stories, and I carried a dream of writing, though I did not bear the knowledge of how to make that happen. This job could mark my entry.
It also meant working with my people. I wasn’t Metis or non-status, but being Aboriginal seemed enough at the time. So I lied. I told the editor, John Cuthand, that I had graduated from a two-year journalism program in Ontario and I was on the road searching for a place to settle. That was on a Wednesday. He was busy, so he told me to return on Monday to do a couple of rewrites for him.
I was ecstatic but scared. So I did what I always did when life confounded me—I went to the library. I asked the librarian for all the books she had on journalism and reporting. For five days, I sat there reading and doing writing exercises. I learned about journalistic style and ethics and what editors looked for in news copy. From opening to closing I sat in the library writing and rewriting. I stoked the fire of my desire with every scribbled page.
When Monday came I appeared on time and was ushered into the back with a handful of newspaper stories from mainstream papers. John sat me at a typewriter and asked me to milk them down to a few hundred words apiece. I’d failed typing in high school, so I sat and pecked out one letter at a time. It took me an hour, but I finished the assignment.
John hired me on the strength of my writing.
That job introduced me to the volatile world of native politics in the late 1970s. The constitutional reform that would entrench our rights was still three years off, and governments regarded us as problems rather than as citizens. There was a lot of unnecessary wrangling over the delivery details of rights and programs most Canadians took for granted.
As a reporter I saw dire poverty up close and personal. I saw people who’d been damaged by the forward thrust of history fighting to maintain an identity in the thick flow of change around them. I saw young people desperate for a cultural linchpin and elders, stately and graceful, reduced to being old and ignored. I saw how cruelly a nation could forget one of its founding peoples.
The stories I wrote for New Breed awakened me politically. This was my first hands-on introduction to the lives of my people. I felt the flames of identity being fanned to life within me. Not only was I becoming a writer, I was becoming an Indian. But politics does not nurture identity, because rhetoric is not teaching. I absorbed all the things I saw and heard around me, and because I craved so much to present myself as a native person I became strident and irritatingly vocal.
I was a quick study, and I learned well. The questions I asked as a reporter grew sharper, more pointed and challenging, especially to native politicians. One day at a press conference I was pursuing an issue, pointing and gesturing, moralizing and editorializing. One of the leaders I was going after shook his head and said, “It’s like being attacked by Super Injun.”
Everyone laughed, and I was horribly embarrassed. But there was a man there that day named John Rock Thunder. He was an elder and a teacher, and when he approached me later he did it so skillfully that I was surprised to find myself alone with him in a small area off to the side of the conference room.
I had it all wrong, he said. He pointed to my beaded vest, moccasins, long hair and turquoise rings. Then he pointed to my heart.
“You want to be the ultimate Indian,” he said. “But you have to start from the inside.”
He went on to tell me that I had been created in a specific order. I was created to be first a human being, then a male, then an Ojibway Indian. I needed to learn how to be a good human being. In the process of that, I would learn how to be a good man. And through that process, I would discover I had been graced all along with being a good Indian.
It can’t work any other way, he said. By trying to be the ultimate Indian, I was missing the most important part of the
It also meant working with my people. I wasn’t Metis or non-status, but being Aboriginal seemed enough at the time. So I lied. I told the editor, John Cuthand, that I had graduated from a two-year journalism program in Ontario and I was on the road searching for a place to settle. That was on a Wednesday. He was busy, so he told me to return on Monday to do a couple of rewrites for him.
I was ecstatic but scared. So I did what I always did when life confounded me—I went to the library. I asked the librarian for all the books she had on journalism and reporting. For five days, I sat there reading and doing writing exercises. I learned about journalistic style and ethics and what editors looked for in news copy. From opening to closing I sat in the library writing and rewriting. I stoked the fire of my desire with every scribbled page.
When Monday came I appeared on time and was ushered into the back with a handful of newspaper stories from mainstream papers. John sat me at a typewriter and asked me to milk them down to a few hundred words apiece. I’d failed typing in high school, so I sat and pecked out one letter at a time. It took me an hour, but I finished the assignment.
John hired me on the strength of my writing.
That job introduced me to the volatile world of native politics in the late 1970s. The constitutional reform that would entrench our rights was still three years off, and governments regarded us as problems rather than as citizens. There was a lot of unnecessary wrangling over the delivery details of rights and programs most Canadians took for granted.
As a reporter I saw dire poverty up close and personal. I saw people who’d been damaged by the forward thrust of history fighting to maintain an identity in the thick flow of change around them. I saw young people desperate for a cultural linchpin and elders, stately and graceful, reduced to being old and ignored. I saw how cruelly a nation could forget one of its founding peoples.
The stories I wrote for New Breed awakened me politically. This was my first hands-on introduction to the lives of my people. I felt the flames of identity being fanned to life within me. Not only was I becoming a writer, I was becoming an Indian. But politics does not nurture identity, because rhetoric is not teaching. I absorbed all the things I saw and heard around me, and because I craved so much to present myself as a native person I became strident and irritatingly vocal.
I was a quick study, and I learned well. The questions I asked as a reporter grew sharper, more pointed and challenging, especially to native politicians. One day at a press conference I was pursuing an issue, pointing and gesturing, moralizing and editorializing. One of the leaders I was going after shook his head and said, “It’s like being attacked by Super Injun.”
Everyone laughed, and I was horribly embarrassed. But there was a man there that day named John Rock Thunder. He was an elder and a teacher, and when he approached me later he did it so skillfully that I was surprised to find myself alone with him in a small area off to the side of the conference room.
I had it all wrong, he said. He pointed to my beaded vest, moccasins, long hair and turquoise rings. Then he pointed to my heart.
“You want to be the ultimate Indian,” he said. “But you have to start from the inside.”
He went on to tell me that I had been created in a specific order. I was created to be first a human being, then a male, then an Ojibway Indian. I needed to learn how to be a good human being. In the process of that, I would learn how to be a good man. And through that process, I would discover I had been graced all along with being a good Indian.
It can’t work any other way, he said. By trying to be the ultimate Indian, I was missing the most important part of the
Similar Books
