From One Raven's Eye

Page 7

Hello and ahneen. Do you have a little time to settle down in on spot for at least a bit? Staring out my window sometimes gets me to asking myself how I got myself into this place in the first place. Actually, the how part was easy. By an old green, rattly stationwagon is how. Why we're here is the hard part. I've somehow managed to meet most of the Ojibways out in those foothills and none of us are exactly sure.

My family has always been the hard to keep track of type. There are people who look like me spread out from here to Toronto. Now some people might call us wanderers while other would say maybe we're plain lost. Whatever it amounts to, all this got me to thinking over this fairly common habit we have of being here or there but never any one where for too, too long.

Some people like my mom have lived in one place and worked at one job for over five years. Yes, there are exceptions to every generality. Anybody who doesn't believe that, has obviously not travelled around enough, either in their lives or in their minds.

In the old days all that personal mobility led them to call us nomadic. These days they call us shiftless. Shiftless means having little ambition or moving around for no good reason. Well, even if I admit to being somewhat footloose these days, I'd rather be called shiftless than shifty, wouldn't you?

Back in the good old nomadic days on our reserve people didn't stay in one spot

all year round. We travelled the trapline, sturgeon, blueberry, wild rive, trapping circuit. These days there isn't much of a living left to be made from the land anymore, sadly enough.

Most people now live off the welfare or summer work, winter U.I.C. or the nine to five routine. There is always still that personal moving around going on but it isn't whole families of the whole band taking off to do the same thing all at the same time.

The changing times pretty much came for us when they built these two hydro dams nearby. People lived so close to the river they became somewhat like that river them-selves. That concrete wall might be enough to control the flow but the water itself doesn't change. It can still feel the pull of the slope and the need to complete its ancient run to the ocean, to go the course the hills and other natural forces have shaped for it.

On the reserve, without any natural outlet, the people went dark and still. Until

a fairly short time ago, few people left the reserve for good. Now more and more are trickling into the city. Part of that is just the thing to do when you've been feeling restless for awhile.

Once we arrive here we find it isn't easy to settle down and live the way the mortgage and pension plan makers figure a person should do in order to be successful.

One time I was involved in a course called Native Urban Orientation. This Native manpower counsellor would try to put together a waiting list of twenty people who said they wanted to take the program. She would get the names in June then try to contact the people in late August to see if they were still interested. She would be lucky if four or five people would still be at the same address or could be reached at the phone number they gave her. What would really get her mad was when the couldn't even get hold of me for the very same reasons.

A while ago, the people who like to count and sort things must've got around to asking themselves, "hey, how many Indians are out there really?" When they couldn't come up with an answer they started to get nervous. They decided to find out exactly

how many there were by actually getting out there and counting them one by one. They even went so far as to hire other Indians to count the other Indians in their own Cree, Dene, Carrier and Peigan languages.

What they found out we probably won't know for maybe a year or so. Well, they'll just have to start all over again because I for one will be somewhere else by then.

I left the rez six years ago maybe because of my family's wanderig off habit but mostly to try to get things writing, things going. In those years I've lived in Terrace, B.C., Saskatoon, a couple of times, The Pas, Manitoba; Kenora, Ontario, and Gretszkyvlle, Alberta.

To me, since the traditional way of making a living is gone, there is some value in getting out to see the larger world a little. In dealing with landlords, cops, social workers, bus drivers and waiters, we get to know the minds of the people who mostly control what's going on these days. When we do go back to the reserve and begin shaping our communities how we want them, we will have a better idea of what we are up against in trying to do that.

To live in the city, you definitely have to learn those talking for yourself ways. If you just stand there looking all mystified, other people will start using you to chain their bicycles to.

Once I was telling Melinda's grandmother about missing this and that back home. She listened for awhile then told me "a person should go where you heart is." I hope, in your looking around times, that the reasons for your comings and going are good and happy ones, not sad at all. If the way gets a little crazy or confusing sometime, well, maybe what that old woman said to me that time will help you start to make some sense

of it.

That's it for this week, thanks once again for reading another one of these, hope your way over these next seven nights and days are clear and good.