The land is mother

Page 4

There's an old cabin somewhere in Indian country.

Actually, the cabin has long since lost the battle to the ravages of time but its foundations might still be visible. It lies nestled somewhere in the rough and tangle in the northern Ontario bush.

In the mid-50s, the Wagamese family lived here and for a short time experienced together the last vestiges of the traditional Ojibway life.

The cabin, the family and the way of life have all undergone some drastic alterations in the last 35 years.

These days negotiating my way through a cosmopolitan lifestyle can make the distance between Bankview and that old cabin seem galactic sometimes.

I went there once. Rather, I tried to go there. Paddling across the mercury platter of that northern lake was a returning in itself. In all these years of traveling and exploration it was the experience that most says home to me.

I rambled around and around that section of woods for days and never once stumbled across anything remotely resembling a cabin or its foundations.

The rough and tangle had exercised its autonomy.

But there was something in the process that was immensely healing. The time I spent wandering in search of my beginnings gave me the time to reflect on the nature of those beginnings. It gave me the time to reconnect to my Ojibwayness, my Indianness and my humanness. Even though I never discovered the physical manifestations of that cabin or my beginnings, I nonetheless emerged from the bush with the belief it had existed one time.

These days when this city life gets too much to handle I can go there. The feeling of heritage, tradition and beginnings is always there for exploring.

However, had I been able to locate that old cabin the piece of land itself would have become the significant thing.. The revisiting is a feeling thing. It would have contained tangible evidences of my heritage, my people and myself. For me, as an individual, it would be sacred.

No amount of capital could force me to alter it. No amount of difficulty could sway me for returning to it in order to feel the tangible, yet invisible, positively if effects on my life.

This spiritual. This is healing. This is Indian.

The Mohawks in Oka are reacting to the same motivation.

The most basic human right in the world is the right to know yourself. For the Indians, the single most important element that defines them as individuals, bands, clans and nations is the land.

The land is mother. It is a living, breathing, nurturing thing that requires the respect and honor of all of us to continue.

The land is a feeling.

Non-Natives have a great deal of difficulty understanding and accepting this.

Part of the problem lies in the disturbing lack of information regarding the authentic representation of Indians circa 1990.

The media in general somehow sees fit to investigate Indians only when they're dead, dying or complaining.

The unfortunate results is Native people begin to become regarded in the public eye as being overtly political nations.

Hence the misunderstanding.

Politics, and the recent militancy, are simply a tool Indian nations have had to learn to employ in order to protect, enhance and define their rights and spiritual traditions.

At the very root of the so-called "Indian problem" is this country is the direct confrontation between motivations of the Indians and adopted pragmatism of federal politicians.

The trick is that transition from the spiritual to the political is a much easier way to travel than the reverse.

When the Indians blockade, barricade or arm themselves in defense of land and tradition the deck, unfortunately, is stacked against them.

Mainstream consciousness focuses much easier on accepted rightness and wrongness than it does on the legitimacy of unknown or unfamiliar protestation.

Headlines announcing policeman dying on behalf of golf courses don't do much to alleviate the problem. The constant images of masked "warriors" serve only to reinforce the ideas o Indian "terrorists" and the implied wrongness of their actions.

Media would do much better to work at fostering communication between themselves and the Indians so the underlying spiritual motivations of their actions can be presented and perhaps understood by the general reading public.

That old cabin in the woods will always represent the cultural, traditional and spiritual foundation of my life even though its physical presence has disappeared.

It follows that although the physical manifestations of the old Indian way have dimmed considerably, it remains the prime motivation in the outright acts of the Indian people today.

The general public just needs to be given the opportunity to understand.