A Quality of Light (35 page)

“You know how you learn some things and you can almost feel the world rearranging itself all around you, like you’d never seen it that way before? That’s how I feel. I read that book and it was like nothing was right. Not me, not my world, my life, nothing. So I read some more and talked with Staatz and his brothers until it was like I found myself in their anger. My voice. I feel guilty. Guilty because I can’t rub off my whiteness. And it pisses me off. It
really
pisses me off because everything that I’ve learned, everything that I read about, was like a knife going into me. Into my fuckin’ soul. My heart. I’m not supposed to be a whiteman, Josh, I’m not. I’m supposed to
be an Indian. I’m not pissed off at you. I’m pissed off at them for the lies and the horseshit. For my bullshit life.”

“It’s okay, Johnny. It’s okay,” I said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll read the book if you lend it to me. Maybe I’ll get angry too. I don’t know. We’re supposed to be good, loyal and kind. We passed blood on it. So I’ll read the book, okay?”

“You sure? It’ll piss you off.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said with a grin.

“You won’t be the same.”

“Big deal. I’m not the same as I was ten minutes ago, thanks to you.”

“Hey, what’s a blood brother for?”

“You really think I’m an apple Johnny? A phony?”

“Nah. Not really. An apple wouldn’t even look. Wouldn’t question. You’re more like a Viva Puff.”

“A what?”

“You know, those little cookies that are all brown on the outside with a big white inside and red in the middle?”

“Great,” I said. “Just great.”

“S
o you read the book?” Nettles asked, pouring more coffee.
“It was like being woken up roughly. Shaken out of slumber. There was a history in those pages I never imagined possible. I mean, we grow up in a Canada that’s ordered and neat, a society that’s ostensibly democratic, socialized and benevolent. At least that’s what I believed until I read that book”

“And now?” he prodded, one eyebrow arched slightly, sliding a plate of sandwiches towards me.

“Now I still believe that it’s ostensibly that way. If history has given us anything it’s the ability to keep up appearances. Beneath the pseudo-rational sheen of things is a world a lot less glamorous,
a lot less civilized, less rational, less healthy than we want to admit. People are still being belittled, disempowered, disenfranchised and assimilated. Did you ever hear the Spanish term
los desaparecidos?”
I asked.

“Los what?”

“
Los desaparecidos.
It means the disappeared. It’s a term that rose from the civil wars in Central America. The regimes would round up those who they believed opposed it and they would disappear without a trace. The loved ones they left behind refer to them as the disappeared.”

“So what’s that got to do with this? Gebhardt was in Central America, was he? That where he got the military connections. Mercenary, was he Joshua?”

I laughed disarmingly. “No. Nothing like that. At least not that I’m aware of. I’m just trying to make a point.”

“And that is?”

“That every society acts like a regime in some ways. They all create their disappeared. You don’t have to be an Indian to be disenfranchised or disinherited, David. All of us are to some degree. You’re what, English extraction?” I asked him.

“Yeah. Only extraction sounds like something you’re yanked out of. You’re saying society’s like a big dentist yankin’ us out of our backgrounds?”

He definitely had a way with an analogy. “I guess that’s what I’m saying,” I said, chuckling. “I’m willing to bet that you don’t practice any of the things that set you apart as being decidedly British. Am I right?”

“I don’t even know what decidedly British is,” he said, “except maybe a good line for Red Rose.”

“Exactly. You’re disenfranchised. You’re one of the
los desaparecidos
from your own heritage.”

“And the point is?”

“The point is that we all surrender our identities to be a part of society. White, Indian, black, Russian, Czechoslovakian — everyone has to surrender some aspect of their cultural identity to be a
part of society. There are no pure cultures here. Not anymore. There can’t be because society demands that we assimilate part of it into our daily lives. If culture is the day-in, day-out activities we find ourselves involved in, then we’re all disinherited from ourselves. None of what we’re asked to do to function as Canadians these days was part of our pure cultural selves, you see?”

“Okay. But what does any of this have to do with this situation?”

“Everything, because that’s what Johnny saw. He saw it in himself first and then he saw it in the lives of the native peoples. And it’s what I saw after I read
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.”

“I’m not even on the same highway here, Joshua. Saw what?”

“Saw that history is about dissolution. That unless we’re willing to act as warriors to save and preserve the hereditary truths we’re born in, we all become the disappeared. Disappeared from our pure selves. It happened to the white races first and I think that’s what colonization, as Johnny put it, is all about. The belief that you can recover yourself by starting over again. You can’t, of course, but somewhere, somehow, the belief arose that there’s salvation in geography. The more you occupy, the more you are.”

“You got that from the book.”

“Yes. Not as explicitly then. I’ve thought about it over the years but yes, I saw the effects of history.”

“But it didn’t change you like he said?”

“Oh, yes. Yes. It definitely changed me.”

“How? You still became a reverend.”

“I did. But up until that point I assumed I was supposed to lead people to
my
salvation,
my
sense of divinity. But
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
was the first book I read to convince me that if I were to preach, I would preach
choice.
I would preach about my own disinherited past, my own journey to my identity, the tools of both cultures that I used to get me to my Ojibway-ness, my Indian-ness, and my faith. You don’t need to kill or fight to reclaim yourself, David, you just need to look in the right place for the gift of knowledge and of truth. But we all need someone to show us how to search. The truth you find is your own. The God you find is your
own. I became a servant who was willing to preach acceptance instead of conversion.”

He nodded solemnly. “The
first
book, you say. You read more?”

“Certainly. I borrowed all of Johnny’s books, and he had a lot of them. Native newspapers, political tracts,
God Is Red, Prisoners of Grass, Red on White
, it was amazing the collection he had.”

“And you read all of it?”

“Yes.”

“And you still wanted to go to Bible college?”

“More than ever. The way things worked out, it was reading those books, realizing the hidden face of history, and dealing with the feelings born out of that exploration that convinced me.”

“That went over well, I guess,” he said ironically.

“Yes,” I said with equal irony. “It went over real well.”

T
he summer before we went fly fishing in the Hockley Valley was tough on me. You missed it entirely. You were so busy in your pastoral little world that you missed the action. That, of course, was the February that the AIM warriors squared off against the FBI in the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Wounded Knee — life’s ironies are so vaudevillian at times. Here I was being changed from the inside out by the history I was exposed to in
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
and suddenly Wounded Knee comes up in the news. You don’t know how much I wanted to scram down there to be with those people in the sights of all those guns, how much I wanted to shoot back in anger, to seek redemption in a fusillade. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know enough. So I spent that whole summer with Eldridge Cleaver’s
Soul on Ice, The Autobiography of Malcolm X,
Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man, The Diaries of Louis Riel
and Harold Cardinal’s
The Tragedy of Canada’s Indians.
I read magazine articles on Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, Mao Tse-Tung, Che Guevara, the Weathermen and the Black Panthers. I started to learn that the process of
becoming a warrior in this age was the process of acquiring information.

I began to realize the strength in Abbie Hoffman’s assertion that in order to bring power to its knees you had to first understand how power maintained itself. The shackles of bondage are the shackles of ignorance, so I absorbed everything about as many revolutionary thinkers as I could. Going to Wounded Knee unprepared would have been like going unarmed, my presence no help to anyone. But I followed it as closely as the media tricksters would allow me and I seethed. Injustice is broad farce for the educated. Maybe that’s how you learn to laugh in the face of danger. You have to learn to see it as the sophist buffoonery it really is.

The more I learned about the peculiarities of whiteman’s power, the more I sensed that I was out of place. There I was in Mildmay, Ontario, slogging away for a few measly dollars an hour, shelling out vise grips, nails and baler twine when the real world needed warriors. But that’s really the trick, the
legerdemain
that happens to keep us isolated from each other, politically hamstrung, and ineffective. They want us all to believe that the sole responsibility to our life and those we purport to love is the assumption of a role. We’re encouraged to become something — doctor, lawyer, hardware clerk, whatever — and we’re told that once we get there we’ve succeeded, we now have a function. Therein lies the smoke and mirrors. We get a function and then we get responsibility. The career, the mortgage, the car, the TV, the kids. We become responsible for maintaining it all, forgetting the broader, more critical issues like how much we’re getting screwed and how deeply.

The critical thing becomes recognition and money. Money, money, money, the eternal carrot dangling in the faces of the mules who haul the wagon of power. People sell out who don’t even know they’re selling out. They pass on the ethics of a degree, a job, a future. I saw all of it, standing in the aisle of the old man’s store, and I saw how easily we fall into the trap of sufficiency. That’s when I knew what I would do. I would save everything possible so I could go and get my education. Not in some ivy-covered institution but in the streets, on the reserves, in the gatherings where the people went to learn how to survive. I was going to use the whiteman’s capitalist system to finance my own agenda, and it gave me pleasure. The day I decided
that
was the day I was born.

L
ife’s purpose is to create. We all do it in one way or another. Literally, of course, through art, more practically through work and education as we create our selves, but we all create in order to be. In order to become. That’s what I believe. But the bigger lesson is to learn how to live creatively. To have creative relationships with those around us. The key is to recognize the breath of Creation, the God, if you will, in yourself and then in those around you. Living creatively is to recognize God in everyone and to honor and cherish that God. Indians believe that. So do other spiritual peoples.