the northwest of Ontario and who lived a good three hours by bush plane to the south), treated them in exactly the same manner. There was an abundance of poverty. Most of the residents slept on the ground or floor, had no plumbing or electricity, and thought that the annual five dollars paid to them by the Indian agent was government largesse.
All major decisions were taken off the reserve and directives simply “came down as though from on high,” whether it was a matter of whose children should be sent out to the residential school at Pelican Narrows, Sioux Lookout, or how many beaver pelts a specific hunter and his family would be allowed to sell at the post in any given year. In later years, as the plight of both the Indians and the Inuit came much more to the fore of public concerns in the country, Canadians came to see the tragic results of all the many years of such paternalism.
The other issue that shouted aloud to me then was the perverse way in which Aboriginal spirituality was ignored or despised. This problem still resonates with me today whenever I read yet more shocking news stories about the high rate of suicide among young people on the reserves in the Big Trout region and in the various Native communities all around the shores of James Bay and Hudson Bay. Overall, Native spirituality from the earliest days of first contact was deliberately looked down upon, and wherever it dared any open expression it was instantly and crudely stifled. We now know the havoc wrought by the residential schools as tools of this campaign.
Instead of trying to discover and understand the spiritual traditions and rituals of the conquered first inhabitants of Canada, the government, the missionaries and non-Natives in general immediately assumed they were the vestiges of a savage past that needed to be eradicated as swiftly and as thoroughly as possible. One of the most shocking, even appalling, aspects of this situation is the fact that for over a hundred years it was Canada’s official policy to “take the Indian out of the Indian.” That is an exact quote from Sir Duncan Campbell Scott, head of the Indian Affairs department, as he defined his mandate early in the last century. The results have been a national scandal for years. It does not require a team of experts or a Royal Commission to discover that if you destroy the spiritual beliefs and practices of a people and discourage the use of their languages, you cut off the very wellspring of their being. You rob them of the source of that strength and meaning which made it possible for them to live full, happy and productive lives in one of the harshest environments on the face of the earth. We taught them to earn their living by trapping and then, when fashions or sensibilities “outside” suddenly changed, they were deprived of any viable means of earning a living. Faced with unemployment at a rate that would cause riots and chaos in the rest of the country, the great majority are today left relying wholly on welfare. The young people have nothing to do and nowhere to go. The suicide rate among males from fourteen to thirty is a literal horror story. The same is true for the Inuit as well.
There have been and continue to be attempts to revive Aboriginal religious traditions, but the grim truth is that an awful lot of this past has been forgotten and any meaningful recovery is going to take a huge amount of time and dedication on the part of those sincerely desirous of seeing a renaissance in our day. This is an area where the churches could help, if they could set aside for a while their arrogant assumption that the white man’s God and the white man’s Saviour is the only way of salvation for the world. My experiences at Big Trout had begun to teach me a lesson that I would take a long time to learn.*
In May 1998, I returned to Big Trout with my wife Susan for a week to mark the fiftieth anniversary of my first visit there. Much had changed. The Hudson’s Bay store is gone. In its place is a large Native-run supermarket complex, which includes a clothing store, hardware store, deep-fried-chicken outlet and gasoline pump. The old clapboard church that also served as my school is gone as well. Today’s school, with about 270 pupils from grades one through eleven, is much like schools everywhere, down to obscenities scribbled on the exterior. There’s a huge gymnasium and a computer room. Modern bungalows stand where teepees once were the norm. Some are in top condition—others are eyesores. But most at least have oil heating, a refrigerator and a TV set.
But there were less positive aspects as well. There is a growing crisis of diabetes, tuberculosis and other diseases. The detritus of consumer technology—machines, twisted snowmobiles, rusting vehicles, a million plastic containers—smother parts of the town in ugliness. Their annual cleanup was scheduled for the month following my visit, but like the rest of us, Big Trout residents have bought into the disposable society. And behind the growth and signs of prosperity is another dark shadow. As some angry teenagers told us, “There’s nothing to do here.” Hundreds of similar Native communities across Canada still lack safe drinking water. The infant mortality rate continues to be a national scandal. The plight of our Aboriginal peoples remains a disgrace.
When I first came to Big Trout Lake in 1948, these were an economically independent people to a large degree, living off the land. Today, much of the settlement is on welfare.
Susan and I loved the people. I was deeply moved to meet so many of my old students and to make new friends. But I came away feeling very sad. These people, as one former chief said, “need a deep healing of the spirit” in order to find a different future. The current Truth and Reconciliation hearings will hopefully be a small step in that direction.
* In June 2010, hearings began in a Truth and Reconciliation Event, a five-year project aimed at healing wounds in the Aboriginal communities of Canada caused by the residential schools. It has a budget of $60 million and is a product of the largest class action in Canadian history, brought by former students of the schools against the federal government and four churches who were involved. The church-run, government-funded residential schools began in the 1870s and the last one only closed in 1996. Children were taken, often forcibly, from their parents and traditional way of life. They were forbidden to speak their Native tongues or practise their culture. They were forced to become Christians, and many were physically or sexually abused. See editorials in the Toronto Star, July 24 and 25, 2010.
4
“THE LORD IS MY
LIGHT”: MOTTO OF
OXFORD UNIVERSITY
MY FATHER KNEW all about the Rhodes Scholarships many years before I was eligible to apply. Candidates had to be male (a restriction that thankfully has long since been removed), be in their final year at a Canadian university, and have a thorough track record of academic and athletic achievement together with some signs of leadership potential and of concern for the welfare of others. Cecil Rhodes, born in 1853, an imperialist who had made a fortune in the diamond mines of South Africa, created the scholarship fund in his will in 1902. It was to be the world’s first international study program. Ideally, Rhodes wanted the impossible: fully rounded individuals who would take back to their countries of origin the gifts offered by an Oxford education (something he didn’t complete all in one session because of poor health). When my father started to campaign and exhort me to apply, I wasn’t optimistic.
Several well-meaning but misinformed key people, some of whom I had hoped to put down as my necessary references, told me fairly directly that these scholarships always went to the sons of the educated “well-to-do” in Canadian life. The not-so-subtle subtext was that an east-ender whose parents were working-class immigrants from a family where nobody, at least in recent generations, had ever gone to university didn’t have a hope in Hades of getting the award. Recent studies of successful Rhodes Scholarship applicants over the years show this perception to have been quite erroneous. Fortunately, my father convinced me to move ahead with an application. I had the high marks, and while I wasn’t extremely proficient in any one particular sport, I had played intramural basketball and hockey for Wycliffe College. I was also a member of the university history club as well as the leader of a growing young people’s Bible class at a downtown church. And I had spent the three summers at Big Trout Lake teaching Cree children.
All of this was noted in my
