I WAS IN a street gang once, in a time so far removed it feels like another life. It was 1973, and I was seventeen. Our world was rock ’n’ roll, tight jeans and T-shirts, Earth shoes, lava lamps and soft drugs. Flower Power reigned, and there was a charm to being a member of the counterculture. Peace signs proliferated. If you were a “head” in those days you were a hippie, a raging addict bent on robbery.
There were ten of us in our gang, and we calledour-selves the Freaks. The Freaks weren’t feared by anyone. Nor did the police pay us any more attention than a casual wave of the hand to clear us off the steps of the old courthouse in St. Catharines where we congregated. The music we loved brought us together. The Beatles had just disbanded. Jimi, Janis and Jim were dead. Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was required listening, as were Neil Young’s Time Fades Away and the Rolling Stones’ Goats Head Soup. These purple summer evenings seemed to last forever.
The Freaks were a bunch of teenagers who had fled our homes because of family breakdown, domestic violence or abuse. There was nowhere to go but the streets of our city. We were a gang only in the very loosest terms. We were school dropouts, poor and mostly unemployed, a motley collection of lost souls who clung to each other for community.
Ticket prices were still reasonable for rock concerts then. We would pool our money and go to shows at Buffalo’s Rich Stadium, Hamilton’s Ivor Wynne Stadium, Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto and the Forum in Montreal. We saw Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, the Stones, the Who, Neil Young, the Allman Brothers and a host of other music giants. We made the trip to and from these events in a variety of dilapidated vans and station wagons. Sleeping bodies lay every which way inside these cars. We’d missed Woodstock, but we were determined to be anywhere music raised its long-haired head.
Back at the pavilion at St. Catharines’ Montebello Park, we drank cheap wine and listened to music on portable 8-track players. We never caused a ruckus, and the police were content to let us be. We played Frisbee. We shared our food and our cash and crashed on each others’ couches when we were lucky enough to have them.
The Night Stalkers, a local car club, were moneyed kids from the west side. They were the cheerleaders and quarterbacks, class presidents and valedictorians. They drove around in fancy, tricked-out cars with the name of their “gang” in glittery script on the bumpers. The Night Stalkers were shiny and beautiful. They gleamed in comparison to us. Whenever they drove past, they would blare their horns and yell taunts at us. They laughed openly at our rust-bucket cars when we could afford the gas to cruise around in them.
Because we were all teenagers, we’d inevitably end up at the some of the same places. The main one was the roller skating rink, the social-networking site of the day. The music was loud, the food was cheap. The rink was also the only place where the Freaks could outshine the Night Stalkers. We were more adventurous skaters, more daring, and we lived for rhythm and abandon to the beat. In our rented skates, we skated rings around our rivals.
Now and then, there’d be fights in the parking lot. The combatants who squared off generally ended up with nothing more than a bloody nose or a black eye. After the fight, both sides would disappear to celebrate or to grouse, depending on the outcome. There was never a rumble or a riot.
One by one, the Freaks got jobs, settled into relationships or left town. The Night Stalkers drifted off to university or college. Our harmless teenage tribalism had marked none of us. It was a stark contrast to the gang era we live in now.
Aboriginal gangs flourish today in the concrete rez of Canada’s prisons, the low-income neighbourhoods of cities and in reserve communities themselves. They emulate the big-city gangs of the United States with their tattoos, their graffiti, their clothing, their music, their gang signs and their violence. They proclaim themselves as warriors, but there’s nothing warrior-like about them. In Native tradition, a warrior is honoured for living a principled life, standing up for the people and working to sustain them. There is none of that in an Aboriginal gang. Nor is there any true Native pride, just a dismal caricature and the costly struggle to maintain it. Lives are lost, homes disrupted, communities destroyed. These gangs are a blight, yet our Native politicians seldom mention them. They rarely talk about those slain in random shootings and knifings or those lost to addiction, prostitution or prison. They remain quiet about the sad irony of our own people killing and oppressing each other. They don’t mention the kids who’ve had their childhoods taken away.
We need a gang mentality to offset gang mentality. We need the whole gang of us, this community of human beings, to reach back into the traditional teachings of our cultures and pass those principles on to our youth. They are our future. They are the future of the planet, and they need our input and our guiding energy if they are to assume control of our human destiny with dignity and pride. It’s not just a Native thing—it’s a human thing. The trick, in the end, is that by teaching them we reaffirm the same teachings for ourselves. The whole gang of us moving forward in peace.