My favourite reluctant Indian

My favourite reluctant Indian. TC, my grandpa.

... somewhere in between gentrifier and displaced. colonized and colonizer. being Metis can mean feeling cognitive dissonance at its most earnest ...

(Originally written on T&R 2022) and updated as things become conscious.

Today is complex for me and many. Anyone who works with me knows how I feel about canned land acknowledgements. Could we just not?

I recorded with my grandpa and made these clips around 2017 when the tech video tools weren't really there, yet. It's raw video, moments I spun up for Instagram at the time. One day, I'll re-cut everything. I'll whitewash this up into a neat and tidy little package and publish. But not today.

*sound on for vid:

Nice guy when he's sleeping

TC passed away right away before COVID. And when I say 'passed away' I mean he gracefully opted to undergo assisted suicide. We spent that morning calling his old girlfriends and praying on the phone with his sister. He explained to her that was ready to go, he had a good feeling about the timing. Two months later the entire world shut down for a pandemic.

His favourite saying was "nice guy, when he's sleeping." So, there you go.

I had become quite close to TC in the last few years of his life, predominately because we shared a love for dive bars and the people and stories that inhabit them; our relationship was low-effort and natural. I used to skip class in high school and meet him at the Lucky Duck on Macleod Trail (clam and Coors lite).

Grandpa wasn't a saint. To say the least… But he did better than those before him, and we got along pretty good.?

TC and my mother's family were and are complex, as is my relationship with many of them.?

I am proud of my mother for leading in recognition of who we are (even if she is overcome at times with internalized racism and complex emotions of denial… a "them not us" mantra). She was shamed and rejected at times by her family for researching and acknowledging our "Metisness"… and that has become a cycle of more internalized shame and complexity for her and for me.?She always wants it both ways, to be Metis yet completely non-indigenous. Proud in one second then shifting to internalized shame and anger at the very same time. It's a heart-breaking catch-22 to watch play out and know that you can't fix. You can't drag people to consciousness any more than my grandpa could lead his horses to water.

Millennials and GenXers are too talky talk

Many in my family are awakening. I watch my cousins embrace businesses, go back to school to specialize in indigenization areas of study, and ultimately - own our truth.

I grew up hearing, 'Shhh Theresa, we are just a little "Metis" not that much …' During my 20s, I felt like an imposter each time the issue came up in school and with friends.?Directly related to Louis Riel and our name (Lamoureux) gentrified over every inch of the Oak Point graveyard.

Hey colonizer

That's the thing about being Metis. You're always somewhere in between gentrifier and displaced. Colonized and colonizer.

Being Metis can mean feeling cognitive dissonance at its most earnest and traumatic and unless you've lived it, or are living it - that won't make sense.

By the time my grandpa peaced-out from Manitoba as a teenager to come West, he had left all the jigging, Michif?language and fiddling behind him. Abandoned the culture, yet couldn't shake the trauma, which was passed on in various forms from the obvious behaviour of parents not fairly equipped, to the nervous system (check out Gabor Mate if you're breezy on the science) whether anyone in my family likes it, admits it, or not. Trauma? Us? You must be kidding, we're just fine over here drowning in estrangement and dysfunction.

I get it (the denial); Personally, I could do with a lot less of the intergenerational trauma and a bunch more of the jigging and fiddling and tourtiere. That would have been a much better legacy for my nervous system to tackle in adulthood. But we get what we get.

And it's only a small part of our story.

Silent witness

Growing up with white friends, I could speak about it. With caveats, of course; qualifiers as to just "how much" Metis I am.??Like an academic or historian looking back into my family tree.

Terrified each time I was with Indigenous people — how do I explain this to "them," exactly? Blond hair and blue eyes, as well as the vast privilege that come with that, coupled with being raised in relative monetary wealth. Dad's British family and Nan and Grandad and Coronation Street constantly blaring from the TV.

Refusing to apply and accept a scholarship for Metis journalism students because I didn't feel Metis "enough" to receive it — my own internalized racism… all the stuff that comes with colonization and the bullshit we are dealing with today as Canadians and Indigenous people.??

I used to think land recognitions were the stupidest thing I'd ever heard of. What a bunch of empty and meaningless liberal, white corporate crap that results in nothing at all. But over the last few years, I have seen how these small steps have been important in opening up dialogue and giving voice to those who hid before. The land recognitions are not about land at all, they are about telling our story. Putting a page back in a textbook. And, in my opinion on the darker side, providing a water cooler discussion in a safe space for white people (which is sadly sometimes what it takes to get white people to feel comfortable talking about anything slightly off-putting to our ego at all) We need a box and script to stick to and stay in. Something for the CBC to report on and quantify as Canadian news.

I get it - I'm down with the land recognitions - except, could we all stop doing land recognitions over zoom? Zoom isn't on land.

One day, I will finally put the journalism hat back on and write this essay properly… publish it somewhere. I've been trying to put pen to paper, or document for a decade, and it won't come out. Applying at the Banff Centre and being waitlisted, then watching COVID shut everything down and the Banff Centre program, go extinct.

Denial is a powerful drug

I was 38-years-old when I finally saw where my grandfather TC and his family were raised in the Oak Point Settlement near St Laurent Manitoba (2018).?A place my mother and her siblings spent some time as children.

This trip was... intense to say the least. I was supposed to go with my grandpa alone. But my mom and aunt soon lobbed on. It was a horrible experience and one I am eternally grateful to my mother for providing. She influenced the road map, introductions to family and context for our journey; if I had been there alone TC would have no doubt had me sat at the bar or manipulated me away from Oak Point and kept me in the city, away from anything remotely resembling a Metis Settlement or truth (recognition if not reconciliation).

Speaking of dive bars...

A lot of really messed up wonderful moments and meetings happened on that trip. But to cut to the chase, the entire macabre Metis reconning of a vacation cumulated in a conversation at a bar that I will never forget. My grandpa is dead now, so I am the last witness; as (apparently) the two other tablemates immediately "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"ed this pivotal convo from their consciousness.

But I remember.

Sitting with my grandpa, my aunt and my mother in a bar in Winnipeg, listening to him break down through shaken tears and tell us about the dead babies (corpses). As a child, he remembers finding dead babies hidden at the Catholic school in Oak Point, Manitoba. Where those babies came from (the nuns, surrounding families?) or who they were is left to mystery.

It was not the first time I had caught wind of this story. This time was different though. My grandpa was purposeful and pointed in his delivery and personal.

"I want you to listen.... girls, I have something I gotta tells you." I can remember him saying this and then crying and not being able to speak. My aunt said something along the lines of: "we are listening dad, it's okay..." and then he spoke.

He told us things I had heard in bits and pieces, as rumours and whispers as child. Things about nuns and priests and molestation and family. His own father and the abuse that took place. And the dead babies hidden in school walls.

It was not the first time I had heard the stories, they seemed to be in my consciousness, I can see the walls... but I don't remember when I first was made aware.?I knew.

In 2021 all this uncovering of dead children was perplexing to me. I asked some of my cousins recently:

"Were you surprised at all of this uncovering of the dead children across Canada? Was this somehow f-ing news? How did we know and the rest of Canada not, exactly?!" My cousins and I think that perhaps we learned in Social Studies classes. Did we learn in Social Studies? Then we "corrected" ourselves; maybe we learned at home from our parents??No, that wasn't it... did grandpa tell us? No.

… perhaps we have collective and convenient amnesia as Canadians. Because we knew... And that means "they" knew.

Is there a consciousness that genetically embeds the memories intergenerational trauma? Or is that too far out to think about? "They" (the researchers and thinkers) also think the heart is as influential and important as the brain. That our hearts as organs have memories and send messages to our bodies the same way the brain is thought to be the epicentre of all. The brain, our body's colonizer.

The conversation happened in that bar in Winnipeg

It happened.

It happened.

It happened.

I am writing it here because every time something bad comes out, it almost feels like healing... and then like clock work someone shoves it back in its box and locks the lid. Being around my family is like suffocating on inconsistency bathed in gasoline.

Recently, my mother informed me she "has no recall of this conversation in the pub" with my grandpa. One of the most pivotal healing points of truth and explanation for so many things, so much behaviour, in our life and she went into cognitive denial.

She has no recall of her own father telling this story, of the school system he was in as a child. And technically, it's just a school in Manitoba. Not technically a residential school, you know? There's that sucker punch again to the Metis consciousness - it's not a residential school, so you were all FINE.

Now STFU.

My mother also informed me that she does not believe there was a genocide in Canada of Indigenous children. As far as residential schools and genocide goes? She is sure as sure that the gov't and all involved "had to take those children from their families and educate them" and everyone in power meant well. The dead kids? Many and most died of natural causes, she says. "Polio and smallpox, Theresa." It is what it is. No one did anything wrong, and we all need to get over it. And most importantly, the only message that is really being sent:

I need to STFU and stop talking about all of this. It's too traumatic.

My mother has, in her old age, gone into a complete shutdown of reality, and refusal of the truth when it's uncomfortable to survive whatever it is she is surviving. I am expected to Stockholm along for the ride, and there are consequences for questioning magical thinking.

There's a reason they call the trauma generational

To survive our families we often deny the truth and live in their reality. Read their metaphorical textbooks and go along with their narratives or risk having every ounce of love, food or water taken. Sounds a lot like the basis of successful colonization. Isn't that kinda the strategy imperial countries and early missionaries perfected?

"This is your story, this is the truth."

One day you wake up and you can't even remember the truth anymore and you start to identify with them (the abuser) more than yourself until you become one.

That is generational trauma ... self-hatred, and the cancelling of your story passed on.

Stop talking about it. That is the message.

And the message is an internal stakeholder communication that we hope won't get leaked.

My grandfather and others (who did everything they could to leave and cover up their roots) must be completely befuddled by Truth and Rec. He tried to "protect" his kids and grandkids from discrimination by leaving it behind and identifying with the power structure in place (if you can't beat 'em...). And now we're, jerks like me, trudging it all back up and healing and woke-signalling all over social media ... how disrespectful.

When my mother and I returned from that trip from Winnipeg things were never the same. Not that they were normal to begin with. That trip was really the beginning of the end. Turning points in consciousness and life. Going to Manitoba with her was like taking a blow torch to a curtain of secrets and a story my mom tried to control the message and narrative in her mind to survive. She would never forgive me for seeing the pieces of that story laid out in a different context than her brain needed it to be presented. She thought we'd visit a graveyard and see some old aunts and cousins, maybe have a BBQ at someone's house... and instead, it was all tears and screaming and dysregulation until the cows came home.

The stories we tell ourselves

We tell good stories.

Before I went back to Oak Point, all I had to base our Metis history on were my grandpa's stories of growing up. And he was a really, really good storyteller.

Maybe a little too good.

And maybe, he passed that storytelling stuff on to me and perhaps I should embrace that legacy instead of the trauma and the drama.

The day TC agreed to be interviewed on camera about his life (about 2017ish) before the trip to Oak Point and Winnipeg, the two of us spent an afternoon driving around the country. Southern Alberta. When I finally got the cameras out and asked Grandpa about being Metis, I was afraid. I can hear it in my voice; I say "they" & "your family" not "us" or "Me."?

He knew it was coming (the Metis question), and he was ready for me. The answer he gives is a lot more complex than just being afraid others (they) will think "we" are on gov't handouts. Or identifying more as French than Metis. It's layered and I'm not going to unlayer it here. However, in this brief moment with my grandpa, what strikes me is the part where when asked why he doesn't "identify" as Metis, he answers:?

"... because I don't want their goddamn money. I come this far without 'em… I'll go all the rest of the way…"?

The 'they' he ultimately refers to is... white people? but in his context - the government??Or maybe it's those crappy priests and nuns... who knows who "they" are. That's the thing about being Metis, there is no "us" and "them" or "they" and "me."

He didn't want to be Metis, or Indian, because he fought so hard to be equal, and equal meant stripping everything away - he was never going back.?

My grandpa would have preferred "you" skip the land acknowledgment today and buy him a beer.?

He would have preferred there was no day of National Day of Truth and Reconciliation at all. He would have laughed at us and this whole 'gaddam' day. And he would have told us to go to work.

He didn't want to be Metis.?

He hated being an Indian.?

And that, is colonization.?

#metis #truth&rec #indigenization #NDTR #EveryChildMatters #tellyourstory Métis Nation of Alberta Manitoba Métis Federation