Filmmaker Lisa Jackson & Author Diane Haynes
Originally uploaded by Jane Ray’s Wildlife Rescue Series
In the fall of 2005, I travelled to the Eskasoni and Six Nations reserves as a ‘production assistant’ for Aboriginal filmmaker Lisa Jackson, and when I returned home, I wrote this letter for my friends and family. It’s about history, language, culture and the country we call home. It’s also about the launch of the first book in Jane Ray’s Wildlife Rescue Series: Flight or Fight. It’s long … so make yourself a hot chocolate, relax and enjoy!
Warning: Content concerning Canada’s residential schools may be disturbing to young readers.
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Hi everybody!
I’m back at my desk after three weeks away — Halifax, Cape Breton Island, Brantford, Toronto, Edmonton and home. Sporadic Internet access and a crazy schedule kept me from forwarding the regular updates I’d hoped to send. So here’s my letter home ….
I hitched a ride east on the back of a documentary. Well … actually, I was driving. My friend Lisa Jackson is an Anishinaabe filmmaker whose first documentary, Suckerfish, garnered her international attention. In 8 minutes, she captures the essence of her relationship with her mother, an Ojibwe woman from Sarnia, ON, who spent her childhood and early youth in one of the worst residential schools in the country, and who passed away about 10 years ago. The NFB offered Lisa the opportunity to make a second film, and she chose to focus on Aboriginal languages in Canada — the fact that they’re dying, why that matters, and what can be understood and expressed through them that cannot be captured in English.
For her research, she needed to visit a number of reserves across Canada, strongholds of the languages, or places where extraordinary efforts are being made to save them. Problem is, Lisa doesn’t drive. That’s where I came in. Driving Miss Jackson.
From October 7 through 20, I was Lisa’s “research assistant,” and my “gear” consisted of a couple of Chrysler Sebrings. We never bought a map for any of the cities we visited, I ran two red lights in two weeks, and I managed to get the second Sebring temporarily stuck on an above-ground streetcar girder on Bathurst Street in Toronto. Other than that, we managed exceedingly well.
From Vancouver, we flew to Halifax (an all-day affair), picked up Sebring number one, and hit the highway for Dartmouth, which is apparently the Surrey of Nova Scotia. That was my first taste of driving in a strange city in a strange car in the dark. I don’t know that I improved much over time; you’ll have to ask Lisa. I probably should have had a “How’s My Driving?” sticker on the back of the car, just to warn other folks on the road that that was a question worth asking.
Upon telling various locals we were ultimately headed to the Eskasoni reserve on Cape Breton Island, we were warned, “Oh, you don’t want to go there!” and “I wouldn’t go to Eskasoni in anything but an armoured truck.” The NFB budget didn’t allow for an armoured truck. We were going in the Sebring.
We overnighted at the Holiday Inn in Dartmouth, after a late-night dinner of baked lasagna and caesar salad (local east coast fare) at a dodgy pub called Whisky’s, by the ferry terminal. Wrestling was the television entertainment of choice, and the patrons looked as though they may have been related to the show’s “stars.”
The next morning, a Saturday, we checked out and drove over the Macdonald Bridge into Halifax, which seemed — in the brief time we had to explore — an ideal combination of Vancouver’s corporate towers and Victoria’s size and quaintness. I’d love to go back. We had breakfast at a trendy little cafe called Jane’s, which I considered an excellent omen; Jane is the name of the main character in my book.
I slacked off my very first day on the job. Whitecap, my publisher, had managed to book me a promotional event at the Eastern Shore Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre near Halifax that afternoon. So I abandoned Lisa to the care of a local friend, and commandeered the Sebring out to Eastern Shore. Lisa conducted her first interview, with Bernie Francis, a Mi’kmaq (Micmac) scholar and first-language speaker. And I survived my first on-the-road promo stop.
Eastern Shore is a wildlife rehab facility and the home of Hope Swinimer (two separate buildings), built in a cosy community among lakes and very near the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. Hope had managed to bring in about 15 young people and their parents for the weekend event, and I had my first taste of how passionate young people are about animals and the issues that affect them, the amazingly thoughtful and articulate questions they pose, and their excitement about a series of books that tackles the subject in a way that’s never been done before. That passion and excitement and the warmth of their response welcomed me everywhere I went. For those of you who attended the launch in September, you know that my book went out into the world on a wave of goodwill and support and the love of my family and friends. It is being received, it seems, in the very same spirit.
I had managed to fit 12 copies of the book into my suitcase along with three weeks’ worth of winter clothes; I sold them all that afternoon
We all met back in downtown Halifax for a pint (okay, a pint of hot chocolate in my case) with Brent Sedo, an old colleague from our REALM Magazine days, and then set out for Cape Breton Island. We had been told it was a 3.5 hour drive, so we left at about 6pm.
Then it started to rain. Then it got foggy. Then it got dark. The highways aren’t lit, and the right lane disappears every once in a while without warning and a semi is coming up on your left and there’s nowhere to go and you’re pretty sure everybody’s going to die and there’s no way the National Rental Car insurance is going to cover this.
We stopped in Antigonish. Thanks, Lisa.
The drive across Cape Breton the next morning was as beautiful as you’ve heard; the rain and fog had let up and the leaves were just starting to turn. The roads wind through the landscape and next to the sea and up and down hills and mountains. We stopped for lunch at a roadside cafe and bought some oatcakes and local apples, then continued on to North Sydney. It turned out the Best Western in North Sydney was about two hours from anywhere, including Sydney, and Eskasoni. So the next day we packed up again and moved to the (haunted) Royal Hotel on the Esplanade in Sydney. At this point, I checked an atlas; technically speaking, we were at the edge of the world.
Eskasoni (es-ga-ZO-nee) is a beautiful reserve about an hour outside of Sydney, bordered by lakes (everything in Cape Breton is bordered by water) and running in one long line down a peninsula-like stretch of land. It is a stronghold of the Mi’kmaq population (3,500) and of the language, and there are many first-language speakers. Many are elders and adults, as you’d expect, but parents have started teaching it to their children again, so children are growing up knowing it, and then attending immersion elementary and high schools as well. Lisa asked what could be expressed in Mi’kmaq that couldn’t be conveyed using English.
Most aboriginal languages in Canada are comprised primarily of verbs, as opposed to English, which is made up mostly of nouns. Things. Material objects. Mi’kmaq (MEEG-mm-ach) expresses everything in terms of process and relationship — the speaker’s relationship to the other person, or to the plants and animals of the earth. Linguists believe that although a person’s language does not actually dictate their thinking, it will bring certain ideas/foci/concepts to the forefront of thought over and over again by the way it’s structured. One theory poses that North American culture is as materialistic as it is because of the English language’s preoccupation with “things.”
We interviewed two Mi’kmaq elders in their home as young children ran in and out speaking their language. We interviewed students at Cape Breton University, a linguist in her home over a home-cooked meal, and attended a Mi’kmaq language class at the university (I learned the alphabet and the phonetics and memorized numbers from one to 10 — test me!). We spoke with the CEO of the Band (a lawyer and PhD student with UBC Law), and recorded a young boy singing a Mi’kmaq song he wrote for his aunt’s funeral. He lived with his father in a small trailer that doubled as a cigarette shop.
The reserve seemed to be a microcosm of society off the reserve — rich and poor and in-between; educated and illiterate; concerned about the fate of the language, and ignorant of any threat. I was told to expect to see band leaders driving around in Cadillacs and living in huge houses. And it’s true, in many cases when the government provided reserves with money to improve services and education, those in charge of its stewardship kept it for themselves. But why anybody should hold them to a different standard than other North American corporate leaders and politicians, I do not know.
The following Friday, we set out again for Halifax, where we were scheduled to catch a flight to Toronto. With the 3.5-hour drive time in mind, I rather obsessively scheduled six hours. As it turned out, we’d been badly misinformed, but were unaware because of breaking the trip into two legs on the way up; the drive back to Halifax took 5.5 hours … at 140km/hr.
A tripod part, a trip to Woozles Books (still no Flight or Fight in stock) and $50 worth of sushi later (Vancouver prices kick ass!), we left Halifax for the airport and said a fond (but fast — we were almost late for our flight) fairwell to our Sebring.
An uneventful flight (just the way I like ‘em) to Toronto brought us in at about 7:15 pm local time, at which point we were introduced to Sebring No. 2 and headed southwest for Brantford, home of The Great One.
I mean Wayne Gretzky, of course, but speaking of the great one, did you know the Iroquois tell the story of “the fatherless boy” who came to live among them, and who chose twelve people to learn his teachings and pass them along to the world? He is called the Peacemaker. And did you know that this legend predates Christian contact?
Once you’ve tasted 140 km/hr, you can’t go back. We barrelled down 401 and 403 with the best of them, and found our way through Brantford to Highway 54, which led onto the Six Nations reserve — a confederation of six First Nations that is one of the oldest confederate democracies and which was used as a model by Thomas Jefferson and other American founding fathers to build the constitution of the United States of America. This trip was nothing if not filled with irony.
It was late, and dark, when we pulled into the parking lot at the Bear’s Inn, a B&B right on the reserve made up of a collection of log cabins. We stayed in the Heron Building, in the Blue Heron Room. The owner had a black cat, named Shadow, who helped fill the void (I was well into kitty withdrawal by then).
Lisa had chosen to study the Mohawk (which translates roughly as “man-killer,” and which, understandably, the Mohawk people aren’t that fond of; the Mohawk term for Mohawk is Kanyen’keha [gan-yen-GAY-huh]; “people of the flint”). She had made contact with one Brian Maracle, originally a writer who lived in Ottawa and Vancouver, and who gave up his career to learn and then teach Kanyen’keha back on the reserve. With the help of a Kanyen’keha scholar working at Western (and whom we also interviewed), Brian had created an 8-month, full-time immersion program for anyone who was committed to recovering their language.
Mohawk is dying (a language dies somewhere in the world every two weeks; with about 5,000 left now, in a hundred years there may be nothing but English). Other than a few elders, there are virtually no first-language speakers. In other words, any young people or adults who speak it have learned it as a second language, and are not fluent. Brian is close; some of the students who have come through his program in the past 10 years and who’ve pursued their studies afterward are even closer. And they’ve come back to teach.
There are 10 students in the program this year, ranging from teenagers to elders, and all of them have given up jobs/schooling/other lives to be able to attend full time. They believe that if Mohawk dies, their culture will die. That whatever it means to be Mohawk will disappear.
The language is polysynthetic, meaning every word contains as much meaning as a full sentence in English. The word for “dad” actually says “he, to me, is father” — it expresses relationship, it puts the elder first, and it eliminates all the stigma English has with “stepdad” and “my mom’s new boyfriend.” The word for “one” actually says “he is one,” or “she is one.” It is a verb, not a noun or an adjective. “One” and “two” are verbs describing unity and duality. There are no Mohawk words for putting another person down, although there are many ways to express humour. There are so many permutations of words that it is possible to express all the minute variations of feeling through the language; there is, one interviewee told us, never any need to yell, or even to get angry. There is no word for goodbye.
Physicist David Bohm used to conjecture about a language that could express the relationships and processes he saw within the world of physics and quantum physics that he was studying. English certainly wasn’t capable. Near his death, he was introduced to Mohawk, and said, This is the language I’ve been looking for.
Proponents believe that if everyone spoke Mohawk, the world would be healthy and whole, instead of dirtied and half destroyed. There is no way in Mohawk to speak of the earth, or of water, or of plants or animals, without also speaking of your relationship to them. The words for “I need” actually say “all that I ever need is provided by the earth.” There would be no way to speak of “collateral damage;” we would have to say we took the lives of our brothers and sisters.
As you may have figured out by now, I didn’t sit outside in the Sebring listening to JackFM while Lisa conducted her interviews. As a matter of fact, somewhere around this time I began to get the distinct sense that the Canada I lived in and had known all my life was little more than a thin layer of onionskin sitting on top of the real home and native land. That somehow by meeting these people and sharing in these discussions, and by learning just a few words and their rich, multilayered meanings, I’d dropped through the onionskin and landed on the crust of a country that was miles and centuries deep. As soon as I accepted that there was another whole world right in front of me that I hadn’t been able to see before, I began to walk with a foot in both worlds, and to begin to see that other world, and to hear and understand things said there as though they were being transmitted to me over a great distance. But the distance wasn’t made up of miles; it was made up of time.
I am a Canadian citizen. (Yeah, yeah … I am Canadian.) This journey invited me to become a citizen of Kanata. I said yes.
It never occurred to me that at the same time Europeans imposed their cultures and religion and languages on the Aboriginal peoples, cross-polination was also occurring. It seems the conquerors weren’t that interested in giving credit to their new subjects for the things they “borrowed.” To give you an idea of how pervasive some elements of Aboriginal language and culture are throughout North America: “Uh-huh” is Mohawk for “yes.”
The imposition of the conquerors’ language and culture was the Canadian government’s explicit goal; the plan to eradicate the “Indians” and their way of life was just as explicit. Their method was the permanent break-up of families; their means, the residential schools. Most of us have heard something about them; some of them having stayed open as late as the 1990s, they’ve been in the news, mostly in the context of lawsuits against the governments and the churches that ran them for various types of abuse. There were hundreds of schools across Canada, and over 100,000 Aboriginal children from the ages of 5 through 16 went through them between the late 1800s and the 1970s.
Children were taken forcibly from their parents for over four generations, and although they received some education, they spent most of their time working — farming, cooking, building maintenance. Punishments for infraction of rules or escape attempts or talking to siblings of the opposite sex were severe; the punishments for speaking an Aboriginal language included needles through the tongue. Students were routinely subjected to abuse of all kinds, and hundreds died — of the repeated rapes and beatings, of malnutrition, of disease. Those who survive — and there are many thousands still alive — suffer post-traumatic stress disorder and other ailments typical of prolonged trauma and abuse, and many have turned to alcohol and drugs to numb the memories. A whole new perspective on the drunk Indian at the corner of Hastings and Main.
Near Six Nations is the Woodlands Cultural Centre, formerly the Mohawk Institute, and known by former students as the Mush Hole because of what they were fed. Lisa had planned to visit because the old school building contains a museum and gallery, and the old residence houses a library. When she heard it called the Mush Hole, though, she realized it was the school her mother had attended, and the visit took on another dimension.
I have been to the Dachau concentration camp museum in Germany. This was worse. The residence is essentially empty and unused, except for the library on the third floor — one small enclave of peace and relief in the whole edifice. Crew from the APTN came through some time ago with the intent of doing a broadcast program on the school; microphones without batteries picked up and recorded voices, presumably of children who had died there. The crew refused to return. I was nauseous as we toured through the building. Some areas were worse than others. The presence of the children and the sense of their suffering was overwhelming. There are people who work there full time; I could not spend a full day in that place. Brian Maracle’s partner Audrey told us that occasionally people will visit from the reserve and do ceremonies to feed and heal and release the children whose spirits are trapped there. But they don’t go often; it brings up too many memories of their own.
This Canada, too, is so far from the nice, polite nation I grew up in. But there it is, right at my feet. And here I am, a citizen.
We returned to the Mohawk immersion class for one last goodbye. The young daughters of one of the students sang us a song in Kanyen’keha and accompanied themselves by banging enthusiastically on plastic yogurt containers — all we could find to take the place of drums. It was exactly what we needed.
We drove into Toronto late last Thursday, easing ourselves into the spirit and culture of urban Canada by sitting in rush hour traffic for three hours. We dropped the trusty Sebring at National, I left Lisa at the ImagiNATIVE film festival and turned in early. The next morning, we said a rushed “bye for now” and went our separate ways
I spent the next 10 days visiting schools and libraries in Toronto and Edmonton, and talking about Flight or Fight. What a gift. I am convinced young people are coming into the world well aware of what they’re up against, of the legacy we’re leaving them. And now I’m convinced they’re up to the task. Bright, articulate, thoughtful, funny, ready to laugh, and ready to take a stand themselves. They love animals, they love a good story, and they’re disgusted with corporate and government irresponsibility. And they’re way smarter than we are. I could hardly keep up.
I had a home away from home with Marion in Toronto and with Susan in Edmonton. I was chauffered to Toronto events by the inimitable Trent Olson, whom I expect Whitecap will sorely miss. Good friends wined and dined me, made me home-cooked meals, and let me pet their cats. And yet, there were so many people I didn’t manage to see, and so many things we never managed to do — the Cabot Trail on CBI, $25 whale watching, Peggy’s Cove, shopping ….
A magical 40 days since my book launch, Flight or Fight is in Chapters/Indigo stores and other fine independents across the country, and available online at Amazon.ca. If you love me, you’ll post a review. :)
Thanks for listening. It’s good to be home. I live in a stunningly beautiful city, in an amazing land, that rests just on top of a mysterious country I never knew was there. I can never go back to not knowing. I think I will call it home someday.
Talk to you soon.
