WHEN I WAS small, the world seemed pretty frightening. As a foster kid, and later an adopted one, I never felt like my feet were solidly on the ground. Kids know automatically when they’re being excluded. You get a bruised feeling in your chest that never really goes away. But there isn’t a time I can remember when the natural world didn’t offer something that captivated me, whether it was a cave buried in a cliff or a rushing river churning itself into rapids. It might have been the Indian in me that responded so strongly to those things. But I believe we’re all born with an inherent sense of wonder, and there’s nothing so devastating as losing it.
Not so long ago, some Ojibway people from a remote reserve in Ontario invited me to their community. My assignment was to introduce the members of their adult education class to traditional oral storytelling skills. The students were a small group of young people for whom public high school had been a failed experiment. They hadn’t been able to achieve their potential there, for one reason or another, and the band was encouraging them all to get enough credits to earn their Grade 12.
Just like the natural world, stories and storytelling have always been infused with a wild degree of mystery and magic for me. I am constantly amazed at the nature of the creative process—creating something from nothing, bringing people, places and ideas to life. And as a First Nations person, I’m constantly floored by the richness of my oral tradition. I feel the ancient thrum of it in my chest. When I write, even though I compose my words on a keyboard, nothing feels finished until I’ve read it aloud to myself, given it the freedom of the air. When I read my work aloud, I feel closely connected to a vibrant storytelling tradition.
I sought to bring that keen thrill to those students. I sought to ignite an ember from the old tribal fires that burned in our villages in that classroom so that we could all draw strengthand inspiration. But it was not to be. The students ranged in age from nineteen to twenty-two. They’d been out of school for a handful of years, and more than half of them already had children of their own. They were all more comfortable with computer games, music videos and satellite television than they were with their own cultural heritage.
Of all the things that a history of displacement takes away from people, the sense of wonder is the harshest loss of all. After we’d walked to a small lake on a brilliant November morning, I asked the students to find a private spot for themselves, to close their eyes, breathe deep, feel that morning around them and then tell the others in the group what they felt. Not one of them could do it. Instead, they engaged in horseplay, called out to each other expressing derision for the exercise. They missed the experience of that lake in the morning sun. Little wonder they had nothing to say about it.
Later, when I did my storytelling show for the whole community, only twenty of seven hundred on-reserve residents showed up. Of those, only a few caught the wild hilarity of my stories highlighting the gamut of the Native experience in Canada. The others sat squinting, unmoving, unsure what to make of this strange man cavorting in front of them. Putting on that performance was hard work, and when it was over I felt very sad.
The disconnectedness in that community didn’t lie just with the youth. It was all-pervasive. Life for the residents of that reserve had become drudgery, offering no hope for something different, no glinting light at the horizon. They couldn’t feel amazement at the magnificent place they called home. When you lose your sense of wonder, you’re incapable of seeing the magic everywhere in the world around you. The spark igniting the ingenuity, creativity and imagination that mark us as a species has been extinguished.
We can all relate to that feeling to some degree. Our day-in, day-out routines sometimes get us down. But for many of Canada’s First Nations people on remote reserves, the malaise feels chronic, self-perpetuating and final.
Wonder is what fuels us, what propels us to achieve. We need the light of our imaginations to make life worth living. When Native leaders identify their people’s most pressing issues, reigniting that sense of wonder should be foremost. We need to bring our people back from the inside out. Everyone deserves to experience the magic of a lake in the morning.