The original's solitude

ANDREW LODGE STAFF

I don’t know what they want . . . I know what they don’t want, though. They don’t wanna work. That’s what it seems like to me.” That’s what George, a logger and fourth generation Canadian of English- Norwegian descent, told me as we watched news of the Caledonia protest in Ontario on the television in a bar in Northern B.C..

A week earlier, I had been sitting around with a group of native guys just down the road from that very bar, on the reserve. When the topic of Caledonia came up and I asked what people thought, Donnie, one of the more outspoken of the group spoke up: “You white guys, you can’t understand . . . ” he trailed off amidst laughter. He was teasing and everyone thought it was funny, but it wasn’t meant as a joke.

The forgotten solitude

In 1945, Hugh MacLennan penned The Two Solitudes, for which he was later awarded the prestigious Governor General’s Award. Set in Montreal and hailed as the quintessential Canadian novel, Two Solitudes describes the so-called bi-cultural divide between English and French that lies at the heart of the nation (or nations as the case may be).

It would be historically naive to downplay the rift between French and English in this country. There is another history, though, one far less emphasized except in romantic tales of fur trade, rebellion, and today, coexistence. It is the story of resistance and domination, but ultimately of detachment. It is the story of the first inhabitants of this land and the more recent arrivals.

What follows are excerpts of conversations and experiences I’ve had that relate to this enduring divide. I spoke with both native and white folks, sometimes together but most often separately. Before the accusations fly, I’ll throw it on the table. The methodology is decidedly unscientific, the sample not random nor necessarily representative. The settings were deliberate at times, sometimes accidental: hitchhiking pick ups, work camps, hospital rooms, the local bar . . . and yes, as is the case with these sorts of settings, the respondents were sometimes inebriated.

Oh yeah. And I’m about as white as they come.

Worlds collide and everyone survives

Just outside of Nanaimo on B.C.’s Vancouver Island, a friend and I waited for a ride. My buddy had grown up farming in the northern part of the province and had never hitchhiked before. In fact, prior to this day he had thought hitchhiking was for hippies and losers. He was terrified. I tried to tell him it would be OK.

After not too long, a rusty pickup slowed down and pulled by us to a stop. As he had passed we had both seen inside the cab; the driver was a large native man with long hair and wrap-around shades. I started to throw my bag in the back of the truck. My friend grabbed my arm: “Are you crazy?” he said. “We can’t ride with him!” I pulled away and threw my bag in the back. Any ride’s a good ride and I’ll take what I can get, sang Bob Dylan. I love Dylan.

“Jump in,” I said as I hoisted myself up. The sliding window at the back of the cab slid open.

“Plenty of room up here,” came the voice from inside. I shrugged and hopped back down. My buddy had the look of a man who was suddenly resigned to the fact that the gallows were inevitable. We hopped into the cab. An hour of light conversation and we were dropped off at our destination, five miles out of the fellow’s way as it happened. As we walked down the road to the place where we were headed, my friend shared a couple of thoughts.

“That guy was an Indian! I have never been that close to an Indian before. I’ve never talked with one for more than a couple of seconds. That was weird. So fuckin’ weird. He was so . . . so . . . . ” His voice trailed off as he searched for words. “So normal!” He laughed. “Right on. This is gonna be a fun trip.”

Definition of a rough part of town

It was a Thursday night in the emergency room at St. Boniface Hospital where I was doing my training. The next guy to see was someone who had been jumped outside the Winnipeg Hotel on Main Street. His assailants had beat him up pretty good. He had cuts all over his face and one eye was already swollen shut. He was taking it pretty well, all things considered.

“You know how it is,” he said.

“Mother fuckers.”

“Rough part of town,” I responded as I looked him over.

The patient nodded. “Lots of Indians,” he said.

Deliberate separation

It was a hot day and I had been waiting for a ride for awhile deep in the heart of northern Alberta. Too long I had watched huge fancy pickups — testaments to the oil boom — drive by without stopping. Finally I was picked up by a dilapidated towtruck driven by a barefoot native guy with a little kid sitting beside him. We drove for quite a ways.

At some point far away from any settlement, the truck suddenly slowed down. I looked over at the driver. The little kid started bouncing in his seat. “Almost home,” he squealed.

The guy looked over at me. “We’re feeding you before you get back on the road.” We turned down a dirt road and drove for a few more miles until finally we came out into a clearing with a dozen or so old school buses and trailers.

“This is home,” the fellow announced as he got out of the truck. The place was out of this world. I spent awhile just walking around this makeshift community.

Later as we ate together with a large group of men, women, and kids, my curiosity got the better of me. I had to find out what was going on. The man who had picked me up spoke.

“We just felt we had to get away, for ourselves, for the kids. The bullshit on the rez, it was no place for us. So we got together and moved out here,” he looked at me and smiled. “You white people would call this a commune.” Everyone laughed. “And town . . . well,” he paused and then looked me in the eyes. “Town is a shitty place if you’re an Indian.”

Social Worker

“I’ve lived here for eight years now.” I’m talking with Kevin, a social worker in his late 50s who moved here, to one of Manitoba’s many remote reserves, for “a change of pace. I liked it enough that I stayed.”

“I like the life here. But it’s hard sometimes. Very lonely.”

“You’re around plenty of people,” I point out.

“Yeah, you know, but it’s like . . . these aren’t my people, you know? Sometimes I don’t really think they accept me. Sometimes it’s even like I think they resent me.”

Kevin works with everything from alcohol rehab programs to atrisk youth. It is hard work and the resources are often stretched. Sitting in a bar in Thompson, Man., Kevin looks tired.

“Is this an ‘us and them’ scenario going on here?” I ask.

He looks at me. “Oh yeah. For sure it is. If you’re from the outside you hang out with other outsiders. The cops, the teachers, the nurses, the pilots. The only way you don’t is if you marry in.”

“You can’t just hang out with the locals?” I persist.

Kevin shrugs. “I guess. It’s hard, you know?”

Moose meat with a smile

Three years ago, several of us were moving from town to town in Alberta and B.C. in search of a tree-planting contract not destroyed by the megacompanies and the softwood lumber dispute. It was looking bleak and we were pretty down and out, until we got a hot tip from another friend somewhere in the wilds of Manitoba.

“You guys gotta get out here as soon as you can. I’m on a First Nations plant and it rocks.”

With nothing left to lose we split for the heartland and soon were immersed in a completely different world. By day we made good money with the most placid boss we had ever had. At night we shared moose meat and shot the breeze with the five other older fellows that comprised the crew. The foreman’s sister owned the small outfit and she treated us all like family.

“You guys come into town and come by our house anytime you like,” she said. “We got freezers filled with meat, we got showers, you can watch TV, whatever you like.”

Everyone on the reserve soon came to know that there were four white guys out in camp working for the family. At the end of the contract, our boss had a big barbecue in her yard with all the moose we could eat and plenty of beer to wash it down. The whole town came out, partly for the party, partly to check us out. It was an unforgettable experience: hospitality from strangers that I had never experienced in such proportions anywhere else in Canada. For some reason, I think we made a good impression as well. Hopefully we’re all richer for it.

Perhaps the most strikingly ironic part of the Solitudes metaphor is the fact that in the case of the First Nations, there really was a solitude in North America prior to the European arrival in the middle of the last millennium. Different ethnicities to be sure, different ways of life, competing interests and conflicting peoples; all of this is certain, and certainly not surprising. But the difference was, in a sense, of degree, as opposed to of kind. The European arrival signalled a massive sea change on this front. But in a certain sense, it did not end the solitude. It seems that there has been and continues to be so little positive contact between the arrived/arriving groups and the first inhabitants, that “solitude” remains an apt descriptor.

Canada desperately clings to our imagined multiculturalism. It is part of the national discourse; children are formally indoctrinated into it from a young age as part of the educational curriculum. Multicultural implies a happy co-existence, an intermingling, if you will. The native world contrasts sharply with the non-native backdrop here in Canada, and the two worlds.