A Quality of Light (30 page)

“I think we all learned something about that,” Pastor Chuck said with great dignity.

Jacqueline did not speak for the longest time. She sat there sipping her tea, looking at an invisible point of space somewhere between the table and the wall. When she set her tea cup down, hitched her chair a little closer to the table and spoke, it was gently and softly.

“See these braids here. They’re old and white now, but one time they were black. They changed. Everyone who sees them now sees them as white, forgetting that they started out black. But me, I always see them the same. Not white, not black, they just are. Because someone taught me one time, a long time ago, what they’re supposed to mean. You see Indians on TV and in movies all the time and they all got braids. Pretty soon people start to believe that Indians always got braids. If you’re Indian you gotta have braids. Even us we start to believe that. So lots of us wear our hair in braids because we think we’re supposed to. And that’s all we know so it’s all we pass on to others.

“But braids are there for a reason. See, the old people, way back, were looking for a way to teach their people to remember how they were supposed to live. They wanted a symbol. Nothing fancy, just an everyday symbol to help them remember. Well one day, an elder was sitting in the tall grass thinking about this problem. She watched a group of people walking by and saw how they flattened the grass. She came by that same place a few days later and she saw that the grass had stood back up again even though it had been flattened a few days before. She thought, ’That grass is sure humble. It allows people to pass, surrenders to it and then stands back up again.’ Humble and strong, you see?

“Well, pretty soon she starts to see that that’s how people are supposed to be — humble and strong. So she takes a bunch of that sweet-smelling grass and starts to braid it. As she braids it she thinks about three things that people gotta remember if they want
to live a good way. She thinks about humility, respect and kindness. She thinks about faith, honesty and love. She keeps on thinking about these things and praying. When she’s finished she ties a small knot at the end of the braid of sweet-smelling grass, like an amen, kinda. For four days she keeps the braid by her bed. She looks at it when she goes to sleep and looks at it again as soon as she gets up. Every time she sees it she’s reminded of three things she needs to live her life in a good way. She remembers how she prayed as she braided it and how she focused on each of those qualities as she prayed. Well, pretty soon she sees how strong a symbol that braided grass is. She starts to pray with it and she finds out that when she burns it while she prays, the smoke is sweet smelling too, comforting and kind. Pretty soon she starts teaching her people how to burn it, what it represents. Soon, the teaching of the grass is everywhere.

“But it wasn’t enough. People would go hunting or on a journey, and not having the grass around to remind them, they would forget the principles they needed to live their lives in a good way. One day she’s standing on a big rock bluff with the wind blowing her long black hair around. It touches her face and she thinks how much it feels like long, soft grass. She sits down and begins to braid her hair like she braided the grass. She thinks of three principles as she braids, just like when she did the grass. First one side, then the other. When she’s done she realizes she has two strong symbols right on her head. So she taught her people to braid their hair while thinking of three spiritual principles they needed to live their lives in a good way. Every time they passed each other they would see braids and be reminded of how they were supposed to live their lives.

“Also, they got to spend a portion of their days considering those principles, those teachings, as they braided. And that’s not such a bad way to spend a portion of your day, is it, Pastor Chuck?” she said, smiling at all of us.

“No,” Pastor Chuck said with a grin. “Not such a bad way at all.”

“So, no matter how white these old braids get, I’m always going to respect them for what they stand for, not for what color they are, how thick or how long. Even if I went bald all of a sudden and they fell off, or if I cut them off out of respect for the passing of a loved one, I will always remember the teaching. Always. Bein’ Indian, Ojibway, is about learning the teachings and putting them into practice in your life. It’s not about how you look, where you live, who you live with. It’s about what you carry inside, not what you show to the world. It’s an inside truth. When you have it within you, you can go anywhere, do anything — you will always be an Indian, an Ojibway.

“You people done well with this boy. You know him. You respect him. And you’re willing to come here to help him find out about himself and his people. That tells me you love him very much. You love him enough to give him a choice of worlds. You don’t fail when you offer choice — only when you don’t. This is the only place he can learn to choose. You got to wander around with your own, learning to see parts of yourself in them. When you can do that, then you can learn to see parts of
them
in
you.

“Joshua?” she asked suddenly. She smiled at me.

“Do you want to come here for a weekend every now and then to learn about us? Where you came from, maybe some of the language, ceremony, stuff like that?”

I thought about the teasing and how it felt to have no recourse. How it felt to be hated for being something and someone I had no knowledge of. How lonely it felt to be like a fencepost in a field of snow. How right all of this felt. How the word
Kane
and the word
Indian
had always seemed to exist in juxtaposition despite the dormant knowledge that I was both.

“Yes.”

“Good,” Jacqueline said. “And Ezra and Martha, you’re welcome to join us any time. Pastor, same thing.”

Jacqueline told us that she didn’t have an agenda. She wanted me to come up and be around my people on a regular basis, and the teaching would come as it was supposed to. When we’d finished she took us on a tour of the reserve. We met her grandchildren,
sons and daughters and a handful of community members.

“You know, I think I’m gonna like this Indian stuff,” I said to no one in particular.

G
radually, the edges of my world folded together as strangely, as exotically as an origami bird. Throughout the summer of 1969 I spent every second weekend prowling around Cape Croker with Jacqueline and her family. We burned the sweet-smelling grass she’d talked about each morning and prayed long prayers for guidance, protection and blessings for those around and about us. Indian prayers weren’t substantially different from Christian prayers, and the smell of the sweetgrass was soothing, centering and healing. Jacqueline would sing a prayer song with her hand drum each morning, soft and low in Ojibway, one verse, it seemed, to each of the four directions. I found myself close to tears each time I heard that ancient language spilling out across the land accompanied by the heartbeat rhythm of the drum. She explained that the drum was the heartbeat of the people — its sound reminded all of us of the heartbeat we first heard in the darkness of our mother’s belly. I understood my sorrow then, for a mother I had never known, and when I told her this, Jacqueline held me in her warm brown arms, cooing softly in my ear some Ojibway phrase of comfort while stroking my hair.

We spent most of our time on the land. Either Jacqueline or one of her children or grandchildren would take me fishing, snaring rabbits, picking berries or simply walking. The land, she said, was the greatest teacher of all. The land taught purity, harmony, balance and sacrifice, if you learned to really look at it. She would tell me stories of Nanabush, the trickster, the great teacher of the Ojibway, and take time to explain how there were different levels in each story. Every time you revisited a story you would discover more and more teachings. Like the parables, I later told my parents.
She spoke of the power of the four directions and the teachings you could find there — teachings that led you in a circular pattern of growth to an elegant, aged wisdom. Each of those directions focused on one aspect of a whole person — heart, mind, body and soul. Traveling, studying and applying the teachings of each of those directions was essential to becoming a good human being.

The limited idea of Indians I’d had coming into that first summer was replaced by the burgeoning knowledge that the Ojibway experience was as infinite as human possibility itself. You learned the foundational beliefs, the essential teachings, held them in your heart and carried them into every waking activity of your life. You became an Ojibway in everything you did. Just like being Christian, I explained to my parents, who listened raptly to everything I brought home to them. I came to regard those weekends not so much as a reconnection but as a natural unfolding of the wings of an exotic paper bird, its shape and movement mysteriously ordained by circumstance, kismet. The guiding hand of God hadn’t lessened through exposure to my culture and heritage, but became enhanced, expanded and more intensely glorified within me.

Johnny stayed busy in the store that summer. His father began taking more and more to the front-room sofa, sick and unable to make the effort of keeping up appearances. Johnny and his mother were forced to pick up the pieces. Mrs. Gebhardt, under Harold’s guidance, showed an innate ability to manage finances. While she cleaned up the ordering and accounting, Johnny learned the hardware business alongside his grandfather. Harold insisted that Johnny draw a salary, and over the phone those evenings Johnny talked about the books he could now buy and the weekend trips he could take to visit his friend Staatz in Galt. He didn’t tell me much about Staatz except that he was learning a lot from him and being guided to certain books that were opening up his mind to things. He listened attentively to everything I said about my trips to Cape Croker. When school started again we fell into our usual routine of lunches and spare classes together and huddled conversations on the bus.

The first indication I had that things were changing was a phone call in late November that year.

“Hey, Josh,” Johnny said excitedly. “What do you think about Trudeau and his White Paper?”

“White Paper?” I asked in my best straight-man delivery, certain that this had to be a joke.

“You know. The White Paper on Indian Policy,” he pressed.

In 1968 the Trudeau government had come out with what they termed a “comprehensive plan” to deal with the Indians. Although there had been a lot written in the papers about it, I’d largely ignored it. There’d been a huge swell of protest from Indian groups across the country and it had never made it into law. For me, the realities of being Indian were the weekends I spent on Cape Croker. Politics was a distant reality. “I don’t know, Johnny,” I said.

“You don’t know?”

“Yeah, I don’t know.”

“Josh! They wanna assimilate everybody!”

“Assimilate?”

“Jesus, Josh!
A-ssi-mi-late,”
he said. “You know. Make white.”

“What are you talking about?’

“I’m talking about the government saying that Indians are supposed to be nothing special. They wanna take away the reserves, the treaties, everything, and make them all
Canadians!
Can you believe it?”

“Johnny, I
am
Canadian.”

“No, you’re not! You’re Ojibway!”

“It’s still Canadian.”

“Bullshit. If they figured you were Canadian how come they didn’t let you vote until 1960?”

“I don’t vote, I’m fifteen.”

“Not
you.
I mean you, the Indians.”

“Oh. I’m all the Indians now?”

“No, of course not. I’m just referring to your political consciousness. You have one, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Yeah. What exactly is a political consciousness, anyway?”

“Jesus! Aren’t you learning anything on the Rez?”

“The what?”

“The Rez. The Rez-ervation? You know? The place you go to learn how to be an Indian?”

“Oh, that Rez. No. They don’t talk about it.”

“How can they not talk about the death of their people? How can they not talk about the government trying to pretend that it doesn’t have to live up to its agreements? What do you talk about up there?” he shouted into the phone, and I could almost see his arms waving in irritation.

“Well, we talk about a lot of things. We talk about legends, stories, about the things the grandfathers and grandmothers taught. We talk about the land, the things it teaches. That sort of stuff.”

“That’s it?”

“There’s more?”

“Hell, yes, there’s more!”

“Like what?”

“Like broken treaties. Like smallpox-infested blankets. Like banning ceremonies. Like no education past high school. Like welfare, chronic unemployment, like it being against the law for Indians to organize politically until a few years ago, like having to live under a paternalistic policy like the Indian Act, like Indians dying faster and younger than the national average. Like lots, Josh!” he shouted.

“Well, none of that ever comes up,” I said quietly.