Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada's Past

T
HE STANDARD TEXTBOOK HISTORY
of Aboriginal peoples begins twelve millennia ago as the world was coming out of an Ice Age. The ancestors of Canada's Aboriginal peoples crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia to North America. Moving steadily south and east, over the course of hundreds of generations, the descedants of this original group of explorers won for themselves a continent. In the path of their migration, up and down the face of North and South America, they created a quilt-work of civilizations, each with its own history and values. Over the millennia these nations rose, fell, and evolved in concert with the larger rhythms of nature.

Flash forward to the early 1500s when our conventional narrative gathers steam. Along the eastern shore of North America the first European explorers make their landfalls and experience the ‘first contact' that gave Canada its name. The arc of history moves through the early wars of conquest to the establishment of the first permanent European settlements in the 16th and 17th centuries. To Canadians, the signposts in this historical journey are a series of familiar dates strung out in succession: Jacques Cartier landing at Chaleur Bay in 1534, Champlain's voyage up the St. Lawrence in 1603, and the creation of the Hudson Bay Company in 1670.

Having witnessed the European migration to their land, Aboriginal peoples are moved figuratively to the sidelines of history. The standard history of Canada from the 17th century onward is the story of European colonial wars, the introduction and impact of Western technology and industry, and the deepening of a North American political culture based on the ideas of the Enlightenment. Increasingly strangers in their own lands, Aboriginal peoples come to be perceived, more and more, as an administrative challenge as opposed to a dynamic force in the unfolding of the country's identity. The combined effects of the treaty and reserve systems, the failed Rebellions of 1885 and subsequent Indian Acts all conspire to render Canadas Aboriginal peoples an historical anachronism in the eyes of the dominant culture. This sentiment, in various forms, has continued up to the present-day despite a decades-long revival of Aboriginal culture, industry, and government.

Even this most cursory look at the traditional narrative of the history of Aboriginal peoples confirms that we read their story through our systems of understanding. It is difficult, if not impossible, for one culture to capture the historical reality of another culture that it has displaced. As hard as non-Aboriginals might try to correct for biases, our history and traditions are different. European culture sees the passage of time as a chronology of events as opposed to cycle of being and becoming. It embraces scientific criteria to determine what is an historical fact and looks askance at myth and oral history. And ultimately, it stresses the very process of historical inquiry as a hallmark of civilization. All of these attitudes not only set Western culture apart from an Aboriginal world view, they determine the very way history is recorded, created, and conveyed to future generations.

This is not to say that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cultures are incapable of creating common understandings and mutual respect. What we need to work on is finding new ways—after more than four hundred years of living together—to hear each others' stories anew, to step out of preconceived notions of not only what constitutes our history but how our history is constituted.
Our Story
is an important contribution to moving dialogue in this direction.

The nine works of fiction contained in this volume tell the story of Aboriginal peoples in Canada not as a string of facts laid bare in chronological order. Instead, each of the Aboriginal authors has chosen an historical event and through the act of storytelling, turned it into a work of fiction. In each of these fictionalized accounts we are exposed to the Aboriginal sense of place, the passage of time, and the complex relationship of myth and truth. The result is a new vantage point not just on how Aboriginals perceive their place in Canadian history but a different approach to recounting the past and making it come alive in the present.

As a fusion of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal notions of storytelling and history,
Our Story
contains, at its heart, the basis for the two cultures not only to better understand and appreciate each other, but also to move forward together.

Rudyard Griffiths

I
N MY INSTALLATION ADDRESS
as Governor General, I cited these words of Chief John Kelly as a meaningful expression of the Aboriginal peoples' regard for all those who came later, for those who dispossessed them. Consider the baleful history that they have had to live; consider the almost total ignorance in Canada about that history and about their present situation. It is astonishing, then, the extent to which Aboriginal peoples still engage in intercultural dialogue with generosity, understanding and goodwill. When there is so much room and reason for misunderstanding, for bitterness and frustration, I have always marvelled at how measured, wise, yet impassioned
their
statement of their being is—the manner in which they tell their stories, the way in which they want to include the rest of us, although they still struggle to know what is theirs and to make it ever more deeply theirs.

A collection like
Our Story
—permeated with pain, struck by joy and veined with personal experience—is not only about what historical events can mean to different people, but also about how the threads of this collective narrative make a cloth that is strong and beautiful.

Just to look at the lives and work of these authors is to realize how our cultural life, and therefore our life as a nation, has been enriched by Aboriginal artists like these: Tantoo Cardinal, Tomson Highway, Basil Johnston, Thomas King, Brian Maracle, Lee Maracle, Jovette Marchessault, Rachel A. Qitsualik, and Drew Hayden Taylor. They speak not only as Aboriginal people but also as fine writers, who do everything that writers are supposed to do: create characters, engage emotions, dispel despair.

“A Blurry Image on the 6 O'Clock News” is a story set against the backdrop of an event not far in our past, the so-called Oka Crisis. Drew Hayden Taylor takes us there again—or more precisely, to Kanesatake—through the eyes of a white woman watching for the appearances of her ex-husband among the Mohawk protesters. The story of their love and of their breakup, of a mixed couple's struggle to find love and harmony, is a potent symbol of what we are still not quite able to do right—to live together.

This collection also reaches back for the deep background to the encounter between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. Brian Maracle's “The First Words” represents the drama of creation as
the
defining moment in the history of his people. As he notes, pivotal events with white people “have helped determine where and how we live, but they have not determined how we think or what we believe.” His retelling of the Iroquois Creation Story evokes a world in which everything is held together in a loving tension, but also one in which things can fall off the edge. In the languages of the Six Nations confederacy, there are many ways to say “we,” which can include not only the people speaking but those being spoken to. What a profound reverence for harmony, a concern for people and relationships that is built right into the creation tale
and
into the languages in which it has traditionally been told.

This myth provides the underpinning of the rest of
Our Story
, including Basil Johnston's “The Wampum Belt Tells Us.” It emphasizes the importance of story and of the generosity of the land, as the
mazhinawae
recites the history of the Anishinaubae people and their encounters with whites. Their land and their story are gradually taken away and turned inside out. In spite of all this, dreams remain as “the unfulfilled desires of the spirit,” but the recitation of the wampum sash ends with sadness and disillusion:

Another history, retold and reclaimed, is found in “Skraeling” by Rachel A. Qitsualik, the story of the coming of white men—the “giant men [who] had killed without purpose,” with ice-blue eyes and monstrous boats. All this is seen from the fascinating perspective of an Inuit man (the word Inuit means “those living here now”) who encounters his “now-extinct cousins,” the Tunit, just as they meet the Vikings. Qitsualik's beautiful description allows us to feel the eternity of the land and the shock that anything could happen to it or its age-old custodians, that anything or anyone could deny their fundamentally right place in the universe.

The image of the dream ending and the awakening to an unpleasant and unsought reality permeates the stories in this collection. As Lee Maracle writes in “Good-Bye Snauq,” “I need to know what is ending so I can appreciate and identify with the beginning.” There is a deep sense that the loss of property—in this case, a once-strong stream that was homeland and supermarket and sacred ground—is not just a transaction, as
the negotiators might see it, but rather a loss of the limitless freedom and generous behaviour that comes from living in harmony with nature.