On the adventure ☆彡 Posts

Living in reality
We can endure your cages your bullets
Your lies your confusion
We know you have destroyed your peace
Living in reality you only exist

-John Trudell

For such a long time, settlers and our government have been doing the same thing over and over. We repeat and repeat the same patterns until they become the fabric of our life and seem like reality itself. In this reality, some people love peace, order and good government and some do not: the angry ones, the people from whom we stole the land. The ones whose languages and cultures we tried to kill off. The people we betrayed. Our betrayal is our sorrow and tragedy, buried deep within us—the wound of our country. But this fabric, this injured country, seems like our only choice. As if our way of life is the best one possible and theft and violence were the only means of creating it. Canada. Peace, order and good government. Peacekeepers, diplomats and nice polite travellers are our faces to the world.

Yet consider how we arrived in this present: by refusing to share the land. By signing treaties with our predecessors and breaking them, or misunderstanding (on purpose) the agreements we signed. By taking the land without offering even the promise of compensation. What is now called “Crown land”.  The unceded traditional territories of all the people who lived here first and still live here now.

We parcel this land into lots for houses, roads and industry. We clear-cut, mine and drill for oil in the vast regions. What little is left over we turn into national parks, where we manage the wildlife – counting species of fish, birds and other animals. In parks, we dictate where visitors may walk or swim or pitch a tent. Whatever is left over after that is for Indigenous peoples—we allot 0.2% of the land to 5% of the population ¹.

More often now, we hear voices demanding the Canadian government acknowledge that most Canadian land is unceded territory. These voices are getting louder. Our country is filled with histories and life-ways that have existed for as long as anyone can remember. Lands and waters that defy management, that science and technology cannot account for. We try to dismiss these voices or discredit them – these other nations within our borders. We continue to build houses in disputed territories, in places such as the Mohawk community of Kanehsatà:ke in Quebec and on the Haldimand land tract at the Iroquois community of Six Nations in Ontario. We surround communities with heavy industry, such as the Chippewa people of Aamjiwnaang First Nation who are hemmed in on all sides by the oil and gas refineries and chemical plants of Sarnia, Ontario’s “chemical alley”:  home to 40% of Canada’s petrochemical industry ².

To ensure the success of our Canadian project, we place a higher value on our settler lives than we do on Indigenous lives. We don’t always know we are doing this, because we know so little about the Mohawks and the Chippewas and other nations, like the Nlaka’pamux people of Coldwater First Nation in Merrit, BC. A bitumen pipeline runs through the middle of their reserve. Now Kinder Morgan wants to build a new pipeline directly over the community’s main water source. The people have said no. The chief of Coldwater First Nation says: “For us it’s not about the politics, but the future of our community and ensuring we have access to clean, safe water.” ³  The Prime Minister of Canada says, “We are one country. The federal government is there to ensure that the national interest is upheld.” ⁴ He has promised that Alberta bitumen will reach the west coast by the Trans Mountain pipeline, no matter what.

In the past, we hid the evidence of how we tried to wipe out the old cultures – we ensured that our children did not learn about residential schools or the banning of Indigenous languages and ceremonies. Now, as parts of the truth come out, we blame our actions on the ignorance of the past – back then, we did not know better than to separate children from their parents; we thought teaching them Christian ways would make them more like us. That some children starved or died of TB, or that certain nuns and priests abused the children is unfortunate. We have said we are sorry for trying to “kill the Indian in the child.” ⁵ But our ancestors lived in a harsher, crueller world. We can’t be held responsible for it. We had not yet achieved our current state of peacefulness and kindness – we were not fully Canadian.

Nowadays, we sometimes allow the old songs and stories of this place to be told, though we often try to orchestrate them. We want everyone to know how open and accepting we are. We are sure it would be much better for Indigenous people to settle their differences our way, under the power of the Crown and through our justice system, though it tips most often in our favour.

And so we repeat broken stories of how we triumphed, how it was all for the best, while we stand on the ground of other nations. We think, how ridiculous: Indians having countries. The Indians who could have ruled countries are long dead and gone. There are no real Indians anymore.

And we make yet more promises we do not keep – of clean drinking water or equal funding for education. We show respect by calling the first peoples “Indigenous” instead of “Indians.” Before that, it was “Aboriginal,” “First Nations” or “Native.” But the empty words we speak don’t change the fact that we are creating a dystopia, a chasm opening up between us. In this chasm, we are strangers on the land – we become lost and drown. Our maps blow away on the wind, swept out of our hands. Animals turn from us, and predators attack. It is a place full of thorns and dead ground.

As time passes, the chasm grows wider until it seems the only way to cross –  to reacquaint ourselves with this place –  is to lose ourselves: to walk off the map and leave behind the marked trails; to search the land’s deepest places for the overgrown winding route – the path our ancestors walked before we settlers made enemies of the Onkwehón:we ⁶ (the original people). Before we forgot how to be Onkwehón:we.  

We’ve been thinking and acting like settlers for so long we no longer think this place (this land we call Canada) could seep in and grow through us, green and alive. We are sure that it could never be so vast. That starlight cannot sing in valleys and light up the highest leaves, turning the deep green pine needles to shades of blue.

We might still dream in our beds of open rooms where a starry sky appears each night, but it is only dreaming. We may, in our dreams, sit by a window to smell wet earth and the perfume of summer flowers. We might hear someone else who is outside in the night, singing in a soft voice from their yard. See the golden square of their window, lit up. Hear the sound of coyote breathing as he searches through our garbage. We may suspect that we are not the only ones. If only we could remember these things, if only we could still know them when we wake from dreaming.

-for Jesse Thistle

When you say you are sorry (from your heart), you open the door to a room within. A cool, peaceful space where a breeze blows in the half-open window and green leaves brush against the glass. You enter and sit in the chair, yellow sun slants across your face and there are no distractions. You’ve begun to understand pain—being hurt and hurting others. You’ve started to make space for it, and in consequence, find yourself here in this room where pain lives side by side with your heart, in peace.

When you say you are sorry, a door opens and something new begins. The door may open to a different place where sad stories and tragedies fill only a few rooms in a great, sprawling house. A house also filled with laughter and the smells of supper cooking, the quiet murmur of voices in prayer. Someone’s fingers tapping on a keyboard, writing a story; someone else singing, another sewing. Listen to the sounds of children running in and out of the house, playing hide-and-seek in a field, gathering wood for the bonfire. They remember and dream as you do, memories and dreams of their own, mysteries falling from the stars, sparks of light shimmering among trees in summer. This house has always been here. But maybe you belonged to a people that painted over the door. Whole other lives. You never saw them until now.

They pull and they paw me
They’re seeking to draw me
Away from the roundness
of the life

-from “I Pity the Country” by Willie Dunn

I picture a fine, woven silver web that begins and ends inside a spider. The spider begins and ends in a web of life that has no beginning or end because it is a circle. Our social and blood relationships are intertwined as webs, beginning and ending in each of us, who in turn begin and end in the circle.

The Indigenous Peoples of this place seem to have a sense of the world as circular and revolving, always turning and returning to the same places and seasons. Some of my ancestors must have seen the world the same way—they were shepherds, fishers and farmers who lived from season to season, year to year, on the land. But today, to our science-based, settler minds, the circle is an inconvenient mystery—we can’t find its beginning or end. Circles don’t stretch out across the land as straight lines do, pinning down life with sharp edges.

The circle curls up into itself and spreads out, getting in the way of our complicated systems: our electrical grids, roads and bridges, telecommunications lines strung out over the earth. Our straight lines are hard and flat, pressed down over mystery and disturbance, onto a land we don’t understand, despite how we try to measure and parcel it out, square it away.

We have a straight, flat gaze that freezes in place tracks of wild animals weaving through forests, running through backyards in the middle of the night, stopping in mid-air all the wings that ride the wind above our houses at dusk. We would hold it all there, tight in our grasp.

This is the place we call Canada, a place of science and industry, connected from Victoria to St John’s by the world’s longest highway, settled in cities and towns. But the older place, the one to which this modern nation clings, tenuously, sees Canada and laughs. The very idea. As if. That place stretches out endlessly. Within it, our highways are only fading lines on the landscape, our cities small outposts of flickering light. I am small in this place and can’t see the beginning or the end.

We settlers draw our lines, measure our property, make up rules. But we’re lost inside the circle. The circle is outside of our outer world, beyond our imagination. It makes up the sky that holds our sky. All our rivers and oceans flow within its ancient roots and stones. And it keeps spreading out every time we think we’ve touched it, taking us further into the wild.