Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada's Past Read online

  CONTENTS

  RUDYARD GRIFFITHS

  Preface

  ADRIENNE CLARKSON

  Foreword

  BRIAN MARACLE

  The First Words

  RACHEL A. QITSUALIK

  Skraeling

  BASIL JOHNSTON

  The Wampum Belt Tells Us …

  TANTOO CARDINAL

  There Is a Place

  JOVETTE MARCHESSAULT

  The Moon of the Dancing Suns

  THOMAS KING

  Coyote and the Enemy Aliens

  TOMSON HIGHWAY

  Hearts and Flowers

  LEE MARACLE

  Goodbye, Snauq

  DREW HAYDEN TAYLOR

  A Blurry Image on the Six O’Clock News

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  PREFACE

  THE 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

  FOREWORD

  As the years go by, the circle of the Ojibway gets bigger and bigger. Canadians of all colours and religions are entering that circle. You might feel that you have roots somewhere else, but in reality, you are right here with us.

  IN 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 believ
e.” 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:

  Within a few years … the Indians were no longer free to come and go as they were once accustomed to do, for they no longer had anywhere to go. They now had Indian agents as masters. Missionaries came among them to tell them what was right and what was not. They were now no better off than the Pequots or the Narragansetts. In fighting for the White man’s freedom, the Indians lost theirs.

  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.

  These stories look at the society and culture that have been created here, north of the 49th parallel, in a significantly different way than we generally do. Property is not simply to be possessed by someone who pays the most or cuts the best deal. When one character says, “no one in this country has to deal with ancestry in quite the way we must,” it is a very poignant statement about possession and dispossession and the maintenance of Aboriginal identity.

  For identity is essential to these stories. Métis life in the early 20th century, plagued by despair in the face of a proud history ignored, is seen through the eyes of Francis in Tantoo Cardinals “There Is a Place.” “I was lost, lost for a long while there,” he says as he struggles to overcome grief and separation. Flashes of joy and hope lie in the closeness of forgiving relationships and the kind of history that is written from parent to child, or grandchild. “The Moon of the Dancing Suns” is by Jovette Marchessault, a Montagnais writer, and it finds hope in similar places as it explores the role of Aboriginals in two world wars. We should all know and be ashamed that they did not get the same financial and educational opportunities that our other veterans did after fighting for their country. In her tale, “while death galloped rapidly around the world,” there is acceptance and a sort of redemption in the vision of children, even though their fathers, “like so many other Natives, were buried in the lovely Canadian military cemeteries somewhere in Europe. ‘Kahgee pohn noten took,’ the Crees say. This means, ‘the battle is over.’” The gentle irony, the dance of hope and despair in these two stories, is heartbreaking.

  In “Coyote and the Enemy Aliens” and “Hearts and Flowers,” Thomas King and Tomson Highway deal with identity and the question at the very heart of racism: is the Other a human being? Even though our laws did not explicitly state that Aboriginal people were not human, they were routinely excluded from society. They were separated because they were Aboriginal, and this comes forward very clearly in King’s sly and darkly humorous story of the connection between Aboriginal people and the Japanese Canadians who were imprisoned and dispossessed during the Second World War. The trickster Coyote is again at work here, and the loss and humiliation of these two marginalized peoples is shown to be fundamentally inhuman and rather ridiculous. In Highways telling, the long-withheld conferring of the vote to Aboriginals—in 1960!—preoccupies a young boy whose musical talent does not obscure his awareness that people like him, in the eyes of many, are not worth consideration. Appreciating and creating beauty make us truly human, yet there exist hideous structures and attitudes which reject this and cause the boy to suffer and wonder what it means to be a human being.

  When we read a work of literary art, it should never be a purely didactic exercise, a moralizing lesson. It is something that pleases us and helps us to understand what we haven’t experienced, what we might not have known that we didn’t know. That’s what Our Story does. That’s why these stories are important. These are voices which we must all listen to, for they form a part of all that we are. And they tell an amazing tale.

  Adrienne Clarkson

  BRIAN MARACLE

  The First Words

  IMAGE CREDIT: ARNOLD JACOBS

  CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE

  WHEN I WAS INVITED to write about a “defining moment” in our people’s history, I considered and immediately rejected obvious dates of great historical significance like 1492, when Columbus was discovered. And 1527, when Pizarro unleashed the holocaust of epidemics that eventually wiped out fifty million people. I rejected recent Canadian dates like 1982, when “aboriginal and treaty rights” were enshrined in the Constitution.

  I also rejected significant events in the history of my own people, the Rotinonhsyón:ni—the people of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy. The people here in my home community of Grand River have long memories and a strong sense of history, and many would nominate 1779 as a defining moment. That’s when George Washington burned our villages to the ground, thus earning him the Iroquois name that he and all the subsequent presidents of the United States are known by: Ranatakáryas, the Town Destroyer. Many would say a defining moment was 1784, when we were forced to move from New York State to the Grand River Territory. Others would say one was 1799, when the Seneca chief Skanyatarí:yo had a vision that led to the establishment of the longhouse “religion” that has kept our language and culture alive in the face of five hundred years of pressure to assimilate. And still others would choose 1924, when the Canadian government outlawed the traditional chiefs and—at gunpoint—installed an elected band council, creating a rift that has plagued our community to this day.

  All of these were pivotal moments in our history, it’s true. But all of them involve our interactions with so-called “white people.” They were not about us. Most of them involve things that happened to us. They have helped determine where and how we live but they have not determined how we think or what we believe. The event that determined those things, that determined our true nature, the event that defined us as a people without reference to others, occurred a very long time ago.

  But it wasn’t, as some might think, the founding of the Iroquois Confederacy. Even though that event predates European contact and certainly was a defining moment in our history, it is not about our true self. We created the Confederacy as a reaction to a crisis we were facing. At that time the nations of the Iroquois were warring with one another in an endless and devastating cycle of blood feuds. So, we are told, the Creator sent a messenger to the earth who persuaded our ancestors to stop all the killing an
d accept a life of peace. This man, known in English as the Peacemaker, also brought with him a set of laws that laid out how the nations would work together in a confederacy based on consensus. When he had finished, the Peacemaker had restored the world to a life of peace and harmony, the way it was at the time of Creation.

  And it was that time—the moment of Creation—that was the defining moment in our history. That was when our character as a people was determined. That was when we were given the gift of speech and, with it, a unique way of looking at and understanding the world. That was when we were given the sacred responsibilities that shape our lives. That was the moment that shaped how we think and what we believe.

  The First Words

  The woman took a quick breath, opened her eyes, sat up, and looked around. She was sitting on a riverbank, surrounded by flowers and an abundance of plant life. Every variety of bird and animal stood, perched, or floated nearby, watching her. She was young, she was beautiful, and she was naked.

  Hundreds of pairs of eyes silently watched her as she struggled to absorb everything in sight. Everything—everything—was entirely new to her and she was overwhelmed by the beauty and the wonder of it all. Every one of the creatures and plant forms, she noticed, was so different from every other and, as she looked down at herself, so different from her as well.

  And then she noticed that one pair of eyes watched her with greater interest and intensity than all the others. They belonged to a creature whose life form was much like her own. She sensed a kinship with this being whose body glowed softly from within.

  “Ónhka ní:se?” she asked at last. “Who are you?”