For Joshua (21 page)

But Canada is not a nation first. It is people. It is the feeling of the land. And it’s the feeling of the people on the
land
for
the land. That’s what defines this country: the feeling of the people for the land. Not only those of us who were here first, who are native to it, but everyone. There aren’t many people in any part of Canada that don’t love the country for itself. You won’t have to travel far to find people who love it for the plains, the mountains, the muskeg, lakes, rivers, marshes, tidal bores, glaciers, estuaries, deltas, and seas. All my travelling had taught me that. So had the people I’d met.

Earl loved rivers and he built his life on the banks of one. It cradled him, wrapped him up in it its sights and sounds and smells. The coal miner’s sons from Sydney loved the smells and textures of harbour life and made them come alive in their music. Sylvie and Luc carried the rustic joy of the Québec bush to the campus of a university. Glen, the rambler, adored the feisty, beer-swilling rollick of the bush camps, sawmills, and mines because they all reflected the land on which they were made—a bold, swaggering land—and he lived his life with the same verve and swagger. The Saskatchewan farmer’s son and the Métis steelworker were filled with the ache and passion of a prairie life, and their lives were poems and paeans to it. All of their stories came from the experience of generations spent on the land. They came from heartache and loss, disillusionment and
sorrow, success and celebration, birth and dying—the same places our stories come from. That night around the fire in Nipigon had taught me this, had placed all of it in my soul. It took sitting on that hill and thinking about unity and belonging to bring it back.

You don’t have to be Ojibway, Cree, Haida, Inuk, or Blackfoot to love Canada. You don’t have to be Native, because the truth is that everyone born here is native to this land. Everyone who has ever laid a loved one to rest within the breast of this earth has a spiritual tie to it that is as strong, as valid, as our own. Everyone who can trace a line to ancestors here, everyone whose lives have sprung from a relationship with the land, everyone whose family story is one that includes hardship, struggle, and a reclaimed dignity, has a right to claim themselves as native to Canada. We are the
original people
of this land, and that will never change, but everyone whose first breath is from the crystal clear air of Canada is native to this country. There are many people among us who will be angered by that thought, many who will deny it, but if history, intention, and responsibility have anything at all to teach us about ourselves, it is that our thinking must change.

We are the original people. We are the ones who emerged from the forest to welcome the strangers when
they arrived here so long ago. We are the ones who saw them suffer from the harshness of life on the land. We are the ones who came to their aid. We are the ones who guided them through seemingly impossible territories to show them the splendour of the country. We are the ones who taught them to respect it for its power. We are the ones who showed them how to nurture it, to gather its resources, to reap its blessings, and to honour it for them. We taught them to survive here. We taught them to grow. We taught them to take this land like a potion, to drink it deeply into themselves, to feel its energy, its transforming juices, and to become more. We taught them to be at home here. We taught them how to love this country.

It was our role to do those things. It was our responsibility. It was the original instructions handed from Creator to us—to walk gently upon the land and do each other no harm. It is still our role. It is still our responsibility.

As original people we are the guardians of the land. Protectors. That role will never change. When you protect something you keep it from harm. You cradle it within your spirit, and nurture it in everything you do so that it will grow, become more, become what the Creator intended. We cannot know what the Creator intends for anything. Even
with our own children we do not know. But we have to follow the rules of protectors nonetheless and nurture them. Tecumseh’s mother did not know what the Creator intended when he was crawling around her wigwam. Big Bear’s mother did not know. Neither did the mothers of Sacajawea or Pocahontas. They protected them, guided them, nurtured them, kept them from harm and they became
great
. It remains for us to do the same with Canada. Always. Because we do not know what the Creator intends for it. That will come to pass in the Creator’s time. But we know what he intends for us and that is to be this land’s guardians—to show the way.

As original people we know how to honour this land. We know how to bless it. We know how to approach it spiritually. We know how to take the lessons from that spirituality and give it back to the land.

The truth is, Joshua, that a real Indian is a person who lives feeling. Real Indians use the teaching tools of our way to travel inside themselves. Real Indians, having made that sacred journey, discover their own truth—their selves. When they discover their selves they discover that the Creator has graced them with another tremendous gift: the gift of choice.

When you know who you are you can choose anything. You can choose what to wear, where to live, where
to work, what to study, the activities you enjoy, the people you want for friends. Everything. You can choose everything that the world has to offer and it will not change the fact of who you are. You can experiment with choice. You can try anything on for size, and if it fits and you’re comfortable, keep it, make it your own. Or, on the other hand, if it feels cumbersome and awkward, you can let it go and make another choice. Armed with identity, the knowing, you are empowered with choice to help make that knowing an ongoing thing. You can always learn more about who you are. You can always become more and more real.

That’s the truth of our way.

As parents and teachers we need to tell our children this—that you can never be less than who you were created to be. You never have to qualify. You never have to prove yourself. You just need to
be
.

Each of us carries within ourselves the memory of drums on distant hills. In each beat of our hearts we hear the wails and chants of singers, of dancers’ shuffling steps, of spirits raised in one great voice to praise the Earth and the breadth of her dominion. In our veins runs the blood of generations past, and in that rich, thick flow are tribal memories of days long gone when our people truly lived in union with the land. Those memories flicker and dance
with every move we make in this modern world. They call to us. Beckon to us in dream time. Rise up like sudden phantoms in times of trouble. Ebb and flow like tidal waters in the casual day-in day-out routines of living. They are in our blood, and our spirits long to be reconnected to them. We all crave, as deeply as any thirst, a return to those tribal fires where the people gathered in one small band to huddle against the night. A return to times when we lived in harmony, balance, brotherhood, and belonging. A return to the shelter of those tribal flames, to the sense of warmth they gave, the belief that in that one small circle of our people could be found the hearts and bones of our survival. We’ve felt that fire slowly die in our communities. We’ve watched its light fade, its warmth disperse, and its embers lose their spark.

And that is what we mourn.

From that mourning comes a staunch desire. A desire to re-create it all. To rebuild it. To live as our tribal hearts would have us live—in unity, peace, and brotherhood. That is what our tribal hearts desire and that is what we miss.

We go to great lengths sometimes to make it real for ourselves. We go to great lengths to fan those dying embers, to stoke those flames back to life, to chase away the night. In our cultural lives we insist that real Indians know how to
sing and dance and drum. In our traditional lives we insist that real Indians attend every ceremony, make every offering, possess all the medicines, and speak our languages. In our communities we insist that real Indians live as everyone else lives, choose what everyone else chooses, and fit in by being exactly the same. We insist on all of this because we have seen how quickly things can disappear into the night and we need everyone to fan the dying embers of those tribal fires. We don’t want to lose any more of ourselves, so we get tough on each other, demand that we all be what we believe everyone needs to be to stay strong, to live, to survive. We don’t want to grieve the loss of another part of ourselves.

Our neighbours in this country need to hear this, too. They need to hear that there is so much unrest among their Native brothers and sisters because of grief and longing. They seek to understand us, but we have too often closed the door to our lodges and said that only Indians may come in. They wonder why we seem so upset, why we insist on land claims, special treaty rights, a voice in political decisions that affect us. They wonder why we are so angry at them.

In truth, we’re not angry. We’re sad. They need to know this. They need to know that for us, for tribal people
who carry the memories of drums on distant hills, the land itself haunts us. It reminds us of what we have lost every time we look upon it. It reminds us how far away from those tribal fires we have moved, of how incredibly things have changed, of how with every fibre of our beings we seek a return to the things that kept us vital, dynamic, spiritual, and alive forever. They need to know that every land claim, treaty negotiation, blockade, and court case is born out of that desire. They are born out of a spiritual hunger, not a physical greed. They are actions created by a profound sadness and longing for the flames of those old tribal fires. For a sense of who we are. For an image of ourselves cast in the light of traditional fires. They need to know that they are actions taken to ensure that we will not need to grieve the loss of another part of ourselves.

If they can understand this, they can understand us, because everyone has lost someone or something they miss with a longing that is deep and blue and cold. So it is with us, and we need to tell them that.

This is why it is so hard to be considered a real Indian in this world—because it’s easier to calm someone’s anger than it is to heal someone’s sadness or to fill a lonely need. It’s only natural, I suppose, for someone carrying the crushing inner burden of loneliness to do whatever it takes
to make it go away. At least that was true for me. When our people tell each other that they need to do this, they need to act this way, they need to wear this, to be seen here or seen there, they are speaking from that loneliness. They are trying to recreate that tribal life today, trying to rebuild it, make it vital and alive again.

But the secret is that we can never bring back those days. We can never recreate the buffalo hunt. The world has changed far too much. But if we recognize the loneliness we carry and own it, call it ours, then what we can do as a people is to recreate and carry the
spirit
of those things in our hearts. We may not relight the fires that used to burn in our villages, but we can carry the embers from those fires in our hearts and learn to light new fires in a new world. We can recreate the spirit of community we had, of kinship, or relationship to all things, of union with the land, harmony with the universe, balance in living, humility, honesty, truth, and wisdom in all of our dealings with each other.

I don’t know when or if we will see each other. I don’t know if you will ever read this book. But I hope so. I wrote it for you, and in the writing I began to realize that there were probably hundreds, maybe thousands of young Native
people who might need to know this story, too. There are many who have been denied the presence of a father in their lives. Many who have never been offered the teachings this book talks of. Many who carry the same set of feelings about themselves that I once carried. Many who maybe already drink the way I drank to kill those feelings. And I just knew you would want to share this with them.

But, ultimately, it is yours.

The truth of my life today is threefold because I will always be three things in this world. First, I will always be a male, Ojibway human being. I always was. Secondly, I will always be a drunk who can never drink again. Lastly, I will always be your father. Nothing in the world can ever change that.

Seek me out when you are ready. I won’t be too hard to find. I’ll be on the land somewhere, feeling its heartbeat on the soles of my feet, knowing with each breath that it is home, that I am home, wherever I might be.

Until then, my son, I love you.

Your father

I would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for its generous support in the creation of this manuscript. Also, my heartfelt gratitude goes to Chief Allan Luby and the Band Council of Ochiichagwe’Babigo’Ining First Nation for the space to complete it.

Thanks to my family, for their support and belief in me; my agent, Bruce Westwood, for friendship and guidance; Natasha Daneman, for enduring the phone calls, e-mails and nomadic movements; Maya Mavjee and Nick Massey-Garrison at Doubleday, for encouragement, advice and acceptance. Further, immense gratitude to Shelagh Rogers for her humanitarianism, Dawn Maracle, Drew Hayden-Taylor,
Carla Robinson, Sally Catto, Kika Mowry, Peter Simpson, Professor John Wadland, and all the friends of Bill W. for being there when I needed them.

And especially to Catherine, Sebastian, Pizhoo, and Buddy, for giving me a home and the strength to write this book.

Richard Wagamese’s award-winning first novel,
Keeper’n Me
, helped establish him as one of Canada’s major new literary talents. A former columnist for the
Calgary Herald
, he received a National Newspaper Award for his writing. Richard Wagamese lives in Ontario.