The PWM offices were on the second floor. They had a printing press and, off on a landing, a section for collating and stapling. A few PWM guys were there, along with about six NARP members. They were talking about Cuba and the Vietnamese revolution and as I looked around the place my eyes fell on a barrel of rifles standing in the comer. Wayne Thom was sitting there on top of them and I thought, “Christ! All this talk about revolution and here are all these rifles!” I was a bit scared but didn’t know quite what to think of it. (About a week later I asked Ray about the guns and he said they belonged to the PWM and not NARP.) That first night I helped collate and staple their newsletter. People were talking and arguing all the time: about politics; about some guy who was coming over from Vancouver Island to speak, and a soccer game that was planned between the PWM and NARP on the weekend. There was a lot of teasing and joking going on, along with the work and beer drinking. It really wasn’t much of a meeting; mainly a work session. When we’d finished they told me they were planning to sell the newsletter around town, especially at the Indian Centre dances. They also mentioned that they had this discussion group at the Centre in which NARP people participated. It was on Friday and they asked me to come along.
I went to the Andrew’s place for the next meeting. We went downstairs and they were playing this tape by Stokely Carmichael. I noticed that everybody was drinking; in fact, Wayne Thom had already passed out. I thought it was pretty strange, but I didn’t say anything. People drank and I didn’t have anything against drinking.
The tape was about an hour and a half long and I listened to it carefully. Everyone laughed when Stokely was talking about Black people dyeing their hair, trying to straighten it, and girls putting on magnolia cream to look more white. It set me to thinking. I could remember when I was in school, how I always set my hair and wanted it to look curly—but it never lasted very long, the curls falling out in an hour or so. It always made me feel bad. And when I was sixteen I used to pluck my eyebrows to look more attractive by white standards. So I related to what Stokely had to say pretty well.
After the tape was over there was a discussion. Gordie did most of the talking; seemed he remembered everything on the tape and I thought he must have heard it several times before. He’d use some quote from Chairman Mao and relate it to a point Stokely made. At that time I knew nothing whatsoever about Mao Tse-tung and just sat there wondering what he was talking about. He kept talking about the “little red book” and repeating that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” That seemed to be his favourite saying. Gordie was a white guy, but because he was married to Gerri—who was an Indian like all the others—they allowed him to be a member of NARP. He was also very close to PWM, though I wasn’t sure at that time whether he was a member or just a supporter.
Ray Thorn started arguing with him about how PWM people went around quoting Chairman Mao and doing very little else. “It’s not good to keep on quoting and quoting! You can’t learn Marxism by a mechanical process where you just go on quoting things till they stick.” They talked and argued back and forth for about two hours and nobody else got to say anything, just sat and listened.
When it was over, people just went home. I stayed behind for a while talking to Gerri. She seemed a pretty sensible person and knowledgeable about different struggles going on. She talked about Vietnam and about how the Iroquois Confederacy had gone to the World Court to protest their people being drafted and sent to Vietnam against their will. They’d finally won their case. She also told me about some other people who were Red Power advocates: Larry Seymour, Duke Redbird—who was in some Saul Alinsky films—and Harold Cardinal. By the way she talked I felt that a lot was going on and that I was really out of it—behind the times. Finally, I said I had to go home and left. Stacy, who’d come to the discussion with me, drove me back to my mom’s place.
I went to several NARP meetings after that. Most of the time I either talked to Gerri or listened to Ray and Gordie arguing. It almost seemed there was a personal thing between them. Once Gerri asked me if I wanted to go sell newspapers with her. NARP got the Panther paper and sold them up at Simon Fraser University (SFU) and the University of British Columbia (UBC). So I went up to SFU with her and was selling The Black Panther when a guy named Jamie Reed came up and started attacking us as being counter-revolutionaries and so forth. He was a member of the Internationalists, which later changed their name to the Communist Party of Canada, Marxist-Leninist (CPC-ML). I remember being taken aback because I didn’t even know what a counter-revolutionary was—or that I was supposed to be a revolutionary in the first place. Finally I got mad. He was leaning against our table and screaming things in my face. “Just get out of here,” I told him in a serious voice, “before I flatten you!” Gerri had been trying to reason with him but it was my experience with screamers that at some point or other they ended up taking a swing at you. Gerri was talking calmly about Black Power, what it was, and that NARP supported it. Then just as she was telling him he had no right to call her counter-revolutionary, some student came up and made some stupid comment about how proletarian poetry wasn’t poetry at all. This diverted Jamie and, in the meantime, people started coming up and buying newspapers, curious to see what was going on. We sold out in a couple of hours and went home. On the way I asked Gerri who this guy Jamie was and she said, “Oh, they’re all a bunch of crazies, these Internationalists. They go around quoting Mao and acting like a bunch of gangsters, beating up on people, just trying to intimidate everyone into agreeing with their line.”
The next day we took some more papers out to the University of British Columbia and raised quite a stir. UBC was really a conservative school—still is—and there were a lot of anti-Panther people who came up and argued with us. One guy, a real racist, tried to intimidate us by saying things like, “Hell, what do you Indians know, anyway?” We just laughed at him, angry but thinking he was pretty stupid. This was my first experience with that type of political action—trying to engage in political discussion and so on. Actually, I didn’t do much of the talking, but I listened a lot to Gerri and helped out where I could. She seemed to know what she was talking about and I respected her for it. On the way back I asked her how she came to know so much about the Panthers, Vietnam and so forth. She said she’d read quite a few books and things and gave me a reading list. I expressed some interest, but didn’t really pick up on it right away.