ONE NATIVE LIFE: RECAPITULATING ANISHNAABEG IDENTITY AND SPIRITUALITY IN A GLOBAL VILLAGE By CHRISTOPHER N. WAITE Integrated Studies Project submitted to Dr. Angela Specht in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts – Integrated Studies Athabasca, Alberta November, 2010 Waite: Native Life 2 Table of Contents Abstract.............................................................................................................................p.3 One Native Life.................................................................................................................p.4 Severed Links, the Individual Effort Required for Believing in Self.................................p.6 Recapitulation as Adaptation..........................................................................................p.18 The Science of Mysticism................................................................................................p.24 Quantum Everything, the Primacy of Consciousness.....................................................p.26 Synchronizing with Anishnaabeg Perception.................................................................p.41 Conclusions.....................................................................................................................p.47 References.......................................................................................................................p.50 Appendix 1......................................................................................................................p.57 Appendix 2: Quantum Consciousness According to Amit Goswami, PhD.....................p.58 Appendix 3: Ojibway fasting compared to “Toltec” recapitulation..............................p.61 Appendix 4: the Assemblage Point.................................................................................p.63 Waite: Native Life 3 Abstract Forming an identity as an Anishnaabeg-Canadian involves a reappraisal of beliefs, values and knowledge of world-views. In the context of a global techno-village, Anishnaabeg traditional culture stands to offer the wider community a way of living a good life, in spite of anti-Native racism observed via print and electronic media. For a Native culture, more specifically, the Ojibway of Northwestern Ontario, simple yet powerful traditions such as solitude and thankfulness within/as part of Nature can evoke pycho-spiritual healing and metaphysical balance, awe of and appreciation for life. Paradoxically, the once-thought-of-as-pagan traditions may be of vital importance as the global village looms on the edge of eco-catastrophe, the cost of the Western business-as-usual social model. Quantum science indicates what traditional medicine men intuited, that our global village is entangled via mind, but can we change our minds to survive despite ourselves? Waite: Native Life 4 One Native Life Building an identity is not like building a backyard deck. Department stores reflect our desires. The outside world reflects our spirit. Spirit is intangible, but we learn it through shared and internal narratives. Culture is a shared narrative. I am a Canadian Oji-Cree Man (Niin-Anishnaabe-Canadian). Half -Aboriginal. Native. I’ve been an Indian, but never an Injun. I’ve been called (and accepted being called) a Chug; short for chug-a-lug. Variations I’ve heard are In-ee-in, Indin, and Inyin. First Nations is used more commonly in the media. Native-people has a nice ring to it, though Native-person feels more cold and detached. Am I a Native-person? Well, no, not really. My dad emigrated from London, England in the 1970’s. He worked in New England as a camp counsellor, but didn’t like the ostentatious culture there. He found his way approximately 2000km northwest of there to Weagamow Lake, Ontario, where he met my would-be mom. She translated for my dad, who by this time was a school teacher. It makes me happy to see pictures of a young English chap with sideburns very much in love with a young Native woman who at one time actually thought the streets in London were paved in gold. She found out later, when visiting London herself, the streets were nothing like that. They divorced when I was a kid. It was hard after that. Alcohol turned life into a nightmare. It has taken a lot of effort and time to deal with those days so that I don’t pass on self-destructive habits to my children. So far, so good. In many ways, I think that my personal story parallels many other Canadians’ and Native-Canadians’ experience over the same duration as my family’s history sketched out above. For Native people especially, adapting to the Canadian reality resulted in a severe alteration of worldview. When I asked my mom if her dad had gone to residential school she said, “No, no, no, grandpa didn’t even see white people until he was older!” Based upon the ages of my mom, 58, and her oldest sister, mid-to-late 60’s, my goomshoom (grandfather) was born sometime around 1920 in remote Northwestern Ontario 1. My mom, like her parents and grandparents, sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles, was born in the bush. (My dad was a school teacher hailing from England). Where my mom’s family is from, officially called North Caribou Lake First Nation by Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC), there hangs at the Band Office a photograph of my grandma making a rabbit-fur blanket. I saw it when I was there for my goomshoom’s funeral, about 7 years ago. In the picture, she looks like she’s in mid-adulthood. She died 1 Rogers & Rogers (1982) essentially, did the work they on the genealogy of the people who are known as the cranes; hence the name of the radio station at Weagamow, Ojijakos, which means crane . Waite: Native Life 5 perhaps 13 years ago. I never really knew her. I spent a little bit more time with my goomshoom when I met him for about the third time in my life 9 years ago. Aside from some fishing trips and a family vacation to visit extended family on my mom’s reserve when I was six or seven, I knew virtually nothing about my culture until I was in my early 20s. I was born in 1979. At the time my Gokum died, I was attending the University of British Columbia. I had made the choice to return to school one time after the break in classes (it might have been spring break or perhaps it was Christmas) rather than travel to northern Ontario to attend her funeral. I remember feeling sad and writing a poem that I entitled “G”. I can’t remember the poem itself, but I seem to know that I didn’t complete it. When I wrote that poem, I didn’t I know the Ojibwe word for grandma. I didn’t want to use the white term grandma for her in my poem, but I didn’t know the Ojibwe word, so I opted for what was essentially a coded reference, “G”, to denote her grandmother-ness, but also to acknowledge my recognition of her (and my) Indian-ness. In another conversation with my mom she said to me that life in her childhood was about survival (hunting, fishing, trapping, preparing for the cold, etc). It occupied virtually all of her family’s time. She told me there were times when they had to borrow from neighbours just to get by. In the photograph, my Gokum is making a rabbit skin blanket. My mom used to snare rabbits, but I don’t know if she knows how to make a rabbit-fur blanket. I’ve never snared a rabbit. I don’t know how to make a rabbit-fur blanket. For me, to think about the rabbit skin blanket is to ask: how many traditional skills can be lost per generation before the tradition breaks? What constitutes cultural traditions? From an early age, my mom was expected to help with anything that needed to be helped with. She’s told me about setting gill nets and spending the night inside a killed moose. Her father had to go get help with the claimed moose and she, a young girl, would be too slow to keep up. I’ve only done a little bit of hunting, but I get the idea that the animals that would love to feed on moose, like wolves, lynxes and cougars don’t immediately show up once people leave the area. Her father, my goomshoom, would’ve had to snowshoe like the wind back to camp to get help claiming the moose. Moose are extremely heavy. The quartered limbs can each weigh about a hundred pounds. So, once the guts were out of the moose, my mom was probably told to curl up inside and to stay there until dad got back. He would have had to haul ass back to camp so that friends and family could follow him back to the kill and start taking meat and whatever else was needed from it. Survival! My mom has a picture in an album of her cleaning (skinning and removing the edible meat for consumption) a beaver on the tail gate of a pick up truck. The picture must be from the early 1970s, it must’ve been my dad who took it. Ojibway tradition is a question that I bring up from time to time when I’m talking with her and sometimes with Waite: Native Life 6 him on the phone. At the time of this writing, they are living in British Columbia, in towns separated by an hour-long car ride, and I am living in Thunder Bay, Ontario, a 53- hour-long Greyhound Bus ride away. Traditionally, Ojibway people lived in the areas throughout Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ontario and parts of Manitoba, up towards the sub-Arctic, down to the southern shores of Lake Superior. Their range extended west into the Prairies. They “held sway over what is today the northern two-thirds of Lake Huron, the American shore of Lake Superior, northern Minnesota, parts of North Dakota, eastern Montana, southeast Saskatchewan, and southern Manitoba, as well as the lake country east of Lake Winnipeg extending almost to James Bay.” (Danziger, 1979, p.7-8). William W. Warren (b.1825) described the birth of the Ojibway people with reference to the Lenni Lenape, an east coast Maritimes people (1984, p.12, 56-7). This east to west migration story is corroborated by Benton-Banai (1988, p.1).