Dropped Threads 2 (18 page)

Our move here brings a sense of peace and wholeness to my life. I take time to walk the gravel roads and sit with my feet hanging over our dock. Away from the steel and concrete of Ontario, I reflect on the twists and turns that have brought me to this place. I begin to accept myself as a lesbian and a mother.

As I begin life with Heather, I know that some people will say I am placing Jonathan and Rachel at risk. They will argue that in our intolerant society, my children may be the objects of abuse because of their mother’s choices. Yet denying my own identity and submerging myself in marriage did not preserve them from harm.

During our first summer in Alberta, Rachel makes friends with a girl who lives a quarter of a mile down the road. Like a New Age Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, they are inseparable. With torn butterfly nets slung over their shoulders, they go in search of minnows, discover salamanders under rocks and listen to the rattle of cattails and orchestra of frogs.

One day, Rachel slams open the back door and tearfully announces that her new friend is no longer allowed to visit our home. She cannot come for sleepovers or share meals with us. After we calm Rachel down, Heather and I take a walk over to the girl’s house. When her mother answers the door, we are not invited over the threshold. The woman tells us that a mutual acquaintance informed her that we are lesbians. She is angry that Heather and I had not “warned” her about our orientation. Nothing we can say will shake the woman’s conviction that her daughter should not be exposed to “sinners” like us.

We return home from that encounter, expecting Rachel to blame us for the loss of her first friendship in her new home. But it is Rachel who keeps the faith. “I don’t want to be friends with anyone who doesn’t like my family,” she says.

Before fall arrives, we visit the large country school that Jonathan and Rachel will attend. We tell the principal that we are an “alternative” family and are concerned that our children may be subjected to the prejudice of others—teachers or peers. She reassures us with a smile, saying that she will not allow any such behaviour. We are filled with hope that Jon and Rachel will skim through school without a care, like the “whirligig” beetles that glide across the surface of our blue-green slough.

Despite the best intentions of the principal and our own efforts as parents, we cannot prevent Jonathan from making his own mistakes. Within a week of starting school, he gets into a fight with another boy. We are confronted with the fact that Jon has used his fists to let other boys know he’s just as tough as they are. In our female-headed, pacifist household, how can we help him express his masculinity? We take Jon jogging behind Heather as she pedals her bike for miles along dirt roads. We buy him drums, and he starts taking music lessons. Better for Jon to “beat the skins” than fight with his fists.

Jon and Rachel carry signs bearing the words “Hatred Is Not a Family Value” as we stand on the Alberta legislature grounds among the crowd of drag queens, pink-haired twenty-year-olds and office workers. We are all here to support Delwyn Vriend, a young man who lost his job at a local college because he is gay. The province’s human rights commission refused to investigate Vriend’s dismissal, claiming that prejudice against gays and lesbians was not covered in provincial legislation. He challenged that refusal, eventually taking his case to the Supreme Court. The justices agreed with Vriend, ruling that homophobia must be read into Alberta’s human rights laws.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court ruling is not enough for those who believe that it’s a sin to be gay. In letters that drip with condemnation and promises of violence against “sexual perverts,” they lobby Premier Ralph Klein to invoke the notwithstanding clause, a legal loophole in the Constitution that gives provinces the right to opt out of national legislation.

In front of the closed wooden doors of Alberta’s stately Parliament buildings, speakers demand that the government refrain from overturning the Supreme Court decision. Our children laugh and cheer, but Heather and I, ever watchful, scan the crowd for any sign that words of hate might be transformed into action.

The high school holds an open house when Jon is in Grade 11. He proudly takes Heather and me on a tour of his classrooms. One of the teachers asks him to introduce us. Without hesitation, Jon responds, “These are my two mothers.” The woman stares for a moment and then says slowly, “You can’t have two mothers, Jon.” He meets her gaze and says evenly, “Yes, I can.” The teacher is still shaking her head as we leave.

Today, thirty-two years after my father disappeared from my life, twenty-year-old Jonathan has the same wide smile, dark hair and sea-blue eyes as the man who once ran beside my bike. He sits at the kitchen table, wolfs down a plate full of pasta and tells us about the rock band he drums for, his job as a short-order cook and his life as a university student. His long-haired, teenage sister sits beside him, laughing and teasing her brother.

When Jon told us that he was moving out to live in the city and share a home with friends, a voice inside me shouted, No—you can’t leave! Then I knew. I no longer needed to protect and support him. I can let him go without letting him down. I can wave goodbye to my son. And this time, Heather and I will be there when he turns back to wave.

We Are More
                                Than Our Problems

Wanda Wuttunee

Memory: I’m in Fort Resolution, a tiny community of several hundred in the Northwest Territories. I awake to a hot, blue-sky summer day in July. The only place for toast is the pool hall up the dirt road, about a five-minute walk. I know how to blend in as a woman alone in these communities—no makeup, nondescript clothes, low-key behaviour—so I’m a bit startled when all of a sudden there’s a young man on a bicycle beside me. I didn’t hear him coming. “Hi. You’re Cree, aren’t you?” he asks. No one has ever guessed my heritage so quickly. I think for a moment and point to my face—“Fat cheeks?” He nods. He balances well in the rutty road as he rides beside me. Just before I turn into the pool hall, he says, “If I don’t find someone to drink with soon, I am going to blow my head off.” All I can think to say is “It sure is a beautiful day. Enjoy it.” After breakfast, I go to the school to work with three locals who have a vision for themselves and their community. As part of a research project on economic development in First Nations communities, I am there to help these people get small businesses started so their youth have options other than the ones there for the young man on the bicycle.

Another memory: Jacqueline, a young woman in Haines Junction, Yukon, has chauffeured me around for a weekend while I visit her community to help local people who yearn for small businesses. She is an artist and also works as an economic development officer. We’re staying at her family’s cabin. On this soft June evening just before the sun goes down, we can hear the rhythmic thumping of the grouse immersed in their mating rituals. An energetic granny is looking after the meals for the workshop. When Jacqueline tells her about the grouse and the thumping, the granny says with a twinkle in her eye, “You know what he is saying?” She starts flapping her arms and strutting, “I feel like chicken tonight!” Jacqueline’s laughter rings out in the warm evening air. Later, when she tells me of the devastating impact of the suicides in her family—one after the other, after the other—her personal courage and integrity astound me. After tears, we laugh again. Government statistics cannot measure the resilience of that human spirit.

And another community. Nestled in the northeast portion of the province of Manitoba is the small fly-in community of St. Theresa Point. A mall houses the “economic heart” of this isolated place—a Northern Store, a chain retail outlet, a fast-food business, and a convenience store that is closed all the time that I am there. To deal with the 80 to 90 percent unemployment, there is one economic development officer and two staff members. It’s December when I arrive to interview these people and other community members to find out about their vision for community development. The place where I stay used to house the nuns. The windows are covered in plastic for insulation that doesn’t work too well, so while I fit in some marking for the Native studies course I teach at university, I’m on my bed huddled beneath five quilts.

And yet, my strongest memory is of the joy I share with these First Nations people. We gather at a radio station to play music and help raise money for a local charity. The big question is what designer made my socks—as a guest in town, I’m an object of much interest. We get caller after caller flinging answers at us. The fifth caller in wins a bingo card with the answer—Calvin Klein! In this remote little community, where the lineup stretches 150 feet down the mall at 9:00 a.m. on welfare day, the laughter flows freely, people get engaged in a guessing game for charity and they know about a designer from New York. We finish off the day with a ceremony honouring the elders. Smiling faces in a community known in the outside world by a single statistic—unemployment.

St. Theresa Point, Manitoba. Haines Junction, Yukon. Fort Resolution, Northwest Territories. Tiny dots on the map. Hardly worth noticing. The people living in these places are some of the faces behind the statistics that any non-Aboriginal Canadian might know about from the “newspaper reality”—headlines about our problems, about Aboriginal people being at greater risk for a wide range of medical problems, including infectious and cardiovascular diseases, as well as chronic conditions such as diabetes and tuberculosis; about how life expectancy for our people is seven to eight years fewer than for other Canadians; about the frequency of alcohol and substance abuse, family violence and suicide, which alone is two to three times higher for First Nations people than for other Canadians.

I am a teacher. While my training is in management studies, I teach at a university in the Native Studies department. I hold two degrees in business and a law degree. In 2000, I finished a Ph.D. on Aboriginal economy. One of the first things I say to my students when we meet in the classroom is that my goal is to help them see beyond these “problem” statistics and to move the understanding of my people from their heads—the logical, rational and objective place that universities ask us to operate from—to their hearts. That is, I believe, the beginning of true knowledge, wisdom and understanding. Those are the teachings that I follow.

Logic dictates that people with huge obstacles that go to the essence of their existence are too far down a dark hole to have any kind of hope for significant and lasting change. That has not been my experience. That is not what I teach my students. These statistics do point to huge problems that we have to come to grips with—but are they the whole picture? Where am I in those statistics? Where are my colleagues and some of my relatives? Where are the ones who live their lives with courage, pride and delight? Like Auntie Maggie, a trapper woman who laughs through hardships and celebrates life and its natural ending after outliving three husbands in northern Manitoba. Like Jane Priscilla Wuttunee, my granny, a healer and mother of twelve. Like James Wuttunee, my grandfather, who fed and clothed his family with grace, good heart and hard, hard work. We’ve been the invisible ones and, for far too long, the silent.

We are more than our problems, and the chorus of our voices is getting stronger. In the work I do, I witness the positive changes happening in individuals, families and communities. I know other statistics that balance those we read in the daily newspapers, the ones that represent the inroads we are making in education and business: currently there are over forty thousand Aboriginals enrolled in colleges and universities in Canada, up from a total of sixty in 1961; and there are over twenty-two thousand viable Aboriginal-owned Canadian businesses, up from a total of eighty-five hundred in 1981. But statistics can never get to the heart of who we are; for that we need others to know the stories of individual Aboriginal people who stand out in our communities—people like my father, William Wuttunee.

William, of Cree, Irish and Scottish heritage, was born in 1928 on Red Pheasant Reserve, Saskatchewan, a tiny place of about thirty-six square miles—typical, dirt poor and filled with people who do the best they can in trying circumstances. He had eight brothers and sisters (three others died) who were born to Priscilla and James Wuttunee. James made the decision to move his family from the reserve to the nearby small town, Battleford. He felt he had to give up his status as an Indian in order to provide his family with a better life; he did not, however, give up who he was or his integrity as an Indian.

My father attended residential school for two years, with the resulting emotional scars suffered by any ten-year-old who feels as though school turned out to be “a prison for unknown crimes.” After earning the highest marks across Canada in Grade 12, my father won a scholarship to McGill University. He studied law and eventually completed his studies at the University of Saskatchewan. He met my mother in Regina, married despite the opposition at that time from my mother’s Caucasian, strict Catholic family and had five children. I am the eldest.

My father entered into a pact with one of his brothers: they would raise their children without the burden of anger and shame from our history. No passing down of the outrage against the injustices suffered by our people. Supported by my mother, who feels strongly connected to Aboriginal culture, my siblings and I learned the positive, beautiful things about being Indian. My father taught us about our relatives: we knew our aunts, uncles and cousins; we visited the reserve regularly and learned to take pride in our culture. These heart gifts are part of me.

Did you read about my father or about my family in the newspaper this morning? We are part of the reality that isn’t often reported on. Newspapers don’t tell the whole story, but they may well be the main source of information for most Canadians on the pulse of Indian country. Even if these stories run alongside ones about other “problem” circumstances or people in Canada, somehow they take on a different hue if they are about Aboriginal peoples. They sit differently. Reaction is often, Why waste money on a losing proposition? Why isn’t anything changing? Sometimes those attitudes colour encounters we have with others.

One particularly memorable encounter for me was with a man from a business-support program in B.C. who was attending a conference on entrepreneurship that I, as an M.B.A. student, was also attending. We began talking over lunch, and for some reason, this man felt he should advise me that I had three strikes against me. He stated matter-of-factly that my age (thirty-two) and the facts that I was female and Aboriginal were deterrents to my becoming successful in business.

I consider those traits my biggest assets.

It may be hard to have hope for us when so many are surrounded by a darkness born out of painful personal experiences. But there is hope. I carry hope because of what I see happening in individual lives, what I witness in small, isolated communities and because of the many gifts I have been given by my father and my mother—pride in my heritage, an ability to see the beauty of the human spirit and a belief in myself. I see the hope, the dreams and the reality that are not measured by those statistics you read in the newspaper. I see the bright lights shining across this country. They are the heart and soul of my people. This story is my gift to them.