A Quality of Light (47 page)

W
e are the children of someone else’s history. We are born and we die under the shadow of a foreign sense of time. We carry within us the infertile seeds of promises sewn by the hands of greed. Withered
and dried, they are lodged in our breasts like arrows, oozing their poisons, singing their histories.

Indians die. They die from poverty, despair, futility, desperation, melancholy, assimilation, racism and hatred. Arrows fired from the bow of colonization. Arrows that seep their poisons into the life blood of the People. The poisons of violence, suicide, drunkenness, cultural alienation and racism itself. Thirteen arrows and thirteen poisons. We return those arrows and poisons to you today.

We return them because we no longer need them. We no longer need to suffer their woundings, their humiliations, their lingering malaise. We return them because they are
your
arrows. They did not originate from us. We no longer need them. And we no longer wish to die.

We know they come from you. Five hundred years has given us that knowledge. The People’s troubles have manifested themselves throughout the entire brief history of your presence in this land and we say — shame on you. Shame on you for the death of vital cultures. Shame on you for the outlawing of ceremony and ritual, for the death of languages, for the rape and pillaging of resources and peoples, for the broken treaties, the suicides, the drunkenness, the violence, the poverty and the rejection of ourselves. Shame on you for five hundred years of arrogance, mute acceptance and ignorance. Shame on you.

But, now, today, if we allow these woundings to continue, if we allow the poisons that seep into the life blood of our People to continue, if we allow the atrophy of our cultural ways, our languages, our teachings, our communities and our people to continue, if we allow our anger, our pain, our denial to continue to be inflicted on ourselves, then we say — shame on us. Shame on us for their perpetuation, knowing what we know.

So we return these arrows to you. There are thirteen. Respect, honor, faith, loyalty, sharing, kindness, trust, honesty, humility, acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude and love. These are the thirteen arrows we return to you today. They are the healing properties of our medicine lodges. They are the prayer poles of our Sun Dance arbors. They are the ribs of our sweat lodges and they are the spars that support the Great Hoop of the People. They are the foundation of our way. They are the reasons that we have lived, survived and perpetuated ourselves despite everything. They are the life blood we would fight to protect and we would die to honor.
Learn their healing properties and join us in the building of a new place of healing within their framework. Within the framework of this country. A new lodge where all can sit as equals.

That’s what we are fighting for. That’s what we seek to perpetuate. That is what lies beneath the anger, the politics and the rhetoric. It is what lies beyond the barricades, road blocks and occupations. Yet when we stand together to protect ourselves, you call us militants, radicals, criminals. We are none of these.

We are warriors.

But you are not an Indian, you say. You are white. You would ridicule me for that, denounce my statements, my feelings and my actions as those of a confused and addled personality assuming roles not his own to play. I know what I am. I know where I came from. I know where I no longer wish to return and I know where I belong. So I ask you, what defines a warrior? Is it skin? Is it blood? Or is it heart, mind or conscience? Skin, blood and tissue do not think or act or feel. Only heart, mind and conscience can accomplish that.

I am a warrior of conscience. A warrior of heart and mind. You don’t need to be an Indian to assume that role — just human.

It is my humanity that makes me a warrior. My humanity and its instinctual craving for security, survival, community, love and justice. When you live in a tribal way you learn that these instinctual urges are felt individually but expressed and experienced collectively. Tribalism is an expression of the needs of the one honored by the whole. We are all tribal people. We all have, within our genes, the memory of tribal fires. Some of us have distanced ourselves from that memory through denial of our primordial past, our civilized ways, our technologies, our science, our vast and cumbersome learnings. But it lies within each of us like a latent hope. A vague stirring of desire to be included in the warmth, the security, of a community, a circle easing together around a common fire, safe from the encroaching darkness. Perhaps we need to remind each other that we have those old fires in common. That each of us carries in the private chambers of our heart the embers of fires that burned on distant, ancient hills. That each of us possesses the memory of drums, prayer songs and offerings to the great and tremendous mystery around us. That each of us, in the great story that is the history of our people, carries the memory of
the one, nurtured, protected and enhanced by the whole. That we were once warriors and we, all of us, once fought to protect that way. That we are human beings and the night is always around us.

I do not fight to dishonor, disrespect or disassociate myself. I fight to be included. For the People to be included. For all of us to be included in that circle of light and warmth that springs from a desire for common survival. That is not criminal, radical or savage. It is human.

We cannot change history. We do not seek to. We only seek to use its woundings, its poisons, its pains and its failings to strengthen us for the march forward. To form the framework for a new and stronger lodge for all of us. A medicine lodge where all may heal themselves.

So we give these arrows back to you. Our blood is on them, our tears, our longings, our private joys. Hold them. Feel their energy, their strength, and join us in the raising of this lodge, this circle of belonging, for the trail has been long, the battles thick and deadly and our spirits cry for the promise of rest.

    There was silence when I finished.

I folded the paper and put it in my shirt pocket. And I made my statement. I told them what I had seen. And I told them a story about a great meeting between the Animal People and the Creator. And I told them it was Johnny’s story.

“Because he knew,” I said. “He knew that the process is the same for an individual as it is for a community, a culture and a nation. All it takes is integrity, purity, of heart and courage. Johnny believed that this country had that. That its people had that. He just wanted to remind us.”

And then I took my arrows and walked away.

G
o home, he said. Go home. Go and tell them that it’s all about light.

While my wife took care of the needs of our congregation those
hazy yellow days of autumn, I surrendered myself to the arms of the earth, the pull of its waters, the suspiration of its winds and the quiet temperance of its moods, its graceful shifts of balance. I surrendered myself to the thick pall of grief that settled over me like a morning fog and I knew somehow that the ripple and gurgle of the waters of the Hockley Valley would be the balm that soothed my achings and the elixir that slaked my parched and sere spirit. I could talk to my God there. I could talk to myself. And I could talk to Johnny.

I set a small tent upon the land and spent my nights listening to a nocturnal world a skin away. I spent my mornings and my evenings upon that ragged creek casting lines across the water. And I spent my afternoons dangling my feet over vertiginous space on a cliff grown less precipitous by age and caution. I gazed away across those trees and glens and thought about the boys we were and the men we had become. Laughing Dog and Thunder Sky. I thought about the great journeys we had made and how, in the end, the land bears our secrets, our sorrows and our happiness. Everywhere we lived and everywhere we died.

You become eternal when you leave a light to shine for the travelers to come. You travel through a personal darkness, seeking the mysterious glow that hovers somewhere beyond your familiar territories. Step by step you make your way towards and away from yourself. A simultaneous distance. Those who return have secured themselves to an immovable, living body — a people, a culture, a past or belief. The strand they return on is woven of filaments peeled from that bulk, that weight, that heft. My strand had been fastened to the tree of faith that had sprouted on three hundred and twenty fertile acres near Mildmay. A tree that had stretched upwards, grown more canopied, lush and full with the gentle watering of a cultural way that was eternal itself. Johnny had no tree.

That’s why I left the church late that fall. Not out of any lingering sense of guilt or even an adopted resentment. Not because of white and not because of Indian. But because of Johnny. Go home, he said. Go home. Riding in on the warm wash of light atop that cliff came the realization that home is not a destination. It’s
not a building, a patch of land or a country. It’s not a moral stance, nor is it an ideological affiliation. It’s just belonging. A critical and luminant joining to the heartbeat of Creation. A symbiotic attachment to all that is and all that will be. There are no churches in that seamless meshing of energies. Just heartbeats. Heartbeats and the ceremonies and rituals of tribal peoples joined in a cosmic dance directed and choreographed by the invisible hand of God in all his guises.

We moved to Cape Croker the following spring and I went to work with Jacqueline at Mindemoya Lodge, counseling women who needed help removing the arrows of a misdirected religion, one that sought to teach that salvation was a place you prepared for instead of a place you carried within you. I helped them cope with the fear of a wrathful, punishing and vengeful God and learn to walk the path of trust, simple reliance and humility. In time, we established a talking circle for men and I was asked to lead it. It grew by word of mouth and the incredible power of example that change effects on those around us. Five short years later, a similar camp for men was established a few miles down the road from Mindemoya. It is now filled year round with men seeking reconnection to themselves and their idea of God. It’s modeled after a traditional camp in the Rocky Mountain foothills and it’s known as Johnny’s Camp.

My wife became the pastor of a small nondenominational church she established on the reserve. Now and then I speak there, and in the joining of sweetgrass, sage and the teachings of the Gospel I find an ecumenic kinship that nurtures me, encourages me and lends me faith. I know the difference now between what is spiritual and what is religious. Can comprehend text and subtext. I know the point where holistic and ideological diverge. I’ve learned to take the best parts of each belief system and create a living, vital relationship to the God I find in everything. If I am a preacher now, I am preaching the message that you find God fully in yourself first and then you become graced with the discovery that He, or She, resides everywhere. In every thing, in every body.

A big, big God.

My son sits in sweat lodges and he sits in confirmation classes. He has learned the way of the pipe and the way of the Gospel. He has learned the language of his father’s people and the language of his mother’s, the way of the Ojibway and the way of the non-Aboriginal world. He is as comfortable in tweed as he is in buckskin, and he knows that when the time comes for him to move out into the world, he is stronger because he has the best of two worlds to fall back on when difficulty comes. You don’t fail when you offer choice, Jacqueline said one time, only when you don’t.

And me, I spend my time talking about light. How it is the world we are born into. How everything is colored by it. How in the end we travel on it. I spend my time talking to other men, other warriors, about this thing we call God and how it is the belief that saves us, not the ritual. I tell them that it’s the same for everybody. And when the universe and our humanity becomes confusing, weighty, difficult and wounding, we can fall to our knees, and whether those knees are clad in buckskin, silk, denim or nothing at all, we find we are in the shelter of a shared Creator, a common God who loves us, nurtures us and leads us to light. So I lead them through sweat lodges. I teach them prayer songs. I teach them to talk openly with the God they seek, to yell, to scream, to cry, to swear. Because faith does not require an extensive vocabulary to work — merely a heart. Together we learn how to make that mole’s journey within ourselves and to celebrate what we find there. The light of a personal truth, the light of self-knowledge and the light that allows us to follow the strands of our histories to a place called home.

It’s all about light really. It’s all about light. And when I stand in the hushed light of evening, watching the waters of Georgian Bay unfold against the lap of the land and then wash back into themselves, I think of him and realize another truth. That the quality of light we search for, the one we hope defines and sustains us forever, is revealed only when the story ends. The light of our example. We leave it behind like a beacon for those who come behind us, to light their way over footfalls and caverns. Eternal light. Eternal life.