From one Raven's Eye

Page 7

More on Being Poor

Guess what time it is? Springtime? Yes, 1986? That, too. Another month or so until five dollar and twelve dollar treaty days? Well okay, but besides all these things, it is also time to finish a column began last fall concerning being poor. You mean you'd forgotten we were going to get back to that? Well they say too much pressed wheat in a person's diet can plug up their memory like that.

Back then we went over how we cope, mostly positively, with going without. It always just amazes me visiting people living hard times constantly who always make me feel better just being around them for awhile. You end up asking yourself how it is so many end up struggling so hard.

One thing that comes to mind is what Allan said that day to this government commission. They were investigating the affects of the loss of commercial fishing to individuals and the band. His eyes and voice sort of blazed over as he rose to speak.

When that first tourist camp opened up, even before the road came in here, the camp owner and a tourist from New York or some big place like that came looking around for guides. Well, there we were living in a little log place out in the bush, no electricity, nothing.

Anyway, when they came to my dad's door that rich fella looks around inside then asks, real polite you know, what it was we were eating.

Fish eggs, my dad said, and manomin.

That guy sure laughed when I told him that manomin meant wild rice. He said where he was from people ate fish eggs, too, but they called it caviar. And wild rice was served in only the fanciest eating places where even he didn't like to pay that much for it. He laughed again knowing that here we were eating that kind of thing every day.

Well things have changed for us since those days. The sturgeon where we got those eggs from are all gone. That hydro dam they built floods out the rice half the time. A person like me can't afford to buy their manomin from the store. Just a handful costs eight or nine dollars.

I guess a person can say we were living pretty poor in those days, too, but we just didn't know it. Allan and Mitchell and Bill Sr., all in their mid-fifties, would come around to the band office and tell me stories about those days. People travelled from the trapline, to the fishing grounds, back to home, plant a garden, then off again for blueberries, then wild rice picking, then trapping again. Everybody kept busy filling a root cellar to see them through the winter. We'd sit there smoking cigarettes, talking, sometimes looking down at our feet, sometimes staring off down that big blue water curving away amongst those hills we were all born between. Pretty soon that quiet, sad mood would pass and we'd be back joking back and forth, teasing over this and that.

When I hear people say Indians are just lazy and would rather live on welfare anyway, I just feel like grabbing that person and shaking them so hard their freckles would fly off.

But you know Allan and those guys would never agree to such a thing. Even after I got into a speech about poverty causing family breakups, alcoholism, suicide, people in jail and all sorts of other heartache, they still wouldn't agree with me doing that.

Try hard, find a way, is all they would say, if they said anything at all.

Many people say education and a job training are that way. But what about the fact more and more people are slipping below the poverty line all the time. And after the last big employment crisis of three or four years ago, they now figure at least a million people will be permanently unemployed.

Now, say we all woke up tomorrow morning and found university degrees under our pillows. You suddenly started counseling all your visitors and they started counselling you back. Later that afternoon, after answering all the questions on the game shows all morning you went down to manpower or the band office to submit an application in respect of an employment position that might presentlyexit. Yesterday you went down to ask for a job but you're smarter now so, it takes longer to say the same thing.

Well on our reserve, counting all the jobs we could then take over immediately maybe forty people would have full-time work. Our employable labour force is around 180 persons. The essential problem of a viable economic base to support the community would still exist.

Maybe we could set up the largest Native consulting service in the history of the western world to put people to work but we would have to do it mighty quick. It wouldn't take long for those smarty pants Indians from other reserves to think of the same thing.

In the city all the jobs that serve the specific needs of Native people in the government and Native organizations would soon be all filled. Right away we start competing with non-Natives for their jobs. About that exact time is when we would find out sure how sincere those invitations to join mainstream society had been.

"He refuses to leave until he gets an answer and he is fully qualified."

"Yeah, that's true but his tan clashes with the furniture."

"Oh well then, he isn't perfect for the job."

"No, I'm afraid not."

We could find ways to beat that sort of thing but it is a hurdle you can pretty much count on.

I'm not saying living in poverty is something we should just accept but it is an ever present and growing aspect of the society we are being more or less forced to join. Once you are in a disadvantaged situation it's pretty hard, as a group, to break out of it. The present individual answer is either an education or winning the lottery. We should, however, take a long hard look at what our traditional idea of "social welfare" was and compare it to what the present day non-Native one is and see exactly what we are gaining and losing in accepting it.

All this is just talk to the people who are going to their cupboards and finding nothing there but a calendar with the days crossed off it. A recent survey done said that 47 - almost half - of the people on assistance in the city had to use the food bank to see them through the month. Eighty-five per cent agreed that they weren't given enough to buy groceries with in the first place.

The average Native household pulls in $9,000 a year, the poverty line is set around $12,000. Another way of looking at it is: if you are spending a third of your income on housing, then you are poor. I don't have the statistics for the reserve, but I do know that caviar sales are way down in that part of the country.

To the ones who live with the grinding of the heart and will of poverty and can still rise above it to shine in a smiling around and sharing way, they have my highest respect. To the ones struggling under the weight of all that, all I can say is what I've been told, try hard, find a way. They say it does not good to wish, but I can't help but wish for some time and place where these kinds of days are behind every single one of us.

Thank you again for reading another one of these things. The nicest thing a person can do for a writer is to take the time to read their stuff, for that ..meegwatch. meegwatch.