INCHOATE THOUGHTS
Child’s leather moccasin (Blackfoot: Siksika?)
Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University
October 2, 2009
Hi,
Over the last few years I have been recovering aspects of my
peculiar North American inheritance. My most recent thoughts were prompted by a
visit by the Hon. Justice Murray Sinclair to speak at the Harvard University Native American Program. Mr. Justice Sinclair chairs
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, investigating and proposing
corrective measures arising from the long-term acculturation of indigenous
children through Indian residential schools. The Canadian prime minister,
Stephen Harper, formally apologized for this program in June, 2008.
My father did not go to such a school. My grandfather took him
to England. The effect was similar. He lost all connection with the indigenous
people of Alberta, where he had been born in 1917. Although I was brought up in
England without any sense of an Indian connection from my father, I learned a
little about this from my grandfather. My great uncle invariably sent me Indian
things from Alberta when I was little. I remember the smoky smell of my
moccasins.
I still habitually walk around the house in moccasins—many
people do—but I place my weight on the ball of my foot before the heel. Jane
told me she had long noticed this, but had dismissed it as just another of my
eccentricities. But it isn’t. It’s Indian. I recently remembered that as a
child I had a tendency to flat-footedness. To counter it, my grandfather taught
me to walk as he himself had learned.
In one sense all this is ridiculously trivial, yet I have found
myself writing and teaching more and more on indigenous North American topics,
and wondering why. Mr. Justice Sinclair’s visit brought home to me that I am
dealing with a sense of loss and confusion. He spoke of the cruelty of cultural
erasure; of people living as whites who agreed to talk to the commission on
condition that their Indian identities should not be revealed before their
deaths, even to their own children, because of the sense of shame that
residential schools had inculcated in them when young. I am a naturalized
American who was brought up English, but despite my immigration record
proclaiming me a relative newcomer to North America, I have been here longer than
my entire life. Something of my grandfather lingers—and in more than the way I
walk.
Ever,
Ivan