WINTER SETTLES OVER THE NORTH COUNTRY, SLICKING THE ROADS and icing the trees. I glance down at my hands while pumping gas one afternoon and discover they have desiccated into lobster claws, red and crinkled. Worried I could lose a finger in the time it takes to fill a gas tank, I retreat to the Victorian, crank up the thermostat, and refuse to leave except to teach. When temperatures plunge into the negative twenties and I must not only shovel a path to the garage each morning but also chip away the ice that sealed its door shut the night before, I abscond to Texas.
Bad timing. While I’m gone, one of the biggest indigenous rights movements in Canada’s history erupts. Called “Idle No More,” it is triggered by legislation intent on eliminating key protections for water, fish, Aboriginal land, and Native sovereignty. Four Saskatchewan women hold a teach-in widely touted in social media, and flash mobs soon begin descending upon shopping malls and performing round dances before bewildered Christmas shoppers. Other protesters block major railways, highways, and ferry lines. Attawapiskat chief Theresa Spence erects a teepee on Victoria Island by Parliament Hill and launches a hunger strike1 to persuade Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the governor general to meet with her and other indigenous leaders. The following day, an Attawapiskat elder swears off food as well.2 The movement spreads, with solidarity demonstrations in Stockholm, London, Berlin, Auckland, Cairo, and a number of U.S. cities, as well as at the Mall of America3 in Minneapolis. I watch these developments with excitement and longing from my MacBook in Corpus Christi. The hardest day to miss is January 5, when thousands of Indians shut down border crossings throughout Canada. At Akwesasne, Mohawks occupy the bridge connecting the portion of their nation called Cornwall Island with mainland Canada for three hours as they round-dance, drum, chant, and sing.
As soon as I return to the North Country, I call Bob, the elder who showed me around Thompson Island. Not only am I eager to discuss Idle No More, I also want to learn more about him. During our hike through the forest that afternoon, we discovered we have mixed parentage in common. While I relate much more strongly with one heritage over the other, however, hybridity is his identity. He calls himself “Métis” with a pride seldom heard from mestizos.
Bob lives with his wife, Marie (a Mohawk), on the far eastern tip of Cornwall Island. From the bridge, you pass a Peace Pipe Tobacco and Convenience Store, a string of self-built houses, a snowman, young men joyriding an ATV, and an arena shaped like a turtle before turning on the last road before the gravel falls into the St. Lawrence River. Marie’s homestead spreads across five acres of fields. Bob envelops me in a hug, his bear claw necklace tickling my face, and invites me inside. Every room contains a conversation piece—artwork, hanging textiles, a box of dried corn, a bowl of tobacco leaves, dozens of old photographs—but he is most eager to show off a hand-woven sash festooned with fringe. Back in the nineteenth century, French Canadian men tied sashes around the waists of their coats to keep out the cold. The style has since been adopted by the Métis.
“I was talked down to by the whites for being Indian, and by the Indians for being white. ‘Half-breed’ is usually considered derogatory, but the Métis are proud of it,” Bob says as he drapes it over my outstretched palms. Cherry-red, it is patterned with arrowheads colored yellow, green, and blue. Then he shows me the Métis flag, which features the sign for infinity: a horizontal number eight. It represents the two cultures coming together forever—“nine months after the first Europeans arrived!” he jokes.
That’s pretty much how it happened, though. European men (particularly fur trappers) quickly realized that Native women were essential to their survival in the punishing new climate. Not only did they provide food and pleasure, but they assisted with translations and culture clashes as well. The trappers invited women to live with them in the villages surrounding the trading posts where they sold their pelts, and together they had children who eventually became employees of the trading companies too.
While European men mostly benefited from this arrangement, it was a grave risk for the women. Until 1985, under Canada’s Indian Act, Aboriginal women were considered “disenfranchised” when they married non-Native men. Not only did they (and their children) lose their status as Indians, but they were also prohibited from living on their reserve, inheriting family property, receiving treaty benefits, and being buried in their ancestral cemetery.4 Aboriginal men who married non-Native women, meanwhile, could keep all their rights plus gain Indian status for their wives (despite the fact that many tribes are matrilineal). This, Bob says, is partially why Métis rights organizations were formed. “A Native woman would marry a white man and he would abuse her and leave her, and she’d be left on the outskirts of a reserve with her children trying to fend for herself, because her tribe would not take her back,” he said. “Our organizations sprang from there, to get those women housing, to give them some support.”
Gradually, the offspring of these mixed couples developed a culture of their own with a distinct music, dance, dress, and language (a fusion of Cree and French called Michif). Although Bob says their population is well over a million, the government estimates less than half that amount. One reason for the discrepancy is confusion over who can claim to be Métis. The Supreme Court devised the following test in 2003: self-identifying as such, having an ancestral connection to a Métis community, and being accepted by that community as a member. That method is hotly debated in Aboriginal communities, along with whether or not Métis should have treaty rights, yet as someone long afflicted with an inferiority complex over her hybridity, I am actually impressed that they receive group recognition5 at all. I once interviewed fifty biracial people for a book project about mixed identity. Every single one of us struggled over existential isolation but were so guilt-ridden that we could hardly admit it. I eventually abandoned the project for the same reason.
“My mother was Cree and my father was like Daniel Boone, a crazy Irish fur trapper,” Bob says as we sink into the couch with glasses of iced tea. “He was nineteen and she was sixteen when she got pregnant, and a priest got the authorities to throw him in jail for six months. But when he got out, he went back to her and proved he would be with her, and they stuck it out.”
The couple reared five children in a region so remote, the nearest full-fledged hospital was a three-hour flight away. This distance proved disastrous when she contracted tuberculosis after giving birth to Bob. When it was clear she would not recover,6 the father brought their baby home alone. The government soon took away Bob’s four older siblings and sent them off to Indian Residential School (or “Catholic concentration camp,” as he calls it) while Bob got placed with his maternal great-grandmother. Having lost his entire family, his father headed south.
Out in the bush, Bob was raised as a traditional Cree. His grandfather and uncles taught him how to trap animals with fine pelts—muskrat, beaver, otter, squirrel, weasel—and brought him along when they tracked down caribou and moose. His great-grandmother taught him how to harvest sweet flag and hold a sliver beneath his tongue to alleviate ache. He spoke Michif at home and studied English at school.
When Bob was ten, his father paid him a visit. He had married another Cree and started another family (for an ultimate headcount of fourteen children with three different women). He invited Bob to join them. Devoted to his great-grandmother, Bob said no, yet she contracted cancer soon after and checked into a hospital. All of thirteen, Bob found himself alone in the house and then—when she died two years later—in the world. He worked odd jobs to save some cash, then set about finding the siblings who had scattered across the country post–residential school.
“[At school] my brother used to wet the bed a lot. Those nuns, they threw him out in the snow bank to punish him,” he says. “When he was fifteen, he beat up a priest who was mean to him. He ran away from the school, and the authorities chased him down and threw him into boarding school where runaway kids go, like a jail. He got out, ran away, stole a car, which got him four years of jail, then he got out and did the same thing, stole a car and got four years. Then he did it again. Three times, twelve years of jail.”
He found his three sisters in Edmonton, Calgary, and British Columbia. “One of them lost an eye at the school. She got hit with a slingshot, and no one ever fixed it. She suffered for it all her life until she was fifty and then got it done herself,” he says with a wince. “The kids were not looked after at those schools, eh? They just forced them to go to church and pray. They punished them for speaking Cree. They bullied them to work day and night. They fed them poorly. My brother never recovered.”
“Where is he now?”
“Dead.”
His family dispersed, Bob decided to make a new one. He married a Czech woman in Vancouver, landed a good job at Housing Authority, and started having children (for an ultimate headcount of eight, with three different women). None of these joys salved his binary ache, though. Despite his traditional upbringing, he received a cool reception from the urban Native community. He, in turn, distrusted most white people. Whiskey became his confidant. He got charged with drunk driving five times in five years. As his addiction intensified, he took to Skid Road, a Vancouver strip famous for its single-room occupancy hotels, bars, drunks, derelicts, and prostitutes.
“Native people, we had nothing in our own community, so we would go to the city to find even less, so we would go to Skid Road because we couldn’t handle it,” he says.
A Native Friendship Center helped him sober up in the late sixties. He started dancing in powwows and combing the shelves of libraries. Riding the fervor of the era, he politicized, too. For many years, he advocated for the rights of Native fur trappers, dressing in buckskin and setting up teepees whenever Greenpeace and animal rights groups staged a protest. Then he became involved with the Métis, serving as president of the Northwest Territories chapter and assisting with negotiations to include them as a constitutionally recognized Aboriginal group along with the Inuit and the First Nations in 1982. Since moving to Akwesasne with Marie in the late eighties, however, he has curtailed his involvement.
“There is a divide-and-conquer mentality among the Canadians,” he says. “Mining companies and nuclear companies use the Métis to say they have Native involvement when the First Nations don’t want to get involved. Métis jump in like a dirty shirt. No wonder First Nations don’t like us. The Métis are starting to work against other Aboriginal people.”
Which brings us to the Idle No More movement. Bob has been urging Métis leaders to get involved but with scant success. “They fear losing funding from the government, even though the government just gives them an office and salary, nothing terribly significant.”
After telling me about the great local actions I’ve missed, Bob assures me the best is just ahead. In early January, six young Crees left their remote village of Whapmagoostui, Quebec, on the shores of Hudson Bay and started snowshoeing across Canada in the name of peace. Hundreds have since joined them for what has been pegged “The Journey of Nishiyuu,” or the Journey of the People. They’ll be arriving in Ottawa at the end of March to petition Parliament for better conditions for all Aboriginal people. Indians will be driving in from all over to greet them at the end of their thousand-mile trek, Bob says. We vow to do so, too.
WINTER INTENSIFIES. In the mornings, I trudge past snowdrifts taller than me, past icicles shaped like daggers. The sun sinks before class is over, and I walk home in darkness between snow banks glowing with moonlight. Some days it snows and some days it ices and some days it sleets and one day it spits tiny ice-balls that bounce. Some days I awake to sunlight and excitedly plan a hike, but by the anointed hour the sky has grayed all over again. One thing the North Country teaches you is to seize the sun, because you never know when it will return.
In the worst of it, I build a fire, pull the blankets close, and click on the website of the Nishiyuu. Even when temperatures plummet to fifty degrees below zero, they keep walking. They wear white hooded ponchos over layers of furs and wool and snowshoes made of rawhide and wood. They drag their provisions on sleds. The youngest is a sixteen-year-old named Stanley. He walks with a staff whose colors represent the grandmothers. The other five “originals” range in age from seventeen to twenty-one, and a forty-six-year-old Cree serves as their guide. They call him the White Wizard because he always knows the way, no matter how blinding the snow. He leads them along the Cree’s traditional trading routes, and when they camp each night, members of other tribes join them. Inuits. Algonquins. Attikameks. Ojibwas. Mi’kmaqs.7
In March, the North Country becomes a mud pit. Lawns melt into ankle-deep slush in the afternoon, freeze throughout the night, then melt into shin-deep slush the following morning. Icicles dangling from rooftops drip, drip, drip, then fall. I dart in and out of buildings, fearful of being impaled, and wade across town in Muck Boots.
But then one morning, I awake not to snow-muffled silence but to birdsong. One morning, a squirrel climbs down from a tree and sniffs. An Adirondack chair tentatively appears on somebody’s front porch, and by evening three more have joined it. One morning I awake to find all the maple trees wearing buckets. One morning, the thermometer hits thirty-nine degrees and students come to class wearing flip-flops. One morning, the Amish return to town in their horse-drawn buggies and set out their pickles and jellies. And one morning, Bob calls to say the Nishiyuu walkers are about to reach Ottawa.
We head over in Bob’s 1999 Cadillac Deville. I leaf through his CDs and pop in one of Métis music, anticipating drumming and chanting, but a merry burst of fiddling spills forth instead. Bob starts jigging in the driver’s seat, slapping his hands against the steering wheel and snapping his fingers as we jet past the farmhouses and grain silos, wineries and orchards of Ontario. Caught in traffic on the outskirts of Ottawa, he points out the many rearview mirrors adorned with dream catchers.
We park at the Canadian War Museum, which proves it’s not an oxymoron by displaying a tank on its lawn. Bob pops the trunk of his white-stretch Caddie and searches for regalia. First up is his Métis sash, which he wraps around his waist so it dangles down his leg. He exchanges his tennis shoes for snow boots and his baseball cap for a furry, ear-flapped number that resembles a Russian ushanka. “I got it at a muskrat store, ever been to one of those?” He tries to slip on a fringed buckskin jacket, but it doesn’t fit. “I’m too fat!” he sighs, then tosses it back in the pile. Next come a staff, gnarled and polished, and a puppet with a floppy tongue. “Husky?” I ask. “Wolf!” he says indignantly. He hands them both to me before pulling out his final accessory: a stretch of rope. He loops it around his neck like a tie and tightens it like a noose. “This is what Harper is doing to us,” he explains, then snaps the trunk shut. “Off like a herd of turtles.”
Up ahead, a woman with long black braids walks along a snow bank, her crimson robe rippling behind her. We follow her to Victoria Island, where Indians waving banners and journalists wielding cameras line the bridge. Burning sage perfumes the air. Bob greets almost everyone, barking at children with his wolf puppet and telling elders in wheelchairs, “I’ll carry you.” At one point, he jumps in front of a stalled car and mimics cranking its wheel. People laugh and take his picture. “Don’t!” he says. “I’ll send you one when I was good-looking.”
Bob isn’t the only one who primped for this event. First Nations women wear long patterned skirts over jeans and feathers in their hair. Inuits sport knee-high sealskin boots and fur-trimmed cloaks. Supporters have dressed up too, either in Guatemalan huipiles or anarchist shirts emblazoned with slogans like “Harper’s8 Killing Canada.”
Three rivers converge at Victoria Island, which made it a sacred space for Algonquins for thousands of years before the British deemed it a prime piece of real estate. Eventually the land was returned to the tribe, and it has since become a “summer village” for tourists as well as the symbolic headquarters of Idle No More. Down by the old stone millhouse, Algonquin elders in full regalia tend a fire on the snow bank. As I draw near, the hypnotic drumbeats begin to pulse inside my chest. I huddle into the folds of the crowd and absorb the sonorous warmth.
Suddenly, everyone rushes toward the Portage Bridge, shaking their signs and cheering. The Nishiyuu have arrived. The crowd forms a receiving line from the bridge to the fire and applauds as the walkers stride past, a reported 270 in all. The white hooded ponchos depicted on their website have since become canvases for Sharpie autographs, embroidery, and beadwork. A few walkers wield staffs, but most carry nothing whatsoever. No backpacks or CamelBaks or fanny packs. No water bottles or globs of energy Gu. No specialized hiking boots with micro-adjustability. The walkers wear Converse and sunglasses and that’s about it. They are young and they are virile and some puff on cigarettes as if to prove it. No one seems especially exhausted, although a number are limping. The original six walkers are easy to spot, and not just because of the traditional snowshoes strapped to their backs. The windburn and the sleet and the blisters and the cold have weathered their young faces into a placidity normally found only upon statues of bodhisattvas.
As they gather around the fire for the welcoming ceremony, the crowd backs away to give them space. They bow their heads beneath the drumming and the chanting and the blessings. After a time, some peel away to greet the family they haven’t seen in days or weeks or months. One young walker stands by me. She wears an orange and green skirt beneath her poncho and a sash that says NISHIYUU JOURNEY 2013. She self-identifies as a James Bay Cree, one of the last nations that manages to sustain itself hunting and fishing despite losing much of its forest to forty years of hydroelectric projects.
“How far did you walk?”
She pauses to consider. “Four hundred kilometers? Five?”
“Why did you do it?”
“It was somebody’s dying wish,” she manages before her wind-burned face crumples. “She passed while I was walking.”
An older man walks over and hugs her from behind, but she continues: “She was . . . she was like my mother. I talked to her about the walk but found out she was sick. She told me to go ahead and do it, and to finish. So . . . I did.” She turns around to embrace her supporter and sob.
Several thousand people have gathered on the island now, some by the fire, some by the fry bread line, but most along the snowbanks. I meet another James Bay Cree. When I admire his tribe’s commitment to traditional living, he says the most devoted practitioners can be found in the village of the original Nishiyuu. “They live in the part of Canada where you must fly in. If they built a road to it, it would be 300 kilometers long. It is wide-open barren land, like you’re in outer space. They have the strongest culture there, the strongest language. Everything is related to the land over there.”
Once all of the walkers have been blessed and the fry bread depleted, the march to Parliament begins. Wellington has been closed to traffic for the occasion, so we file into the street. “I-dle” someone shouts. “No More,” we respond. Banners unfurl, one of which features a wampum belt that reads HONOR YOUR WORD. Drummers pound a cadence and people dance-step in time. A man with red ribbons woven in his braids does the Fancy Dance, striking a different pose after each round of beats. We make our way up Parliament Hill, past the Library and Archives of Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada, and the House of Commons to the steps of the Peace Tower, 300 feet of gargoyles topped by a four-faced clock.
“Brothers and sisters, there is no word to describe the pride we feel for our people today,” the emcee says before passing the mike to a Cree elder. He launches into a melancholic song. Midway through it, everyone points at the sky. I look up to see a bald eagle soaring directly above. A collective cheer rises to greet her.
The original six Nishiyuu are called to the mike. Visibly dazed, they address the crowd in a decibel above a whisper. The emcee must repeat their remarks so we can hear them. “I truly didn’t think I’d complete this journey,” says eighteen-year-old Raymond Kawapit. “I took this walk to find strength in my life after I lost my brother on February sixth. I went to see my grandmother, and she says when people walk across the land, that is where they will find healing. I thought I was alone in this grief until I started meeting other people along the journey and seeing they are grieving too. Now I start to find the healing.”
Other walkers are called over, too. One is a twenty-something woman whose dark spiky hair has been streaked blonde. When the members of the crowd train their eyes on her, she turns away. “She’s kinda shy, so please put your head down and don’t look at her,” the emcee says.
A long pause later, she accepts the mike with shaking hands. “The reason I walked is that so many committed suicide,” she manages. “There’s no one to help them when they are in need. I myself struggled five years ago when I went to school in Ottawa. I wanted to take my life. I don’t want that for anybody. I started walking, and I made it all the way to Ottawa. Don’t hide your emotions. Let it out.”
At that, she begins to cry into the microphone. Her sobs reverberate across the snow. There is something about her sadness, her candidness, that opens the fissures in us all. I am crying, Bob is crying, the man in front of us is crying, the girl beside us is crying, the woman behind us is crying. For these are nations who have lost their land and their trees, their rights and their treaties, their language and their tradition, and now they are losing their sons and their daughters too, at a shattering pace.9 Their youth kill themselves because of poverty. They kill themselves because of domestic violence, sexual assault, and addiction. They kill themselves because their friends kill themselves, because their neighbors and their cousins kill themselves. They kill themselves because they inherited an intergenerational trauma that rivals the stress disorders of veterans returning from war.
All of this agony, all of this grief, the Nishiyuu walkers have suffered, too. Yet they somehow developed the inner strength to make the collective decision to live. And that is what fuels our spontaneous cry-in. We cry not only for the dead and the dying, however sorely we mourn their loss. We cry for the miracle of the living.
1. For forty-four days, Chief Spence subsisted on a diet of lemon water, medicinal tea, and fish broth. Prime Minister Harper ultimately conceded to the meeting, but Chief Spence did not attend, partly because of her faltering health post-strike and partly because the meeting wasn’t held under the terms she specified.
2. Raymond Robinson continued his fast until Chief Spence ended hers. In his statement to the media afterward, he identified himself as a survivor of three different Indian Residential Schools. “Can I have the same opportunities that you guys enjoy, instead of trying to shove me in a corner, or bury me alive, with these genocidal bills that have been created by the government?” he asked. “What can I do to tell you that I’m as human as you are?”
3. On New Year’s Eve 2012, nearly a thousand Indians and their supporters flooded the rotunda near Sears and danced, chanted, and drummed in a circle. One year later, two Idle No More organizers got arrested for attempting a small-scale reenactment.
4. From a feminist perspective, the reversal of this code might seem like a victory. However, in her 2014 book Mohawk Interruptus, the Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson points out that the law actually helped protect indigenous communities from being taken over by non-Indian (read: white) men.
5. Simpson also makes an important point about “recognition” in Mohawk Interruptus, calling the term offensive as it gives so much authority to outsider gaze. She argues on behalf of the political and ethical stance of “refusal,” which I interpret as: stop playing the game that dismisses you, and start calling your own shots.
6. Bob’s mother languished in the hospital for nine years before dying. He shows me a sepia-toned photo of her standing against a fence post, wearing a suit jacket over a pleated skirt. Her hair is short and stylish, and she is laughing. When I comment on her pretty clothes, he says, “They were not all wearing buckskins and loin cloths, eh?” I then ask if they ever visited her. “How? It was seventy years ago, not like today when you can travel. Back then you were lucky if you could get on a steamboat. I never really met her.”
7. The Nishiyuu can be viewed as upholding a long tradition of athletic feats for Native rights. One of the most famous occurred in February 1978, when 2,000 activists set off from Alcatraz Island in San Francisco and headed toward Washington, D.C., in protest of anti-Native legislation. Twenty-six completed the entire 3,000-mile trek, arriving at the capital that July and holding a series of rallies that helped dissuade Congress from passing some of the bills. Known as the “Longest Walk,” it memorialized other grueling marches that Native Americans have endured, such as the Trail of Tears, and was reenacted thirty years later with an 8,000-mile hike promoting environmental sustainability. The Cherokee Nation, meanwhile, hosts an annual 950-mile “Remember the Removal” bicycle ride that retraces the tribe’s forced eviction from its ancestral land to territories out west in 1838.
8. Much is made of the fact that, rather than greet the Nishiyuu at the end of their heroic march, Prime Minister Harper chose to fly to Toronto to welcome the arrival of two giant pandas on loan from China instead.
9. In April 2016, the Northern Ontario First Nation of Attawapiskat declared a state of emergency when 11 members attempted suicide in a single day, in a community of 2,000. Suicide rates among Canada’s First Nations youth are staggering: twenty-one times higher than the national rate for females and ten times for males. In the United States, the rate is at least three times the national average overall and up to ten times within some nations. According to the Washington Post, Native youth also suffer twice the rate of abuse and neglect as any other race and are twice as likely to die before the age of twenty-four.