BAB: Mongrel

The links to other BAB posts are at the bottom of this one--fifteen specific entries so far.

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My family has (in my completely unbiased opinion) a fascinating history. On my father's side, we can trace our Norwegian ancestry back to Erik the Red and his son, Leif Erikson, who was the first European to find North America. We also have scottish pirates who were kicked out of the Old Country for treason and United Empire Loyalists. On a more personal level, there are people who were divorced while they were in a coma, scandalous remarriages, rumours of illegitimate children, unwed teenage mothers, deathbed reconciliations, and heroes from both world wars. I like to blame my mongrel heritage for my ornery nature--you don't descend from Vikings and pirates and soldiers and iconoclasts and end up milquetoast.

My great-grandmother has one of those stories that could be turned into a novel: her father (the one who could trace his ancestry back to Leif) went back to Norway and never returned. Everyone is pretty certain he died. She was just a child at the time, and I think an only child; they lived on the Canadian western frontier. We're talking turn of the twentieth century here, the Wild West, and in the middle of nowhere, by european standards.

My great-great grandmother was left alone, on the Canadian frontier, to raise a daughter. What follows next is heartbreaking: they were trappers, fur-traders. My great-grandmother, from the age of about seven, was left on her own to trap and skin animals while her mother made the long trek to trading posts and back again. (And today we worry about letting our seven-year-olds walk to school by themselves.)

What happens after that is a complete mystery.

My great-grandmother marries and has children. I don't know who my great-grandfather was; I never met him (one of the scandalous stories referred to above is when my grandmother defied her family's wishes and married a divorced man who'd recently woken up from a coma and they fled east to Ontario). All I can say for certain is that the family spent an unknown period of time on a First Nations Reserve.

You cannot live on a First Nations reserve without First Nations ancestry; yet for the rest of her life, and for the rest of my grandmother's life, this was vehemently denied. Indians! No indian in their blood. Indians were dirty, and drunk. The very idea that they could have any indian blood in their veins!

My great-grandfather on my mother's side was half-indian, probably Cree, and we knew it. We knew it because, while he'd gone to college as a young man and graduated with high grades, no one would hire a dirty, drunken halfbreed and he worked for his entire life as a milkman.

All of the children on both sides 'passed'; that is, you would never guess from looking at any of us that there is anything but European blood in our veins. I am paler in July with my darkest tan than most white people are in January. A classmate of mine in highschool once told me I was the whitest girl he'd ever met; and my father asked me all throughout adolescence and well into adulthood, "Are you feeling well? You look so pale." I am pale enough that I have completely given up as hopeless the quest for a foundation or concealer that matches. All of them, the palest shades of every cosmetics line I've ever tried, are noticeably darker than my actual skin tone. You can see me in the dark.

Which is to say that the only effect my native ancestry has had on my life is to provide me with fodder for interesting stories--the denial of relatives on the one side and on the other outright bigotry and prejudice. But I myself have never had to experience any of this. I don't know what it's like. Certainly I've had every benefit that being white provides in a racist culture.

Every form of racism is dangerous and wrong, of course; but what I've noticed here in Canada is a level of undeserved complacency because our history of racism regarding African slaves is ever-so-marginally better than that south of the border. We emancipated first! The underground railroad led here! All well and good. But Canada's racism towards native peoples is ongoing and brutal, and it is the one thing I am most ashamed about my country.

To some extent what happened was unavoidable--no matter how benign the first explorers might have been, europeans carried germs with them that would have wiped out 95% of the people living here regardless. However, they weren't benign, and the european settlers set about wiping out the five per cent remaining with great vigour. Children were forcibly removed from their families and sent to residential schools were they were beaten if they spoke their own languages and violently converted to Christianity. Many of those children were also sexually abused. Those schools continued until well into the 20th century. All of the fertile and productive areas of the country were claimed by white folks, leaving only marginal lands for the remaining first nations, mostly in northern Canada, where agriculture and industry were almost doomed to failure. Laws were passed that stated that native Canadians were the mental equivalents of children, and so were not entitled to keep their earnings; the earnings were doled out to them as an allowance by government ministries. Those who left the reserves found it almost impossible to find employment.

Another friend of mine who also has native ancestry, and who also looks as white as a sheet of 20-lb bond paper, told me once of her shock when she took a train from her remote northern town south once, and walked through the 'indian car' to the 'white car.' The indian car was full of drunken people, and smelled of vomit and urine. But she didn't have to stay there because she looked white. This woman is my age; she was a teenager when this train trip happened; there was segregation of native and non-native Canadians in public transportation in the 1990s.

Are you shocked? I was.

And today?

Today, the UN writes report after report condemning Canada's treatment of its native peoples, especially in the north, comparing their living conditions to the third world. With no insulation in the houses, no running water, no plumbing, it's a fair comparison. We're talking north Canada here, people, where winter lasts seven months a year, and there is no insulation in the houses. The animal base for hunting has been destroyed. Unemployment on reserves hovers over 40%. Rates of ubstance abuse, suicide, domestic violence, violent crimes, are sky-high. And in the well-off cities in the south, folks complain in letters to the editor that those lazy indians don't even have to pay taxes.

Pay taxes on what?

What happens to those UN reports? A story or two in the papers, then nothing. It would destroy our Canadian self-concept as a peaceful, tolerant and diverse society to acknowledge the deep roots of racism against native peoples in our political and cultural lives. So we wring our hands for a few days, yell at our politicians for not doing anything, and nothing changes. Meanwhile we send troops to countries engaged in genocide all over the world as 'peacekeepers,' ignoring the genocide in our own country, at our own feet, still going on every day, today, right now.

And what am I doing about it?

Nothing.

My ignorance is so profound that I cannot think of one single thing I can do.

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Edited to add links, which will be updated to permalinks as they come in:

Six Until Me
Dawn is Breaking
Never Here Again
Under the Ponderosa
Expectant Waiting
This Is Me
Macarena
On Second Thought
Inner Dorothy
Following Frodo--and part two!
Questing Parson
The Reluctant Prophet
AboutMiche
Bub and Pie
Abbey
Zazen in the Moonlight
ChatNoire

Posted by Andrea at October 2, 2006 10:57 AM under The World

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