Raising the flag is a shared vision

Someone put a flag up on the mountain. Standing at the edge of the lake it flaps and waves high up where they helicopter-logged a few years back.
It’s a sheer slope, rugged and heavily treed. Getting there must have taken some gumption and the flag, the scarlet and white of it hard against the green, is a statement to that grit.
It takes you back as everything out on the land has a tendency to do. Back to when you first saw the waving glory of it.
Victoria Day 1965. I’d been adopted and moved from northern Ontario to Bradford, then a small town an hour’s drive from Toronto. By the time that holiday rolled around I’d been in my new home about a month.
In the school where they sent me, I was the only Indian kid. In fact, I was the only brown face anywhere.
In the class photo from that year I stuck out in that sea of white faces like a fencepost in a field of snow. It was lonely but there was no one to tell. It was devastating.
There was a huge, gaping hole in me that I had once used the land to fill, wandering for hours dreaming childish dreams of being lifted up and out, set down in a marvelous world where no one ever left and time was elastic, stretching out forever.
I didn’t know how to move there. Everything, even the language, the colloquial urban schoolboy rap, was new and hard on the ears.
Then, one day, the teacher announced the upcoming Queen’s birthday as we called it then. She went on to explain that for the first time, Bradford would raise the new Canadian flag on the Friday before the holiday weekend. There would be a band, the mayor would speak and there was to be a special ceremony to mark the raising of the new Canadian symbol.
She said the school wanted someone very special to raise the flag. The principal and the mayor had chosen me.
She said my people represented the original face of Canada and they wanted to honor that by having me raise the new flag. My classmates looked at me with a new respect.
But when the day came, I was nervous. There was going to be a news photographer there and my picture would be in the paper. There would be a big crowd. I was dressed in new clothes, my shoes shined and I was instructed very severely in how to behave. I sat in my chair barely able to listen to the speeches. Then they called my name.
The band struck up the first notes in Oh Canada. My hands grasped the lanyard. As the song began to swell I hauled on that rope and the flag inched up the pole then caught in the breeze, fluttered and began to wave. As I watched it gain the sky I felt honoured. I felt filled with a crazy sense of possibility like that flag could make anything happen.
Right then, I believed that Canada was a wish, a magic breath waiting to be exhaled. I believed that the song was a blessing and the flag was its standard. I believed, as I had been told, that my people were special, that I was special and that the blessings of that song and flag fell equally on my shoulders too.
Well, life happens and the road of it led me through the length and breadth of Canada. I have learned that the song is a dirge at times, a wail, a cry in the night. I have learned that its chorus excludes some voices and that the clamor of it, hidden in the thunder of the trumpets and the snap of the drums, is the holler of common voices, screaming to be heard.
The flag is a symbol of the separation between the red and the white. It’s hugely ironic because of that.
But I love this country. I love that flag. The majority of Native people do. Every land claim, every barricade, every protest is less a harangue for rights and property than it is a beseeching for the promise offered in that flag, represented by it. Equality. A shared vision, a shared responsibility. A wish, a held breath waiting to be exhaled.
Someone struggled up that mountain to plant that flag. Someone carried in them a wish for others to see this country as they do, for the flag to remind them that this land is a blessing and to live here an honour. It flaps in the breeze of this mountain morning, over everything, over every one.
It reminds us that there is hope, that there is a reward for the struggle toward equality.