Retaining identity crucial to cultural survival

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Tansi, ahnee and hello. There's a railroad bridge in Ontario that is the seat of my dreams. It spans a stretch of the Lake of the Woods at the north edge of Kenora. To the average eye it's nothing more than a blackened width of steel, poised above the white water leading to a hydro dam.

My father walked this bridge. He had a small campsite in the bush beyond the town limits. Here, he attempted to live as he had always lived; free, unhampered by schedules, surrounded by the bush he knew so well.

He was a man of the bush, my father. Like most northern Ojibway men he was far more comfortable in gumboots and hunting jackets than oxfords and dress pants. His sense of time and rhythm was in syncopation with the motions of the earth, through seasons, weather and the unexpected.

In that small bush camp he fought to retain his identify despite the incredible changes and forces which were acting on his life. His children were apprehended by the foster care system, his traditional lifestyle had been eroded by hydro development and the edges of that wilderness were being pushed back farther and farther all the time.

That bridge had come to represent the chasm my father crossed every day of his life. Each day he would walk from his camp into the town of Kenora. Each day he made the journey between what had once been and what was now irrevocably altered. Each day he left his familiar past and walked into a foreign future.

He tumbled from that bridge one dark autumn night. They found his body in the river and a piece of my history was removed forever. Because I never met my father, or at least I never got the chance to meet him as a cognizant human being. I'd been taken away before the gift of memory had awakened in me. I'd been far too young to remember anything except the vague, lingering sense of strong brown arms and a soft voice mumbling stories in my ear.

Whenever I go home and I stand on that bridge, I talk to the father I never got a chance to know. I tell him stories of my life and how it feels to be me in the world these days. I walk across that bridge and I try to feel what he must have felt all those late moonlit nights. And I try to find some comfort in the cold, black arms of that railroad bridge. But it never comes.

It is, after all, only steel and steel has no capacity for love. But we tend to hang onto those things that represent our losses in this life and we come to believe sometimes that there's a measure of salvation in the feel of empty things and places. Like objects and locations can somehow transport us backwards in time to those territories that come to mean happiness, security and dreams. Inevitably, however, we're forced to move on.

I can never reclaim my father. That one special relationship in my life is gone forever and I must live it vicariously through the father/son relationships of my friends or in the closeness of certain male mentors.

That's why I understand the importance of Native control over foster care. That's why programs like Calgary's new Child's Teepee Program is a vital one.

Because as I have said many times here, the most fundamental human right in the universe is the right to know who you are. When you're plucked from your own reality and placed in someone else's you begin to lose the knowledge of who you are. The longer you stay away the further removal you are from your own history, your own heritage and your own identity.

The Child's Teepee Program seeks to act as a preventative step between Native child apprehension and homes in crisis. They seek to provide safe, alternative, short-term homes for children before they're lost in the mechanics of the foster care system. Through development of secure Native environments, children might never have to suffer the indignity of having huge portions of their lives removed.

With 42 per cent of all children apprehended by Alberta Provincial Social Services being Aboriginal, the need for programs like this is obvious.

Our chidren are our future. The things we give them today are the tools they carry forward into tomorrow and beyond. We need to ensure that this crucial generation of people retain their identifies, histories and families because those are the things which grant all of us that most fundamental human right.

The Child's Teepee Program is a culture saver. Without it there might be many who, just like me, have to stand in the dark night of their adulthood wondering who they are, where they came from and why they never had their rights protected when they were young.

Blackened steel arms are no replacement for the warm arms of a father. For more information on Child's Teepee Program contact: John Heavy Shields at the Calgary Indian Friendship Centre 1-403-264-1155.

Until next time, Meegwetch.