One Native Life (3 page)
The theatre was pandemonium. Little kids were yelling, throwing popcorn and wrestling in the aisles while older, more sophisticated kids were holding hands, nuzzling, waiting for the curtain to fall and the lights to dim so they could get deeper into their first romantic entanglement.
I sat watching the jumble of action around me. There weren’t a lot of outings for me as a kid. There wasn’t much extra money for things like movies. So I drank up every ounce of that experience.
When the curtain fell it silenced everyone. Every kid in that theatre settled down, awed by the power of the descending dark. When the screen lit up in a glorious sheen, I fell head over heels in love.
Back then, afternoon matinees were double bills with a cartoon and a newsreel thrown in. That day I watched
Bugs Bunny
and laughed. I don’t recall any of the newsreel, but the first feature was
Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear.
Yogi, as the Brown Phantom, swung down from the trees on a rope to steal picnic baskets from the tourists at Jellystone. Cindy Bear got blamed for being the park menace and was shipped off to the zoo. Yogi and Boo Boo had to travel to St. Louis to rescue her, and it all ended happily after a wild dose of adventure.
The second feature,
Apache Territory,
starred a cowboy actor named Rory Calhoun. In it, a wagon train was attacked by Apache Indians. There was heavy drama as night fell and the hardy pioneers were threatened by the evil savages. Everyone in that theatre sat hushed. You could feel the tension. When the denouement came, and the good guys in the white hats won the day and rode off boldly into the sunset, that was something to cheer about.
I was transported by that movie, taken away from my mill-town life and dropped into a world of light and sound and colour so intense I never wanted to leave. It was as if a dream had been thrown up on beams of light. I’d walked into thrilling new territory.
It didn’t matter to me then that there were racist overtones to the movie, that my people were belittled, made cartoons of. It didn’t matter to me that there were snickers and finger pointing when we kids tumbled out into the light of day. All that mattered to me was how I felt. My imagination was fired up and my insides quivered from the excitement of seeing life splayed out on a fifty-foot screen.
Apache Territory
was a standard western, a B movie with B-list actors, writers and directors. It had room only for tried-and-true characterizations, and the story played well to B-movie audiences. I didn’t know then how great a portion of the national demographic believed what those movies said.
We have Indian producers and directors today. Native people are depicting their lives as they live them, and even Hollywood, when it takes the risk of presenting a movie about Indians, does that respectfully for the most part now. When our children see their people on the silver screen today, they see a more genuine image.
In 1964 it was all about the dazzle. It was all about the magic of being entranced. They don’t have curtains at movie theatres any more. There are few double bills, no fifteen-cent snacks. I miss the old-fashioned thrill of it all, cartoon Indians or not.
. . .
SOMEONE HAS PUT
a flag up on the mountain. It flaps and waves high above the lake, up where they helicopter-logged a few years back. Getting it up there must have taken gumption, and the scarlet and white, hard against the green, is a statement to that grit. Seeing that flag takes me back, as everything out on the land has a tendency to do.
Victoria Day, 1965. I’d just been adopted and moved from northern Ontario to Bradford, a small town an hour’s drive from Toronto. By the time the holiday rolled around, I’d been in my new home about a month. I felt as though I’d been plunked down on Mars. There was nothing left of the world I had known for the first nine years of my life.
Bradford was on the edge of the Holland Marsh. There, the land was flat, treeless, devoted to the reaping of vegetables. The water flowed through irrigation canals all brown and muddy. There was no bush, no pink granite outcroppings, no cliffs overlooking a lake, no open vistas. Life among the Martians felt restrictive and colourless. There was a gaping hole in me that I had once used the land to fill.
In the school where they sent me, I was the only Indian kid. In fact, I was the only brown face. The Martians were pale, with names like McLaughlin, Reid, Carpenter and Wesley. Sitting in the tight, formal rows of Bradford Elementary School, I was weird, exotic and more than a little uncomfortable. In the class photo from that year, I stuck out in the sea of white faces like a fence post in a field of snow. It was lonely, but there was no one to tell.
I didn’t know how to move in Bradford. It was a loopy feeling, like in a dream when every placing of your foot is weightless. The edges of my body had become blurred, and I couldn’t find a space to hold me. Even the language, the colloquial urban schoolboy rap, was new and hard on my ears.
Then one day the teacher announced the upcoming Queen’s birthday, as we called it then. She went on to explain that Bradford would raise the new Canadian flag for the first time on the Friday before the holiday weekend. There would be a band, the mayor would speak, and a special ceremony would mark the raising of the brand-new Canadian symbol, which Prime Minister Pearson had pushed through Parliament several months earlier. The school wanted someone very special to raise the flag, the teacher said. The principal and the mayor had chosen me. She said my people represented the original face of Canada, and they wanted to honour that.
But when the day came, I was nervous. There was going to be a news photographer at the ceremony, and my picture would be in the paper. I was dressed in new clothes, and my shoes were shined. My adopted parents instructed me severely in how to behave. Up in front of that big crowd, I sat in my chair barely able to listen to the speeches. Then someone called my name.
The band struck up the first notes of
O Canada.
My hands grasped the lanyard. As the song began to swell, I hauled on that rope. The flag inched up the pole, then caught in the breeze, fluttered and began to wave. As I watched it gain the sky I did feel honoured. I was filled with a crazy sense of possibility, as if that flag could make anything happen.
Right then, I believed that Canada was a wish, a breath waiting to be exhaled. I believed that the song was a blessing, the flag its standard. I believed, as I had been told by the teacher, that my people were special, that I was special and that the blessings of that song and that flag fell equally on my shoulders. The true north, strong and free.
Since then I have learned that the national anthem can be a dirge at times, a wail, a cry in the night. I have learned that hidden in the thunder of the trumpets and the snap of the drums are common voices hollering to be heard. The flag is a symbol of the separation between red and white. It’s hugely ironic because of that.
But I love this country. I love that flag. The majority of native people do. Every land claim, every barricade, every protest is less a harangue for rights and property than it is a beseeching for the promise offered in that flag, represented by it. Equality. A shared vision, a shared responsibility. A wish, a held breath waiting to be exhaled. The flag above the lake flaps in the breeze of this mountain morning, over everything, over everyone.
. . .
WHEN IT GETS DARK,
I stand outside our cabin and lean my head back to look at the stars. Some nights they seem so close you could swear you were suspended on a bed of them, all just beyond your fingertips.
I’ve always been a stargazer. In the North where I spent the early part of my boyhood, the summer skies were clear. The northern lights often set the horizon ablaze in crackles and snaps of colour.
I hadn’t heard my people’s legends of the Star People then. The world of foster homes was a white world, and I lived in the absence of legends. The only stories I had, school-book tales of dogs and families, never really rang true for me. A part of me craved the revelation of secrets, and the sky was deep with mystery. I loved sinking myself into it. I hadn’t read yet about light years or the rate of expansion of the universe or galactic clouds or even the Milky Way. Instead, I was transfixed by something that far exceeded the scope of my one small life. Magic existed in the holes between the stars. I could feel it.
When I moved south after I was adopted, the sky was overpowered by the harsh city lights, and the stars seemed farther away. It was a curious feeling, being lonely for the sky. Of all the things I missed in that new southern world, the sky, the stars and space are what I remember missing most.
There was a field down the street from where I lived in Bradford. It had been the pasture of an old sheep farm before the city encroached and drove the farmer and his family away. The field was marked with orange plastic flags on wooden stakes in preparation for the development to come. But after dark it was wide and open and perfect for looking at stars. I’d sneak out at night and go there to stand under that magnificent canopy. Even though their light was dimmer and there were far fewer than I was used to, the stars eased me some, lightened my burden.
One night a man showed me how to find Arcturus. He was a fellow stargazer, a neighbour who lived down the street. Neither of us knew the other’s name, but we’d see each other at the field. Each of us would stand silently in that patch of open and look up. Sometimes he’d lie down on his back and put his hands behind his head, and it wasn’t long before I was doing the same. He’d trace the path of satellites across the sky with one finger, and I adopted the same trick.
The night he showed me how to find Arcturus, the sky was as clear as I’d ever seen it there. The man stood a few feet away, his face pointed up at the sky, and asked me if I’d heard of it. When I said I hadn’t, he began to talk.
Arcturus is called the Bear Watcher, he said, because it follows the Great Bear constellation around the poles.
Arctis
is Greek for bear, and it’s where the word “arctic” comes from. Arcturus is about thirty-seven light years away from us and the fourth brightest star in the sky. He told me all that while looking up and away from me. I felt the awe in his words.
He told me to look at the Big Dipper, find the star at the end of the handle, then hold my hand out in front of my face, bend the three middle fingers in and put my little finger on that star. Where my thumb sat was Arcturus.
When I did it I smiled. For the first time the stars seemed reachable. All through the years of my boyhood, whenever I felt particularly lonely I would hold out my arm, fold my fingers, find Arcturus and feel comforted.
What the nameless man gave me that night was wonder. There were secrets everywhere, and I could reveal them for myself if I had the desire to search. I did. I wondered. Soon I was reading everything I could about the universe. I learned about planets and nebulae, quarks and quasars, red giants, blue dwarfs and black holes, and I encountered Einstein’s assertion that “my sense of God is my sense of wonder at the universe.” Years later, when I sat in traditional circles and heard the elders and the storytellers talk about the sky and its mysteries, these weren’t foreign ideas.
We all need someone to offer us wonder. We all need someone to share the Great Mystery of the universe, to allow us to see into it even a fraction. Then, when we’ve discovered it for ourselves, we need to offer it to others. That’s how the world opens up for us. It’s how we learn to see possibility in a universe of change. Finding Arcturus is a simple thing to do. I still do it, and every time it’s like that first time. Because, well, how often do you get to say you just discovered a star?
. . .
I DO MY WRITING
in the dimness of morning. Outside, the world is a shape-shifter. Light eases things back into definition. Their boundaries are called from shadow, beginning to hold again, and the land shrugs itself into wakefulness, purple moving upwards into pearl grey.
It’s good to be up and working at this time. I can feel the power of life around me, and as the letters form on the screen, race each other to the sudden halt of punctuation, I understand where the need to write comes from. It comes from this first light breaking over everything, altering things, arranging them, setting things down into patterns again and tucking shadow back into folds behind the trees. It comes from the need for communion, for joining with that Great Mystery, that force, that energy.
I have always wanted to write. There isn’t a time I can recall when I didn’t carry the desire to frame things, order things upon a page, sort them out, make sense of them. But learning to write was a challenge, an ordeal.
It was a different world in the early 1960s, harder maybe, colder, and the idea of Indians was set like concrete, particularly in the parochial, working-class confines of a northern Ontario sawmill town two hundred miles from nowhere.
The school sat between the railroad tracks and the pipeline in a hollow between hills above the mill. We kids sat with the thick sulphur smell coming through the windows and the spume of the stacks on the horizon above the trees. In the classroom I was ignored, put near the back and never called upon for anything.
They said I was slow, a difficult learner, far too quiet for a kid and lethargic. They said I hadn’t much hope for a future, and after they had held me back a year they just let me be. But I wanted to learn. I was hungry for it. I went to school every day eager and excited about the things we were supposed to learn.
But I couldn’t see very well. No one had spent enough time with me to discover that. I was slow to pick things up because I couldn’t see the board. Even down at the front of the room, where they put me sometimes so they could keep a better eye on me, I could never discern the writing on the blackboard. Everything I learned I learned by listening hard to what the teacher said and memorizing it.