The Truth About Stories (14 page)

Now, in those days, Ducks were very agreeable. All right, they said. Just
be careful with it, for we are quite fond of our feathers.

I will, said Coyote, and he stuck the feather behind his left ear and ran
off to show it to all his friends.

What do you think of my feather? he asked everyone he saw.

It certainly is unusual, said Bear, who tended to be more critical than he
needed to be. Too bad you only have one, for now you look a little lopsided.

Oh, dear, said Coyote, and he ran back to the river to find the Dancing
Ducks.

Excuse me, Coyote shouted, would it be possible to get another
feather?

Another feather? said the Ducks.

Yes, said Coyote, as you can see, having only one feather makes me appear
lopsided.

Ah, said the Ducks. You're right. You do look a little lopsided. And
the Ducks gave Coyote another feather. But this is the last one, they said. Don't
ask for any more, for we need our feathers.

I won't, said Coyote. I promise.

And Coyote stuck the feather behind his right ear and ran off to show it
to all his friends.

Aren't these the most beautiful feathers you've ever seen?
said Coyote.

They certainly are, said Raven. And such an improvement on that ratty fur
coat.

You don't like my wonderful fur coat? said Coyote.

Fur's okay, said Raven, but feathers are so much better. They are?
said Coyote.

Certainly, said Raven, stretching out one wing as far as she could. Anyone
who is anyone has feathers.

Well, you can imagine poor Coyote's distress. If Raven was right,
and she was seldom wrong, then fur had somehow fallen out of fashion. Oh dear, oh dear,
said Coyote, I'm going to need more feathers. And back to the river he went.

When the Ducks saw Coyote waiting for them on the bank, they ruffled their
feathers and looked quite annoyed.

We hope you haven't come to ask us for more feathers, said the
Ducks.

I wouldn't do that, said Coyote, and he smiled so all his teeth
showed. I've come to protect you.

Protect us? said the Ducks. From what?

Human Beings, said Coyote, who on occasion can be clever. I heard them
talking. They plan to steal all your feathers.

Steal our feathers! shouted the Ducks.

They might even try to eat you, said Coyote.

Eat us! said the Ducks. Human Beings eat Ducks?

Coyote pretended to shudder. You'd be amazed what they will eat, he
said.

But then who will sing for them? said the Ducks. Who will dance for them?
Who will remind them of their relationship with the earth?

Never mind that stuff, said Coyote, and he lowered his eyes and lowered
his voice and looked around to make sure no one was watching. I have a plan that might
save you. You give me half of your feathers and I'll pretend to be a Duck and
I'll let the Human Beings chase me around until they get tired and give up.

Half our feathers? said the Ducks.

You'll get to keep the other half, said Coyote. And you'll be
safe.

So the Ducks talked it over, and they agreed that half their feathers was
better than no feathers, and certainly better than being eaten.

But what happens if they catch you? said the Ducks.

Oh, don't worry, said Coyote, they won't catch me.

For I am exceptionally fast and very tricky.

Well, you can imagine just how good Coyote looked with his long shimmering
Duck feathers. Even Bear was impressed.

They're okay, said Bear. If you like that sort
of thing.

Look at me, Coyote cried, as he ran through the woods and over the
mountains and down into the valleys, the feathers trailing behind him, flashing in the
light. Look at me!

But Coyote was not very careful with the feathers. He didn't clean
them or straighten them or fluff them up as the Ducks had done, and, after a few weeks,
the feathers were bent and dirty and ragged, and they looked very, very sad, for they no
longer shimmered and glowed.

We can't have this, said Coyote, and he threw the feathers away and
went back to the river.

When the Ducks saw Coyote without the feathers they had given him, they
were concerned.

What happened to all our feathers? said the Ducks.

The Human Beings took them, said Coyote. They caught me while I was
sleeping.

How horrible, said the Ducks.

What's worse, said Coyote, is I need more feathers.

More feathers! shrieked the Ducks. Absolutely not! No, no, no, no!

Then, said Coyote, puffing out his chest as best he could, we'll
fight them together.

Fight? Fight whom? said the Ducks, who were well versed in the rules of
grammar.

Human Beings, of course, said Coyote. For they can be very fierce when
they don't get what they want.

Well, the Ducks didn't know what to do. They talked about flying
away but their long feathers made flying tiring, and they talked about swimming away but
they
didn't know where they would go, and they talked about
running away but their legs were too short to do that. Besides, they were happy just
where they were.

These Human Beings, said the Ducks, what is it about us that they
don't like?

Oh, they like you well enough, said Coyote. They just like your feathers
better.

Now, I could finish this story but you already know what's going
to happen, don't you? The Ducks are going to keep giving up their beautiful long
feathers. Coyote is going to make a mess of things. The world is going to change. And no
one is going to be particularly happy.

Besides, this particular story is a long one that takes days to tell. A
good storyteller can keep it going for a week. We don't really have the time. And
there are other stories that are just as much fun and much shorter.

Such as the one we like to tell ourselves about injustices and atrocities
and how most of them have happened in the past. We tell ourselves that, as we have
progressed as a species, we have gotten smarter and more compassionate. We say of
slavery, for example, yes, that was a horror. We know better now, and we won't
make that mistake again. Of course, segregation was a problem, too, wasn't it.

And if we do make such a mistake in our lifetime, say, for instance,
dumping raw sewage into the ocean or dropping bombs on people, we say that this was an
aberration, a creature of the moment. We say that it was the times, that the fault was
in our stars, that you had to have been
there. As if what we did
was set in motion by natural forces outside our control, something that caught us
unawares or took us by surprise.

Indians, for example.

One of the surprising things about Indians is that we're still here.
After some five hundred years of vigorous encouragement to assimilate and disappear,
we're still here.

Don't worry, this is not the prelude to a flock of sweeping
generalizations and caustic complaints. I'm not going to carry on about genocide
or residential schools or blankets infected with smallpox (no one has ever been able to
prove that one anyway). I'm not going to mention Big Bear or Louis Riel or the
Lubicon Lake Cree or the Mi'kmaq at Burnt Church or the Innu at Davis Inlet or
Dudley George at Ipperwash or Neil Stonechild and the Saskatoon police.

I'm not going to talk about the forced removal of Indians from their
homes or the reserve system or the paternalistic manner in which governments manage the
affairs of Native people.

What I want to talk about is legislation.

In the old days, when we were still a problem, the military solution
was as good as any. But after a hundred years or so of killing each other, both sides
decided that wars were expensive. They cost money. They cost lives. And so, in North
America, where Indians and the British and the French and the Americans spent a good
deal of time and effort fighting each other, it was eventually
agreed that making treaties was better than making war. A rather enlightened
decision, if I do say so. The problem was that, like the Ducks in the Coyote story, the
first rule of treaties was that Indians had to give up most of their feathers in order
to keep some of their feathers for themselves.

At the time, treaties were a poor deal for Indians and a good deal for
Whites. But lately, they've been a better deal for Indians and not such a good
deal for Whites, because like Coyote, Whites haven't been happy with only most of
the feathers.

You might suppose that in the story about Coyote and the Ducks,
eventually, Coyote winds up with all the Ducks' feathers, and, in fact, that is
what happens.

Sort of.

While the Ducks do give up all their large feathers, the new feathers that
grow in are much smaller, and they don't shimmer quite so much and they
don't glow quite as brightly as before, and Coyote leaves the Ducks alone for the
moment as he looks around for more valuable acquisitions.

With Native people, while our land base was drastically reduced in the
early years of treaty making, that erosion has slowed. Even stopped in some areas. Mind
you, we don't have much land left, but feathers are feathers. And even if all the
large ones are gone, after a while, Coyote is going to come back, looking for the
smaller ones. For he has an insatiable appetite.

However, there is a problem with this story: as long as there are Indians,
there will be a plethora of “Indian
things.” Feathers,
if you will. Indian land. Indian rights. Indian resources. Indian claims.

Gnarly, difficult, tempting things that try the patience of governments,
affront corporations, annoy the general public, and frighten the horses.

What to do?

What to do?

Indians. You can't live with them. You can't shoot them.

Well, not anymore.

So it's just as well we have legislation.

And legislation, in relation to Native people, has had two basic goals.
One, to relieve us of our land, and two, to legalize us out of existence. I know that
probably sounds like a rather harsh and cynical statement, and it's not completely
true. In the Proclamation of 1763, for example, the British government, partly out of
fear of the French presence in North America, allowed that each tribe was an independent
nation subject only to tribal law and exempt from British law. But this was a mistake
that, later, American and Canadian governments would not repeat.

In 1887, the U.S. Congress passed the General Allotment Act, or the Dawes
Act as it was popularly known. Driven by the government's desire to control
tribes, by the desire of settlers for cheap land, and by the popular notion that land
set aside for Indians was the antithesis of North American values and fair play, the
General Allotment Act sought to “re-imagine” tribes and tribal land.

Assisting in this matter was a group of reformers, known euphemistically
as “Friends of the Indian,” who
felt that breaking up
the tribal estate and turning Native people into landowners would help rescue them from
their communal but primitive state and hurry them into the mainstream as full and
functioning members of society. The key to this, as far as the Friends were concerned,
was private ownership of land and an appreciation for the concept of profit.

Merrill E. Gates, one of the Friends, summed it up in a speech on Indian
reform. “We have, to begin with,” said Gates, “the absolute need of
awakening in the savage Indian broader desires and ampler wants. To bring him out of
savagery into citizenship we must make the Indian more intelligently selfish before we
can make him unselfishly intelligent. We need to awaken in him wants. In his dull
savagery he must be touched by the wings of the divine angel of discontent. The desire
for property of his own may become an intense educating force. The wish for a home of
his own awakens him to new efforts. Discontent with the teepee and the starving rations
of the Indian camp in winter is needed to get the Indian out of the blanket and into
trousers — and trousers with pockets in them, and with a pocket that aches to be
filled with dollars.”
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And the Ducks thought they had problems.

The heart of the act lay in the division of each reservation into pieces.
Indians got some of the pieces — as a rule, 160 acres went to each head of
household — while the surplus was auctioned off or sold to White settlers. Indians
would become citizens, and magic, presto, be transformed into … well, not
Indians.

Of course, this isn't exactly what happened,
but while the act was in effect — from 1887 to 1934 — the legislation was
able to reduce the tribal estate in the United States from 150 million acres to about 48
million acres. Native people would have probably lost more land but the act was repealed
in 1934 and besides, by then, much of the land that was left was desert.

Canada, which is generally seen as lagging behind the United States in
most things — capitalism, taxation, aggression — actually took the lead in
legislating Indians out of existence with the 1876 Indian Act.

It would be too torturous a journey to try to explicate the Indian Act at
one sitting, for it is a magical piece of legislation that twists and slides through
time, transforming itself and the lives of Native people at every turn. And sprinkled
throughout the act, which, among other things, paternalistically defines who is an
Indian and who is not, are amendments that can make Indians disappear in a twinkle.

An 1880 amendment allowed for the automatic enfranchisement of any Indian
who obtained a university degree.

Get a degree and, poof, you're no longer an Indian.

Serve in the military and, abracadabra, you're no longer an
Indian.

Become a clergyman or a lawyer and, presto, no more Indian.

Legislative magic.

Duncan Campbell Scott, the deputy superintendent general of Indian affairs
(among other things), speaking
candidly in 1920 of Canadian Indian
policy said, “Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in
Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question,
and no Indian department.”
³