The price paid for the urban rez

Page 5

Talk to the feather

The urban rez - it's a term that is being used lately to describe a homeland for many Aboriginal people in the city. But even the sound of "urban rez" brings to mind a land of concrete that is disconnected from nature's beauty and sustainability, a land that held false promises for the Aboriginal people who came to find what their white brothers said was a better life for their children.

Most came unequipped, without education and training, except for the domestic skills and the memory of the strict punishment that mission and residential schools forced upon them. Many of them became lost in the maze of streets of the inner city and also in programs designed to help Aboriginal people cope with the mainstream life that became elusive.

'It is a lifestyle choice,' say many of the workers in social service agencies and rehabilitation organizations. 'How can you get people to change when they don't want to see what is good for themselves?'

They tell themselves, when those people are ready, when they have hit rock bottom, they will get help. That is how Aboriginal people become ghosts in the rush of a busy city, where people choose not to see who they really are.

But they survive and adapt to an environment foreign to their ancestors who once lived and thrived in sync with the movement of the earth. When people truly look and see the Aboriginal people who have become the ghosts of the urban rez, they are utterly amazed at their will to survive. Still, many lives have been lost in the struggle to build the urban rez. For those who lost their lives and stopped becoming ghosts in human form in the city, it seems almost like a merciful ending. At least their spirits were able to return to the land that they truly belonged to.

For those that survive, the price is high. For the cost of the construction of the urban rez is also our language and our dignity. For to build such a haunted place, a price must be paid for our own good - a price of change.

The files in police departments are thick with the sales receipts of the missing, presumed dead and the children who ran away, never to be heard from again. The funerals and obituaries paid by social services also record the price that Aboriginal people have paid to build the urban rez. Sometimes it seems that these files tucked away in the cabinets of government officials are the only proof Aboriginal people are not ghosts in the cities. The more the Aboriginal fathers and mothers struggled to find a connection to the land underneath the cold, black asphalt, the more they realized the price that needed to be paid. It took time and a schedule of payment for this generation to call the urban rez their home.

During most genocide attempts by governments that have been recorded throughout history, there have been those who escaped the cleansing. Those people, though they are few, glow like a beacon, calling the ghosts back to reclaim their ancestry. You may see them working in the inner city with those who are still paying the price of a so-called better life. And you need only look in their eyes to see the dignity of our ancestors. While these revived old and young warriors work to bring back the spirit of Aboriginal people in the urban rez, they usually remain nameless. Nameless to even some of our own Aboriginal leaders who cannot or will not see the price paid for the urban rez. After all, who can see a ghost.

The editor invites your letters and comments. You can write to the editor at Sweetgrass or email at edsweet@ammsa.com