What is My Culture?

What is my culture? I envy First Nations that the trip to their history and culture, albeit shredded by mooniyaw (that’s white people) and colonial policies, is still very short. Certainly culture adapts to changing times; but what happens when culture isn’t adapting, it is being imposed upon?

If I must go back to the roots of my culture, I would be time-traveling more than a thousand years. The Dewars (spelt joo-ers) were “Keepers of the Healing Stones” for the Clan McNab. Even at that time women were valued members of households (not as pictured by Western movies which always place the male in absolute dominance – witness movies about the Iroquois). For Celtic women to reclaim their place as partners in society is not feminism – it is cultural.

I think that it is wrong to adopt First Nations spiritual practices as if they are ours. Was sweet grass known to my ancestors? Was sage used for cleansing? Even as their drum circles move our hearts, they are not our drum circles. We can join them but we should not appropriate them. What did the Celts use for purification, for drums? How far into the mists of history do we need to time-travel to find the power of our spiritual journeys? 

In 2000, I did cross over, I used FN practices - largely because I didn't really have any of my own - in preparation to attend the Working Group on Indigenous Peoples in Geneva, I fasted, attended a sweat, placed my words before the Spirit, and then, to my surprise, I was given a prayer by a medicine man. I would be allowed to “perform” it only once. Even as he gave it to me, I knew that the WGIP was not the right place to ask people to join in the prayer – or that I was the right person to lead the assembly in the prayer. An opportunity did come soon after.

Quaker Aboriginal Affairs Committee (represented by me) was asked to present one workshop at Friends General Conference. After consultation, we chose to hold the workshop on the Draft Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. A US Quaker, head of their First Nations committee and a local band member were present. There was one member of the group who claimed to be of FN descent – a kind of a know-it-all blond guy with a pony tail and lots of beads, ribbons, etc – who kept interrupting with trivia. By mid-morning when we had a “nutrition break”, I think that most of us were tired of his monologues.

When we re-grouped, I asked if I could say a prayer that had been given to me. I stood, the words came. The experience was so powerful – I felt that the person who had given it to me had opened the universe. I stood and addressed the four directions and their representations. Unexpectedly, the forty or so participants stood with me and turned with me. I felt connected to a thousand generations. As we sat down, everyone was silent. Not unusual in a Quaker circle but this time when the words came, they came from a changed, uplifted place.

I was given the prayer to use only once. It was frightening and awe-inspiring at the same time. It was like standing on the edge of a cliff, thinking about flying – and suddenly you are flying!

This is what happens in a spiritual journey – finding that sense of awe, being in touch, however briefly with power outside of ourselves, knowing that it is there and then living so that it can become part of everyday life.

What is my spiritual culture? 

I realize that I’ve thrown my lot in with Quakers because silence is the medium by which Quakers find God, the Light, the Spirit within, Allah, or merely the transcendence that occurs when “two or three” meditate together. That is certainly ok for the journey but what of ceremony in my own life?

And what is the difference between a culture of an individual and the culture of a people? My Celtic ancestors were subdued by the Anglo-Saxons but their religion lived on for awhile underground as Pagan; by the time the Dewars were kicked off the land for the enclosures, they were no longer considered Celts.

Finding my personal spiritual culture is my journey of old age. It is the time when we should  be devoting ourselves to our next journey, that of the after-living. Perhaps our sole responsibility is to leave the world in a better condition than we found it. Finding a way to a right relationship with the spirit, with the land and with people rests with us, indivually and culturally. The mooniyaw have a long road to travel.

Clearing the Plains: Apology doesn't Cut it.

My knowledge of Canadian-Indigenous history was limited largely to school textbooks where the settlers “conquered” the land and made treaties with the Indians. Social relationships across the racial boundary were limited. There were no Indigenous kids in my primary school. My aunt and uncle hired their neighbours, a poverty-stricken Metis family for house work and animal/field work. She said that the man was hardworking and that the woman tanned hides. Their children rode on our school bus and mostly kept to themselves.

When we entered grade eight, the residential school kids came into our schools. Mostly they seemed a lot like us; every summer we became “drug-store Indians” so our skin colour was close to theirs. There was a boy whose first name was “Doctor” who was on the track team and always won the regionals. I developed a limited friendship with Amabelle Bear in grade nine, limited because the residential school forbade contact except in school!

Grade nine was the year that our father discovered that his hired hands (who were Cree from Camperville) had to cash their cheques through the Indian agent, who claimed 20%. He told us that he didn’t know of “a good Indian agent – they were all cheats and drunks.”
(He "banked" for them after that.)

That was the 1950’s.

Colonialism became a topic of conversation in the 1960’s; we settler kids recognized the role that our ancestors had played – “claiming the land” that was not ours. The prairies were the “commons” of aboriginal people just as the highlands had been the “commons” of Scotland.  Our ancestors, having been ousted from the commons in the British Isles (UK) came to North America did not recognize that they were repeating the abuse.

The Dewar family were sheep herders in the 1700’s when the industrial age began. The lords of the land claimed the commons for their private use and shut out the peasants in a series of events referred collectively as the “closures”.  The Dewars immigrated to Eastern Ontario but discovered that the land, the soil and the climate forced them to spread out – the lower farm productivity meant that each person needed more land than in Scotland. My grandfather was drawn west to claim a quarter-section (160 acres) near Dauphin, Manitoba in 1885 and work it as a homestead. He lived in a sod house in summer and a dirt hole in the winter. The second summer he went back to Ontario and eloped with his sweetheart – she spent the first winter of her married life in a 12 x 8 hole in the ground with her husband and her bachelor brother-in-law.

The Dewars worked for their survival in those days – they really did have to raise their own food and go hungry if they were unsuccessful – but most of the skills they needed were adaptable from their European peasant traditions. Little did they know that as they struggled to adapt old world skills to the prairies the First Nations peoples were forced into an agricultural model and starved onto the worst available land with no previous survival skills for an agrarian lifestyle. They had been successful nomads, hunters and gatherers for centuries.

About the same time that he discovered the Indian Agent cheque-cashing scam, dad discovered the Peasantry Act of the 1890’s. The Peasantry Act confiscated machinery that was more progressive on the theory that the Indians (sic) needed to progress through each step of agrarian development – they needed to start as peasants with only hand tools. Somehow Dad conveyed his indignation over the Metis and Cree along the Red River in Manitoba being forced to surrender their tools.

None of these egregious incidents prepared me for “Clearing the Plains”.

“Clearing the Plains” is not for the faint-hearted person, white, Indigenous or immigrant. It describes almost two centuries of crass disregard for the very people who helped settlers survive; it describes deliberate policies of starvation promulgated by the federal government under John A. MacDonald. It describes horrendous suffering – and, at times, great empathy. This is a tale of a planned and enacted genocide over more than a century. 

I say to Prime Minister Harper in his “apology” to First Nations peoples: “Mr Harper, 'Sorry' doesn’t cut it!”