uummati (not a love story) - preface

Acknowledgements

For their inspiration and contributions, big or small, in life and in spirit, the author is deeply grateful to: Elder Fred John, residential school survivor and bona-fide medicine man, for his friendship, compassion, and teaching me the medicine way; Stan Tomandl, the poet-warrior, for his wisdom and infinite knowledge; Ann Jacob for her sweetgrass, and indomitable loving kindness; the Mother Earth Healing Society for teaching me the smudge, and awakening the inner-Indian; Harland and Mary Grande for birthing me, raising me, and showing me the trauma of a World War, and the loss of family are still no match for the sheer, stubborn will to survive; Louis and Mary Romanet - and Florence and Christian Grande - my grandparents: the men, for crossing the Atlantic and finding the women, and the women: for birthing and raising my parents, and keeping it all together, like warriors do, (and the chocolate chip cookies after school); the Indigenous Law Students’ Association, the Class of 2014, and Professors Darlene Johnston, Gordon Christie, and Stephen Wexler, of the University of British Columbia, Peter A. Allard School of Law, my second family, for putting up with me, giving me my real education, and showing me what was at stake; Stuart Wright, master of the arts and true friend, whose excellence is second-nature, and second to none; David Eso (PhD), maestro of the fine-line, for his exceptional insight and confidence; Marie Maccagno, role-model, for living the dream, and her unwavering belief in the power of writing; and Darlene Tonelli, exemplar of the legal profession, for her grace and guidance.

The Story of the Cover

In Inuktitut (the language of the Inuit people) “uummati” (OO-mah-tee) means “heart”, and not simply the organ, but something closer to “essence”.

The image, however, is a painting of a tipi, which is not an Inuit structure, but one belonging to many First Nations south of the Arctic, east of the Continental Divide, and north of Mexico, more or less.

The reason for this juxtaposition between an Inuit word, and a First Nation icon will become clear in the story, but the illustration is a painting made by a student of a tipi, glowing with a strange light.

The student gave it to me on a Monday after the weekend I first envisioned the idea for the screenplay which eventually became Chapter 5 of this novel. The scene described a tipi “glowing with a light of its own.” I had not communicated this to anyone. The student had no way of knowing.

This left no doubt as to the choice of cover art.

The framed original hangs on the wall above my desk.

Epigraph

“Between the conception

And the creation

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Shadow.”

• T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

“If one day we’re happy,

the next day we’re not,

if good and bad are stirred together,

then we’ll like what we can do for one another.”

• Shiilapé (Yellow Nose) to Old Coyote at the Creation

“You are the Yin in my Yang.”

• Becky

Preface

Why ‘decolonize’ art? Why toss a statue into the sea, or edit objectionable words from a modern depiction of an old story to appease the zeitgeist of the day? How do we learn from the past if we are more worried about sanitizing ourselves of its sins than we are about changing the core belief that led to the problem in the first place? The belief in terra nullius - in ‘no man’s land’ - in the promise of a new Eden for the taking from the ‘savages’ - has been my work the last fifteen-years. But, like everyone who calls Turtle Island home, it has defined entire my life. As a Settler, I am where I am, through the taking of Indigenous land, but as an Indian, I have been here forever.

My learning began with the stories my mother passed down of her father, a French immigrant fur trader, and his time living among the Inuit of Nunavik (northern Quebec), and among the Cree of eeyou istchee (James Bay region). Revered by our family, Grandad’s tale formed the basis for the book “Kabluk of the Eskimo” (1932) by Lowell Thomas. From my mother, I received Grandad’s journals, short stories, letters, and his unpublished manuscript - “The Travels of Kabluk” (1932) - with hand-drawn maps of his voyage to marry my Cree grandmother, across the area now flooded by the dams of the James Bay Hydroelectric Project. His story took years to unpack, concurrent with the years discovering my Indigeneity, and to conclude something was seriously wrong in the ‘white man’s world’ concerning the Indian, and how these things - common to all colonial ‘boys-only’ adventures - were reflected in Grandad’s story.

First, eponymous to the boys-only style, is the relegation of the woman. Indeed. Though Grandma appears early-on, and becomes the object of Grandad’s desire, she is otherwise invisible. She remains unnamed through all the writings and has only a few lines. And for some reason, perhaps to hide her identity to avoid being shunned by white society, he felt he had to lie, and say Grandma was white. Or perhaps, even with her brown skin and dark eyes, the “black haired minx” managed to fool him. Either way, we know my ôhkom, the heart-and-soul of the family, whom Grandad loved dearly, was Cree, and started bearing the first of their seven children at the age of eighteen.

Second, though Grandad was one of the more educated adventurers of the time, the cultural gap still emerges in the language - the racial epithets are just more poignant. One of the best examples appears in “Kabluk of the Eskimo”. Speaking for Grandad, Mr. Thomas writes: “The Eskimos were as human and subject to weakness as civilized people are, but in their case the pettiness and peculiarities were the result of their primitive appetites and superstitious beliefs, which they were unable to control.” Though we can only wonder what the Inuit had to say on the appetites and beliefs of such ‘civilized’ men, this story will shed some light on their point of view.

However, raising these facts often elicits the excuse of presentism: “That’s just how it was back then.” In other words, isn’t such ordinary sexism and racism the pith and substance of the colonial story? Sure. But it didn’t go anywhere. It’s in the bones of the nation, and it thrives, well into 2025.

But this body of old school literature is notable for a third element - an omission - not found in Grandad’s canon, nor in any other story I have read from that era.

From Governor General Bagot’s Commission of 1844 which recommended “education as a means of ridding the Dominion of Indians”, to the closing of the last residential school in 1996, no story I have found, written during that time, gives any hint about the abductions of Indigenous children into the ‘program’ over the hundred-and-fifty-year period. Granted, mine is but a small sample, and I welcome any reference to refute my findings, after all, one must exist - somewhere. For how can such a ubiquitous thing go unnoticed? Did these authors (men) fail to see the Indian homes and villages bereft of children? Or travel past a school, and not see the children in their uniforms? Or (more likely) did they bear witness, and regard it as so ordinary as to be unworthy of mention?

This is not to say exclusion from the adventure stories means the plight of native children was ignored. In fact, according to the colonial record, it was a subject of much debate. In 1907, Indian Affairs’ chief medical officer, P.H. Bryce, reported a death toll among the schools’ children of 15-24% - rising to 42% in Aboriginal homes, where sick children were sometimes sent to die. In 1918, a report by bookkeeper F.H. Paget, noted that part of the problem leading to such high mortality rates was the school buildings were in constant disrepair, having been constructed and maintained as cheaply as possible (Spear, 2017). Then-director of Indian Affairs, and Treaty Nine Commissioner, Duncan Campbell Scott, acknowledged the problems, but did nothing. Scott had stated earlier such things did not “justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is geared towards a final solution of our Indian problem.”

Regardless, whether by racist ignorance, or willful blindness, from the mid-1800s to late-1900s, authors of the white man’s derring-do disregarded the genocidal actions of the colonial government and framed the world as they saw it, naturally - writing for their audience, and especially, writing what sells. The forced removal of Indigenous children from their homes was occurring, but, like everything else, it was ‘just the way they did things back then’ - a backdrop to the day-to-day business of colonization. For the next two-centuries, those writings, and all their colonial counterparts would become the corpus litterarum needed to help to cleanse history of the ugly truth.

It began with the Jesuits in the 1670s, and continued to the end of the twentieth century - first, branding the natives as ‘doomed’ in order to be ‘saved’ (Unwin, 2003), and second, sustaining the stereotypes to enable white society to get ‘those people’ out of the way - out of the public mind - and ensure future generations stayed focused on the great unfolding of the Colonial Dream, rather than the destruction of native people required to make it happen. Unfortunately, millions of school children (myself included) were fed these same stories - the ‘opening’ of the country, and the ‘taming’ of the West - but we were never told the truth. Our minders had given us all the advantages their so-called new world had to offer. Why should their children care?

But to this boy, something wasn’t quite right with the white man’s world. For example, I would always wonder why, at the start of every school year, different native kids got on the bus from the farm of the white family up the road. Who were they? Where did they come from? No one could answer these questions. The children answered to their English names, knew little of their own life histories, and kept to themselves as they were shuffled-off into the ‘special-needs’ classroom. Unbeknownst to this boy, we were ten-years into the Sixties-Scoop, but it seemed as if everyone were living in a nation-wide episode of the Twilight Zone, and had been under the spell for a very long time, including Grandad. Two-hundred-and-sixty-years after the Jesuits, he writes in “The Travels of Kabluk”: “The Indian is doomed, and he knows it.” This, after they guided him fifteen-hundred miles to get him to his wedding on time, to marry one of their own.

Many of my generation are now grandparents, some of whom, I find, on the Settler side, still get uncomfortable, because of that childhood conditioning, as I join with them around the medicine drum, in those moments in the ceremony, between songs, when we might explore the meaning of ‘reconciliation’. Many are willing to do the deeper work toward meaningful restitution, some don’t know what to do at all, and a good number think Colonization is a thing of the past, and we should ‘just get over it’ and ‘move on’. Were it that simple.

No matter how much self-rationalizing propaganda it has generated to the contrary, Colonization does not inure to the benefit of Indigenous people. Some of it might have begun as an alliance for the sake of enterprise - to line the pockets of rich Englishmen, most of whom never took the time to visit - but one or two generations after the death of Tecumseh in 1813, the mission changed to assimilation, or elimination, either by force, or by administration, or a bit of both, and it continues today. Indigenous people represent roughly half of all prison inmates, though they make up less than five-percent of the population. And nowhere does the living edge of Colonization cut deeper than the hundreds of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls. The preferred prey of the predator-class, with ties to the halls of power.

When it comes to the land, the Crown points to Treaties as the final arbiters in those parts of the nation where they exist (the rest being unceded). But what Indigenous people regard as agreements of peace, friendship, and sharing, the Crown calls documents of surrender - creating the longstanding, mistaken belief that the Indians simply gave away their land because they entered negotiations. Further, the wording of most treaties differs from what was verbally promised, meaning most were undertaken in bad faith. The result, however, is a presumption of colonial sovereignty over Indigenous land, and power over Indigenous people embedded into everyday life - into the physical and social infrastructures of society. To paraphrase the late Justice Murray Sinclair, racism is so hardwired into the system, it doesn’t need actual racists like Mr. Scott on the job anymore. It’s in the machinery, and is loath to change.

But this country has given a masterclass in the appearance of change. Since 1982, we have “affirmed” Constitutional rights for Indigenous people; struck a Royal Commission in 1996 after the Oka and Gustafson Lake crises; seen five decades of positive (and negative) Supreme Court judgments; and held a painful Truth and Reconciliation Commission - the result of a class-action settlement on behalf of survivors - which found that thousands of Indigenous children died or went missing in the residential school system. This triggered a long overdue backlash - deletion of the racist labels and images of Indigenous people, and a renaming of institutions and landmarks. But we have also defaced monuments, and burned churches; acts which may be cathartic for some, but leave us poorer as people, and as a nation, and do nothing to correct the power imbalance. For no matter how unsavoury the revelation, how curative the response, or how good the intention behind it, the descendants of those who came uninvited from across the sea and assumed power are still in charge - just minus a few statues, some buildings, and some art - and without adopting a single recommendation from the Royal Commission report.

But real, fundamental decolonization is beginning to occur, such as the return of Haida Gwaii to the Haida people, and the Nunavut Devolution Agreement, both in 2024. The same is also coming from smaller jurisdictions, and private landowners - precedents that signal there is no going back. Anything other than a return of land taken under terra nullius - another commission, or policy change on paper - will be simply another spectacle of intention without substance.

As I look back over the years spent teaching around the drum, and advocating for Indigenous rights and title, the irony is not lost on me: I owe my Grandad - the colonial adventurer of the boys-only tale - a debt I can never repay, for having the courage to venture forth. This is the friction of walking between the two worlds, much like the protagonist of this tale.

Therefore, in consideration of all the above, and the fact that the return of land is the only true form of decolonization, I have decided neither to decolonize, nor ‘Indigenize’ the art, but ask simply, “What if one of those adventurers - an unlikely hero, of humbler disposition - became the first of his ilk to notice a heinous, state-sponsored crime occurring right under everyone’s nose in this New World?” And “What if playing the part of the dutiful housewife was only a disguise for his love’s true identity?” Anyone lucky enough to have a connection with their ôhkom knows there’s something special about her - supernatural, even - like part of her is still kicking ass and running with the wolves. Even after she’s gone, she still finds a way to connect with those she loves. What is the source of all that power? And what forces must be at work, both for and against, the union of these two rare individuals? Why, the ripple effect could create new ways of thinking and being for an entire nation, someday, down the road. And who wants that, if you’re the status quo, busy trying to control an Indian problem, or a Trickster who likes it that way?

Welcome then, to a kind of grandfather paradox - a journey to the past, if only to reimagine history and parlay a message to the future - a fractured fable - set in (mostly) fictional places - a fantasy based on real events. Which, come to think of it, might make this story something of a small counterpoint to Colonization itself - that all-too-real event based on fantasy.

sabé

July 1st, 2025