One Native Life
My new non-fiction title is a compilation of newspaper columns I wrote as One Native Life. It’s a look back at 52 years of life as a native man in Canada. Unlike For Joshua these stories are healing and redemptive. They are a reminiscence of the people, places and events that have made my life a wonder. You’ll meet Muhammad Ali, Johnny Cash and a host of elders, teachers, friends and loved ones who have made the journey incredible and memorable.
Excerpt
The sublime moments in life are like the first push of light against the lip of a mountain. You watch that pink climb higher, becoming brighter, slipping into magenta, then orange, and then into the crisp, hard yellow of morning. As the light changes, you can forget the pink that drew your eye, and it’s on mornings when you see it again that you recall how it touched you, altered things for you, gave you cause to celebrate.
This book was born in the hush of mornings.
There’s a lake that sits in a cleft of mountains above Kamloops, British Columbia.
It’s called Paul Lake. It’s three miles long, narrow, and the land that slopes down to its northern shore is filled with fir, pine, aspen, ash, birch, and thickets of wild rose, blackberry, and raspberry. It’s reserve land that belongs to the Kamloops Indian Band, and there’s a small community built up there that’s comprised largely of folks grown tired of city life, and who want the peace that a life in the mountains affords.
My partner, Debra Powell, and I, came here in August of 2005. There’s a small rancher-style house that overlooks the lake, and when we saw it we knew we had to make it our home. We’d grown up in cities. Deb had lived in New York and Vancouver, and I had lived in every city west of Toronto. Both of us were approaching our fifties that late summer, and we’d grown tired of the clamour and clangour of Burnaby, British Columbia where we’d met and lived up until then. We sought a haven, and as we walked the half-acre lot that the house sat on, we both felt as though we’d found it. It was a house, but right from the beginning we called it our cabin.
It had been built by a seventy-two year old Swede named Walter Jorgenson, and it showed the hand and eye of a single septuagenarian. The carpets were moldy. The cabin hadn’t seen a paint job in some time. The deck was unfinished, and the place badly needed a roof. Still, the land it sat upon sang to us, and we found a way to make it ours.
There’s a gravel road that curves down from the main road down to the lakeshore. My dog, Molly, and I began to make a stroll down to the water every morning. That’s where this book began. I felt the land settle around my shoulders. On those morning walks I breathed in the crisp mountain air and felt it ease me into a peace I had seldom experienced. I felt reconnected to my Ojibway self. The more I presented myself to the land on those early mornings, the more I felt it offer me back the realization of who I was created to be.
I began to remember. The sound of squirrels in the topmost branches of a pine tree might hearken to a forgotten episode from my boyhood, or the wobbly call of the loons might take me back to an adventure on the land when I was a young man. And there was always the light. The shades and degrees of it took me to people and places I hadn’t thought of in decades. Every one of those walks allowed me the grace of recollection and I began to write them down. I started to see the course of my life in a way I hadn’t allowed myself before. Up until then I had considered my life a struggle, an ongoing fight for identity and a sense of belonging. Those walks with Molly let me see that I had lived a life of alteration between light and dark, and that for me, in my early fifties, the contrast itself was the identity I had always sought.
I had lived one native life. Within it were the issues and the struggles of many native people in Canada, but it was unique and it was mine. It became important for me to revisit it and reclaim the joy, the hurt, and the ordinary to-and-fro of it.
The first reason, was for my own healing. I’d suffered abuse and abandonment as a toddler. My terror was magnified in foster homes and an adopted home where I lived for seven years. For a long while I tried running away, hiding or drinking excessively to shut out the pain. Gradually, with the help of therapists, I began to understand that I wasn’t crazy. It was the trauma that caused me to choose hurt over joy, that made me believe my life would always be a bottomless hole of blackness and misery. Walking in the light of those mornings helped me to see where the teachings and the grace and the happiness were in all of it.
The second reason was for Canada.
As I got to know our neighbours at Paul Lake, I realized how little they understood me. Our homes are located on lease land on a reservation. Our landlords are Aboriginal people, even though the ministry of Indian Affairs holds the actual title. Despite that, our new friends knew very little about the realities of life for native people. I started to see that this one native, my own, life reflected the character, the spirit and the soul of native people all across the country. But my neighbours had never gotten to hear that. Our stories, as presented in the media, seem to only reflect our lives when we’re dead, dying or complaining. These stories are positive, they embrace healing, they reflect an empowered people, and they deserve to be told.
Because we’re all neighbours. That’s the reality. This land has the potential for social greatness. And within this cultural mosaic lies the essential ingredient of freedom – acceptance. That’s an Aboriginal principle I’ve learned. When you know your neighbours, when you can lean over the fence and hear each other’s stories, you foster understanding, harmony and community.
Stories are meant to heal. That’s what my people say, and it’s what I believe. Culling these stories has taken me a long way down the healing path from the trauma I carried. This book is a look back at one native life, at the people, the places and the events that have helped me find my way to peace again, to stand in the sunshine with my beautiful partner, looking out over the lake and the land we love and say – yes.
