One Native Life (12 page)
She spoke of the struggle to relearn her talk. She spoke of the same embarrassment I felt, of being an oddity among her own. She spoke about the difficulty in getting past the cultural shame and reaching out for her talk with every fibre of her being. And she spoke of the warm wash of the language on the hurts she’d carried all her life, how the soft roll of the talk was like a balm for her spirit.
Then she spoke of prayer.
Praying in her language was like having the ear of Creator for the first time. She felt heard and blessed and healed. It hadn’t been much, she said. Just a few words of gratitude, like prayers should be, but the words had gone outwards from her and become a part of the whole, a portion of the great sacred breath of Creation. She understood then, she said, that our talk is sacred, and speaking it is the way we reconnect to our own sacredness.
We owe it to others to pass our language on. That was the other thing she said. If we have even one word of our talk, then we have a responsibility to pass it on to our children and to those who have had the language removed from them. We learn to speak for them. We learn to speak so we can serve as a tool for someone else’s reconnection.
I’m still far from fluent. I still spend far more time using English, but the Ojibway talk sits there in the middle of my chest like a hope. When I use it—in a prayer, in a greeting, in a talk somewhere—I feel the same sensation I did with that first word at age twenty-four—the feeling of being ushered in, of welcome, of familiarity and belonging.
An English word I admire is “reclaim.” It means “to bring back, to return to a proper course.” When I learned to speak Ojibway I reclaimed a huge part of myself. It wasn’t lost, I had always owned it; it was just adrift on the great sea of influence that is the modern world. Like a mariner lost upon foreign seas, I sought a friendly shore to step out on so I could learn to walk again. My language became that shore.
I introduce myself by my Ojibway name, according to our traditional protocols, whenever I give a talk. I can ask important questions in my language. I can greet people in the proper manner, and I can pray.
For me,
peendigaen,
come in, meant I could express myself as who I was created to be. That’s what this journey is all about—to learn to express yourself as whom you were created to be. You don’t need to be a native person to understand that.
. . .
LAST WEEK WE SAW
wolves on the ice. There were two of them, a large dark male and a smaller, dusky-coloured female. It’s the beginning of winter, and the ice has just set on the lake a few miles down the road from our cabin. I spotted them out of the corner of my eye, two dark dots on a sheet of white.
They lingered a few days. It was the sun, I think. The last vestiges of autumn sun warmed the flat pan of the lake, and the wolves lay there soaking it in, before the cold fingers of winter pushed it from the sky. Transients, headed through this territory on their way north into the back-country for winter.
There’s a lot of animal life in the area. Black bears, bobcats, muskrats, beavers, even the odd rumour of cougars sliding out of view through the pine trees. But seeing the wolves made me smile. There’s a primeval connection to
Myeengun,
as the wolf is called in Ojibway. It pulls at my consciousness, even though I don’t fully understand it.
I’ve always been an animal guy. I never had a pet when I was small, but I was always drawn to the dogs and cats in my neighbourhood. I was a Young Naturalist for a while; that was a mail-in club for youngsters eager to learn outdoor skills. When I was a kid, it was the closest I could get to native teachings.
Back then, I didn’t have the benefit of the animal stories told by our traditional storytellers. I didn’t know that Ojibway people regard animals as their greatest teachers. I never knew as a kid that Ojibway people referred to four-legged creatures as Animal People. It wouldn’t have struck me as odd, though. I think I’ve always regarded them in that way.
Soon after reconnecting with my tribal family, I was walking with my uncle on the traditional land we’d once trapped on. It had snowed the night before, and a couple of inches lay on the ground. Sound was softened, and we moved like ghosts. Everywhere the detail of things was cut into sharp relief by the blanket of white. It was as if the land was magnified somehow, heightened. Seeing it that way was like seeing it for the first time. I was enthralled.
There was a sudden set of tracks in the snow. They cut across our path and disappeared into the thick bush, like a thought. As I stood studying them, my uncle looked around us casually and asked no one in particular, “I wonder who passed here?”
It seemed a strange question. He made it sound as if the tracks belonged to a person. His reaction puzzled me, so I asked him about it.
He told me that when Creator sent Human Beings to live in this reality, he called the Animals forward and directed them to remain our teachers forever. Their teachings showed the Human Beings how to relate to the world and how to treat the earth. What the Ojibway know of ourselves as people, such as our need to live in harmony with each other, came to us from the Animal People.
As we walked, my uncle told me legends and traditional stories: how the dog came to be man’s greatest friend, why the wolverine is a loner and why the raven is black. Each story was like a world, and entering them I felt bigger, sketched out more fully. I could see why my uncle said “who” instead of “what” when we passed those tracks in the snow.
We are all related. That’s what my people understood from the earliest times. At the core of each of us is the creative energy of the universe. Every being and every form shares that kinetic, world-building energy. It makes us brothers, sisters, kin, family. Ojibway teachings tell us that we all come out of the earth, that we belong here, that we share this planet equally, animals and people. Walking with my uncle that winter day, I came to the beginning of understanding that.
. . .
THERE ARE SILENCES
that reside in you like a dream undreamed. I have found them at the edges of great precipices in the Rockies and on the glassine surface of northern lakes, watching the bottom over the bow of the canoe, the movement like flying. The quiet that descends at the end of a good talk can tell you more than all the spoken words. It’s a big old noisy world, and a remembered silence takes you away from that clatter, returns you to a moment when all you knew of life was where you stood—and it was enough.
My life was full of noise for a long, long time. The internal clamour of a scared, lonely foster kid rang through everything I tried, everywhere I went. But when I was twenty-four I found silence.
By then I’d spent a hard eight years searching for a place to fit. I’d been across the country a few times, worked at various things, quit and moved on, prowling Canada like a cat burglar searching for a point of entry.
My brother Charles tracked me down through adoption records, and when we met he introduced me to traditional people. There was an elder he’d been travelling with who had an entourage of followers keen on learning traditional Ojibway spirituality. I’d never met traditional people before, and the idea of Indian ceremony was fraught with anxiety for me.
Back then I thought that you had to qualify as native, Indian, Ojibway. I thought people were measured by the Indian-ness they wore on their sleeve. Nothing about me measured up in that regard.
But they welcomed me. I was greeted kindly and made to feel included. They knew that I was one of the lost ones, one of the disappeared ones who were slowly making their way back to their original homes, their original territories, their original way of being. They understood the difficulty in that, and they tried their best to make the transition easier for me.
Still I was anxious, and when I was invited to a ceremony I wanted to run the other way. Everything I’d heard of native ceremony was built on superstition and fear. I’d heard gossip about shape-shifters, bad spirits, Bear Walkers and hallucinatory visions. I’d heard of bad medicine, and I was fearful that my lack of anything remotely resembling Ojibway would set me up for the black powers.
What I found was the opposite.
We gathered in a circle in someone’s living room. We sat respectfully while the elder prepared, and as I looked around at the faces of those people I was struck by their calm. As one of the apprentices began to make his way around the circle with a large abalone bowl that held a pile of smouldering herbs, we all stood.
The elder explained that we would purify ourselves with the smoke from that bowl. We would pass it over ourselves, smudge ourselves, to cleanse the detritus of living from our minds, emotions, bodies and spirits. In this way, he said, we would return ourselves to the innocence in which we were born, the humility that is the foundation of everything.
We are watched over, he said. Always. We are guided and protected by our grandmothers and grandfathers in the Spirit World, our ancestors, the Old Ones who love us regardless. The smoke as it rises from the bowl carries our thoughts, feelings and prayers to the Spirit World, where they are heard.
I watched as others smudged, and when it came my turn I did as they had done. I passed the smoke over my head and over my heart, the smell of it pungent and sweet, an old smell, ancient and comforting. When I closed my eyes to pass the smoke over my head again I found the silence I’d been searching for all my life.
There was only breath in it. There was only the slow beating of my heart like a drum in the darkness, and the presence of something warm, safe and eternal wafting around my shoulders, lifting me, cocooning me, sheltering me. There was only the feel of hands, wrinkled and lined by time, softened by rest and calm, that touched my face and offered comfort.
In the depths of that incredible silence I knew there was more to me than I’d ever dreamed. I’d never needed to qualify, to prove myself worthy. I was Ojibway, I was Indian, and I was home.
Man Walking by the Crooked Water
. . .
MY
GRANDFATHER’S
NAME
was John Wag-amese. Our family name comes from an Ojibway phrase meaning “man walking by the crooked water.” It was shortened by the treaty registrar because Wagamese was all he could pronounce of it, but the name came from the trapline my great-great-grandfather established along the Winnipeg River. My grandfather walked it all his life.
He was a bush man, John Wagamese. There was nothing he didn’t know of it, couldn’t comprehend or predict. The land was as much a part of him as his skin, and he wore it proudly, humbly and with much honour. In our patch of northern Ontario, north of Lake of the Woods, he was a legend. People still talk about how strong he was.
He carried a moose carcass ten miles out of the bush one time, and on another occasion he fashioned a harness from the canvas of his tent and hauled 120 pounds of blueberries a day’s walk to the northern store for sale. He knew every inch of our traditional territory, and in my mind I see him walking it—a man walking by the crooked water.
My grandfather’s life was the last truly traditional one in my family history. He never learned to speak English, never learned to read or write, never had a driver’s licence, but he knew the land like an old hymn. It sang through him, wild and exuberant and free.
There’s a picture of us in my mother’s photo album. I’m young with long hair, trying as hard as I can to look the part of the Indian. My grandfather is sitting on a bed in light-blue pajamas, his nose bent from being broken, eyes sparkling above the fists of cheekbone beneath his wind-wrinkled skin, his hair in a severe brush cut and his bush man’s hands clasped almost shyly in his lap. There was never a question about who the real Indian in that photo is.
I met him when I was twenty-five. I’d never even known I had a grandfather. The arthritis had confined John to a nursing home by then, and I went to see him whenever I could. When I entered his room for the first time, he looked at me with a toothless smile. He held his hand out at about the height of a small child, nodded and welcomed me home. I’ve never forgotten that—how strong the language of love can be.
Through an interpreter, I asked my grandfather questions about our history, about our traditions, about the world he knew in the bush. He was generous, and he loved to talk. As he did the land came alive for him again. In his mind’s eye he was the young man of local legend, striding through the bush filled with purpose. Now and then I’d sneak him in a beer or two. He’d sip them and tell me about the old days.
My world was foreign to my grandfather, and hearing him talk of times when simplicity was a virtue and independence meant always mending your own net, I learned how foreign that life was to me. But it was mine, accorded to me by history, by family, by the recollections of an old man wearied some by the trail and eager to pass on his stories.
I became an Indian at twenty-five because of John Wagamese. I still had the long hair, the beaded vest, the moccasins, the turquoise rings, the Hollywood trappings of the Indian that I’d taken on in my city life, but I wanted the Indian look I saw in that photo of my grandfather. A look that said, “All that I am is here.” In the years since, I’ve sometimes been fortunate enough to feel it on my face.
My grandfather died in his sleep the year I was thirty-two. When I heard the news I lay in my bed and stared at the sky outside my window for a long time. I wasn’t sad for him. His life had been a celebration. I wasn’t bitter and I wasn’t angry. What he had given me I could never lose.
To honour my grandfather, I took a walk out on the land. Standing there, looking out across the broad sweep of the country he loved, what I felt for him was everything, love and joy and grief and loss. I knew that feeling had an Ojibway name, but I hadn’t found the language for it yet.
. . .
MY PEOPLE TELL
a story about a raven who dreamed of eagles.