A Quality of Light (43 page)

“Okay.”

“Great. Let’s get to work. I only hope that you’re not like me right now.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“Gettin’ kinda tired of my occupation!” he said and smirked through the paint.

W
e untied the hostages and Johnny introduced me as the chief negotiator, news that they greeted with relief. Several of them gathered at the coffee urn, all of them careful to avoid the windows. Johnny had secured couch cushions from various waiting rooms and these were strewn along the walls. Some people lay down to rest. A small group turned on the television, two or three others just sat numbly.

The news was being broadcast live from the front of the building. The reporter identified me and said that my arrival spelled a probable break to the standoff.

Nettles was cautious when I called him. I told him that we were just sitting now to plan and that I would get back to him when we had something concrete. I assured him that the captives were safe and healthy and that things were moving in the right direction. We agreed to have contact at least every hour. If I failed to make contact they would increase their efforts at finding an armed resolution. He stressed the word
resolution.

As the captives watched in bug-eyed wonder, Johnny reverently assembled a small pipe, blessed it in the smoke of a sweetgrass braid, filled it with tobacco, lit it and offered smoke to the powers of the four directions, the earth and the sky, then smoked himself and passed the pipe to me. I sensed the discomfort of the people as they watched us and I realized in that moment how easily misunderstanding can breed fear. To uninitiated eyes the ceremony must appear heathen, pagan, prehistoric. To us, the acolytes, it was a ritualized joining to the divine. We placed ourselves in the circle
prescribed with that pipe as its center. The circle of life. The circle of humble, honest belief and reliance on the eternal and the unseen. From such a position we could talk without fear. The story he told was compelling.

For three and a half years following our brief reunion in British Columbia he had wandered like a latter-day knight errant. Without Staatz he had to find his way around as best he could, and his journeys took him to a wide variety of settings, each with their accompanying angst and anger. Barriere Lake, Restigouche, Lubicon Lake, Temagami and Ottawa. He’d gone searching for a venue for his anger and they’d always been easy to find, and he had assimilated a lot of politics, rhetoric and resentment. From one confrontation to the next he brought his rehearsed diatribe and found acceptance, but never satisfaction. Then he’d decided that the search for fulfillment had to have more substance beyond the shouting and mere resisting. That was when he decided to spend a winter in the teepee.

He’d come out of the mountains with a hunger. A bona fide spiritual hunger, he said. He wanted to know more about the way. More about the preservation of the spirit of the warrior way he’d gotten a glimpse of with the help of the pipe stem. For a few months he’d traveled around and asked people at gatherings and powwows where he could go to learn more. Most of the answers were standard, like finding an elder, going to the sweat lodge, things he’d already done. Then he heard the story of Chief Tall Bear. Chief Tall Bear was chief of a small band of Cree in northern Alberta. He was a traditional person who practiced the old ways in all his affairs. He saw the effects of colonization on his people, in the way they changed their values, their beliefs, their morals and their behaviors with each incursion of the outside world. He watched the spirit of the old ways dwindling and dying amongst his people. He watched his language become replaced with English, watched as storytelling was replaced by television, as alcohol and drugs robbed young people of their spirit and their vision, as violence and abuse began to run rampant in his community, as despair and hopelessness led to suicides, as more and more people walked away from their communities and lurched towards the
glittering promise of cities, only to return broken inside and crying. And he watched as another generation came into the world and learned nothing of their heritage and everything of the outside way. It sorrowed him so much that he decided to lead those who would follow away from the effects of that outside way.

One spring morning he left his reservation with a handful of believers and disappeared onto traditional land in the lap of the Rocky Mountains. There they set up a camp. At first it was a collection of teepees, but through the years it had grown into a log cabin settlement. On this land they revitalized the traditional way. They reperpetuated traditional child-rearing practices, spoke only their traditional tongue, taught only through story, ceremony and ritual. They hunted and gathered from the land. They performed the old rites. They held council fires and teaching lodges. They became a tribal people again. And as the years had passed, Tall Bear’s Camp, as it was known, became a sacred place. People migrated there from every tribe and culture to experience the tribal way, to touch the heartbeat of their culture and carry it back with them into a world that only diminished that heartbeat. There was no electricity there other than the human kind that flows between people working together to preserve the truths that had sustained them though everything. Chief Tall Bear was a warrior in the truest sense, granting life back to his people, and he allowed the people who followed him to become warriors too. He’d died not long after the camp was established but his followers carried on his work. Johnny arrived there the autumn following his sojourn in the teepee. He arrived with a letter of introduction from a member of the Looking Horse family. Long ago a Looking Horse had been chosen to be the holder of the original pipe, the one that White Buffalo Calf Woman had brought to the People to teach them the medicine way. They were a respected family, and without such an introduction Johnny might not have been allowed to enter. Norville Looking Horse had been a friend of Staatz and his family and when Johnny told him about his winter in the moutnains and the glimpse of things he’d received, Norville had told him about Tall Bear’s Camp. Johnny stayed there for six years.

The camp was tucked in the heart of the highest part of the foothills just before they lifted themselves up into mountains. The land was lush and rich. Without the disruptions of technology and invention the people lived as close to the traditional tribal way as possible. Everyone had a clan. Each clan had its own teaching lodge and each had its own area of responsibility to the whole. Johnny had entered as a member of the Beaver Clan. As a member of that clan he had learned to gather firewood and the responsibilities inherent in that role. Later he had become a hunter and learned the responsibilities of that function. He became a Caller, going around the camp announcing ceremony, activity or important news. And at the last he had been a helper or assistant to one of the elders. With each role he had been schooled not only in each task’s relevance and importance to the collective but in the honor that resided in each endeavor. From the most menial to the most venerated, he’d learned the vitality of each function, how it gives life to the people. He’d learned the essence of the way. He learned to drum and sing. He learned to dance. He learned how to ask in a humble way for those things that escaped his understanding. He learned to listen. He learned to speak quietly and respectfully. And he learned how to pray. It had taken six years to learn those things but he’d stayed. The only times he ventured out was to attend a yearly ecumenical gathering on a nearby reserve and an occasional powwow. When he thought he’d learned enough he’d left with the blessings of his teachers, his elders and the people.

That had been two years ago. Now, he talked about how he understood his anger, had visited it, touched it, held it and let it go.

And he talked about me.

In quiet tones he spoke about the incredible love he’d felt for me from the very beginning. How he’d wished that my parents and I would come one day and carry him away into our world. He told me that all he knew of love back then had been tied up with all he knew of loyalty. Loyal meant you would never leave, never abandon, never choose another path and never change. He’d believed we would become Indians together, that we’d invent ourselves in that incarnation just like we’d invented ourselves as ball players.

Only after going back through everything during those six years in the mountains did he realize that it was himself he hated. Getting back at white people was getting back at Ben and Elly Gebhardt. All the yelling, the shouting, the finger pointing were the indictments he wished he could have leveled at his parents and himself. He was a warrior, all right — he’d just been fighting the wrong enemy.

He re-entered a world where little had changed. He’d traveled around and witnessed unrest and discontent. An anger born of frustration over human desires that went unrecognized, unheeded and abandoned, over breaches of trust that lodge like arrows in the breast of the people. Oka hadn’t surprised him in its eruption, he said. Only in its delay.

It wasn’t the People who had created AIM, warriors and warrior societies, he said, the whiteman had. They had made it all necessary through their denial of a people’s integrity and worth.

“Their best device is history. They use history to qualify their subjugation of lands and peoples. But it’s a purely selective device. They use only the parts they need to justify their exploitations. For instance, and this is a big one in terms of the People, they always say that if we were so strong in our cultural and spiritual way, why did we acquiesce so easily to the whiteman’s religion? It must have been because we were simple savages in dire need of
real
salvation. Therefore, they were right to come here and convert us to their Christianity.

“But they conveniently leave out the essence of the story.” He took a piece of paper and drew a small circle on it.

“See, in the Long-Ago Time, the natural world was the People’s greatest teacher. The natural world manifested all the spiritual laws if you learned to look there. Truly spiritual people were those who learned the spiritual laws and practiced them in their daily life. Such people were held in high regard and the People wanted a special symbol that they could offer such persons to signify their special place in the circle.

“So they started with the circle itself, to represent wholeness and completeness. But that wasn’t enough. So they put a long vertical line across the middle of that circle to represent a living relationship with the Creator.” He drew a line down through the circle.

“Still, that wasn’t enough. They thought about the examples they had seen in their villages. They knew that the spiritual ones reflected their spiritual relationship with everything around them, animals, plants, rocks, water and the People themselves. So they put another line horizontally across the circle to represent that relationship. Like this,” he said and drew another line across the circle.

“A cross,” I said quietly.

“Well,” he said, “not in so many words. But a powerful symbol to them of someone who lived a life of harmony with the spiritual and the physical worlds. It was bestowed rarely because people who live in such a manner are very rare themselves. Those who received this honor might paint it on their medicine pouch or wear it beneath their clothing close to their heart. It was far too sacred a symbol to be displayed. And they were far too humble in the face of its implication.

“When the black robes arrived the People were amazed because they wore these symbols around their necks. They thought, These must be very spiritual beings because they wear this honor for all to see. These must be beings worthy of our honor, respect and attention. That’s the real reason the priests were listened to and allowed to go about spreading the message of their Christian God. Not because of the rightness of the whiteman’s religion or the power of their God. But because of trust. A trust with its roots in the divine. And they
knew.
The priests knew because once they learned the language and familiarized themselves with the iconography of the People they knew the real story, the real reason the land was opened in front of them. But it was never included in history because it didn’t serve to justify either the continued invasion of land, mind and spirit or the impression of Aboriginal people as dull pagans. It would have only highlighted their breach of trust. So they buried it.”

I was stunned. In all the time I had spent with Jacqueline she had never introduced me to this story. I was awed by the strength of the spiritual way that gave rise to the symbol and devastated by the abuse of that spiritual way that followed.

“Where did you hear this, Johnny?” I asked.

“In a sweat lodge one time. We were given the story to help in
our healing. Those are the only places you can hear those traditional stories. In places of healing,” he said.

“But you’re telling me here.”

“Exactly,” he said.