A Short History of Indians in Canada (15 page)

Early the next morning, Reuben Lefthand showed up with a large thermos of hot coffee and a box of day-old doughnuts. Even Bella was impressed.

“I guess those people out in Montana know how to do things right, after all,” she told Wilma.

“It’s going to be a beautiful day,” said Reuben. “Have you figured out how you’re going to help?”

Everett waved a doughnut at the provincial building. “Since we’re already here, why don’t we take over a building or something and demand that they release Owen?”

“I say we close a road,” said Siv.

“What did that judge say about Natives?” said Wilma.

“He said we lived short and brutish lives,” said Reuben. “We’ve had about four or five protests about that already.”

“There we go complaining again,” said Florence.

“If we’re going to demand anything,” said Amos, “we should demand that they put Fort Goodweatherday on the map.”

For the next hour, everyone sat around and drank coffee and ate doughnuts and discussed everything from the Supreme Court decision to what Wilma’s daughter Thelma should name her newborn son. Everyone, that is, except Bella and Florence.

Bella and Florence were busy looking through the newspaper that Reuben had brought along with the doughnuts and the coffee, and you could tell by the way Bella rattled the pages as she snapped them open and shut that she was serious.

“So,” said Reuben, “any plans?”

Florence folded up her part of the newspaper, leaned back in the folding chair, and helped herself to a doughnut. “It says here,” she began, “that the city is having trouble with tourists.”

“That’s right,” said Reuben.

“We have the same problem up north,” said Florence.

Florence took a bite of the doughnut and then she took another bite. Bella handed her a cup of coffee, and Florence sipped at that for a few minutes. Nobody moved, and nobody said anything. Somewhere in the distance, you could hear a coordinating conjunction moving in Florence’s direction.

“And,” continued Florence, after she had finished the doughnut, “they can be real pushy and nosy.”

Reuben waited for a while and then leaned forward. “The problem is the city has too many tourists,” he said. “All the hotels are booked and you can hardly get a reservation at a restaurant.”

“We had a reservation,” said Amos, adapting one of his two favourite jokes to the occasion, “until that idiot judge opened his mouth.”

“Okay,” said Florence, and she hoisted herself onto her walker and began working her way down the grassy slope to the sidewalk.

Bella watched Florence for a moment. “Well,” she said to the rest of the people from Fort Goodweatherday, “any questions?”

All things considered, it was amazing how fast Florence could move on her walker. Around the quay they went and past the Empress Hotel, which you couldn’t see too well now because of the tour buses and the horse-drawn carriages that were parked in front.

“Where are we going?” said Everett, who was having a little trouble keeping up.

“Hey, look,” said Amos, “are they taking pictures of us?”

Sure enough, as the procession headed into town, several tourists stopped and pulled out their cameras and their video recorders and began filming Florence and Bella and the rest of the people from Goodweatherday.

Florence ignored the cameras. She clumped along
past the boats in the harbour, up a short incline, past the Tourist Information booth, and straight on along Government Street until she got to a nice-looking bookstore with a stone stoop.

“All right,” said Florence as she settled in against the stoop, “now we’re going to show the white peoples just how friendly and helpful we can be.”

Everyone stood around the bookstore and waited to see what Florence had in mind. And they didn’t have to wait long.

Coming down the street, a man and a woman were walking along looking at an open map. As Florence and the rest of the Indians watched, the couple stopped and looked down a street, walked a little further, looked back the way they had just come, and then walked ahead some more. When they arrived at the bookstore, Florence eased herself off the stoop and cut them off with her walker.

“Pardon me,” said Florence. “You peoples look lost. Maybe we can help.”

The man smiled at Florence and the woman looked around nervously, as Siv and Amos and Everett and Reuben and Crystal and her three girls and the rest of the people from Fort Goodweatherday crowded in to watch Florence.

“No,” said the man, “we’re not lost. We’re just looking…for something.”

“So, what are you looking around for?” said Florence.

“Tell them, Jerry,” whispered the woman, “don’t be a hero.”

“It’s okay, Linda,” said Jerry. “I’ve got this under control.”

“Just tell them what they want to know.”

“Tell us,” said Bella, who was now standing shoulder to shoulder with Jerry. “Florence wants to help you.”

“It’s really nothing,” said Jerry. “We were just looking for the Empress Hotel.”

“That one is easy,” said Florence.

“I have a map,” said Jerry.

“Let me see that,” said Amos, and he snatched the map from Jerry and turned it around, but it didn’t have Fort Goodweatherday on it, either.

“Okay,” Florence said to Jerry and Linda, “follow me.” And she set out down Government Street at a healthy clip. Everyone from Fort Goodweatherday moved with her, and Jerry and Linda were caught up in the surge and carried along like logs in a flood.

“Now that’s the way it’s done,” said Bella, after they had dropped Jerry and Linda off in front of the hotel and watched them scamper in.

Even Siv Darling agreed that it had been a nice thing to do.

“Come on,” said Florence, and she started back into town. “Let’s find another tourist to help.”

The next morning, Reuben arrived with doughnuts and coffee just as the police were getting out of their cars. Florence and Bella were already up and sitting in lawn chairs in front of the tents, watching the boats in the harbour.
“You guys made the papers,” said Reuben. And he dropped a copy of the newspaper in Bella’s lap.

“Morning,” said the policeman who was right behind Reuben. “Who’s in charge of this protest?”

There was a picture of Florence and Bella and the rest of the people from Fort Goodweatherday on the front page of the newspaper with a headline that read, “Indians Harass Tourists as Part of Protest.”

“We’d like to talk to your chief,” said the second policeman.

Bella tried to read the article and look at the policeman at the same time. “Our what?”

“The man in charge of this protest,” said the first policeman.

Bella snorted and said something to Florence in Salish that made Florence smile.

“I’m sorry,” said the second policeman. “I don’t speak French.”

“There have been complaints,” said the first policeman.

“That’s all changed,” said Florence. “We’re not going to complain anymore.”

“That’s good to hear,” said the second policeman, “and mind the flowers.”

“The problem,” said Bella, folding the newspaper and putting it on the grass, “is that they haven’t seen friendly Indians in so long, they thought we were trying to create a disturbance.”

“So what do we do?” said Amos.

“Smile,” said Florence. “We got to smile more.”

Wilma made up a list of ways you could be helpful, and, for the rest of the day, everybody from Fort Goodweatherday smiled as hard as they could as they helped the tourists in Victoria with their bags or took their pictures or offered directions or suggested restaurants or just took the time to ask whether or not they had heard about the decision that the Chief Justice of the British Columbia Supreme Court had made concerning Native land and Native rights.

Even Siv Darling smiled, which was a big concession for Siv since he seldom found anything to smile about.

Everyone was tired by the end of the day. “Helping is a lot harder than complaining,” Amos told Crystal and her three daughters. “I hope Florence knows what she’s doing.”

The next morning, Reuben arrived just behind the television trucks and a dark sedan. The three men who got out of the sedan were dressed in casual slacks and pullover shirts with little animals stitched into the material just below the collar. Two of the men had knapsacks slung over their shoulders. The third man was tall and slim, and from the moment he stepped out of the car until he got where the people from Fort Goodweatherday were waiting for him, he was smiling.

“Oh, God!” said Bella. “University.”

“Don’t know,” said Florence, selecting a doughnut from the box Reuben was passing around. “Could be government.”

“Good morning,” said the tall, slim man. “Welcome to Victoria.”

The television crews pushed in, measuring the angles. They dragged their cameras and cables through the flower beds and up the rise, swirling around the men from the government like currents in a river.

“We understand what you’re trying to do,” said the tall, slim man, looking around the camp and nodding his head, “and we wanted to tell you that we’re sympathetic.”

Bella looked at Amos, and Amos looked at Wilma, and Wilma looked at Florence. The television lights were hot and bright, and Florence had to shield her eyes.

“But this isn’t the way to do it,” said the second man.

“No,” said the third man. “In the end, people who are sympathetic with your cause right now will turn against you.”

“We may lose a tourist or two,” said the tall, slim man, “but in the end, the only people you’ll hurt will be yourselves.”

And the three men went around the camp and shook hands and asked everyone from Fort Goodweatherday questions such as where they were from and how they liked Victoria so far and whom they were pulling for in the playoffs.

After the men got back into their sedan and drove off,
and the television people packed up their cameras and cables, Bella leaned over to Florence.

“You were right,” she said in a low voice. “Government. For sure.”

The people from Fort Goodweatherday stayed on in Victoria and helped out as best they could, and, by the end of the week, the number of tourists in the city had dropped by forty-seven percent.

“It says here,” said Bella, as she sat on the lawn of the provincial building and read an article in the newspaper over coffee and doughnuts, “that the British Columbia Supreme Court is going to reconsider Steels’ decision.”

“They going to let Owen go?

“You guys are something else,” Reuben told Bella. “I’ve never seen the place so dead.”

“Smiling and being helpful,” said Florence, “is always better than complaining.”

“It didn’t put us on the map,” said Amos.

“When are we going home?” said Wilma. “I’ve got a grandson needs naming.”

Florence pulled herself onto her walker. The late morning sun filled the harbour and set the boats ablaze, and, from where she stood, Florence could see the Empress Hotel lying in the shade like a sleeping dog and the quiet streets that ran from town to the water and the information booth at the far side of the quay that hadn’t been open for the past two days.

“Well,” she said, “looks like we’ve done as much as we can.”

The drive back to Fort Goodweatherday was uneventful unless you count the two flat tires Amos discovered when he came out of the restaurant in Campbell River or the shouting match Bella got into at a gas station with a woman who had recognized the people from Fort Goodweatherday from a picture in the paper.

“Some people are so proud,” Bella told Wilma, “having to admit they need help makes them cranky.”

The weather along the coast was unseasonably sunny, and when everyone arrived home, most of the news, with the exception of the salmon fishing season having been reduced by three weeks, was good. Thelma hadn’t named her son yet, which made Wilma happy because Wilma wasn’t sure Thelma was old enough to come up with a good name on her own.

“She was thinking of calling him Clarence,” Wilma told Bella. “Good thing I got back in time.”

The following week, Owen Allands was released from jail.

Amos remained unhappy about Fort Goodweatherday not being on the map, but as Bella was quick to point out, Victoria
was
on the map and look at the mess it was in.

“There were people everywhere,” said Wilma. “That tourist thing is a little scary. Not sure I want everybody in the world knowing where I live.”

At the next council meeting, Florence gave a report on the trip to Victoria and how helping other people with their problems had been the right thing to do.

“Should have seen the looks on their faces,” Florence told everyone. “It’s not something they’ll soon forget.”

“Course we can’t be doing this all the time,” Bella cautioned. “Being helpful is all well and good, but it’s a long drive, and it we’re not careful, we could create one of those cycles of dependency.”

“Don’t forget the provincial road map problem,” said Amos Mischief.

Everyone at the meeting agreed with Bella and Amos.

“Helping was fun,” said Wilma, who had decided that Barnes was a better name for her grandson than Clarence, “but eventually, those people are just going to have to learn to work things out for themselves.”

Ideas, interviews & features

T
HOMAS
K
ING
is one of Canada’s most beloved and critically acclaimed writers. He is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, children’s author, scriptwriter, radio personality and photographer.

In the early sixties, King got a job on a tramp steamer and spent three years working as a photojournalist in New Zealand and Australia, where he made a first attempt at a novel he describes as “real pukey stuff.” His attempts at short fiction were no better—“Blithering messes and romantic slop.”

He returned to North America in 1967, and finished a B.A. and an M.A. at California State University, Chico, and then went to the University of Utah, where he got a Ph.D. During his last year there, he got a job offer from the University of Lethbridge and, in 1980, arrived in Canada.

It was at the University of Lethbridge that King began to develop as a writer. “I met this woman, Helen Hoy, at the university,” says King. “I had nothing to impress her with, but because she was in literature, I thought I might impress her with my writing. Maybe it was Helen or maybe it was coming to Canada. In any case, suddenly I could write.” King and Hoy have been together ever since.

In 1989, Thomas King received a one-month writer’s residency at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. During that intensive month, he finished work on his first novel,
Medicine River
, and wrote the first draft of his second novel,
Green Grass, Running Water
.

Medicine River
was published to critical acclaim.
The New York Times
described it as
“precise, elegant…a most satisfying novel.” It won the Alberta Writers Guild Best First Novel Award in 1990, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award and was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Later, it was made into a CBC television movie, starring Graham Greene, and a three-part radio play, aired on CBC Radio.

Green Grass, Running Water
, King’s second novel, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award in 1993 and won the Canadian Authors Award for Fiction. A national bestseller, it was also named to
Quill & Quire
’s Best Canadian Fiction of the Century list.
Green Grass, Running Water
was the runner up in CBC Radio’s 2004 “Canada Reads” contest. In the same year, King gave the prestigious Massey lectures, and the book from those lectures,
The Truth About Stories
, which investigates North America’s relationship with its Aboriginal peoples, won the Trillium Book Award.

King has also written three acclaimed children’s books, garnering a Governor General’s Award for
A Coyote Columbus Story
. His highly praised story collection,
One Good Story, That One
became a Canadian bestseller in 1993. His third novel,
Truth and Bright Water
, published in 1999, was a bestseller as well. In 2002 he published
DreadfulWater Shows Up
, the first book in the DreadfulWater mystery series, under the pseudonym Hartley Goodweather. The second book in the series,
The Red Power Murders
, was published in 2006, just a few months after his second collection of short stories,
A Short History of Indians in Canada
.

Recently called to the Order of Canada, King has also received an Aboriginal Achievement Award from the National Aboriginal
Foundation and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Western American Literary Association. Thomas King is a professor of English at the University of Guelph, where he teaches creative writing and native literature. He is currently working on a new novel,
The Back of the Turtle
, as well as episodes of his popular CBC radio show, the
Dead Dog Café
.