Lament For Confederation

I made a promise to myself and the sensitive in my community that I would do my best to be as apolitical as I could be when posting my blogs. I'm opinionated, I'm dogmatic and some might say a slight bit arrogant. But this posting is not about me. I've been asked to post a link to the Chief's soliloquy "Lament for Confederation". Instead of a link, here it is, word for word. Read it, savour the words, and take a part of it with you wherever you travel in Canada, and anywhere indigenous people strive to preserve their culture.

Lament for Confederation

How long have I known you, Oh Canada? A hundred years? Yes, a hundred years. And many, many seelanum more. And today, when you celebrate your hundred years, Oh Canada, I am sad for all the Indian people throughout the land.

For I have known you when your forests were mine; when they gave me my meat and my clothing. I have known you in your streams and rivers where your fish flashed and danced in the sun, where the waters said 'come, come and eat of my abundance.' I have known you in the freedom of the winds. And my spirit, like the winds, once roamed your good lands.

But in the long hundred years since the white man came, I have seen my freedom disappear like the salmon going mysteriously out to sea. The white man's strange customs, which I could not understand, pressed down upon me until I could no longer breathe.

When I fought to protect my land and my home, I was called a savage. When I neither understood nor welcomed his way of life, I was called lazy. When I tried to rule my people, I was stripped of my authority.

My nation was ignored in your history textbooks - they were little more important in the history of Canada than the buffalo that ranged the plains. I was ridiculed in your plays and motion pictures, and when I drank your fire-water, I got drunk - very, very drunk. And I forgot.

Oh Canada, how can I celebrate with you this Centenary, this hundred years? Shall I thank you for the reserves that are left to me of my beautiful forests? For the canned fish of my rivers? For the loss of my pride and authority, even among my own people? For the lack of my will to fight back? No! I must forget what's past and gone.

Oh God in heaven! Give me back the courage of the olden chiefs. Let me wrestle with my surroundings. Let me again, as in the days of old, dominate my environment. Let me humbly accept this new culture and through it rise up and go on.

Oh God! Like the thunderbird of old I shall rise again out of the sea; I shall grab the instruments of the white man's success-his education, his skills- and with these new tools I shall build my race into the proudest segment of your society.

Before I follow the great chiefs who have gone before us, Oh Canada, I shall see these things come to pass. I shall see our young braves and our chiefs sitting in the houses of law and government, ruling and being ruled by the knowledge and freedoms of our great land.

So shall we shatter the barriers of our isolation. So shall the next hundred years be the greatest in the proud history of our tribes and nations.

Chief Dan George, July 1st, 1967.

How many Canadians can boast of an Oscar and Golden Globe nomination, a Golden Laurel Award, a National Society of Film Critics Award and a New York Film Critics Circle Award? All in the same year and all for portraying the same historical figure on film. And at the wise age of 72!

He was born Tes-Wah-No, and as a young boy was known as Dan Slaholt. Upon entering boarding school he took his father’s first name as his last, because speaking his tribal tongue was forbidden as were native Canadian names. After leaving school he worked as a longshoreman, a logger and a construction worker. His first acting role was not until he was in his mid sixties. But his most important job, and the name we all know him by came about in 1951.

In 1951 Tes-Wah-No became Chief Dan George. By the mid sixties he was a household name in North America. And in 1967 he gave the speech that would bring him to the fore front of the native rights movement.

The speech was entitled Lament For Confederation. He delivered it before 35,000 people on July first, Canada Day, 1967: Canada’s 100th anniversary. He delivered this speech in the hopes it would boost the self-esteem of his fellow natives, showing and imploring them that anyone could succeed as he had, anyone from a disadvantaged background: anyone, even if their government had suppressed them and denied them their true identity.

All true Canadians, new and old, should read Chief Dan George’s soliloquy Lament for Confederation. There’s a lesson in it for all of us. Chief Dan George would be happy to know his words had not fallen on deaf ears and were being heard 42 years later.

Hail to and respect the Chief.

In Hastings England, on the grounds of the William Parker School, formerly the Hastings Grammar School, grows a Canadian Red Maple. A number of blocks from the school is plaque of commemoration. Four miles to the east, at the Hastings Park ranger station, there is another commemorative plaque. And back in town, at the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery there is a life size replica of a log cabin which once sat at a lake side in the Canadian wilderness.

The plaque commemorates Archibald Belaney. Otherwise known as Grey Owl.

Here’s a man that has greater recognition from, and status in, the country he left and denied any physical link to. Archibald became Grey Owl. A man with a history as Canadian as one could ever imagine. But there is more dedication to his existence by the community that he left and denied any common history with.

Grey Owl is the grandfather of the conservation/environmental movement in Canada: maybe the world. And if it weren’t for Grey Owl the beaver would not be one of our national symbols. If it weren’t for Grey Owl the beaver just might be extinct! Has anyone looked at a nickel lately?

Every Canadian should know who Jellyroll and Rawhide were. If they don’t they need to find out.

Every Canadian needs to understand what it means to uproot one’s self from a culture and become part of another. Then become Canadian. And then to contribute to that culture.

Archibald became Canadian. We all need to become Grey Owl.

When I was seven I was hospitalized for a ruptured appendicitis. Not a fun few weeks: but that’s a story for another time. Before I was hospitalized my mum was reading a book to me at bedtime each night. A chapter a night. No chapter the night of surgery.

That book became very important to me. It became the first real novel I read on my own. My mum read a chapter or two during visiting hours. That was not enough. She left it with me and I finished it.

The book was “Owls In The Family”. The author, Farley Mowat. I went on to read many more of his novels.

They were stories that concerned Canadians. Young and old. They were growing up in urban communities, they were lost in the far north or they were fighting in the trenches of Europe. They owned dogs, or lived with dogs. They built boats and sailed them. They traveled to this great land and they traveled away from it. These characters loved Canada. These characters were Canada.

Farley Mowat is overlooked. His example of Canadian culture is ignored. But Farley Mowat is a true Canadian. His books should be compulsory reading for all Canadian students. Every new Canadian should be expected to have an understanding of Farley Mowat’s Canada.

Farley Mowat’s Canada is my Canada.

Canada Day

Canada enters its 143rd year this coming Wednesday. I’ve been here for 44 of them. That’s almost a third of Canada’s existence as a free independent state. A lot has changed in those 44 years! But you can’t change history! And you can’t change the characters that built that history. Unfortunately though, you can ignore them. And in Canada, I think we have.

Over the last few years we’ve watched as main stream media has told us who have been the most influential and important Canadians, which Canadians are a representation of that ever elusive true Canadian character. Watch this spot over the next week as I write about Canadians I believe to be the most important and representative of true Canadian character and culture.

Many will disagree with my choices but I hope it will encourage them and others to examine what the country means to them. And what really is the character of Canada.