Learning Home

The universe is a circle. Sylvia has chalked it on the board, one round disk floating on a background still ghosted with the notes of a previous lecture. Just a circle, the one thing about existence, Sylvia tells us briskly, that is absolutely certain. Her elders taught her this, and now she is convincing a group of mostly 20-something, mostly non-Native listeners who crane forward in plastic chairs attempting to catch and comprehend this Truth. Blending the confidence of a tenured professor with an encompassing, grandmotherly warmth, she draws two more diagrams, one a square box with a circle inside it, the other a circle encompassing a smaller box. “You see, if it weren’t just one circle, then what would this other stuff be?”

Sylvia’s talk is entitled “Life Cycle Responsibilities”, one of a dozen or so sessions that comprised this year’s Elder’s Gathering at Trent University, an unadvertised, unpretentious convening of Indigenous wisdom from across North America. She has come to teach us about the eight stages of being human, as understood by the Mohawk. Four lines soon pie the circle, then Sylvia’s chalk curves the bottom of another orb, just above the one she’s divided into wedges. “This is the spirit world,” she indicates, dotting a path between it and the human sphere. “All of us begin here – we are spirit before we are born”. Our grey-braided, blue-eyed teacher points to a woman in the audience cradling an infant: “that baby is so important. The couple has to prepare for it. They’ve got to understand what it means to invite a spirit down. They should be ready. For two years, according to our teachings, they should be getting ready.” To help us understand, Sylvia adds a word or two inside each of the eight wedges in the central circle, which represent the stages of human experience, as well as our corresponding responsibilities as we move through them. As this magnetic Mohawk auntie illustrates, via legend, anecdote, and the symbol of the circle, to be created is to take part of a process that involves and requires all, excludes none: the responsibility of infants is joy. For toddlers it is leaning about safety and environmental awareness. For children it is truth. For youth, rejection. For young adults, the work of the people. Parents are to provide. Grandparents give life teachings. And elders instruct the people’s spirit.

I lean back in my chair, uncertain how to either argue or accept such a beautiful and intriguing evocation of life’s gentle, relational purposes. What about when stages break down, are missed? Do we have to go through them all? How can Sylvia not sense our civilisation’s awful tendency to puncture and pollute the circle, especially as an elder in a tradition that holds it sacred? I don’t ask, but she responds to my anxiety with another figure on the board, this time the outline of a human torso, riddled with ragged holes. “This is what happens when our souls are wounded – you can’t see the holes, but there they are.” Each stage is essential, but if we are not taught properly, not loved as we are called to be, they can be missed or misunderstood. Sylvia startles me with her diagnosis. “We have to be careful of the language we let children learn. If we are confused, so they will be too. One language, that’s best.” I sense she’s not using the word in the linguistic sense. But perhaps in implicit recognition of the damage inherent in this babbling age, she turns from the circle’s pleasing ideals to discuss ways of healing its breaches. “The holes, they stay with us, you know. They don’t easily go away. If a woman had all that she needed, she wouldn’t be fifteen and giving away sex for a ride into town. A man wouldn’t be trying to prove himself by making babies and leaving them for her to raise. And so they miss such an important stage, and all of us miss what they can give us, these young people who are going straight from being youth, to being parents, without taking the time to prepare.” Yet, Sylvia concludes gently, we can always go back to learn the things we missed. And we can always practice healing, no matter how many holes we’ve accumulated. That’s what an elder’s teachings are about.

I’m not indigenous to here. Both of my parents trace their lineages back to Europe, and if we like we can get on planes and return to lands where our ancestors farmed, fought, or built ships and sailed away. Those lands, of course, in both demographic and environmental terms, have radically changed. They are no longer identifiable as home for my parents, and they are certainly not home for me. Home, as near as I can articulate it, is located somewhere within – or perhaps all over – this massive country, this land symbolized as Canada. There’s lots of room, but I really have nowhere else to go, not if I expect to nurture and develop that most essential human treasure, that warm certainty of belonging. Somehow, here’s where I have to find it.

But if I can readily identify the need, the reality of its lacking follows close behind. This is not a simple place to call home, not if I expect to share in the concept with a rich spectrum of others, with other languages, histories, and ideas about what’s required to make it work. But I’m convinced that, unless I’m prepared to endorse a competitive, zero-sum, and ultimately brutal notion of belonging (more for me means less for you), I have to open myself to these different experiences, and try to understand the particular struggles of other people who co-exist in this time and space. As a non-indigenous Canadian, there seems to be no more crucial place to begin this exploration than by listening to the land’s first peoples. It’s not merely a matter of who was here first. It’s about mutual recognition, and a long foregone rebalancing of wisdom. For generations, even centuries, Aboriginal peoples have been forced to acknowledge, not merely the existence of arriving European cultures, but their authority, their ascendancy, their power. It’s resulted in a serious, deeply scarring imbalance in the relationships we’re living out as a blended nation, and there’s a long way to go before we reach a healthy equilibrium. But I sense the way forward. This conference tells part of the story of how, and why it matters to all of us.

Beverley Hungry Wolf is Blackfoot, from the rainshadow hills of southern Alberta. Standing in the warm window-wrapped room within another oval of students, her childhood stories are told through the searing, lucid senses of one whose own eyes had been nearly blinded, whose tongue had been nearly cut out.
“Boarding school made a very strong impact in our lives,” she begins simply. “We were raised by priests and nuns. Such a cold place, a very cold place – we couldn’t even touch our best friends. I got into trouble when they asked me my name. I said I am so-and-so’s daughter, so-and-so’s granddaughter, but…” She contorts her body as if she’s grabbing a small cuff of neck, and channels the mad authority of a teacher into a suddenly enraged “I din ask you who your family was girl! I asked for your NAME!!” The charged air presses against my skin, and I wince a little at the violent re-enactment. This was Beverley at five. Mercifully, she doesn’t stay there, but invites us strangers into Blackfoot ways, one hand moving like a feather, her fingers tracing long ways home through the sunlit air. “Blackfoot girls stay close to their mothers. The English thought we were strange – oh we thought they were so strange! We never had aunts or uncles, only mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, grandparents. Everybody was your relative back then. I remember how we used to visit – go out for a month, put up our camp and visit!” Beverley, like most elders, is a mother, grandmother, burier of the dead “six in the past two weeks”, keeper of traditions and teller of stories. She is absolutely honest and sincere in what she tells us, even though so much of it can never be measured by the narrow barometer of fact. To be an elder is to tell the truth. But listeners have to, in turn, accept and honour those truths, or they are as worthless as X’s on the old treaty papers. This is not a passive relationship. Listening becomes a partnering in a dance, or an accompaniment along a path that would otherwise be overgrown, closed off. Although Beverley stands before us without wavering for almost two hours, these old people are no longer physically sturdy – most of what they teach, except the visiting, and the gentler protocols of ceremony, is for others to take up and practice. They realise that it’s no longer their job to sustain cultures, but rather inspire and guide the ones who will.

And somehow, even though most of us who listen are not Mohawk, or Blackfoot, or Indigenous in any direct sense, that gift and burden is being passed to us as well. I remember being struck by the truth of what a Dene friend told me years ago. “It’s not only us who have treaty rights – your people signed the treaties too. You’re our partners.” An easy thing to forget, when the land, the water, the type and style of government, all appear to be so obviously and uniformly ours, and it is only those few Native throwbacks who seem to be standing in the way of our democracy’s onward march, reminding us of what sounds like strange, ancient history. But we shed such wisdom, and forget foundational promises, at our collective moral, ecological, and spiritual peril. Those ragged holes that Sylvia drew for us don’t only manifest in wayward Mohawk youth.

Near the end of the conference, a delightful Six Nations’ elder leads us anew through the familiar seasons in this part of the world, from winter (“a time for white foods: white corn, white bean, ash, beavertail soup”), to spring (“we purify ourselves with the maple sap. Drink four gallons right from the tree!”), through summer (“we’re berry people. It acidifies the urine – fights off bacteria”), and on again (“burdock root, the first year it grows. That’s your fall medicine”). Is this knowledge, and the culture that knows it, useless, now that we can all drag our bodies eighty years with processed foods and pharmaceuticals? Now that we can all mumble or bellow in English, and program our time by TV schedules? Powerfully I feel, the answer remains no. No, even after years of erosion, co-optation, and neglect. No for all of us, Indigenous or not, who left that conference hall inspired by the gentle, crucial message of these elders to keep recognising one another in the sacred space that this country still blessedly cradles. As surely and enduringly as the land itself exists, it seems that land-based peoples will remain those most able to channel its mysteries, translate its stories, guard and be nurtured by its gifts. But how can I, stranger, settler, home-seeker, best accept and cherish these truths I’m told?

It seems clear, as I blink out into the re-interpreted southern Ontario sunlight and get into my car to drive back to the city, that we’re not all called to actually live these traditional indigenous ways. I hold no personal membership in the nations that patchwork this earth, though I – and all of us, from generous elders to eager urban youth – belong to the country that contains them, that might yet kill them off or help them thrive. As such, all the wisdom-strewn stories shared during this weekend hold transcendent relevance, even if we never drink spring sap or attend a sunrise ceremony.

One thing about wisdom: it ain’t exclusive. The universe is a circle, and, know it, like it or not, we must hold our differences within it.