One Native Life

There are in life fleeting moments that remain. A face, a scene, a voice, a sound, a feeling. Something that captures you, or that you capture. And deep down inside you feel as if there were an overwhelming and profound realisation that somehow things, people, time and places are connected. You cannot explain it, you cannot name it, but you feel it. Or it feels you.

In the subway tunnel I walked, glad to have escaped the night chill and slight drizzle of snow. He walked toward me, I took a look at his face. That fleeting moment. It was as if I had seen him before. His toned skin, wrinkled with age, with experience, with sorrow. His hair, rough weathered and graying, tied at the ends into two short braids. The expression was one of tiredness, but one that betrayed that however tired he was, he had to go on. His heavy boots echoed in the long, narrow tunnel, and on his back he hauled a small sac, as he hurriedly passed me by , on his way.

I looked ahead of me, allowed that image to sink in, to connect, to be realised. I turned back to look, but the tunnel was again empty. Into the warmth of the subway I had come, whereas out into the cold, cold night he went.

Perhaps I let my fantansies and stereotypes drive me and what I want to see. Perhaps "One Native Life" I am reading has coloured my mind to see the Native Indian in everyone with tonned skin and braided hair. But in those few seconds as our paths so unexpectedly crossed and then again traveled in separate ways, in separate directions, it was as if I could sense that man's pain and burdens. The one shared by so many First Nation Natives who are wandering the estranged lands of Canada in search of the native land once was truly theirs.

After one reading of Objibway Richard Wagamese's autobiography does not make me an expert in what is a complicated and troubled chapter of Canada's history. But the author, in such simple words, has crafted and captured a world and a past that is not only his story, but perhaps the story shared by many natives forcibly uprooted from their birth communities in childhood, and subsequently placed in residential schools in an attempt to assimilate the native children into (white) Canadian society. It was believed that though you cannot change the fact that they are (native) Indians, you can remove "the Indian out of them". What ensued is over a century of segregation, discrimination and destruction of native peoples, their cultures and languages. The result is a generation of vagrant natives growing up in foster homes, often subject to abuse, belittlement and inacceptance. The traumatic effects explains much of the homelessness, employment, substance abuse and high incidence of health problems and depression among First Nationals.

The irony is that the natives were there before the white Europeans and other immigrants. The term 'Canada' itself is a Huron term for "our village". "[H]ow cruelly a nation could forget one of its founding peoples", and dismiss the ways and livelihoods, the coexistence with nature and this wide, mysterious universe as savagery and hedonism. The First Nationals live(d) in harmony with the land, awed by the spirit of every rock and tree and creature, seeing and respecting the life and the beauty in the world around them. Modernity, imperialism and racism together aims/(-ed) to tame the land, to make slaves of the world and its resources, and worst of all, to tame peoples who once lived wild and free.

Now hundreds of thousands have lost their traditional connection with the land, their land, and are struggling to find themselves, find peace, find acceptance in a land that has become all too foreign. Many Natives wander the streets as "one of the lost ones, one of the disappeared ones, vanished into the vortex of foster care and adoption", thrown into a world of "separation, of cultural displacement". Yes, the government has apologised, and there are compsensation and survivor programmes aimed to wash away the anguish and pain. But how do you repare lives lost and families torn apart? How do you erase the memories of abuse, neglect and living life as ghosts that nobody sees and recognises?

Perhaps... perhaps that man, that stranger who seems to have suddenly become all so familiar for some unexplainable reason, is not a Native, is not lost, and is not longing for belonging. But that fleeting moment in the subway was reason enough to connect, to reflect, to realise, and most importantly, to share.

For he and I, and you and I, are all human beings trying to make the best out of time here on this land. We all have traumas, jubilations, defeats and triumps. We all shed tears of joy and sadness, and we all gaze with awe at the beauty of the rising and setting sun. We all marvel at the wonderful creatures that nature has adorned the land to keep us company. We are all in search of a home, in search of peace, love, security, and the kindness and compassion of another fellow human being.

That's what makes us human. It's not the colour of the skin, the culture we were born and live in, or the language and ways through which we conduct our lives that makes us human. It's in sharing a simple story, in sharing a little bit of all those simple but profound elements that make life worth living is captured, felt, and... shared.