The Truth About Stories (16 page)

Nothing amiss so far.

Now those children get married. The child from the status/status couple
marries a status person and the child from the status/non-status couple marries another
non-status person. The children from the status/status/status couple are status. The
children from the status/nonstatus/non-status couple are not. Even if everyone married
full-blood Indians. Even though everyone has status great-grandparents.

It's actually more fun than I'm making it, because within the
category of status are two subcategories called, euphoniously enough, six-ones and
six-twos, referring, of course, to the sections of the legislation that create status.
Six-one Indians are status and, for legal purposes, are considered to be full-bloods
even if they aren't, while
six-two Indians are status and for
legal purposes considered to be half-bloods even if they aren't.

Now I won't swear that this is absolutely accurate, but as I
understand it the effects of the Indian Act and Bill
C-31
are as follows: Six-ones who
marry six-ones produce six-one children. Six-ones who marry six-twos produce six-one
children. Six-ones who marry non-status produce six-two children.

And six-twos who marry six-twos, or who marry non-status, produce
non-status children. And those children can never, ever be status.

Now that's a good trick.

But what the hell happened?

If we were in the States, the answer would be blood quantum. But here in
Canada we have what is called the “two-generation cut-off clause.” Marry out
of status for two generations, and the children from the last union are non-status.

Oh, you can continue to call yourself an Indian, but you can't live
on a reserve. You can continue to tell people that you're Cree or Blackfoot or
Ojibway or Mohawk, but you can't vote in band elections. You can go to powwows,
sing at a drum, sell arts and crafts if you like, but you are no longer eligible for
treaty benefits, and neither are your children or their children or their children right
down to the end of time.

The two-generation cut-off clause.

No need to send in the cavalry with guns blazing. Legislation will do just
as nicely.

And right now about 50 percent of status Indians are
marrying non-status folk. No one knows for sure how long it will take, but
according to John Borrows and Leroy Little Bear, two of Canada's leading
Aboriginal scholars and teachers, if this rate holds steady, in fifty to seventy-five
years there will be no status Indians left in Canada. We'll still have the
treaties and we'll still have treaty land held in trust for status Indians by the
government.

We just won't have any Indians.

Legally, that is.

So, as the Ducks would say, what is it about us that you don't
like?

At that cabin in the mountains of New Zealand, Paul spent the first
morning showing me how to bake bread in a pot over an open fire, how to dress a deer
haunch, how to sharpen a knife on a river stone. Useful stuff for a life in the woods.
Paul was disappointed to discover that I didn't know how to track or read signs,
but he reckoned that Indians raised in cities lose those skills.

Don't worry, he told me, in a year or so, you'll be as good as
me.

For the next four days, I followed Paul around, watched him set up on a
deer trail, watched him shoot deer, watched him cut off their tails so he would have
proof that he was doing his job. On the morning of the fifth day, he sent me off on my
own.

Make yourself useful, he said. Shoot as many of 'em as you can.

That morning I shot my first deer. That afternoon I packed up my stuff and
left Paul a note.

Thanks, it said.

Then I hiked the eight miles out to the trailhead and caught a ride north
with a trucker.

So what is it about us you don't like?

You're probably thinking racism is the answer.

Maybe.

Certainly part of it is racism. Not the same brand of racism that created
apartheid in South Africa or slavery and segregation in the United States. It's a
kinder racism that is cut with a genuine fondness for Natives and Native culture, a
racism infused with a suffocating paternalism that can gently strangle the life out of a
people. To be sure, it is an affection that is most times misplaced, an affection that
is focused on the more exotic, erotic, mysterious, and spiritual aspects of Native life,
but it is, nonetheless, an appreciation that is deeply felt and maintained.

So if it's not racism per se, maybe you don't like us because
we control large tracts of land and valuable resources, or maybe it's because we
get government subsidies and “special” privileges. But none of these should
present a serious problem. Corporations own land. They own resources. They get
government grants and subsidies. It's one of the benefits of a free-market
economy, where the facade of capitalism is supported by public largesse. Matter of fact,
if it weren't for the infusion of free public money into the private sector,
capitalism would have a very difficult time maintaining itself. Just ask Air Canada or
Bombardier or any of the major players in the Alberta oil industry.

Of course, we don't call it “free
money.” We refer to these public generosities as tax incentives, without
mentioning that the incentive is not to create a better society but to make a
profit.

Even the fact that Indian land is, by and large, unavailable to the
general public shouldn't bother us much. Private hunting clubs own land that no
one but club members can hunt on. Fishing clubs own stretches of river that are
off-limits to the hoi polloi. Timber companies own vast stands of trees that no one but
the company itself can harvest. Drive to the Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta,
Georgia, any day of the week and try to play a round of golf. If you're not a
member, you can't tee up. Or drive to any one of the gated communities in North
America and try to explain to the guard on duty that you just want to look around.

We understand the philosophy of ownership. We believe in the sanctity of
property rights. We relish the mystique of exclusivity.

So just think of Indians as a business or an institution or a country
club.

If it helps.

But, of course, it doesn't.

I didn't leave deer culling because I was afraid that Paul was
right about the world, that things either had value or they didn't. And I
didn't leave because I understood that if you believed in such a world, there
would be no end to the killing.

Though I should have.

I left because there was no point in my staying.
Killing one deer was more than enough, and having done it once, I could not imagine
doing it again.

What is it about us you don't like?

Maybe the answer to the question is simply that you don't think we
deserve the things we have. You don't think we've worked for them. You
don't think we've earned them. You think that all we did was to sign our
names to some prehistoric treaty, and, ever since, we've been living in a
semi-uncomfortable welfare state of trust land and periodic benefits. Maybe you believe
we're lazy/drunk/belligerent/stupid. Unable to look after our own affairs. Maybe
you think all we want to do is conjure up the past and crawl into it.

People used to think these things, you know, and they used to say them out
loud. Now they don't. Now they just think them.

But if we are successful in that middle-class or upper-middle-class way,
if we are able to, as middle North America likes to say, make something of ourselves,
and here you can find any number of good Canadian examples — John Kim Bell, Tomson
Highway, Dr. Marlene Brant Castellano, Tom Jackson, Nellie Cournoyea, Douglas Cardinal,
Mavis Callihoo, Dorothy Grant, Robbie Robertson, Maxine Noel, Daphne Odjig, Graham
Greene, Susan Aglukark … me — then you tell us we're a credit to our
race, the implication being that the rest of our people are not. Or you divide us up
into categories where those of us who have not been successful in that
peculiar way that North America measures success are seen as authentic, while those
of us who have become doctors and educators and artists and politicians and
entrepreneurs are dismissed as counterfeit.

What is it about us that you don't like?

Let's look at the matter from a different angle. Why is the
government concerned about defining who is an Indian and who is not? There's not
an Italian Act that defines who is and who is not an Italian. Or a Russian Act. Or a
Greek act. Mind you, in California, in the nineteenth century for a while, Mexicans were
legally defined as “White,” while Chinese were legally defined as
“Indians.” But even with the French in Quebec, who occupy much the same
position in Canada as Native people do, there has been no legislative effort to
distinguish between French and non-French. No French Act.

Yet, like Indians, the French float in a sea of English influence. They
control an entire province, a larger land base and more resources than any of the tribes
in all of North America. They seem to annoy the English as much as, if not more than, do
Native people. And they have to deal with the attitude of many in this country who
believe that the special rights the French enjoy — a distinct language, a distinct
society — are benefits that, like Native rights, are unearned and undeserved.

The French, I'm sure, feel that they constantly have to reaffirm
their right to exist, but they don't have to deal with laws that try to get rid of
them. There are no legal divisions for status French and non-status French, the concept
of the pure laine being a social construct, not a
legal one.
Consequently if a French woman marries an English man and her children marry Italians
and Greeks and their children marry Australians and Germans and maybe even Indians, they
don't, by law, lose their claim to being French.

The only obvious difference between the French and the Indians is that the
French represent a formidable voting block, which can decide who comes to power and who
does not.

Ah, there's the rub.

And because there's no legal distinction, the French can go on
creating more French no matter whom they marry. All they have to do is maintain their
language and culture, and they will never lose status, while Indians can disappear even
with their languages and cultures intact.

So is the right of identity simply a privilege of power?

Unlike most other ethnic groups, we have two identities, a cultural
identity and a legal identity, and the argument that I want to make is that we should be
able to take both of them with us wherever we go, whatever we do, and with whomever we
do it. For the reality of identity legislation has not simply been to erase Indians from
the political map of North America, it has also had the unforgivable consequence of
setting Native against Native, destroying our ability and desire to associate with each
other. This has been the true tragedy, the creation of legal categories that have made
us our own enemy.

When Bill
C-31
was passed, for instance, a number of band councils sought
to deny members of their own nation — Indians who had reacquired status through
the
legislation — membership in the band out of fear that the
influx of
C-31
Indians would drain the tribe's limited resources. And because they
did not want to share with people they considered to be outsiders.

As soon as Bill
C-31
was passed, it was challenged by three Alberta bands
— the Sawridge First Nation, the Tsuu T'ina First Nation, and the Ermineskin
First Nation — who insisted that the bands, and not bureaucrats in Ottawa, should
be able to set their memberships. “It's not just where do you draw the
line,” Catherine Twinn, legal counsel for the bands, insisted, “but who
draws the line.”
⁴
A valid enough argument as long as you ignore the troublesome
echoes of Merrill E. Gates and his “intelligently selfish” Indians.

The bands argued that their objection to Bill
C-31
was neither racist nor
sexist, that they had no objection to non-status people regaining status, only to the
proposition that status and band membership were the same thing and that bands no longer
had the legal right to control that membership.

The eight-month-long court case that followed was a montage of the horrors
that legislative racism, judicial arrogance, and Native xenophobia can create. The
government, which had originally stripped Indians of status, blithely gave it back with
little regard to the potential consequences. The judge in the case characterized Indians
as primitive and adolescent, in need of governmental control, and argued that
oral-history testimony was unreliable and at odds with the authentic, written,
historical record that had been created by non-Indians. And the
bands, in an unsightly display of fear and loathing, suggested that accepting back
into membership people who, for various reasons, legal and personal, had neither lived
on the reserve nor been part of the community could have disastrous consequences,
including the possibility that the reinstated Indians could band together and vote to
liquidate band assets and sell the land.

An ugly thing from all angles.

No doubt there is some clever cretin somewhere who will make the argument
that termination legislation is, in fact, the answer to the Indian problem, that once
every last legal Indian has been terminated/enfranchised/vanished, and once every
reserve/reservation has been surveyed and sold, Indians will no longer have to deal with
the barriers that status has created.

No more Ducks.

But then who will sing for us? Who will dance for us?

Who will remind us of our relationship to the earth?