Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Birch
This is a Birch Tree near the lake near my house. It's a man-made lake, I live a very urban life although it seems strange to say that in weather that makes it all but impossible to venture outside. There is blue sky and snow everywhere. The whole world is blue, gold and white. Very celestial.
Signs and Omens - another excerpt
3615 Commerce Place Hamburg NY
Lighthouse Inn
Irving, NY 14081
Suburbia gave way to a Reserve, or as they would call it here, a Reservation. I have often been recognized as Mohawk because of my father’s heritage. Truth be told I am probably only a quarter native and was raised absolutely wasp. Still, the community recognizes its own and in Canada I was often called upon to explain why I, a native woman, stood on the outside during pow wows, cultural events or other native gatherings where I was in attendance.
My attendance at these events has always been by chance or in the course of my work. By the typical coincidence life casts at our doorsteps, the one invisible part of my heritage was frequently very visible in my work as a Canadian researcher, writer and policy analyst.
When I left the apartment, I had expected to leave that behind.
I never knew the boundaries of my father’s people’s land. It never occurred to me that they might extend their reach into the U.S. Furthermore, I never considered that there might be Reserve lands within walking distance of urban centres but then again, my idea of walking distance had changed a lot.
I thought of American natives as southwestern, universally Navajo or maybe Cherokee but certainly not Cree or Mohawk. This is racist, I know it but my father was adamant in keeping this kind of information out of my life and as an adult, there were and are so many other things to think about, I simply never thought to look at it.
Yes here I was in Iroquoian land, recognizably Iroquoian and yet completely alien to the territory. The best idea, I thought, was to simply keep walking but of course, one has to stop when the body demands. I decided to take my first rest break at the Seneca One Stop, Tribally owned and operated.
11480 Southwestern Blvd.
The fact that I am walking along a truck route does not inspire confidence.
In the summer of 2000 my best friend and I answered a strange little ad in the paper and, as a duo, accepted a job. We agreed to travel to Manitoba and conduct science day camps in various communities. It sounded like fun; I assumed there were lots of small community centres in little towns across the province and envisioned us in a version of TV small-town America with the cast of locals changing week to week. I was wrong.
Manitoba is very sparsely populated. Aside from a handful of “cities” all of them smaller than the smallest suburb of Ottawa Manitoba is mostly Reserve land – or so it seemed to us. We were sent to travel from one Reserve to another with the aim of inspiring the children of the community to stay interested enough in school to continue with it. I learned a lot on that trip.
I learned I might pass for mixed but inside I was white. I learned that racism is not polite and that pictures of a community are never much like the community itself.
We were objects of hope and suspicion. I was exhausted at least half the time and fighting the shock of seeing the conditions on-Reserve combined with my own dismay at the fact that the little girls we met there nearly all told me they needed to have babies before they went to university only made it harder.
One day we arrived at a reserve bordering a remote lake in a region spotted with shallow lakes lined with gypsum. If you haven’t seen it before, gypsum looks like pieces of bone that have been tumbled smooth by the sea. These lakes are beautiful and calm. In the early morning light, bordered as they are by lush green grass and birch trees, the sight of one is idyllic. The ground cover is a mix of wild strawberries and other small wild plants. From the car it looks like a little paradise but once you get out that changes.
Housing on Reserve suffers almost universally from black mould. This is partly because construction standards are not high but mostly because there is not enough housing to avoid serious overcrowding and people, in general, being made mostly of water, exude a lot of excess moisture. We all shower, eat, drink and maybe most damaging in terms of mould, we breathe – constantly.
Houses that are meant to serve as home to four people might be able to handle eight. In a climate where the seasons are mild enough to allow a lot of open windows, eight or ten people in one house might not be a problem. In a harsh climate, filled with insect life, ten people in a house build for four is a guarantee of mould problems. On some Reserves, many Reserves, if you are living in a house with only ten people then you can consider yourself privileged.
Then there is the issue of clean water. City water pipes do not extend to Reserve lands. Frequently the water system is compromised, remote, difficult to maintain and expensive – a million things can go wrong and they often do. Water must be boiled almost constantly. Mould is unavoidable and with some justification Native families are angry about this and dislike strangers who look as though they come urban centres on sight. We certainly fit that description and walking through Seneca lands in the middle of winter, when everyone knows what everyone else is doing and maybe more importantly who everyone is, there can be little doubt that I looked out of place.
Walking through a Reservation I am like a seventh generation American-Japanese person walking through Nagasaki. I am a spectre of all the things that went wrong. Unable to speak the language and unaccustomed to suffering, I am an unwelcome ghost – the bitter reminder of catastrophic assimilation. If I could skip this leg of the journey – I would.
Irving, NY 14081
3466 Mayfield Rd, Cleveland, Cuyahoga,
to
1023 Kenilworth Ave, Cleveland Ohio
To a Canadian, all American cities are exactly what they project themselves to be. Of course this is not true and anyone old enough to read a newspaper or travel across town alone should know it but somehow, when the subject is a city in another country the illusions hold.
Here is what I knew about Cleveland – working class, beer and German food, middle America, unhip, unchic, folksy, pumpkins in autumn, snow in winter, flowers in spring, dogs in dog parks, hot dogs and baseball and blunt-faced racism that is innocent in its way because it is born out of ignorance. No famous romantic ever came from or admitted to Cleveland. No musicians, no artists, no writers. Cleveland is the working world to me, nine to five, Drew Carey, nothing more, nothing less.
But Cleveland is not any of that. Walking through the city is like walking through an idea of America in 1935. It is solid, forward thinking but possesses a sense of gravitas. It’s cold, of course, everything in cold in February but it has within it a sense of permanence, of determination. And there is a shoreline.
No less than Toronto or Chicago, Cleveland is shaped by its relationship to the lake. Despite the presence of the Rock and Roll hall of fame I don’t think anyone could tell me what the “Cleveland sound” was, if it ever existed. The existence of the museum seemed to me to be more the product of that undertone of determination than of any real connection to music. So, for me, Cleveland was about the lake and about silence.
There was also something about the place that seemed locked and mysterious to me. Cleveland, with its abandoned lighthouse, frozen lake and American flags seemed like a city that kept its own council and knew that good fences made good neighbours. I would never penetrate it.
An Elder once gave me a story about a man who went on a hunting trip with his friend on another shore of Lake Erie.
As they were travelling by canoe to their campsite they saw a turtle in the water beside them. One man decided they should take the turtle, clearly very old, and make a soup for their supper. The other, respecting the turtle’s age and the teachings of his Elders, that turtles are sacred creatures, decided they could not.
Well, you can decide not to take something but you cannot stop someone else from doing so. The hungry man took the turtle and that night at their campfire he made a soup. His friend refused to eat it and ate from their supplies instead, planning to hunt the next day. The light from their campfire made a great circle but also made the darkness surrounding them seem that much deeper. In a way, it rendered them blind.
As a consequence, the man who refused to eat the turtle soup never saw what was happening to his friend until it was too late. By the time he knew what was happening, no human strength could stop it.
a great lake
It looks like the ocean.
The difference being in what I expect;
seals, whales, barnacles,
salt encrustations, mountains beyond.
There is none of that; it is a wide, flat stretch of water, blue and sweet.
You could put your head in and drink it.
Remember Wilf’s turtle story.
The man who killed the turtle to eat the salty turtle flesh,
who used the lake’s own water to make the soup
at his dark campfire.
Remember how he was compelled to walk down to the shore and
laying his body down,
lips level with the small, light-lapping waves
on a quiet night,
and drinking and drinking
he could not stop.
Eventually, he slid into the lake
a magnet for his thirst, for turtle,
he slid into the lake and began dissolving,
became the body
of fresh drinking water
a place for the turtle to swim
world within - world without.
Lighthouse Inn
Irving, NY 14081
Suburbia gave way to a Reserve, or as they would call it here, a Reservation. I have often been recognized as Mohawk because of my father’s heritage. Truth be told I am probably only a quarter native and was raised absolutely wasp. Still, the community recognizes its own and in Canada I was often called upon to explain why I, a native woman, stood on the outside during pow wows, cultural events or other native gatherings where I was in attendance.
My attendance at these events has always been by chance or in the course of my work. By the typical coincidence life casts at our doorsteps, the one invisible part of my heritage was frequently very visible in my work as a Canadian researcher, writer and policy analyst.
When I left the apartment, I had expected to leave that behind.
I never knew the boundaries of my father’s people’s land. It never occurred to me that they might extend their reach into the U.S. Furthermore, I never considered that there might be Reserve lands within walking distance of urban centres but then again, my idea of walking distance had changed a lot.
I thought of American natives as southwestern, universally Navajo or maybe Cherokee but certainly not Cree or Mohawk. This is racist, I know it but my father was adamant in keeping this kind of information out of my life and as an adult, there were and are so many other things to think about, I simply never thought to look at it.
Yes here I was in Iroquoian land, recognizably Iroquoian and yet completely alien to the territory. The best idea, I thought, was to simply keep walking but of course, one has to stop when the body demands. I decided to take my first rest break at the Seneca One Stop, Tribally owned and operated.
11480 Southwestern Blvd.
The fact that I am walking along a truck route does not inspire confidence.
In the summer of 2000 my best friend and I answered a strange little ad in the paper and, as a duo, accepted a job. We agreed to travel to Manitoba and conduct science day camps in various communities. It sounded like fun; I assumed there were lots of small community centres in little towns across the province and envisioned us in a version of TV small-town America with the cast of locals changing week to week. I was wrong.
Manitoba is very sparsely populated. Aside from a handful of “cities” all of them smaller than the smallest suburb of Ottawa Manitoba is mostly Reserve land – or so it seemed to us. We were sent to travel from one Reserve to another with the aim of inspiring the children of the community to stay interested enough in school to continue with it. I learned a lot on that trip.
I learned I might pass for mixed but inside I was white. I learned that racism is not polite and that pictures of a community are never much like the community itself.
We were objects of hope and suspicion. I was exhausted at least half the time and fighting the shock of seeing the conditions on-Reserve combined with my own dismay at the fact that the little girls we met there nearly all told me they needed to have babies before they went to university only made it harder.
One day we arrived at a reserve bordering a remote lake in a region spotted with shallow lakes lined with gypsum. If you haven’t seen it before, gypsum looks like pieces of bone that have been tumbled smooth by the sea. These lakes are beautiful and calm. In the early morning light, bordered as they are by lush green grass and birch trees, the sight of one is idyllic. The ground cover is a mix of wild strawberries and other small wild plants. From the car it looks like a little paradise but once you get out that changes.
Housing on Reserve suffers almost universally from black mould. This is partly because construction standards are not high but mostly because there is not enough housing to avoid serious overcrowding and people, in general, being made mostly of water, exude a lot of excess moisture. We all shower, eat, drink and maybe most damaging in terms of mould, we breathe – constantly.
Houses that are meant to serve as home to four people might be able to handle eight. In a climate where the seasons are mild enough to allow a lot of open windows, eight or ten people in one house might not be a problem. In a harsh climate, filled with insect life, ten people in a house build for four is a guarantee of mould problems. On some Reserves, many Reserves, if you are living in a house with only ten people then you can consider yourself privileged.
Then there is the issue of clean water. City water pipes do not extend to Reserve lands. Frequently the water system is compromised, remote, difficult to maintain and expensive – a million things can go wrong and they often do. Water must be boiled almost constantly. Mould is unavoidable and with some justification Native families are angry about this and dislike strangers who look as though they come urban centres on sight. We certainly fit that description and walking through Seneca lands in the middle of winter, when everyone knows what everyone else is doing and maybe more importantly who everyone is, there can be little doubt that I looked out of place.
Walking through a Reservation I am like a seventh generation American-Japanese person walking through Nagasaki. I am a spectre of all the things that went wrong. Unable to speak the language and unaccustomed to suffering, I am an unwelcome ghost – the bitter reminder of catastrophic assimilation. If I could skip this leg of the journey – I would.
Irving, NY 14081
3466 Mayfield Rd, Cleveland, Cuyahoga,
to
1023 Kenilworth Ave, Cleveland Ohio
To a Canadian, all American cities are exactly what they project themselves to be. Of course this is not true and anyone old enough to read a newspaper or travel across town alone should know it but somehow, when the subject is a city in another country the illusions hold.
Here is what I knew about Cleveland – working class, beer and German food, middle America, unhip, unchic, folksy, pumpkins in autumn, snow in winter, flowers in spring, dogs in dog parks, hot dogs and baseball and blunt-faced racism that is innocent in its way because it is born out of ignorance. No famous romantic ever came from or admitted to Cleveland. No musicians, no artists, no writers. Cleveland is the working world to me, nine to five, Drew Carey, nothing more, nothing less.
But Cleveland is not any of that. Walking through the city is like walking through an idea of America in 1935. It is solid, forward thinking but possesses a sense of gravitas. It’s cold, of course, everything in cold in February but it has within it a sense of permanence, of determination. And there is a shoreline.
No less than Toronto or Chicago, Cleveland is shaped by its relationship to the lake. Despite the presence of the Rock and Roll hall of fame I don’t think anyone could tell me what the “Cleveland sound” was, if it ever existed. The existence of the museum seemed to me to be more the product of that undertone of determination than of any real connection to music. So, for me, Cleveland was about the lake and about silence.
There was also something about the place that seemed locked and mysterious to me. Cleveland, with its abandoned lighthouse, frozen lake and American flags seemed like a city that kept its own council and knew that good fences made good neighbours. I would never penetrate it.
An Elder once gave me a story about a man who went on a hunting trip with his friend on another shore of Lake Erie.
As they were travelling by canoe to their campsite they saw a turtle in the water beside them. One man decided they should take the turtle, clearly very old, and make a soup for their supper. The other, respecting the turtle’s age and the teachings of his Elders, that turtles are sacred creatures, decided they could not.
Well, you can decide not to take something but you cannot stop someone else from doing so. The hungry man took the turtle and that night at their campfire he made a soup. His friend refused to eat it and ate from their supplies instead, planning to hunt the next day. The light from their campfire made a great circle but also made the darkness surrounding them seem that much deeper. In a way, it rendered them blind.
As a consequence, the man who refused to eat the turtle soup never saw what was happening to his friend until it was too late. By the time he knew what was happening, no human strength could stop it.
a great lake
It looks like the ocean.
The difference being in what I expect;
seals, whales, barnacles,
salt encrustations, mountains beyond.
There is none of that; it is a wide, flat stretch of water, blue and sweet.
You could put your head in and drink it.
Remember Wilf’s turtle story.
The man who killed the turtle to eat the salty turtle flesh,
who used the lake’s own water to make the soup
at his dark campfire.
Remember how he was compelled to walk down to the shore and
laying his body down,
lips level with the small, light-lapping waves
on a quiet night,
and drinking and drinking
he could not stop.
Eventually, he slid into the lake
a magnet for his thirst, for turtle,
he slid into the lake and began dissolving,
became the body
of fresh drinking water
a place for the turtle to swim
world within - world without.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Signs and Omens: the first time
The first time it happened was during the summer. Life had finally calmed down. After a year of travelling and looking for a new way to lead my life I had returned to Ottawa and decided that any new life I began must grow out of the old one.
I went back to the city I left the previous September, and I returned to work, on a regular freelance basis for the same company I left before my sojourn in the west. I did not return to the same man or the same address. In fact, I had fallen in love, or thought I had, with someone who lived so far away that where I lived in Canada would be irrelevant until we either agreed to be together in his city or agreed to part company.
There is really no reason to go into the details of how love motivates me. I think it motivates about half of humanity to real action and that half is usually in love with the half that considers love to be a secondary consideration within the context of an orderly life. God thinks he’s funny, he seems to like the poetry of irony – he likes the big, dramatic, painful lessons, I suppose it’s a matter of perspective. On a minute to minute scale, in matters of intimacy and degrees of anguish experienced by the human heart, I don’t think he understands human beings at all.
So, I was in Ottawa on a hot summer day, with a man in the back of my mind and an erratic work schedule. My apartment was small but gifted with a good view and a fresh breeze. Things seemed stable.
I woke up one August morning and went into the bathroom. I turned the tap in the bathroom on and the water ran red.
For a few seconds I just looked at it in disbelief. It was the colour of a dissolved brick. I left it to run. It didn’t change. The color never wavered, it just stayed red. I turned off the tap and went into the living room.
Outside the day was cloudy again. It had been an unseasonably wet and grey summer, more like the west coast than Eastern Ontario. It promised to be a muggy day. I knew at once that I was looking at another fork in the road. I could accept things as they were and move directly forward or I could go back to the taps and try again.
I imagined a growing chaos in the streets below my balcony. The water in the pipes would be just one small sign of many, all coming together to form a kind of pre-apocalyptic landscape. Over the course of the previous year, buildings around the city had burned to ragged shells of brick and broken glass. It seemed as though more and more of the streets were torn up for construction but no men were working on the sites. It became difficult to get to work, every day I needed to find a new route, every day more and more of the streets around the office were blocked, even dug up – just pits, moats of broken cement and dirt where the bus could not pass. I could see the busses starting to change routes in ever diminishing circles around the transit station.
I could see panic just under the surface of the people I passed on the street.
I could see my hiking boots in the closet and the old backpack I bought for school wrinkled and stiff in the blanket box against the living room wall.
I knew I could turn toward my closet. Pull on my jeans, get out the boots and the backpack, turn the key in the lock and simply walk away. I had done so many unpredictable things over the last twelve months, nobody would notice one more.
That was the first time it happened. And that time stays with me.
I went back to the city I left the previous September, and I returned to work, on a regular freelance basis for the same company I left before my sojourn in the west. I did not return to the same man or the same address. In fact, I had fallen in love, or thought I had, with someone who lived so far away that where I lived in Canada would be irrelevant until we either agreed to be together in his city or agreed to part company.
There is really no reason to go into the details of how love motivates me. I think it motivates about half of humanity to real action and that half is usually in love with the half that considers love to be a secondary consideration within the context of an orderly life. God thinks he’s funny, he seems to like the poetry of irony – he likes the big, dramatic, painful lessons, I suppose it’s a matter of perspective. On a minute to minute scale, in matters of intimacy and degrees of anguish experienced by the human heart, I don’t think he understands human beings at all.
So, I was in Ottawa on a hot summer day, with a man in the back of my mind and an erratic work schedule. My apartment was small but gifted with a good view and a fresh breeze. Things seemed stable.
I woke up one August morning and went into the bathroom. I turned the tap in the bathroom on and the water ran red.
For a few seconds I just looked at it in disbelief. It was the colour of a dissolved brick. I left it to run. It didn’t change. The color never wavered, it just stayed red. I turned off the tap and went into the living room.
Outside the day was cloudy again. It had been an unseasonably wet and grey summer, more like the west coast than Eastern Ontario. It promised to be a muggy day. I knew at once that I was looking at another fork in the road. I could accept things as they were and move directly forward or I could go back to the taps and try again.
I imagined a growing chaos in the streets below my balcony. The water in the pipes would be just one small sign of many, all coming together to form a kind of pre-apocalyptic landscape. Over the course of the previous year, buildings around the city had burned to ragged shells of brick and broken glass. It seemed as though more and more of the streets were torn up for construction but no men were working on the sites. It became difficult to get to work, every day I needed to find a new route, every day more and more of the streets around the office were blocked, even dug up – just pits, moats of broken cement and dirt where the bus could not pass. I could see the busses starting to change routes in ever diminishing circles around the transit station.
I could see panic just under the surface of the people I passed on the street.
I could see my hiking boots in the closet and the old backpack I bought for school wrinkled and stiff in the blanket box against the living room wall.
I knew I could turn toward my closet. Pull on my jeans, get out the boots and the backpack, turn the key in the lock and simply walk away. I had done so many unpredictable things over the last twelve months, nobody would notice one more.
That was the first time it happened. And that time stays with me.
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