall, sitting calmly, breathing in the river, the spruce, the quiet. A sacred silence. Watching the world transform, or swapping raucous stories to scare away the unseen twitching ears, curious eyes peering out. Instead of whistling, you start to sing. “I'm Hen-ery the eighth I am.” Or “Frere a Jacque a. Frere a Jacque a.” Or:
Land of the silver birch
Home of the beaver
Where still the mighty moose
Wanders at will.
Blue lake and rocky shore.
I will return once more.
Drum ditty drum drum
Drum ditty drum drum
Drum ditty drum drum
Drum . . . .
Darkness wraps you and your campsite in the comforting circle of the fire's light. Sparks, smoke, coil ever upward, above the leaning trees, gyring home to the stars.
The last time I went up the Gunisao, in the Grumman with the little outboard motor, the propeller smashed on a hidden rock and snapped a shear pin. I had never heard of a shear pin. "They should make those things stronger," I declared indignantly, grudgingly reaching for my paddle and beginning the easier pull, with the current, towards the confluence, and town. We were past the worst white water, and the rapids too were behind us. So the river chose to teach a gentle lesson.
I learned later that a shear pin is made to break, so that no serious damage is done to the motor, and that experienced canoeists carry extra. Plural. And know how to fix them.
So it was an easy examination, set by this northern river. Always travel, never leave home, without paddles and an extra pin. And a companion who knows what to do with it. And a schedule that can accommodate the unexpected. And a mind open to suggestion, ears attuned to listen, eyes eager to see into the darkness. And a belief that darkness is good. And a desire to go there, to get back to it, again and again.
Day is done.
Gone the sun.
From the lake.
From the hills.
From the sky.
All is well.
Safely rest.
God is nigh.
BABY SHOWER
The year after the blond guy from the kitchen sink party took over my job, I spent a lot of time at home, trying to fit into a domestic stereotype. (Yes, the blond guy from the kitchen sink had a job, but he wanted mine, and he got it.) Yes, we are too defined by our work, our identity is too entwined with what we do and what we can do.
That year I made my first attempt ever to bake bread. Without actual bread tins, I improvised, using a set of small glass casserole dishes. I bundled up one of the loaves and walked across the frozen Nelson to a neighbour lady's house with my proud creation. I saw my hostess smile as I handed her the mini-loaf gift, but I didn't realize it was because of its size, smaller than a cinnamon bun. It was perfect, I thought, a perfect shape, this offering. It made a hollow sound when you knocked on it. She was kind enough to save her laughter until after I left.
That year I made my first attempt ever to bake bread. Without actual bread tins, I improvised, using a set of small glass casserole dishes. I bundled up one of the loaves and walked across the frozen Nelson to a neighbour lady's house with my proud creation. I saw my hostess smile as I handed her the mini-loaf gift, but I didn't realize it was because of its size, smaller than a cinnamon bun. It was perfect, I thought, a perfect shape, this offering. It made a hollow sound when you knocked on it. She was kind enough to save her laughter until after I left.
As we were having tea, she told me a story about her Women's Auxiliary group at the church. Every meeting ends with tea and entertainment, she explained, and sometimes the entertainment involves opening a giant box of mystery goods collected from the affluent city homes of believers in the South and packaged up as “mission boxes” to be shipped to northern churches. The box sits there like a giant Christmas present and business is rushed through to get to “the offering.” This time, she reported, when they opened the box, it was full of women's shoes. A whole giant box of women's shoes. They started digging in and discovered that the shoes were all for the right foot. The right foot only.
“Can you imagine,” she said, laughing still, “what they must think of us? To send us something like that?”
“Can you imagine,” she said, laughing still, “what they must think of us? To send us something like that?”
At home in my domesticity, what I did do was crochet. I had found a simple pattern that I liked, and that winter I crocheted, with woven inserts and knotted fringe, six afghans. Two full sized, one for my soon to be ex-husband. One for my newly re-married brother. And four baby blankets—for my other brother's firstborn, my best friend's firstborn, my academic advisor's second, and the firstborn of a colleague and her partner who worked in the school. This latter blanket I wrapped and took as a gift to a baby shower on the reserve.
Before I lived there, I never thought about whether baby showers happened on reserves. Certainly they were a regular part of our culture in southern and rural Manitoba, almost always held after the birth of the baby to avoid bad luck and to assist with colour choices. And most lavish for firstborns because everyone understood that clothing and bedding once outgrown would be shared with neighbours and siblings.
So this shower ritual was relatively familiar, although the mother was from Winnipeg and her partner was from town, from the reserve. We sat in a circle around the living room. Someone sat on either side of the mother who had the baby with her. The youngest person present was awarded the honour of fetching the gifts, one at a time, from the table by the door. One assistant folded the wrapping paper and collected the ribbons; the second assistant wrote down the names of the givers and the nature of the gifts, for the thank-you list. Then each unwrapped present was passed around the circle for “oooh's and aaah's.”
Two things that happened before the tea surprised me that evening. The first was that after the final gift was unwrapped and passed around, the mother stood up and introduced the baby to the circle. She kissed his or her forehead (I cannot remember which this was) then passed the bundle to her right and he/she went from one to the next guest, around the circle, with each woman kissing him/her on the forehead with a smile or a gesture of words which implied “Welcome to this world!” The baby was the final gift.
The second thing which surprised me was that when the assistant had unwrapped my baby afghan, a winter white background with a plaid pattern of non-pastel non-stereotypical chocolate and tangerine stripes, with white, brown, and orange tassels, she shook the blanket out, folded it diagonally, flipped it over her shoulders like a shawl, and began to stepdance, a standing-in-place jig, with fringed edge swinging.
Now I had seen an Indian dance.
PARTY GAME
Before I left, I attended one final party on the reserve. Everyone was sitting around, eating, drinking, talking, when the host came in with a bag of tricks and said “Let's play a game!”
Sure. Why not? What have you got in mind?
He held up a brown paper lunch bag which appeared to have been blown into, like a balloon, making it puff out. “Grip this here, and don't let any air escape,” he directed. Then, “The goal is to see who can come up with the best insult,” he explained. “Pretend that this bag of wind represents your worst enemy, the person you feel the most negative about in your whole life. Has everyone got a picture of that person in your mind's eye? Yes? Okay, go ahead. Pass it around. Give it your best shot. The winner will be chosen by a round of applause at the end of the circle.”
So, gamely, we played along. It wasn't hard for me to pick a face to abuse, a fellow staff member I really felt bullied me and others. I called up my best insults and epithets. Go for it. Go all out. When everyone had taken his or her turn, the roomful of vented emotions seeming lighter already, laughter everywhere, one winner was picked, based upon his descriptive expletive-deleteds and colourful threats.
“Okay, you win,” the host said. Then, “Here. Here is your enemy. Open the bag very carefully, and take a peek.”
“Okay, you win,” the host said. Then, “Here. Here is your enemy. Open the bag very carefully, and take a peek.”
The host handed the winner the brown paper bag we had all verbally abused and we watched him open it. He peered in. He jumped back. He shook his head. He swore. He laughed. Then he re-inflated the bag, sealed it with shaking fingers, and passed it to the person beside him to have his own glimpse. By the time that the last person had sneaked his or her own peek, we all knew. The paper bag contained a shard of mirror; our worst enemies were ourselves.
For every finger you point outwards, three point back at you.
YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND
We don't always realize how much our perceived enemies, the staff bully, the “other” who is not me, may be projections of the things we do not admit or things we do not like about ourselves. Mirrors, possibly distorted, but mirrors nevertheless. In the same way, we don't always realize how much our own backgrounds, which affect our expectations and personal choices for ourselves, also affect our expectations and the alternatives we see as available to others, our students, our families, our fellow citizens. I had escaped rural poverty (although we were never poor) through university; I believed my students, who certainly had the ability if they wanted to direct it that way, should also have the opportunity to choose that route. Hadn't the authorities been telling First Nations since Big Bear's time that “Education is the new buffalo”?
Where higher education was concerned, students on the reserve faced extra challenges. Most of their parents had attended White-run schools, some of them residential schools, against their own and their parents wishes. At least, the parents would have preferred that the government-sponsored education agreed to in the treaties could have been provided without removing the children from their families and communities. Parents who had been to residential schools were seldom really enthusiastic about promoting higher education if it would require the children to leave home. Those from the community who had left to attend university or post-secondary training usually did not return. They too disappeared, absorbed into the mainstream of employment and urban living.
Education then could be seen as continuing to drive a wedge between parents and children, or at the very least, as causing conflict, especially between a parent with Grade Four and a student in Grade Twelve.
“You think you're smarter than us?”
“You think you're better than us?”
“You want to be White?”
Messages were received, whether they had been verbalized or not.
Although schools on reserves were assisted by parent committees, the curriculum was the provincial curriculum, designed elsewhere, to meet the needs of institutions of higher education and of employers, both located elsewhere, far away. Although we tried our best to adapt it to meet the individual needs of individual students in each classroom, what really were those needs? And how would we know? What will the future be like? How does anyone prepare for the unknown? And what would a Cree curriculum have looked like anyway? Besides language education? Outdoor education? Trapping? Nobody wanted to talk about the old days, the old ways. Everyone was ostensibly Christian, and had been for over one hundred years. What was there of Cree culture to insert, to augment the standard curriculum, to help Cree students retain a pride in their identity, aware of ways that they were the same but different, equally human with a unique cultural heritage?
“You think you're smarter than us?”
“You think you're better than us?”
“You want to be White?”
Messages were received, whether they had been verbalized or not.
Although schools on reserves were assisted by parent committees, the curriculum was the provincial curriculum, designed elsewhere, to meet the needs of institutions of higher education and of employers, both located elsewhere, far away. Although we tried our best to adapt it to meet the individual needs of individual students in each classroom, what really were those needs? And how would we know? What will the future be like? How does anyone prepare for the unknown? And what would a Cree curriculum have looked like anyway? Besides language education? Outdoor education? Trapping? Nobody wanted to talk about the old days, the old ways. Everyone was ostensibly Christian, and had been for over one hundred years. What was there of Cree culture to insert, to augment the standard curriculum, to help Cree students retain a pride in their identity, aware of ways that they were the same but different, equally human with a unique cultural heritage?
Cultural differences surfaced obliquely. Anxieties were revealed in questions like “How can anyone want to live alone?” They were thinking of dorm rooms and apartments, when they had only experienced full multi-generational houses. They were imagining leaving, one or two per year, alone, to go into unfamiliar cities. Didn't even the names of services available elsewhere, Indian and Metis Friendship Centres, imply lives of loneliness and isolation, frantically seeking others like themselves, alone without their families?
What in their Cree culture would help them venture out? I remember asking a parent once, when I had overheard stories of the Cree trickster, “Who is this character Waysackayjack? Would you want your children to be like him, to behave as he does?” I remember how that parent laughed, as if there were some sort of secret I didn't get.
Of course they would want their children to be like Waysackayjack, the parent tried to explain. He has all sorts of adventures, he gets attracted to things, he misinterprets what he sees, he rushes in without thinking, he sometimes tries to take advantage of others, but it always works out in the end. He makes a fool of himself and, by doing so, he gets people to laugh at him, and thus at themselves. When he's around, you know that nothing is going to be taken too seriously.
Shape-shifting as a coping mechanism, a survival skill. I didn't understand.
I remember a different parent flashing me a snapshot. I took it, twisted it around, not sure which way was up. Water. A rock wall. Red ochre like paint on the wall. A scene of creatures in a canoe. It was the closest I ever came to the local petrographs which reportedly mark one of the “thin” places, a portal, through which human beings can access the other world, the world of the Maymaykwaysa, the Little People who live in the rocks. There were myths and legends and sacred places that the people still knew about and shared with pride, but these cultural artifacts never made it into the curriculum. Like the powwow dances, they aroused ambiguous feelings about a superstitious past best left behind, relics to be relegated to a bygone era.
The many children who did love to draw inked and pencilled sketches of the life they saw around them. Dancers. The rock group Kiss. Fish. Pineao (Spruce Grouse). Boats. Hockey games. Snowmobiles. Snowmobiles, one boy assured me, were anticipated for generations, he said, before the first Ski-doo actually arrived in the North. Predicted? Yes, the Elders knew. Someone had a vision, years and years ago, about a running chair. Riding on a running chair. So when the machines finally arrived, it was like the Elders said: What took you so long? So he drew running chairs, and shared the legend. But he was the exception.
Waysackayjack didn't come to school, although I believe he is still hiding out on the reserves. In that way too, reserves are preserves of remnants of culture more easily lost or hidden in the towns and cities, unbeknownst to the larger culture except for anthropologists, ethnologists, and students of literature. The parents of high school students weren't thinking of Waysackayjack when they encouraged students to “Stay in school. Get a good education. Go to university. Become a teacher, a doctor, a policeman, a pilot.” When these things were said, they were said with a heavy heart which knew the implications, “and leave us.”
“Just remember to come home and visit.”
I didn't envy the students the tension, the palpable tension between individual and community needs, the ties which bind. Relocating the schools to the reserve community just meant that the students could attend school while living at home. But those schools were still agents of assimilation. And if the students or their parents wanted them to integrate, to be able to manage to succeed within “mainstream” capitalist Canadian society while retaining their Cree identity, they would still have to leave home to do that. To leave home for training or for employment, the dilemma faced by all rural students. Even the ones who chose to go on knew that leaving would be like jumping out of an airplane, from relative security into the great dangerous unknown.
Would they or would they not know what to do with the cord?
CHURCH POINT
We are sitting outside at a picnic table. It is my final month in the North. The grass and the trees are a summery green. A half-ton pickup truck is parked nearby, with its tailgate down. But this is no tailgate party. Other people come and sit at the picnic table too. People from the reserve townsite. A man who works at the school, and his kids. The church is full. There is no room to sit inside. We are here but not here.
We are sitting on the exact spot where the first missionary built the first church. Hence the name, Church Point. This may even be the original church, or its next generation. Simple straightforward frame architecture, four walls, one door, a steeple, a bell. In the 1840s, it was a Methodist Church. Today it is a United Church. This is, after all, Canada.
James Evans, first missionary to the Cree, loved this point. A peninsula of mainland jutting into the water overlooking the spot where Little Playgreen Lake disappears into the Nelson River. When he was here, this place was abuzz. A church. A house. A school. A workshop. For he was a preacher who had the mind of an inventor. He hammered down the tin tea boxes from the Bay and soldered them together to form the first tin canoe. An old Indigenous design, translated into a new material. A technological shape-shifting. It saved him no end of down time making repairs to birchbark on his summer travels, upriver, inland, as far north and west as Fort Chip, thousands of miles of spreading the Word. He was gone for months on end, but when he returned, the people would stand on this point and point, the way the Cree do, with their chins, at the sparkling point of light, at sunbeams dancing on water. From the sun bouncing back off his tin canoe, signalling his approach, they gave the missionary the nickname which translates from the Cree as “He Who Brings the Light.”
I love that story. The literalness. The irony. Of a time when Evans' life was good. And the story about the fur press. A fur press is a large machine built of wood. At first glance it can give you the impression of a giant corkscrew, or perhaps of the superstructure of a wishing well—two uprights around a turned twisted centre, with a handle at the side. But instead of a bucket on a rope, the handle turns a large carved wooden screw which raises and lowers a flat board. Piles of stretched tanned animal pelts are placed under the weighted board, the handle is turned, the screw presses down, flattening the piled fur, reducing the space required to store the cargo below deck, reducing the cost of shipping the traded fur back to London, where they would be transformed into fashionable top hats. James Evans looked at the fur press at the Fort and a lightbulb went off in his inventor's brain. (Of course, at that time, it would have been a candlewick flame, beginning to flicker.) Instead of a tool of the fur trade, instead of a fairy-tale wishing well, Evans saw another kind of press. He wangled an old machine, perhaps from the disapproving Factor, perhaps from the skilled-carver hands of one of his workers, and transformed it into a printing press. He carved wooden moulds of each of the syllabic forms needed to capture the Cree sounds. He melted down lead shot, poured it into the moulds, to form movable type. Pee Pay Po Paw. He set the type and printed the hymns in Cree on pages of birchbark. He bound them and placed them in the church for the congregation, after teaching them to read and write their own language. When they still referred to him with pride as “the man who taught the birchbark to speak.“
Evans loved it here on this point, in this community. But that's the rub. Love. And it's different meanings. The impossibility of translation. The dangers of mis-communication. Of getting lost. Of offering too much. Of misconstrued nuances. Please Explain, came the message from the Methodist Conference, and he had to go. All the way back to England, where he died before he could return.
Evidence suggests a conspiracy. That those men at the Fort, and their superiors in London headquarters, objected so strongly to the changes Evans brought that they had to collude in some way to get rid of him. Of his questioning of the authority of the Company monopoly, proudly HBC (Here Before Christ). Of his school, which kept the men and their families in town. Of his church, which instigated the Lord's Day protests, paddlers and York boat oarsmen refusing to work on Sundays. Trappers newly literate and numerate double-checking their accounts. In every way a man can think of, Evans and his ideas were bad for business. In the power struggle, the culture clash, between the capitalists who had been there since 1670 and the late-coming Christian missionary, the Hudson's Bay Company men had won.
Mr. and Mrs. Evans went south with the brigades, to Fort Garry, Fort William, Montreal, and boarded a ship to London. It is said that his eloquence convinced the church hierarchy and the large congregations who came to hear his tales of adventure, of his good intentions, of his successes, teaching and saving of souls. But he died before he could come back, in his forty-sixth year. Rumour has it that some of his ashes have been returned. That they're buried in that little rock cairn over there. With the metal plaque, with writing in English and Cree. Some ashes. Not his body.
The body inside that church today, the body the pick-up truck is waiting to transport to the new graveyard, is that of a boy, a young man. And his is one of four funerals this year. Teenage boys. All in high school. Dead by hanging, self-inflicted gunshot wound, a drunken fall from a half-built bridge, a suspicious unexplained drowning. Why? Alcohol? Drugs? Three of them from “broken homes,” boys without male mentors. Fostered, locally, but with siblings and relatives nearby. Trying to understand, to deduct some logic, is crazy-making.
Don't think. Don't feel. Don't cry.
The grief just presses down.
GRIEF
That was a long time ago. The past, as “they” say, is another country, and besides, they're all still dead. And I would stop remembering, their faces, their names--Alex, Kenny, Fred, Jeff--if I believed that that was the end of it. If someone could tell me, honestly, that kids are not still dying.
The line from the funeral in Linden MacIntyre's The Bishop's Man brings it all back. “I'm told he wrote 'There is no future.' Think of that. . . . Think of where we have arrived as a society when those who shape the circumstances of our lives and our communities can leave our young, the very embodiment of our collective fate, in such a state. There is no future?” [p.193]
When I first went to the reserve, had been there barely weeks, six young people drowned in one car which rolled into a water-filled ditch. And that Christmas, the fathers of two students died in a house fire, one trying to rescue the other. The hospital doled out pills to the grieving--sleeping pills, tranquilizers, anti-depressants--and kids started selling them at school. “What colour?” you could hear them whisper, negotiating a buy. “What colour?”
And on Parents' Day, when the mother of one girl explained to me, through her translator, how happy they were to have a school, a high school, in their town, because when their kids had to attend high school outside, in a larger mainly White community, she said, “When they have to leave to go to school, they die.” I thought she meant spiritually, or symbolically. “Our children are lost to us again.” But she also meant literally. As her eldest daughter had been murdered about five years before. Gang raped by four White guys, stabbed multiple times with a screwdriver, and no one in all that time had ever been charged with her death.
Even today, in another century, some five decades later, I cannot look at those styrofoam coolers you buy at Canadian Tire for transporting beer or fish. Coffins for babies, the kids on the reserve call them.
But I was lucky. A Cree friend recognized my grief, and saved my life. Pulled me out of the water by the scruff of my neck, like rescuing a kitten which had been tossed into the river.
Some years later, talking to a co-worker who was also a psychologist, questioning myself, he assured me: It would be unprofessional not to care.
MISSIONARY
A man was being interviewed, on the radio or on television, about his experiences as a Protestant missionary to a group of First Nations somewhere in northern Quebec or Ontario. He told the story of how one of his parishioners, a trapper, self-supporting, a family man, had lost a child, and had came to the mission for comfort, for words from the preacher which would help him cope with the sadness of his loss. “The man's grief was so profound,” the missionary stated, “that I realized, in that instant, that there was nothing I could offer this man, there was nothing I could teach him, there is nothing I could teach these people about being human that they do not already know."
Yes, I thought. Perfect. They had cried together. And the missionary had abandoned his work of proselytizing, and had returned South, a wiser man. One who had peeked into the brown paper bag and recognized the face of racism in the shard of mirror. One who acted to change that face, to face the truth.
JUXTAPOSITIONS
“Dancing is like taking a shower; one wrong turn and you're in hot water.”
It would be a mistake to misread my juxtapositions as my being anti-religion. I am not anti-religion. I believe religion and the fellowship faith offers is one of the long-standing ways human beings have devised to “help each other through” our time here on Earth. However, the belief, by any religion and/or all religions, that what they believe is superior to what anyone else believes is racist. And those racist assumptions are what has caused wars and human rights abuses from time immemorial, as well as personal shaming and guilt, and the depressions which arise when anger turns inward. The skeleton in the Canadian closet is racism, and it hangs with racks full of christening gowns, cassocks, and vestments.
The late Canadian literary critic and theologian Northrup Frye pointed out that the educated imagination is one which recognizes that what he/she believes is also only a possibility. In his own words: “In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others.” [p.32]
Transposing my teaching motto, I put it this way: It is not What we believe which matters; it is That we believe. [Or not, if that is what you choose to believe.]
Here I feel perhaps I need to confess. The only thing I find more off-putting than proselytizing is pontificating.
So, I left the North believing that the best thing I could do would be to bow out. To leave the students, their parents, and their community to their own devices, to figure out for themselves how they best wanted their children educated, for the kind of lifestyle, the kind of future they envisioned.
I did feel guilty because I continued to fear that the men in charge of the schools, the men making all the decisions about who got hired, who taught what, what they taught, and how they taught it, still made decisions which seemed to imply that White ways were superior and that assimilation into White society was the answer to all “Indian” questions. Men who imposed their opinions, their gender, their culture. Men who were quick to remind everyone that everything on reserve was paid for by tax dollars from the South. That he who pays the piper calls the tune. (An old Celtic saying.)
So that nowadays, in the relationship between the Cree and Canada, between First Nations and the federal government, controlling the purse strings is the way racism is imposed, the way individuals and groups are oppressed, in that old equation of racism=superiority. Although of course, Cree culture, culture per se, exists even when money is scarce or non-existent, as most writers can tell you.
When I left, and remember, this was more than thirty years ago, there were plans to build a new high school that would focus on training mechanics and hairdressers. But the students who wanted to prepare for university were to be removed from the community and sent elsewhere for high school. A decision which I protested, for its insensitivity. It was as if these men had never heard about the negative impacts of “residential schooling” on students, families, and communities. I do hope this plan changed, but I do not know.
Recently I saw a news report on television which said that a student I had taught was now a principal and possibly is now an administrator. This, perhaps unreasonably, gives me a dribble of hope. As it did when I heard a First Nations leader (also cited in Regan, p.227) from a different region of Canada put it this way: “Yes, you can help us paddle, as long as you let us steer our own canoe.”
