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  ONE NATIVE LIFE

  RICHARD WAGAMESE

  DOUGLAS & McINTYRE

  Vancouver/Toronto/Berkeley

  Copyright © 2008 by Richard Wagamese

  08 09 10 11 12 5 4 3 2 1

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or

  by any means, without the prior written consent of the

  publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing

  Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit

  www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.

  2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201

  Vancouver, British Columbia

  Canada V5T 4S7

  www.douglas-mcintyre.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Wagamese, Richard

  One Native life / Richard Wagamese.

  ISBN 978-1-55365-364-6

  1. Wagamese, Richard. 2. Ojibwa Indians—Biography.

  3. Indian authors—Canada—Biography. 4. Authors, Canadian

  (English)—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

  E99.C6W338 2008 C813’.54 C2008-902676-4

  Editing by Barbara Pulling

  Jacket design by Jessica Sullivan & Peter Cocking

  Jacket photograph by Tom Schierlitz/Getty Images

  Interior design by Peter Cocking

  Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens

  Printed on acid-free paper that is forest friendly (100% post-

  consumer recycled paper) and has been processed chlorine free.

  Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West

  We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada

  Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province

  of British Columbia through the Book, Publishing Tax Credit, and

  the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry

  Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

  For Debra,

  for all the mornings of the world…

  . . .

  Defenceless under the night

  Our world in stupor lies;

  Yet, dotted everywhere,

  Ironic points of light

  Flash out wherever the Just

  Exchange their messages:

  May I, composed like them

  Of Eros and of dust,

  Beleaguered by the same

  Negation and despair,

  Show an affirming flame.

  W.H. AUDEN, “SEPTEMBER 1, 1939”

  Contents

  . . .

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  BOOK 1: AHKI (EARTH)

  The Language of Fishermen

  Riding with the Cartwrights

  The Kiss

  In Apache Territory

  The Flag on the Mountain

  The Way to Arcturus

  Upside Down and Backwards

  Bringing in the Sheaves

  My Nine-Volt Heart

  Wood Ducks

  Freeing the Pike

  My Friend Shane

  Chasing Ricky Lark

  Taking Flight

  A Kindred Spirit

  Running after Werezak

  BOOK 2: ISHSKWADAY (FIRE)

  Lemon Pie with Muhammad Ali

  Up from the Pavement

  The Tabletop TV

  Ferris Wheel

  The Question

  A Hand on the Lid of the World

  A Dream of Language

  Driving Thunder Road

  Ways of Seeing

  On the Road

  The Night John Lennon Died

  The Kid Who Couldn’t Dance

  BOOK 3: NIBI (WATER)

  Being Buffalo Cloud

  Making Bannock

  The Birth and Death of Super Injun

  The Country between Us

  Learning Ojibway

  The Animal People

  Finding the Old Ones

  Man Walking by the Crooked Water

  A Raven Tale

  Shooting Trudeau

  The Medicine Wheel

  Coming to Beedahbun

  Thunder Teachings

  Vanishing Points

  The Beetle Trees

  UFOs

  Two Skunks

  Bringing Back the Living Room

  Butterfly Teachings

  To Love This Country

  Firekeeper

  Ceremony

  The Sharing Circle

  Stripping It Down

  BOOK 4: ISHPIMING (UNIVERSE)

  Neighbours

  The Doe

  Rules for Radicals

  Scars

  My Left Arm

  Planting

  Wind Is the Carrier of Song

  All the Mornings of the World

  The Forest, Not the Trees

  Living Legends

  Playing with Your Eyes Closed

  What It Comes to Mean

  Walking the Territory

  Acknowledgements

  . . .

  MY HEARTFELT THANKS go out to all the producers and editors who saw the worth of these stories and broadcast or printed them. Deb and I are immensely grateful to the Yukon News, the Calgary Herald, the Native Journal, the Wawatay News, the Anishinabek News, the First Nations Drum and Canadian Dimension. I am deeply appreciative of the efforts of Missinippi Broadcasting of La Ronge, Saskatchewan; the Native Communications Society of the Northwest Territories; the Wawatay Radio of Sioux Lookout, Ontario; and, especially, of CFJC-TV in Kamloops, British Columbia. Among our southern neighbours, I’d like to thank News from Indian Country in Hayward, Wisconsin; Indian Country Today in Oneida, New York; and Native American Times in Oklahoma for bringing these stories to their communities.

  Of course, none of these stories would ever have seen the light of morning without the love, care and guidance of Dr. Charles Brasfield of the North Shore Stress and Anxiety Clinic in North Vancouver, British Columbia, or, in earlier times, of Dr. Lyn MacBeath.

  Thanks and a holler over the back fence to the people of Paul Lake, especially to Merv Williams and Ann Sevin for the barge, the time on the water and the friendship. Our lives are richer for the friendship of the Daciuks—Ron, Carol, Ed, Arlene and Shannon—and of John and Penny Haggarty, Muriel and Peter Sasakamoose and Rick and Anna Gilbert.

  To our new friends Dian, Richard and Jacob Henderson, we say Chi Meegwetch for the honour of your friendship.

  To Barbara Pulling, for a wonderful job of editing these pieces and creating a manuscript; Scott McIntyre of Douglas & McIntyre; my agent, John Pearce, and all the folks at Westwood Creative Artists, my great thanks.

  Thanks as well to the Canada Council for helping financially during the writing of this book.

  ONE NATIVE LIFE

  Introduction

  . . .

  THE SUBLIME MOMENTS in life are like the first push of light against the lip of a mountain. You watch that pink climb higher, becoming brighter, slipping into magenta, then orange, and then into the crisp, hard yellow of morning. As the light changes, you can forget the pink that drew your eye, and it’s on mornings when you see it again that you recall how it touched you, altered things for you, gave you cause to celebrate.

  This book was born in the hush of mornings.

  There’s a lake that sits in a cleft of mountains above Kamloops, British Columbia. Paul Lake is three miles long, narrow, and the land that slopes down to its northern shore is filled with fir, pine, aspen, ash and birch and thickets of wild rose, blackberry and raspberry. It’s reserve land that belongs to the
Kamloops Indian Band, and the small community built up there comprises largely folks grown tired of city life who want the peace that a life in the mountains affords.

  My partner, Debra Powell, and I came here in August of 2005. There’s a small rancher-style house that overlooks the lake, and when we saw it we knew we had to make it our home. We’d both grown up in cities. Deb had lived in New York and Vancouver, and I had lived in every Canadian city west of Toronto. Both of us were approaching our fifties that late summer, and we’d grown tired of the clamour and clangour of Burnaby, British Columbia, where we’d met and lived together up until then. We sought a haven, and as we walked the half-acre lot the house sat on, we felt as though we’d found it.

  It was a house, but right from the beginning we called it our cabin. It had been built by a seventy-two-year-old Swede named Walter Jorgenson, and the place showed the hand and eye of a single septuagenarian. The carpets were mouldy. The cabin hadn’t seen a paint job in some time. The deck was unfinished, and the house badly needed a roof. Still, the land it sat upon sang to us, and we found a way to make it ours.

  A gravel road curves from the main road to the lakeshore. My dog, Molly, and I began to make a stroll down to the water every morning. The land settled around my shoulders. On those morning walks I breathed in the crisp mountain air and felt it ease me into a peace I had seldom experienced. I felt reconnected to my Ojibway self. The more I presented myself to the land in those early hours, the more it offered me back the realization of who I was created to be.

  I began to remember. The sound of squirrels in the topmost branches of a pine tree reminded me of a forgotten episode from my boyhood; the wobbly call of the loons took me back to an adventure on the land when I was a young man. And there was always the light. The shades and degrees of it evoked people and places I hadn’t thought about in decades. Every one of those walks allowed me the grace of recollection, and I began to write things down. I started to see my life differently. Up until then I had considered it a struggle, an ongoing fight for identity and a sense of belonging. Those walks with Molly let me see that I had lived a life of alternation between light and dark, and that the contrast itself was the identity I had always sought.

  I had lived one native life. Within it were the issues and the struggles of many native people in Canada, but my life was unique. It was mine. It became important for me to reclaim the joy, the hurt and the ordinary to-and-fro of it.

  The first reason I wanted to do that was my own healing. I’d suffered abuse and abandonment as a toddler. My terror was magnified in foster homes and in an adopted home where I lived for seven years. For a long while afterwards I tried running away, hiding or drinking excessively to shut out the pain. Gradually, with the help of therapists, I understood that I wasn’t crazy. It was the trauma that had caused me to choose hurt over joy, that made me believe my life would always be a bottomless hole of blackness and misery. Walking in the light of those mountain mornings helped me to see where the teachings and the grace and the happiness had been.

  The second reason was Canada.

  As I got to know our neighbours at Paul Lake, I realized how little they understood me. Our homes are built on leased land. Our landlords are Aboriginal people, even though the ministry of Indian Affairs holds the actual title. Despite that, my new friends knew very little about the realities of life for native people. I started to see that this one native life, my own, reflected the character, the spirit and the soul of native people all across the country. My neighbours had never gotten to hear about that. Our stories, as presented in the media, seem to reflect our lives only when we’re dead, dying or complaining. The stories in this book are positive. They embrace healing. They reflect an empowered people, and they deserve to be told.

  We’re all neighbours: that’s the reality. This land has the potential for social greatness. And within this cultural mosaic lies the essential ingredient of freedom—acceptance. That’s an Aboriginal principle I’ve learned. When you know your neighbours, when you can lean over the fence and hear each other’s stories, you foster understanding, harmony and community.

  Stories are meant to heal. That’s what my people say, and it’s what I believe. Culling these stories has taken me a long way down the healing path from the trauma I carried. This book is a look back at one native life, at the people, the places and the events that have helped me find my way to peace again, to stand in the sunshine with my beautiful partner, looking out over the lake and the land we love and say—yes.

  BOOK ONE

  AHKI

  (EARTH)

  MY PEOPLE SAY that we are of the earth. We come from her. We emerged from her bosom fully formed and ready to assume our place as stewards, caretakers, guardians. Our rich brown skin reminds us that we are her children, that we belong here, that our home is always at our feet, wherever we might travel. In the beginning, I had no access to these teachings. I was rootless. But in the world of my boyhood, I always found people, places or things that grounded me, allowed me to feel connected even if only in very fleeting ways, to the heartbeat of the earth. She is our salvation. The time we spend in communion with the earth is the time, my people say, that we are truly spiritual. It enhances, empowers and frees us. Looking back, I see that as true.

  The Language of Fishermen

  . . .

  I HAD A HERO when I was six. He wasn’t a hockey player, a rock ’n’ roll icon, a comic book hero or even a movie star. He was a mechanic, a tall, slender, chain-smoking grease monkey who smelled of oil, tobacco and Old Spice aftershave.

  His name was Joe Tacknyk, and he was a Ukrainian Canadian. He was a quiet, reflective man who cackled when he laughed, told stories of Jimmie Rodgers, the Old Chisholm Trail and life during wartime. He was my foster father. I came to live with him and his family when I was five. He saw the fear in me from that first moment, the confusion, and did what he could to make them disappear.

  He’d come for me early spring and summer mornings. He’d scratch at the soles of my feet with a wooden spoon and hush me to silence with a finger to the lips. Then, while everyone else slept, he made an elaborate game of sneaking me from the house with our fishing gear and into the old green pickup truck in the driveway.

  As we drove out of Kenora, Ontario, on the gravel road that ran north from town, he’d slip me a cup of coffee and some warm perogies wrapped in a napkin. We’d watch the land roll by, and the silence we sat in was as profound as any I’ve ever experienced. There was nothing to say. Mystery. We sat in the hold of the mystery of the land. There were no words to describe that feeling.

  When we got to the marina, my job was to load the gear in the old wooden boat while Joe hooked up the gas tank. Then we’d pull away from the dock and he’d look at me. I’d scan the water of the river, pick a direction and point, and he’d head us that way. Once he’d found a cove or a bay or a rock point somewhere we’d start to cast. Wordlessly. Always. The only language we used was the quiet way of fishermen, the nod, the gesture when we needed tackle, each of us content to look at the land and the water and the deep endless bowl of the sky.

  I landed a huge jackfish one morning. When it hit my bait, the rod bowed under the keel of the boat, and I could feel the whale-like pressure of the fish at the other end. Joe sat and watched me. The only words he offered were cautionary ones, cryptic tips on how to play it. After twenty minutes or so he netted the exhausted fish and hoisted it into the boat. It was enormous. My hands were sore from clenching the rod, but I held that fish up by the gill case and felt proud and noble and strong. He smiled at me, ruffed my hair some and went back to casting, but I knew he was proud of me. That made the effort worth it.

  We let that fish go. I sat in the boat and watched it heave for breath, and something in me understood that it was the battle that was memorable and the fish deserved to live to fight another day. Something in me understood that I’d been graced with some of the spirit of that magnificent creature and that it could be free again. I asked
him and he looked at me quizzically for a moment, then nodded and helped me ease the fish back over the side of the boat.

  We never spoke of it after. Never shared that moment with the rest of my foster family. But there was an unspoken bond between us, and I knew that I had earned his respect. I could see it in the way he looked at me when we were on the water, like an equal, like a partner, like a man. I’ve never forgotten that.

  Joe understood that I was Ojibway. He understood that I needed a connection to the land to feel safe, real, right. He also understood that there were things in me I could not express, and he gave me the language of fishermen so I could start to find the words.

  Of all the men who came into my life as I was growing up, Joe Tacknyk was the one who fostered “father” in me. He gave the word meaning. See, Joe understood that we all have one basic human right coming in—the right to know who we are created to be. He took the responsibility to show me that in the only way he could.

  For me, at six, fishing was as close as I could get to my roots. Joe got me to the land because he knew that was where my spirit could renew and reclaim itself. He knew that who I was, who I was born to be, was directly connected to the land and its mystery. He got me there. Always.

  Cancer claimed Joe a year after I was adopted by another family at age nine. When I heard I took a long walk on the land and breathed the news deep into me. The tears that landed on the grass that day were tears of gratitude. He was my hero, Joe Tacknyk, and I would never forget him.

  I don’t fish now as much as I once did, don’t get out on the water as often as I might like, don’t surround myself with the mystery of the land nearly as much as I should. But there’s never a moment when I don’t feel Ojibway, and I can thank Joe Tacknyk for that.

  Riding with the Cartwrights

  . . .

  I’VE DISCOVERED, in my life as a tribal person, that rituals ground you. They don’t need to be elaborate in their solemnity or deeply devotional in their application to affect you that way. No matter how slight or insignificant, rituals connect you to the people you share your home and your planet with. They allow you the freedom to breathe.