Exceptional Circumstances

1: Love and Ambition

Icome from a Métis working-class background. Every year from May to October, my dad helped load and unload freighters on the docks of Penetang, a small town on the southeasterly tip of Georgian Bay. He drew unemployment insurance and fished and hunted the rest of the year. When I was a kid, I got along well with everybody — Métis, white , and Indian. We all went to the same elementary school and my friends came home with me to eat Mama’s tarte au sucre and to listen to Grandpapa’s stories of his days first as a fur trader and later as a soldier in the trenches during the Great War — as he still called World War I. We played cowboys and Indians late into the evenings. Everybody wanted to be cowboys, even the Indian kids — nobody read any racist meaning into it — at least not when we were really young.

My friends made me welcome in their places — the Métis and Indian mothers fed me hot bannock topped with brown sugar and the white ones gave me peanut butter cookies. But as the years went by, and as we grew older and started high school, our relationships changed. The white kids found excuses to avoid coming to my place. A couple of Métis friends made ugly racist remarks about the guys from the reserve when they weren’t around and stopped inviting them home. Then, one by one, the Indians dropped out of school until there were only a handful left, and when the white and Métis kids ran into them on the streets, they pretended they didn’t know each other. When white kids from families moving into town to take jobs at the shipyard showed up at school, I overheard some of my Métis buddies tell them they weren’t really Métis. They were pure French they claimed — pure laine as they say in Quebec. But they were as brown-skinned as me or any Indian, and I could tell the white kids didn’t believe them.

It was around then that I began to understand the complexities of racial identity in our small town. The Indians, I saw, were at the bottom of the social scale. The Métis, because of the white blood of our fur-trader forbearers, ranked higher than Indians but still lower than whites because of our Indian ancestry. To be white was to be at the top. It was simple enough. Then one day I went with my parents on a shopping trip to Toronto. A group of Franco-Ontarians from somewhere up north were laughing and joking among themselves in French as they waited for a movie theatre to open on Yonge Street. Speak white, you French bastards, someone shouted from out of the shadows. That’s when I found out that white people discriminated among themselves as well.

I’m proud of the fact I never pretended I was a dark-skinned white — an Italian or Greek, for example — even though I might have been able to get away with it. I loved my brown-skinned parents and my dark brown-skinned grandpapa, and wouldn’t hurt their feelings for anything in the world. As a child in elementary school, I had worn my identity lightly. As a teenager in my last years of high school, exposed to the atmosphere of prejudice permeating the halls, I asserted my pride in my heritage. Although basically shy, I began telling anyone who would listen that Louis Riel, who led the Métis nation in two disastrous rebellions against Canada out west in the nineteenth century, was my hero. I put a Métis flag on my bedroom wall and took to wearing a Métis sash on the anniversary of his death. I may have overdone it, but for the rest of my life, I have bristled whenever anybody spoke ill of my people.

Life was otherwise good. I did well in school — not surprising since I was one of those lucky people blessed with an exceptional memory. It wasn’t photographic, but it was as close as you could get. I could store away and recall almost everything I read or heard. It’s a gift from God, the parish priest told me. But don’t let it go to your head. You’re no smarter than anyone else, but it’s an aptitude that’ll help get you through school and when you look for a job.

By high school, I had earned enough money from working alongside my dad on the docks in the summers to buy myself a 1950 Ford hardtop sedan. It was rusted and sometimes wouldn’t start without a push, but it had a manual shift and I could beat any of the other guys who drove Chevs or Pontiacs in street races. I also had a girlfriend, Corinne Lalande, an Indian girl from the nearby Christian Island reserve who lived with relatives in town. We had known each other since we were kids in the same grade in elementary school, but we hadn’t paid much attention to each other until high school when we defied the unwritten convention and started to hang out together.

She took me to pow wows and I took her to Métis fiddling contests. She took me canoeing in the waters around Christian Island and I took her horseback riding, my favourite weekend sport throughout high school. Her folks invited me to their house for meals and my family made her welcome at my place. Eventually, she started coming home with me every day after school and we’d do our homework together. She’d join us for mass and share our big lunches on Sundays. At these times, Grandpapa made her laugh, telling her his grandmother had been a good Catholic Indian from the Cat Lake Indian reserve in northwestern Ontario, winking at me and saying that Indian girls made the best wives.

But Corinne and I didn’t need any encouragement from Grandpapa to take our relationship further. In those days, most young people in Penetang — and across Canada for that matter — married young, sometimes when they were still teenagers. We were madly in love, walking around hand-in-hand, causing a stir because she was so beautiful with her long straight black hair, clear skin, and classical Indian features. I wasn’t bad looking in those days either, being tall with European features and light brown skin like so many of the Métis guys. We talked endlessly about sharing our lives together and decided that after high school, we’d enrol in one of those one-year business schools that taught typing, shorthand, office management, and bookkeeping. She’d focus on typing and dictation with the goal of becoming somebody’s private secretary. I’d concentrate on typing, file management, and accounting, and look for a job as a payroll clerk in the shipyards after graduation.

We decided that as soon as we got jobs, we’d have a wedding service in my family’s parish church followed by a reception and dinner at the community hall over at the reserve. By that time, we’d have picked out an inexpensive apartment to rent — something over a hardware store or Chinese restaurant. We’d save every penny to buy a vacant lot close to my parents and eventually we’d have the money to put into building on it. I was good at working with my hands and would do the work myself, with help from my dad, grandpapa, and my cousins and uncles — all the members of the Cadotte clan.

Like a lot of other couples just starting out in life in Penetang, we’d spend the first few years living in the basement. We’d layer tarpaper on the top of the capped ceiling to keep out the rain and snow and partition the open space below into a bedroom, living/dining room, bathroom, and kitchen. After a year or two — depending on how much money we’d put away, and whether any babies had come along — I’d begin work framing in the first floor. Eventually, in ten years or so, the house would be finished and paid for, complete with a screen porch where Corinne and I could spend the summer evenings with our children. Both families supported our plans and we couldn’t have been happier. Then on January 12, 1962, in my last year of high school, the course of our lives changed.

My day had started as it always did at that time of the year. I loaded up the furnace with coal to last the day, shovelled out the driveway and path to the road, drove to Corinne’s to pick her up, navigated my way to school through a tunnel of ten-foot-high snow banks, parked my car as usual behind the school, and went in to attend classes. Everything went well until our three o’clock class on the history of New France. The teacher, Angus Fairbanks, came in and sat on the edge of his desk, smiling and swinging his leg as he always did when he thought he had something interesting to tell us.

As you know, he said, I’ve always believed it important in the teaching of history, even at the high-school level, to use original sources to supplement textbooks. I have here in my hand, he said, holding up a book of documents, "English translations of the Jesuit Relations, sent to the Paris headquarters of the Jesuits by their missionaries in the field. The one I’ll read from describes the martyrdom of St. Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant, tortured to death by the Iroquois during their attack on the Huron town of St. Ignace, a few miles from here, on March 16, 1649."

After introductory remarks on the Jesuit attempts to convert the Indians, Fairbanks started to read. It was a subject we all knew. We’d studied it in elementary school and had been listening for years to our parents and grandparents talk about the seventeenth-century battles between the Hurons and the Iroquois in old Huronia, the homeland of the Hurons. We knew that the Iroquois, provided with weapons by Dutch traders, had fought a vicious war for the control of the fur trade against the Hurons, who were backed by the French. Without Fairbanks having to tell us, we knew that the Hurons had lost and fled to make new homes elsewhere. We knew several of the French priests had been killed and canonized as saints. We knew they’d been buried not far away, in Midland at a church called Martyr’s Shrine which brought a lot of tourist dollars into the region.

But the people around Penetang, at least the ones I knew, had always been uncomfortable with the subject. Terrible things had happened in those far-off days that weren’t fit to mention, certainly not around the dinner table. And nobody, especially the veterans, including my own dad and grandpapa, who had seen and maybe done awful things overseas, wanted to be reminded of the things people sometimes did to each other. And with so many Indians living in the reserves around Penetang, nobody wanted to embarrass them by bringing up past massacres by Indian warriors, even if those warriors were from different tribes and came from somewhere else. We had enough problems getting along with each other as it was. All of us wanted Fairbanks to stop reading and put away his book, but nobody dared interrupt him — he was, after all, the teacher, and teachers were more respected in those days.

And so we all sat there, not daring to look at anyone else as Fairbanks, a newcomer to the community, unaware of our local taboos and oblivious to the damage he could cause, carried on reading. And by the time he finished, my so-called extraordinary memory was a gift I regretted having. For the text I stored away against my will, and which would return periodically throughout my life to trouble me, began with a flourish and ended in horror. The following is an excerpt from what he read with the gruesome parts cut out to spare the feelings of the reader:

Father Jean de Brébeuf and Father Gabriel Lalemant had set to go to a small village, called St. Ignace, distant from our cabin by about a short quarter of a League, to instruct the savages and the new Christians of the village. It was on the 16th day of March in the morning, that we perceived a great fire at the place these two good Fathers had gone. This fire made us very uneasy; we did not know whether it was enemies or if the fire had caught in some of the huts of the village.

The Reverend Father Paul Ragueneau, our superior, immediately resolved to send someone to learn what might be the cause. But no sooner had we formed the design of going there to see, than we perceived several savages on the road, coming straight toward us. We all thought it was the Iroquois who were coming to attack us; but having considered them more closely, we perceived that they were Hurons who were fleeing from the fight, and who had escaped from the combat.

The savages told us the Iroquois came to the number of twelve hundred men, took their village and seized Father Brébeuf and his companion and set fire to all the huts. They proceeded to vent their rage on those two fathers, for they took them both and stripped them entirely naked and fastened each to a post. They tied both their hands together. They tore the nails from their fingers. They beat them with a shower of blows from cudgels, on the shoulders, the loins, the belly, and the face — there being no part of the body that did not endure this torment. Although Father Brébeuf was overwhelmed by the weight of these blows, he did not cease to encourage all the new Christians who were captives like himself to suffer as well, that they might die well, in order to go with him to Paradise.

Those butchers, seeing that the good Father began to grow weak, made him sit down on the ground, and one of them, taking a knife, cut off…. Another tore out…. Others came to drink his blood … saying that Father Brébeuf had been very courageous to endure so much pain as they had given him and that by drinking his blood, they would become courageous like him….

When Fairbanks described the torture and deaths of the priests, we all bowed our heads, not in prayer but in embarrassment, not wanting to look around and catch the eyes of our fellow students. About half the class were Métis and the others were mainly the sons and daughters of white British and French settler families, with three Indian girls, including Corinne, in the mix. I felt sorry for Corinne and the other girls from the reserve. Their ancestors had played no part in the events the teacher was describing but I was certain they were feeling humiliated and ashamed just for being Indian. I felt that way as well, even though I was only part Indian. Grandpapa had told me there were many Indians in my family tree, in addition to his grandmother, and it just made sense that one or more of those distant relations were alive in those days. For all I knew, they might well have participated in the massacre.

I stole a look at Fairbanks who remained perched on the edge of his desk, still swinging his leg nervously, his face flushed with excitement, a small smile on his face, and his eyes glued to the text he was reading. He’s enjoying doing this to the Indian and Métis kids, I thought. I glanced at one of my classmates who came from an old settler family — Hilda Greene it was. We’d been in the same class since Grade 1 and I’d never liked her. Her face was twisted into a humourless grin and the freckles on her face were glowing like Christmas tree lights. I imagined her worst stereotypical views of Indians and Métis were being confirmed. I wanted to stand up and tell Fairbanks to stop reading. The material’s grotesque, I wanted to shout. You’re embarrassing everyone, I wanted to scream … but I didn’t.

Fairbanks finally completed reading the worst parts and moved on to the peaceful finish — like a pianist playing a piece of classical music who ends a thunderous passage with calm reconciliation. But there was no feeling of understanding in the classroom, just a deep, uneasy silence. Nobody spoke, nobody looked up from their desks. I heard Fairbanks say, Well, what do you think? That brought history alive didn’t it? If that doesn’t raise your awareness of the inhumanity of man to man, nothing will. It was a truism that grated on my ears; he’d probably picked it up at university.

Still, nobody said anything. Finally I heard him call out my name. I don’t want to boast — that’s not my style — but I was the top student in history and could always be counted on to offer my opinion on any subject under discussion. Luc, he said, almost imploring me to break the sullen silence in the room, what do you think? Help me get a discussion going.

I said nothing, and then looked up to see the others looking at me, expecting me to take the lead. What do you think? Fairbanks asked. A little hard to digest, but you must admit that really brings local history alive.

I’m sorry, sir, but you wouldn’t want to hear what I really think.

No, go ahead, Luc. Get your concerns off your chest. We need honest debate.

I think it was a big mistake to read the document that way. It wasn’t put in context.

It seemed pretty straightforward to me.

Not to excuse the Iroquois, I said. But their actions were no worse than what the so-called civilized Europeans were doing at that time in history. Dominican priests were acting as agents of the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal and torturing and burning people by the thousand at the stake to save their souls. Innocent people throughout Europe and in the American colonies were being put to death for witchcraft. Anyone suspected of breaking the law was routinely tortured in those days to get confessions before being put to death. The Inquisition threatened Galileo with torture if he didn’t deny that the earth moved around the sun. You got to consider context, I said. The behaviour of the Iroquois has to be seen in context. Indians today shouldn’t be judged by the actions of some warriors in the heat of battle centuries ago. Reading that old report like that hurts the feelings of Indians today. Context is everything.

I’m sorry if I’ve upset you, was all he could say.

That just got me even more worked up and I carried with my angry rebuttal. And what makes today’s white people think they’re more humane than the seventeenth-century Iroquois. Most, if not all, of the so-called advanced countries in the world, including Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and the United States, hauled millions of Africans across the ocean to lives of slavery in the Americas throughout the eighteenth century and most of the nineteenth century. The United States and most Latin American countries treated Indians like vermin fit only to be exterminated. In this century, the Germans murdered civilian non-combatants by the million during World War II. Even in Canada, as we meet here today, the government is dragging Indian children from their homes to be sent to be brainwashed in residential schools.

Fairbanks let me go on until I calmed down and said my response was exactly what he had hoped to stimulate. I want you to feel deeply about history. I don’t want you to take my word for anything. I don’t want you to take the word of a priest writing about a slaughter that took place a few miles from here without making up your own minds on who was in the right.

But nobody else said anything. Corinne began to cry, which made me feel awful. I think Fairbanks realised he had made a mistake but didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t my intent to demonize the Indians, if that’s what’s bothering you. I just wanted you to think for yourselves.

He then asked a number of questions to stimulate debate, but nobody spoke up and the rest of the period was spent in an embarrassing silence. When we filed out the door at the end of class, however, I overheard Hilda Greene, her lips curled in derision, whisper to one of her friends, Indians were savages back in them old days and they’re savages today. My dad says it’s in their nature and they’ll never change.

When we went back to history class the next day, an unhappy Fairbanks said he had received calls from parents to say he had gone too far in reading the Jesuit Relations. Someone had told him he was a sadist, out to titillate and not educate their children. Looking my way, he said someone else said his presentation lacked context. The chairman of the school board, who hinted his contract might not be renewed for the next year, had called to complain.

"The people of Penetang obviously