DE BIG-SHOT TRAIN: A Northern Love Affair with Algoma Central Country
A Rough and Ribald Story of a Lifetime in the Bush ~ Robert Cuerrier
Chapter 11 The Great Divide
OF DEATH AND BEER
Indian people have a profound respect for the bond between the dead and the earth. Many believe that in the beginning mankind emerged from a hole in the earth –the land was the womb. The earth is the mother, death returns you to her. Burial grounds are sacred. The spirit is on a journey, and to disturb it is to intrude on that journey. Even to visit gravesides one has to be reverent and right-minded so as not to upset a natural order.
My friend, Calvin Burnside, is with the American Indian Movement and is often called upon to intervene in the desecration of Native burial sites. He elegantly articulates the spirituality of the Indian point of view and yet he has the political savvy for the media sound bite that will reach everyone in a direct and familiar way. He’ll say things like “Whites have taken from us for five hundred years and now they want to dig up what’s left,” or “Where are your ancestors buried? I’ll go and dig them up.”
Anyway, I’m amused when I think about the white view of the dead here in the Soo. The city’s oldest graveyard, the resting-place of the folks who pioneered and built this town, was located on our “Golden Mile” business district that becomes Highway 17 North leading out of town. The graveyard was let go and was an amalgam of brush and weeds and vandalism. In the mid-seventies the city moved to correct this. We pulled up those graves and built a much needed beer store on the site.
I have a sort of heritage tug of war within myself when I frequent the beer store. Sacrilege on my native side and expediency from my white blood. It’s close. For years we had one little car here on the farm and I had a travelling teenage daughter and a gad-about wife. So sometimes I took the horse and buggy to the beer store: it was an hour return trip and one big can on the way home with which to mull the Great Divide.
TWO SOLITUDES
If you wonder why there are sometimes two solitudes, White and Indian, you don’t have to look much further than how they view the dog. Now I’ll admit that not much of this difference holds today but it did not too long ago and it shows you that two different cultures can think so differently, even about a creature that they both love.
The lives of Indian people might often depend on the strength and willingness of their dogs so, they kept them aggressive and full of purpose. What on the surface seems to be cruel was really just conditioning and management techniques. Dogs were loved but were not pets.
Years back in Yellowknife I’d go down to the dock in The Old Town to watch the Indians on Great Slave Lake coming in off the traplines in their big freighter canoes full of packs, furs, children and dogs. They’d land, tie up the dogs, then go visiting and shopping. The dogs would sit there without food or water. After a few days a man would return, put on a heavy pair of gauntlets, kick, beat and threaten the snarling, lunging dogs to get through to the packs for food and to the lake for water for them. And even when they were out on the land and working, the dogs would be made to fast one day a week.
I remember that the first winner of the famous thousand-mile Iditirod dog sled race was an Indian from Alaska. He complained bitterly to the rules committee about what he honestly believed was stupidity. If a dog quit, it had to be put in the basket, freighted in and turned over to a handler a the next checkpoint, cared for and flown home. Yet he no longer wanted this dog, nor did he want it around to taint the others. He wondered why he should be put to all this expense and inconvenience when he would shoot the dog as soon as he got home anyhow.
The White view is a little different. They all the time ascribe human qualities to dogs, let them live in the house and perhaps, on occasion, buy them a Big Mac at the drive in. I often see folks allowing my dogs to lick their faces which I find disgusting since any dog spends a lot of time licking its own or other dogs’ genitalia and worse. Further, anyone wanting to neck with a dog should surely not do so in public. To an Indian it’s amusing to watch someone when walking a dog, bend down with a little baggie over their hand and then deposit the offering into a suit coat pocket.
GENESIS
“The Good Lord came up with the dog late on Saturday night just before He rested. That explains ‘em.” ~ Leonard St. Jean Baptiste
JU-JU LORE
It’d be easy to be skeptical looking at today’s revivalist Indian preachers and healers and I have been. First of all, like every other religion, theirs is based on faith and belief in mysteries and so acceptance is a big leap for anyone. As it was long ago, sometimes sorcery, magic, politics and making a good living are a part of the medicine man job description. Moreover, many of the present leadership have a checkered past as evidenced by their prison tattoos and their admitted history of multiple abuses. Not too removed from the white radio and TV evangelists we see today, eh. Anyway, Indian “priests” have been characterized by some as an unsavory bunch of superannuated sinners with bags full of ju-ju lore. But it’s not all like that.
Through providence I’ve found a man to explain things to me and bet of all he doesn’t mind if my interest is casual and intermittent. His name is Robert Big Track. With his wife, Wendy, they head up a singing and drum group and work weddings, funerals and healings. Big Track’s grooming for the ministry followed the usual path. He saw some additional life defining jail time in Vietnam, where as a prisoner of war, his captors time to time backed him by locking him in a sheet iron cage set out in the hot sun. This pleased him and dismayed them as he considered it his personalized Asian sweat lodge. He drove his tormentors to distraction by singing his joyful sweat songs whenever he was put in the oven.
Some other friends of mine, Harold and Terry, helped me make maple syrup here on the farm. Terry was diagnosed with cancer and told she had three months to live. She’s an Indian originally from an isolated, lonesome reserve somewhere up on the North Saskatchewan. I knew that, but I didn’t know anything about her beliefs. So I was a bit sheepish when I asked if she’d like me to arrange a healing lodge for her. She brightened, said yes, and confirmed my instincts when she dragged a medicine bundle out of her purse and spilled the contents on the table. She attended the lodge, is still kicking, has enjoyed good health for years and is working her regular job, which is pulling ol’Harold back onto the good Red Road whenever he hits the bottle and then the ditch.
I could have become a wide-eyed believer right then but its more my nature to be a squinty-eyed doubter and, of course, I didn’t let myself down. I went to a sweat with Big Track because Vicki Eagle Elk, a famous healer, was coming up from the Pine Ridge reserve in South Dakota. Vicki specializes in internal disorders. After we were seated in the healing lodge she pointedly asked me, but no one else, for an explanation of why I was there. I explained that I wanted to support and honour Big Track’s ministry and that my sister, who was with me, had some intentions. I made no mention that I was curious, which is not considered an acceptable motivation. I also secretly planned on praying that my considerable stomach ailment would somehow catch a cure.
They brought the hot rocks in (the grandfathers), but Vicki wasn’t shutting the door. After a long delay (we were on Indian time here I guessed), someone asked her why we weren’t getting under way. Vicki had heartburn. I smartly piped up that I could help and smugly dug into my shorts for a few Rolaids to pass over. She popped them and closed the doors. We were interred in darkness and the heat was intense, I was sweating from the heart out, numb with pain. To bear it I let myself melt into the drum, the songs, animal calls and bird trills. Something was happening.
Yet I left feeling a little critical of Vicki. She had challenged a few of the people seeking cures, telling them to choose between the old way and the white doctor, which I didn’t understand. And so, for a while afterwards, I enjoyed telling the story about how I’d cured the healer. Until I got thinking about it. I began to feel that she’d read me, called attention to my entrails and had diffidently sent me a message; which seemed to say, “Go see the white doctor then, you cynical mixed breed,” I did. “He told me my chronic heartburn was causing big, big trouble and gave me a prescription to follow for the rest of my life. She’d set me on the healing path in spite of myself and no one, not even I at the time, was the wiser. Now it’s just not within me to undergo a conversion, but I am somewhat more thoughtful today.
HUMOUR
Unlike the white man, whose life is global and sense of humour universal, Indians are largely introspective in regards to what’s comedic. Reserve life, being marginalized at home and in the cities, overriding poverty and their relationships with white men gets them looking inward and becomes the basis of what’s funny.
Humour is often scorched with cynicism and even pain. Russell Means, one of the fathers of the American Indian Movement, speaks of his categories of Indians. Along with the traditionals (folks who share old values), there’s apples (red on the outside, white on the inside), and the hang around the forts (have a government job). Then there’s the all-conference Indian, volunteers who live on honourariums for representing the band at any meeting anytime and anywhere a party might break out; all the better out of town and out of sight.
Most of the Indian comics play it up the same way. I saw Burntstick at the Best Western recently. Some whites were there. He asked for a show of hands to find they were sprinkled throughout the audience. “That’s good, like a little salt on a moose steak,” he said. He joked about being a redskin. Having an abbreviated alphabet –OPP, RCMP, no GST, and about an Indian banquet which would be bannock, lard and tea. By satirizing family violence, drinking and drugs, his message was clear without being said directly: Walk the Red Road.
Native humour I find deliciously dry, straight-faced. (Remember the Dead Dog Café skits on CBC Radio?). Indians often make statements; it’s up to you to figure it out –they’ll just leave it alone, you get it or you don’t. A fellow told me once about being in a residential school where the Catholic clergy forced assimilation on them. They were discussing the Virgin birth of Christ when one of them not quite accepting said laconically, “Ya, same t’ing happen to my sister.” Then he paused and added, “Two times.”
