Becoming Indian

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

When my grandfather spoke I felt my Ojibwayness come alive. I lived in the city, worked jobs he'd never done, surrounded with things he'd never craved. My world was foreign to him, and sitting there, hearing the talk of times when simplicity was a virtue and dependence meant always mending your own net, I learned how foreign that life was to me. But it was mine, accorded to me by history, by family, and by the recollections of an old man bent by time, wearied, perhaps, by the trail, and eager to pass them on.

I became an Indian at 25 because of John Wagamese. Oh, sure, I had the long hair, the beaded vest, the moccasins, the turquoise rings, and all the Hollywood trappings that I'd learned in my city life, but I craved the Indian look I saw in that photo of my grandfather. The look that said 'All that I am is here.'

Through the past 27 years, sometimes I've been fortunate enough to feel it on my face, but it's been fleeting--like learning to become always is. It's been there in ceremony, in talk sometimes, in healing, but it remains a search, a journey. Still, my grandfather lit the light of tradition within me, and in the soft roll of the old talk I found and reclaimed myself.

He died in his sleep when I was 32. When I heard, I lay in my bed and stared at the sky outside my window for a long time. I wasn't sad for him. His life was a celebration. I wasn't in grief for a loss. What he had given me I could never lose.

All I knew, for absolute certain, was that to honor my grandfather I had to take a walk out on the land. Looking out across the broad sweep of the country he loved, I realized that what I felt for him was everything, love and joy and grief and loss, and that it had an Ojibway name and I hadn't found the language for it yet.

Richard Wagamese received the 2007 Canadian Author's Association Award for his third novel, Dream Wheels (St. Martin's, 2006); www.richardwagamese.com. Reprinted from Canadian Dimension (May/June 2007). Subscriptions: Outside Canada, Canadian $39.99/yr. (6 issues), in Canada $29.99 from 2E-91 Albert St., Winnipeg, MB R3B 1G5, Canada; www.canadiandimension.com.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print