The truth about stories, says the author and son of a Cherokee Thomas King, is “that that’s all we are.”It’s a notion at least as old as the Psalms. “We spend our years as a tale that is told.” And in our lifetimes, we’re shaped and guided by the stories we hear about who we are, where we come from, what we might be.
But stories can also be dangerous, King said in his Massey Lectures of 10 years ago. “So you have to be careful with the stories you tell. And you have to watch out for the stories you are told.”
As much as anything, Idle No More — born of a rally organized in Saskatoon in November by four aboriginal women — seems to be an attempt by Canada’s First Nations to insist that their story be reclaimed and heard, to galvanize their people and the wider public into addressing a long-standing national disgrace.
To get lost in the diet particulars of one hunger-striking chief in Ottawa, or the accounting idiosyncracies of one reserve’s band council, or a decision in Attawapiskat by a people grown wary of media to ban a TV crew, is to miss the larger and legitimate point of Idle No More and the opportunity it presents for essential change.
That drastic change is needed — at a time when the northwestern Ontario community of Pikangikum is called the suicide capital of Canada, and an inquest is soon to be held in Ontario into the deaths of seven native young people who died after leaving their remote home communities to pursue education in Thunder Bay — is beyond question.
After all, if any of that — much less the inferior schools or abiding squalor of daily life — had happened in Leaside, or Shaughnessy, or the Glebe, all hell would have broken loose. But in most of Canada, the misery of First Nations is usually out of sight and far from mind — the collective conscience salved by the stories we’ve been told.
Let us reach back in Canadian history only so far as our first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, for evidence of how long the label “idle” has been strung around the necks of First Nations and why Idle No More was a movement whose time had come.
The problem in his day, Macdonald said, was that his government had been “overindulgent” with Indians.
“But what can we do? We cannot as Christians, and as men with hearts in our bosoms — allow the vagabond Indian to die before us. Some of these Indians — and it is a peculiarity of their nature — will hang around the station and will actually allow themselves to die, in the hope that just before the breath leaves their body they will receive some assistance from the public stores.”
It was “the ways of the white man” that would lead aboriginals to prosperity, the PM mused, if only the idleness that was their peculiar nature wouldn’t stand in the way. And so the story has endured for 125 years.
As a young Saskatchewan lawyer during the Depression, John Diefenbaker did not charge Métis or native people who came to him for advice. “I was distressed by their conditions, the unbelievable poverty and the injustice done them.”
Generations on, another prime minister would vehemently concur.
“We signed treaties with many First Nations because their co-operation and their lands were essential to the growth and success of our communities,” Paul Martin wrote in his memoirs.
“And then, when our economic and military needs changed, and the peoples with whom we had contracted solemn oaths had been enfeebled by us, we simply abandoned our honour, ignored our agreements, and did what we damned well pleased. It is our national disgrace.”
What Martin went on to describe was worse than disgraceful. It was tantamount to a program of ethnic cleansing.
“It was not just about breaking our promises to native peoples. It was also about attempts to break their societies. We tried to strip them of their languages and traditions, we attacked not only their system of government but their religion. We systematically ripped children from the bosom of their families to cut them off from their heritage, and then subjected many of these children to degradation and abuse.”
To set foot on a reserve is to learn the appalling effects of that project of deracination, to understand First Nations as a traumatized people, in much the same way as peoples are who have been subject to famine and pogroms.
The Idle No More story is not about Attawapiskat (though that community has become the focal point of native woe). It is not about Chief Theresa Spence (who with her hunger strike has likely done more harm than good to the movement). Even so, Attawapiskat is as good a place as any to inventory social ills.
In the community, there is poverty, torpor, boredom and despair so pervasive you can almost smell it. For most people, there is no job to go to. For most young people, that fact removes any incentive to attend school.
Young smiles show the absence of a dentist. On adults, the scars of unstitched cuts and the crookedness of unset bones show both the prevalence of violence and the absence of doctors. Smuggling alcohol and drugs — those brief but lethal respites from a painful reality — is one of the few thriving enterprises.
Still, when MPP Sarah Campbell, who represents the vast Ontario riding of Kenora Rainy-River, visited the community with NDP colleagues, she was not particularly surprised by anything she saw. “We have the same problems on most of the reserves in my riding.”
Idle No More is, first, about facing those facts and taking responsibility for changing them. It is about winning recognition that Canada has a serious problem in the way First Nations are living and treated. It is about the fundamental truth for First Nations that effective organization is key to building the pressure that forces remedies.
No less a figure than U.S. President Barack Obama started out on just such an understanding, working to organize Chicago’s black underclass.
“Change won’t come from the top,” he wrote in Dreams from my Father. “Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.” As his organizing mentor Marty Kaufman told him, “If poor and working-class people want to build real power, they have to have some sort of institutional base.”
Kaufman had other advice for the future president as Obama got down to the job in Chicago.
“If you want to organize people, you need to steer away from the peripheral stuff and go towards people’s centre. The stuff that makes them tick. Otherwise, you’ll never form the relationship you need to get them involved.”
What made Shannen Koostachin tick was education. The young Attawapiskat girl was a Mushkegowuk Innanu Cree, one of seven children of Andrew and Jenny Koostachin. When she was 14, she told of having to go “down south” to continue her education and pursue her dream of becoming a lawyer.
“I have never been in a real school since I’ve started my education,” she wrote. “I’ve been going to school in these portables for eight long struggling years.
“I was always taught by my parents to stand up and speak out for myself,” she wrote. “My message is to never give up. You get up, pick up your books and go to school.”
Shannen was killed in 2010 in a car crash while attending high school down south. Other young people in Attawapiskat picked up her campaign for a new school in the community and called it Shannen’s Dream.
In Canada, on its reserves and among urban aboriginals, it is not just Idle No More that sees the need for that sort of organization, activism and change.
Last year, the Bank of Montreal said Canada’s future was tied to the ability of indigenous young people to play a part in the economy. Aboriginal people are the youngest and fastest growing segment of the Canadian population, yet overrepresented in the country’s unemployed. Worse, the gap between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people with post-secondary education was widening, with only 4 per cent of First Nations people graduating from college or university.
Idle No More is all about organization. It’s about building relationships and stimulating involvement. It is following the example understood by Shannen Koostachin and taught to Barack Obama.
That the movement has itself become a national story — the occasional sidetracking notwithstanding — might just be the long-needed catalyst for addressing a problem that’s not going away.
For as Paul Martin said of Canada’s First Nations, “for all the fearsome efforts we have made over the centuries, we have failed to destroy them.”
To set foot on a reserve is to understand something of why that should be. It is to experience the enormous forbearance of First Nations, their patience, their toughness, the generosity of spirit shown visitors — even media sorts who too often treat residents like zoo animals and arrive merely to showcase the worst of things.
As is so often the case, the lessons come in stories.
Micheline Okimaw is proprietor of Attawapiskat’s White Wolf Inn. Asked about the nearby De Beers diamond mine, she shakes her head and smiles.
When she was a little girl, Micheline wintered in the bush — as the Cree always had — with her grandfather and trapped pretty near where the De Beers mine now operates. After paydirt was found, she says her grandfather used to tease her.
“He would say to me, ‘I guess you never knew all those years that you were sleeping on diamonds.’ ”
And, for all the trials of life around her, and the peculiar nature of the white man’s ways, Micheline Okimaw is still able to laugh.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Jim Coyle
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