Back in 1974 I was about as lost as you could possibly be. I’d left my adopted home a year or so before and had been living on the street, on welfare, unemployed or working at one dead end job after another for very little money. It was a bleak time. I felt snared by circumstance and left with little hope of better so I began to hit the road just to get away.
I’ve gotten to know Canada pretty well as a journalist. Since it all started in 1979, I’ve lived and worked in most of Canada’s major cities and I’ve experienced a lot of what we’ve come to know as our cultural mosaic. I’ve spent time with a lot of different cultures and it’s been an outstanding thing. The idea you get of a unified yet diverse homeland is empowering.
Some days, when you get to the middle of your fifties like I am, you look back and wonder how you ever made it this far without certain things happening. There are turns of fate and circumstance all along life’s road and at my age, you get to re-examine all of them. People get sick, people leave, and accidents happen, good fortune sprawls across your path as suddenly as summer rain. It’s a lot to consider.
Nowadays we live in the mountains of the BC Interior. My wife and I moved here full-time in 2007 after two frustrating years commuting from the Lower mainland. It’s hard to cope with a city when your heart resides in the open places. So we made the move permanent as soon as we could. Our home is a small rancher-style house that overlooks a lake that’s snagged between clefts of mountains. The view is astounding and to be able to write here is a pleasure and a tremendous gift.
I stand at the sink washing dishes. It’s one of the things that I do around our home that always feels like a ceremony. I can get meditative staring out the window at the lake and the mountain behind it and feeling the pull of the land all around me. It’s a centering thing really, and something that’s come to be important to me. Right after we eat I get to it, putting things away, squaring things and washing everything up. It’s a pleasure that I like to do alone.
We’re heading into our sixth year of being on our piece of land in the mountains. Some days it doesn’t seem like that long at all but then, as we’ve discovered, time has a different quality there. Things just move easier. I used to say slower, but over the years I’ve come to realize that it’s all the same pace wherever you are – only there it feels more elegant.
I met a man some years ago who was a vaunted Ojibwa teacher. He’d published books, taught at universities and been a high profile ethnological speaker. That means, he was able to talk about the entire gamut of Anishinabeg reality, both the historical and the contemporary. For the most part he was regarded as a learned, wise and pre-eminent expert on our culture.
You give up everything about your identity when you’re an Indian in the city. That’s the common belief among those who never really take the time to get to know us or our lifestyles. It’s all a big negative assumption, as though urban and Indian is a heap big negative.
It’s not though. I lived in cities for years and it was that more than anything that led me to such strong reliance on my culture and traditions. It was that more than anything that taught me that my identity is, and always was, an inside job. Living in an urban setting helped me realize that.
When I think back to the number of books that have affected my life, I’m incredulous. The line snakes back through 55 years and touches on virtually everything. Sometimes I feel as though the doorway to a library was where I was always supposed to go. In fact, the absence of effective and immediate teachers from my family and culture was removed from me as a toddler and the world of books offered me guidance and wisdom.
Becoming a professional writer is a process. I’ve been at it a long time now and I’m still learning, still working to grasp and use new tools, new approaches. This month will mark the 32nd year that I’ve collected a pay check for writing. In that time I’ve moved from newspaper to radio to television to novels, memoirs and poetry. Along the way I’ve learned incredible amounts of things about the world, life, philosophy and myself. I wouldn’t trade this life for anything.
When I was a boy growing up in my home community of Attawapiskat on the James Bay coast, I was deathly afraid of looking at the full moon.
I grew up...
I’m happy to see the ongoing support and assistance in our northern remote communities to help our people cope with so many lifelong and generational issues...