Dr. Grauer's Column - And Truth is Our Only Legitimate Teacher: An Indigenous Story

And Truth is Our Only Legitimate Teacher: An Indigenous Story
By Stuart Grauer

Is it possible to love something you are incapable of understanding? I know I have, and I sense it in the story this week.

In Canada, this week is Truth and Reconciliation Week. This is a transformative five-day journey for students, educators, and the broader community to engage with the history and enduring spirit of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples. September 30th annually memorializes the children lost to the residential school system and honors Survivors and their families.

In the United States, though we have no Truth and Reconciliation Week, we observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which is on October 13 this year. For many who may not have considered the purpose of truth and reconciliation, it is important to recognize—and teach— that the history of the whole of the North American continent includes the killing, displacement, and cultural erasure of millions of Indigenous people.

What I don’t hear about much in these beautiful honorings is the true life and learnings of the Native American child that were taken away forever. It is hard to imagine what the Native children learned “back in the day,” and so it is hard to have an experience in feeling the loss of it all. We don’t really know what their life was like, even as we try to honor it. So I am offering this description, which is personal to me as a teacher—and I will disclose how this can be at the end.

Here is a long out of print, firsthand account of an Indigenous boy’s life and learning over 100 years ago, in the far North: the story of David Butterfly, “Papoose,” from an old fur trading village.

The passage is a direct account recorded by a fur trader well over 100 years ago, but censored by me in parts that would be too offensive to bear today, even though the writer, Captain Thierry Mallot, seemed to love this culture. The passage reflects his lived observations of a child he knew. Though his language does not translate well across generations, I have chosen to leave much of it intact as a window into the way Indigenous life was described in that era. Readers may find parts of it difficult, yet it seems important to encounter these words in their original form, in order to better understand both the life being described and the perspective of the time. To feel what was lost, we need a glimpse of what daily life looked like. Here is such a glimpse into the lost world we honor and reconcile this week:

Papoose is the only boy of the family. His parents love him with the fierce love of the Northern Indian…. To be truthful, I am afraid that he is utterly spoiled and his manners are atrocious. But … he keeps me posted on everything that goes on. I have of course to bribe him heavily for that, with sweets, tobacco, jam, and pocket knives, and what not…

Papoose is a thin, long-legged little human… with the healthy purple-brown complexion... His coarse black hair rests like a round cap on the top of his skull, his last “haircut” having been accomplished by his mother, with a pair of straight shears, all along the edges of a kettle clapped beforehand on his head.

His eyes are really enormous, velvety black, and as sharp as needles …He wears a pair of soiled canvas trousers, reaching halfway down to his ankles, sustained by a leather string which starts from his right hip, reaches across his chest over his left shoulder…

His shirt, made out of an old caribou skin, is torn open at the neck, while his feet are shod with real moose-hide moccasins.

He always wears on his wrist a pair of thin bracelets, in leather and beads interwoven with small porcupine quills…

Papoose smokes a pipe, like a man, and when he does not he wears it thrust, bowl upward, in a slit in his shirt, on the left side of this chest. When he smokes he spits, and his skill at spitting is just short of miraculous. He never moves his head one way or another—his aim is unerring.

He dearly loves dog fights and I have caught him several times coaxing two huskies to come to grips by rubbing their noses against one another.

His great joy in life is to shoot, at anything, with a bow and blunt-head arrows. As in spitting, his skill is amazing. Inside of forty feet he can hit anything he aims at, including your tent guide rope and the small knob on the lid of your kettle when the latter is boiling merrily over the camp fire.

Another favorite passion of his is to throw the short axe, holding it by the handle, at a given target. As long as he is aiming at something large and consistent, such as the trunk of a tree, I don’t see much harm in the game. But when he tries to hit the snow birds in camp, especially when the latter are hopping on the ground in close proximity to my tent, I cannot help feeling a bit nervous.

He knows and can imitate the call of any wild animal. His masterpiece is the laugh of the loon, but he can honk a flock of geese three miles out of their course.

Papoose doesn’t know how to read or write, even in Cree, but his sense of location is uncanny. The north is stamped in his brain wherever he is. Blindfold him, twirl him around for a minute, stop him, and ask him where north is. Invariably his hand will point “true north.” I have never known that experiment to fail.

He has travelled this year alone, either in a hunting canoe or on foot in winter, twenty miles from my camp which his family has pitched. He is nine years old, mind you! Nobody here seems to think it very remarkable.

He loves to sing, all to himself. Funny Indian songs—half Cree, half Chipewayan. I have listened to him an hour at a time… There is no tune to speak of—just a plaintive singsong which never seems to end. But now and then he strikes a high note and his whole little self seems to give way to it. He sways back and forth, beats the air up and down with the palms of his hands, and keeps up the note until his very breath stops.

In the pitch-darkness of a winter night, right under the northern lights shivering in the sky, on the edge of a camp fire shooting weird thin sharp shadows across the snow, his little Indian song grips and scares your heart. [1]

This eerily vivid book is long out of print, for which some of you will be grateful, but I am transported by it because it is intensely real. It also captures the view of Westerners in those days when most were coming to believe that all Indigenous needed to be re-educated by whites, and the children—all over the United States and Canada—were removed from their families and brought to boarding schools where their cultures could be erased. In the U.S., our Congress passed the Indian Civilization Act in 1819. The Canadian “Indian Residential School” program was expanding rapidly in the 1880s (and the United States program would a few years later) and Papoose must have somehow escaped it. In the above story, I am un-erasing a little. How Papoose escaped this program, I cannot say.

As promised, the back story: The writer, Captain Mallot, was a fur trader who worked for the legendary Revillon fur manufacturing firm that, 50 years later, bought out my own father’s (and grandfather’s) company in New York. I have cut some of his phrases which do not translate across generations, and some of what remains is also potentially misunderstood. But there is a core there we can bring forward for our students: the giving economy, the respect of the caribou, the forest-schooling perspective—including astonishing connection and sensitivity to the natural world—and the respect of the land. All these remain as teachings featured in the annual Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Week, along with the “re-wilding” of our techno-absorbed children. They all belong in school textbooks and discussions, though they seldom are.

Much educational programming is brought to schools every year by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, though. Students and teachers must engage in meaningful dialogues and contribute to our collective path toward reconciliation.

I am amazed to have the Theirry Mallot book, “Glimpses of the Barren Lands,” and I handle each page like an antique. I think reading and telling the truth about Native life from back in the day is an ultimate and great educational challenge. In the United States, we have not created a national Truth and Reconciliation process, though in recent years Indigenous Peoples’ Day and growing public attention to Indian boarding school history have begun to serve a similar purpose.

As a final note, I want to acknowledge that the polemics in our nation today are so intense that many people I know are about to give up the belief that we are even capable of talking and listening across all the cultural lines being drawn. Some may even object to the story above.

And yet, providing a perspective from long ago is one way to see if we can comprehend the truths we struggle most to face. My own belief is that the answers to our apparent cognitive dissonance—and the path to reconciliation—lie more in listening people into compassion, listening more deeply and with greater care, than in talking over them, forcing them into our view, or inflaming divisions. More than proving others “wrong” or cruel, we need reconciliation first if we are ever to arrive at a sharable truth.

The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation would appear to be modelled after the South African model of Nelson Mandela following the end of their Apartheid: an honest facing of the truth, an absorbing or letting go of blame so that we can move forward in greater peace.

Truth is rarely simple—it is normally complex. Not often complicated, but complex, and that can be confusing and frustrating, and so it takes study. I’m not in favor of a romanticized version of Indigenous history, and yet, there must be something about the human condition that enables us to put all of this truth out of our thoughts and sensitivities, to treat it as nonmaterial, and to exclude it from our education. We are grateful to the teachers who open these antique truths.

We don’t tell the truth because it’s prettier or more colorful, we tell it because it needs telling—and the truth is the only legitimate teacher. I wish you all a thoughtful and respectful Truth and Reconciliation Week and Indigenous Peoples Day.

[1] P. 119-122, “Glimpses of the Barren Lands,” Captain Thierry Mallot, Revillon Freres, New York, 1930.

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