FOR A LONG time, I’ve been of the m ind that heroes are for children. Once the world settles down around your shoulders, and responsibility becomes your mantra for day-by-day living, heroes get left behind. Sure, as a baseball fan I have players I admire, and as a rabid musicologist I have musicians I love listening to, but for a long time there hasn’t been a distant figure who has touched my life in a meaningful way. I’ve just become too busy for heroes.
Life is a succession of practical tasks. Life is stubborn, plodding routine. Life is an eyes-on-the-horizon march towards success and security. There’s little time for the dreaming, the idolizing and the vicarious basking in glory that heroes demand of us. Heroes are the province of childhood recollections and dinner table tales. So I was surprised when I found myself watching the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination race with great interest. Normally I’m blasé about U.S. politics. Like all Canadians, I’m inundated with American news, and I sometimes feel I know more about what’s going on south of the border than I do about our own domestic situation.
But the presidential primaries caught my attention. For one, Hillary Clinton was in the race, and I desperately wanted to see a woman assume the mantle of power. Women are a lot like Indians, really. They know how it feels to be marginalized, prejudged, undervalued and over scrutinized. So I wanted her to do well. Maybe I could score a vicarious victory from her achievements.
But I was even more interested in Barack Obama. When he secured the Democratic nomination, then squared off against Republican John McCain in their November showdown, I couldn’t have been happier. If anyone understand show race affects your ability to secure a just place in society, it’s a black person, and Obama’s race for the White House held a lot of importance for me. I wanted him to win. I wanted to believe that there is still room in this world for someone to do the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the extraordinary, the historically outrageous.
It’s not just Native people who share that wish. Women, people of mixed race, people with disabilities, the homeless, the mentally challenged, gays, lesbians, people who are under-educated and unemployed, the elderly, immigrants and youth all want to see an underdog rise up, not only to challenge the status quo but to give it a good licking. As a First Nations person who’s watched and waited for an inspiring politician to rise from our ranks and lead us to equality in Canada, I saw Obama as a beacon in the darkness.
Obama’s quest continued the journey begun by Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln wanted emancipation for black people. He wanted freedom and equality to be more than just poetic phrases in the U.S. Constitution. His vision was justice for everyone, and it took a war to get the ball rolling. The theme was continued later in the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. Reverend King’s crusade was for the everyday rights of all people. He expressed that in a clarion call to black consciousness, but his message was for everyone. He was a pacifist who held out the possibility that salvation could come from the people themselves, if we would only heed the message. Many of us did, and things changed.
I was a boy in the 1960s. I remember the tumult of the civil rights movement. I remember the permissible racism of the white neighbourhoods where I lived—Aunt Jemima on the pancake box, the waist-coated Negro coachmen on numerous lawns, the references to Brazil nuts as “nigger toes” and black men referred to as “boys” in the colloquial conversations of men I was supposed to admire. There were “good Negroes” like Sammy Davis, Jr., Nipsy Russell and Jackie Robinson, but I recall the fear “bad Negroes” like H . Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael evoked in my adopted white parents. Their fear was transferred onto every black person they encountered after the riots in Detroit and Watts. I remember looking at my own brown skin and wondering how that applied to me.
I couldn’t frame the equation properly then, but life offered me that chance eventually. The older I got, the more aware I became of being treated as different, out of place and wrong. My white home was no shelter from that racism. My adopted parents continued to try to carve me into their own image, never thinking that the constant nicks and gouges were causing me pain.
I became a high school drop-out, a welfare case, an unemployed, homeless alcoholic and eventually a card-carrying First Nations activist. Along the way I met people of all stripes who showed me that it isn’t just skin that polarizes us—it’s attitude. Having labels applied to you is tiring. Fighting my way through terms like “lazy,” “shiftless,” “stupid,” “backward” and “drunken Indian” was arduous, and the journey was seldom illuminated by models of change.
When I started to write the stories of my people as a journalist, I ran up against many historical barriers. The story of the relationship between whites and Indians was rarely told. Instead, Canadians believed what the history books told them, that grand tale about Europeans conquering the wilderness and establishing a 1/22/2011 shining nation from sea to sea to sea. They knew the names of the “explorers”—Radisson and Groseilliers, David Thompson, Alexander Mackenzie—but not those of the Indians in the canoes.
So Barack Obama’s quest was my quest, too. His crusade for justice, for representation, for recognition was not just for black people but for all of us who have had to fight to be seen, heard and valued. Watching it unfold, I felt the hope Obama expressed in speeches and debates. He represented the power of one man to keep moving forward despite old hurts.
The image of Obama, arms raised in victory, showed me and marginalized people everywhere that triumph is not only possible—its time has come. We all needed that lesson, because heroes ought never to be relegated to our past. For people of all ages, heroesought to be part of the fabric of every day.