A Yankee in the Canadian Bush -- Racism

 

Adam Paishk with leg of moose at old boathouse

Chapter 10

Editor's note: It is appropriate that this chapter appears today as Sept. 30 is Orange Shirt Day in Canada. Started in 2013, Orange Shirt Day is a day to remember First Nations children who were taken away from their parents and sent to residential schools, from the 1860s to the 1990s. The Canadian

Government program was operated by various churches with the stated purpose of forcing the children to denounce their heritage and assimilate into what was considered mainstream culture. The children at the schools were forbidden to speak their native languages; their hair was cut and they were not allowed to contact their parents. In 2008 the Government apologized for the program which was widely recognized as cultural genocide. In addition to being ripped away from their families, the children were frequently assaulted, sexually assaulted, starved and used for medical experiments. Many of the children died at the schools, were buried in unmarked graves and their parents never told what happened to them.

Although I had never heard of the word "racist," it became obvious as the weeks went by that first year at camp that Bill Stupack hated "Indians." We were with Bill every day while he and Dad built Bill's new cabin about a mile from the camp. During that time he never missed an opportunity to point out that Indians were the "scourge" of the land. According to Bill they were lazy, stupid, thieving people who you should always avoid. Most of all, they were drunks, he said. Bill himself was a teetotaler.

We were new to Canada and Bill was really our only friend so far. It would have been easy to accept his views but to my surprise, Mom and Dad were not swayed to his side.

"Why does Bill hate Indians so much?" I asked my mom one day.

"I don't know," she said while she rolled out pie dough on the kitchen table. "We may never know.

"But here is what we believe: God created all people equal and he made them in lots of colours. We treat everybody the way we would like them to treat us -- with kindness and respect. Right?"

Mom would often read the Bible and seemed more religious than Dad although every once in awhile he surprised me when he would quote some biblical passage, usually verbatim, such as, in this case: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

Then Mom added something that I recognized at the time was a new life lesson and maybe not even one of the Commandments. Up until then it had been: don't lie, cheat, steal, swear or hurt other people plus five other Commandments that I didn't think applied to me yet. Pretty straightforward stuff. This new lesson took some thinking.

"We don't let other people pick our friends for us. God gave us a brain for a reason."

Huh! 

As far as I knew, Mom and Dad had no life experiences with Indians. There didn't seem to be any at Pickerel River other than the wife of the next door neighbour. Dad would surprise everyone for the rest of his life whenever mentioning the woman -- Mary -- by always immediately adding, "And she was a good woman!" as if someone was getting ready to say otherwise.

Anyway, after Bill moved into his new house I was surprised when on one of Dad's first trips to town with the boat, he brought back two "Indian" men -- Frank and Adam Paishk, brothers who lived in the old log cabins at the other end of the narrows that led to camp. Dad had hired them to help with some project. Frank, about 40, only stayed a couple of days but Adam, about 30, ended up working the rest of summer and fall. He also became our teacher about "Indian" ways. 

Frank and Adam had been born right in the cabins where they still lived. They were trappers in the winter and the area around camp was their registered trapline. It had been their father's before them.

Adam smiled any time you looked his way and finished almost every sentence with a laugh.

"He is so polite," my mom said one night after Adam had gone to one of the guest cabins for the night. There was no other place for him to sleep since Dad had not yet built a bunkhouse, and the guest cabins were nearly all empty anyway because we had so few customers.

Adam spoke perfect English and seemed well-educated. Not only could he read and write but "his handwriting is absolutely beautiful," noted Mom. "Better than mine even." That was a high compliment coming from someone whose writing was always commented upon.

"Where did you go to school?" she asked Adam. I don't remember where he said other than it wasn't Red Lake. Most likely it was Sioux Lookout, about 150 kilometers to the east or Kenora, a similar distance to the southwest. This mystified Mom.

"Was your family living there at the time?" she asked.

No, said Adam. His family had always lived at the west end of Red Lake.

"Then why did you go all the way there for school?" she persisted.

"That's where the Indian School is," Adam explained.

Oh! Indian kids and white kids didn't go to the same school! It was the first we knew about this but it would be four decades later that we learned about the horrors at those residential schools.

 We learned from Adam that the Indian people in the northwestern region of Ontario were Ojibway. 

"That's the same, I think, as in Eastern Ontario where we had a cabin," said Mom.

"Yes," Adam confirmed. "And there are Ojibways in Manitoba and even in some of the States. There are lots of Ojibway people," he laughed. "Up north, there are Cree," he added.

Mom found some Indian ornaments we had brought from the Pickerel River. One was a picture frame made of birchbark and decorated with porcupine quills and the other was a birchbark heart with two small drums or barrels and a canoe slung beneath. 

"Do Ojibway people here make these kinds of things?" she asked.

Adam said no. For one thing, there were no porcupines here. They had all died from a disease many years ago. 

In Red Lake, Ojibway women made things out of moose hide and decorated them with glass beads, he said.

Other things Adam taught us were that native people kept their persons and clothes fastidiously clean.  To a man, they were the hardest workers Mom and Dad had ever seen. They were also exceedingly clever and could make all sorts of things from the bush. Adam could make a whistle out of a poplar sapling in about two minutes. In the spring time when the sap was flowing heavily, he would cut a six-inch length and turn the bark completely off in one twist of his hand. Then he carved a notch and a flattened a stretch of the wood leading to the notch. He put the bark, which had come off intact, back on and handed it to me.

"Here, Danny, blow into this."

It tooted perfectly.

In the months that followed he made me a model Cessna 180 floatplane using bits of scrap aluminum flashing and also a large wooden plane with wheels and a propeller that would turn into the wind. He suspended the plane with three strings from a long pole. I could either sweep the pole through the air or run with it. The plane would "fly" with its prop spinning. I would pretend the grass was trees and would fly the plane into landings on the bare dirt trails around the camp.

Adam also taught me how to puncture a balsam blister with a twig, then throw it into the water. The twig will shoot forward, away from the resin exuding from the other end. It was like a boat under power.

One time Dad and Adam were cutting out windfalls across the trail on a portage lake. I would help by dragging away branches. We were hot and thirsty when we reached the lake and Adam surprised us by going directly to a small birch tree, cutting a six-inch strip of bark from it and then folding it into a cone. He then held the cone in place by splitting the end of a branch. He reached this dipper as far out into the lake as he could and passed it back to us for a drink. It was practically watertight and the birch gave the cold water a wonderful taste.

"That Adam is a quick study," observed Dad after Adam had worked at camp a couple of weeks.

He quickly put him to work making head and footboards for all the metal frame beds in camp. These were made out of three-inch diameter spruce, aspen and birch which Adam peeled with a drawknife. Dad then showed Adam how these could be fitted together by making a dowel at the ends of one piece and a hole, drilled with a brace and bit from Dad's toolbox, on another. The dowel was made by making a shallow cut with a saw around the log, then splitting the wood from the end toward the cut. Adam used his Mora hunting knife for this. When the dowel was nearly round, he could finish it with a little whittling with the knife and finally, sandpaper. It sounds laborious but Adam could fabricate the ends for a double bed in just a day. Single beds were much easier. He could produce four or five of these daily.

"Danny, do you know what Paishk means in Ojibway?" Adam asked me one day. Paishk, of course, was Adam's last name.

"No," I said.

"It means nighthawk," he said, then added. "Do you know what a nighthawk is?

I didn't.

"It's a bird that you see sometimes just before it gets dark. When I see one I'll come get you."

Sure enough, a day or so later, Adam pointed out the narrow-winged birds, zigzagging through the evening sky, catching bugs.

It occurred to me then to be on the lookout for Ojibway names of things. The first time I met someone named Keesic -- another common family name in the Red Lake area, I learned it meant "Blue Sky."

Ojibway people have really cool names, I thought. 

In the years that were to follow we learned that native people were nothing like what Bill Stupack had described although most of the men who worked at camp were indeed alcoholics. Mom and Dad didn't see that as a racial thing. They both came from large families and most of their brothers and sisters were alcoholics too. A couple of the men who guided at camp didn't drink at all and none of the few women did. We would also meet lots of Ojibway men and women who lived in Red Lake who were not drinkers.

Contrary to what Bill had told us, Ojibway people where the most decent, honourable people we had ever met. And they were scrupulously honest. I would go on to spend a lot of time with these people. They treated me like one of their own.

Nearly all the men who worked as guides and camp workers were single, homeless men. In the winter they trapped or worked as wood cutters. We didn't understand at the time why they didn't have homes but Dad recognized that they were the most skilled.

"These guys know the bush like the back of their hands. They were born there. There isn't a lake they haven't been to," he said.

We also realized that Ojibway people were almost all very poor. Dad thought it ridiculous that the government wanted them to live on reserves. Why? There was nothing to do there. We should help them build homes in town, he said.

We had a lot to learn about the history of native people, the racism that went behind segregating them onto reserves, the racism that saw them arrested and jailed for being intoxicated while white inebriates were given a ride home by the cops. We didn't know that in the past native people had been decimated by diseases brought by Europeans, that priests had told them their deaths were God's way of punishing them for "living like Indians," which is to say sustainably and with a reverence for all living things. 

We did know that the U.S. Constitution was fashioned after the Six Nations Confederacy. That was about all that was taught in our schools.

A couple of decades later I would marry a descendant of those Iroquois Confederacy or Haudenosaunee (People of the Long House.) Brenda Cooper's grandmother was a Mohawk from the Six Nations Reserve in Southern Ontario. Brenda was extremely proud of her heritage and would go on to teach me things she knew about her First Nation.

Ironically, Brenda's ancestors and mine were from the same basic area. Before the American Revolutionary War, the Mohawk had lived in what became Pennsylvania and western New York. My ancestors were from the Ohio-Pennsylvania area.

...to be continued

Others in this series...

Roots

Prologue

Rough Draft

Bad Ice

Why Here? 

A Gold Mine

Talking Bill into Selling

Red Lake in the '60s  

First Winter

Bullies
Wolverine