The Lost Days of Columbus
by Lee Maracle
I wonder sometimes if Christopher imagined the impact his voyage to Turtle Island would have on the geography, culture, demography, economy and sociology of the entire world. I imagine him sitting in some parlour in Italy, a vigorous and youthful male with a huge sense of adventure, studying the Greek classical scientists, some of whom imagined the world to be round, while he considered his contemporaries, some of whom believed it was flat. Which way was the tide moving at the time? I suspect it was in the direction of round. Someone, after all, financed his trip—a woman in fact. No ordinary woman, but a Queen, Queen Isabella, put up the cash to realize his dream. But this is not His/story or Her/story, it's mine.
I would like to say that what was going on in Europe in 1492 had nothing to do with me. I would like to avoid the ostentatious pomp and ceremony around Columbus' quincentennial celebrations. I would prefer not to have to write this piece. Unfortunately, Christopher's voyage did change the world and I inherited the results. I need to write this down and I am grateful to TRIVIA for publishing it.
The ashes of our ancient fires burn low these days. Indigenous people everywhere in the world of late have been hustling to “catch up,” to somehow find a place in the New World. At the same time we have been struggling to identify and articulate in English the thin lines of cultural connection to our past. Culture is an elusive butterfly. She is wide open to interpretation and she depends on the consciousness of the community, the nation and the individual, to exist. The human variable is an unreliable one. Consciousness is a state of being enjoyed by reasonably healthy people. The colonial legacy I inherited was neither reasonable nor healthy.
In my living memory, my mother, recently deceased, worked 14-16 hours a day at very hard physical labour to feed and clothe seven children. We were waifs then. Abandoned, the State would now say, and would remove us from this state of abandonment and neglect and “place” us all in foster homes, likely never to see each other again. Thank goodness we weren't considered “Indians” then. My mom, you see, was Métis.
But that just posed an additional heartache for me. You see, her people were among the first “throwaways” in our community. When I get up on the podium, neither Indigenous people nor my white audience can identify me as Métis. This title has meaning only when I consider my homeland. It is a vaporous thing for me--this notion of homeland. My ancestors came from the east, where the first women to marry white men were cast out. They settled Montréal.
It didn't take long for more white settlers to arrive from Europe. Preference was given to them, and my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers packed up their children, their meagre belongings, and left. The men they married, if they had done well, stayed behind. Many of them returned to Europe and brought “real” wives home to Canada. Not far down the road we began a new settlement and initiated what became a vigorous trade between whites and Indians, with ourselves in the middle. It wasn't long before more settlers came, and we had to move again.
Our children travelled inland to secure the trade routes and the trade items Europe wanted. Often they returned with partners—Indigenous partners. By 1885, in Manitoba the term Métis reflected not just Indian and white bloodlines, but also Indigenous genetic diversity. We are Huron, Mohawk, Micmac, Anishwabe (Ojibway), Cree, Salish, Chilcoten, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, French, Basque and Chinese by blood. These are the bloodlines of my own children. It is only when my relationships with Indigenous people or white people become intimate that anyone comes to know I am Métis.
I know it everyday. It lurks in the language of white folks (“you half-breeds only want to drink, fuck and fight”) and the language of reservation Indians (“you aren't really Indigenous, are you”) and the language of the Indian government and political tribal councils (“if we are desperate we will hire a Métis”). And we can only have a homeland “at the permission of local tribal councils,” which historically have not granted us that.
When Columbus' antecedents first came, they fathered children. They rarely claimed them. Nowadays, Indigenous men are our fathers. They rarely claim us. Bill C-31 was supposed to resolve this dilemma I am told. It does so for those whose grandmothers were “counted” in the early days of Canada when Indians were still pure-blooded, or at least that is the story. Counting the Indians and “registering” them is a recent historical phenomenon—initiated sometime after 1871. Care and vigour to keep the Métis separate from whites and Indians were applied after the unsuccessful 1885 Métis liberation war. This was also the last time Indians, whites and Métis fought together to realize a dream. That war was initiated by us, and the principles of equality, land protection, and Indigenous democracy for both men and women were articulated jointly by both Métis and Indigenous people. For a short time, we had a homeland. After the rebellion, the moving trail began again.
I was born on the West Coast. It is the end of the trail for me. I cannot and will not consent to be thrown into the sea. As my mother lay dying, I sat in the living room of a dear friend in Toronto, speaking to someone I had just met but about whom I had heard a great deal over the years. A respected man. A sovereignty advocate. “Métis are not indigenous,” he said earnestly, meaning me. I plummeted. A downward spiral began into the world of tears all Métis women have shed each and every time we were cast away, by white men or Indigenous men and now by our own Métis men who are divorcing us at alarming rates. Underneath it all a moment of peace provided by understanding gently rocked. I let the peace and understanding grow in silence.
Columbus came from a “throwaway” world. A “get rid of them” culture. We don't. The Métis trail forced our mothers to steadfastly hold on to the inclusionary culture of our original societies: “Everything, stone, flora, fauna, human, has a perfect right to be.” The words of my mother float about the room. I once told her with a good deal of bitterness in my voice that Indigenous people don't like us and asked her why she worked so hard for their sovereignty and salvation. “I don't,” she said. I thought at the time this was a lie she had persuaded herself of to save face. My mother, you see, worked tirelessly to halt the mad child apprehension program of the state directed at Native families. She worked to keep Indigenous children in their homes, with their original families and, failing that, at least with their original communities. Single-handedly she reduced the Native child apprehension rate in Vancouver from 49% to 10%. She was sad she hadn't done better. She began her mission at a time when Indigenous people themselves were reluctant to take on their relatives' children. For her it was a clear question of sovereignty and cultural integrity.
Mother sat in the oak chair of my kitchen quietly for some time before answering in that rare voice I loved so dearly. With great softness and reverence she answered, “It doesn't change our obligations to humanity and earth one bit. We are responsible for the caretaking of this earth. Not just a tiny piece of it in some remote reservation, but all of it. That no one but ourselves feels this way doesn't change a thing.” When she died I wept, “It isn't enough, momma, it isn't enough.”
Christopher brought with him his “throwaway” culture. When we bought their trade goods, someone should have reminded us not to take the culture along with them. This country was peopled by Europeans who were evicted from their homeland or forced out by economic recession. Today we call such people “refugees.” They come in every colour, race, shape and size. They are the unwanted. We have integrated at every level a distaste for these castaways. “F.O.B.'s” (Fresh Off the Boat), “Chinamen,” “Ragheads,” “Hindus,” “Spics,” “Wops,” “Wogs,” all form a part of our language now.
But these people form just a small part of the earth's children we throw away. We toss “things” away after we have called them into being. We chuck whole forests of trees, what we call paper, into huge dumping grounds. We toss stones welded into new shapes and forms into dumping grounds. We cast oil, earth's energy source transformed into plastic baubles, into these dumping grounds. We rename it all garbage, but these materials all had beginnings as natural beings, as earth, stone, flora, or fauna. The very word “garbage” arises from the culture Columbus was born into and brought here.
Racism, sexism and tribalism are predicated on the existence of another kind of garbage—human garbage. They are rooted in the throwaway culture. There is no place called “away.” Every inch of soil in this world is a place. There is no human garbage either. Every single living human being has a place in this world.
The throwaway culture did not begin with the Métis, nor will it end there. It began with patriarchy in Europe thousands of years ago. The throwing away of women and other individuals who could not conform to the rigors of patriarchy. We know who these “other” people are, and a whole language was developed for them. The “faggots, dykes, queers” were the first to experience being tossed out of their communities eons ago by emerging patrarichal societies far away from here. An entire sector of science is devoted to justifying why these people with their different sexual preference should be “thrown away.”
I used to think that it was a European problem, not mine. But after reflecting on Columbus and the impact his voyage had on Indigenous society, I no longer can afford to be apathetic about those people. I gamble here. I am no different from the next throwaway kid. “Faggot” and “dyke” formed an insidious part of my dictionary when I was young, just as “half-breed bitch” was part of my brother's language. I am forced to take another look. I am forced to reconsider in the light of my own throwaway condition those whom I once threw away or tried to.
It dawned on me one morning while looking at my children. Who gave us the authority to throw anyone away? Who gave them the authority to throw me away? Who gave reservation-defined Indians the authority to re-define me? Who gave us the authority to reduce the natural world to exploitable products to be thrown away once we had no use for them? It wasn't Columbus. It was the people he worked for, those with guns, money and power.
“They are so few in number,” this Indigenous man said to me the other night. “Ah, but they are held up by our internalization of their attitudes.” We, the half-breeds, the dykes, the faggots, the ragheads, the chinamen, honkies, white trash, the gooks, spics, wops, squaws, bucks and niggers, by our silence and our disunity grant them authority—by our acquiescence to divisions among us, we wield the weapons of their authority, we execute the will of a minority, a very small and very sick minority. The same minority who financed Chris' voyage, who threw away their own people, who destroyed the natural environment in their own homelands and pirated the world, buying, selling and murdering life all over this planet. Whole armies of us, the foolish and self-betrayed, girded up our loins and marched about, clear-cutting logs, over-fishing, making war on both human and non-human earth beings. In the end we lost our humanity, we lost a sense of spirit and we inherited the crippled throwaway culture of Chris' bosses.
I return Christopher to those who would adore him. I give him back to those who cling stubbornly to throwaway ways. I return to my mother's ashes, which people and nourish a small scarlet maple in the home she created for us. I hear her sing the anthem of her ancestry, “Red River Valley,” and in my memory I repeat her words: “It doesn't change a thing—we still have obligations to earth and all her children.”
“Come sit beside me if you love me / Do not hasten to bid me adieu.” New meanings are born in the words of her song. A song huge in its social implications.
I have no idea what the world really looked like in 1492. The written accounts were kept by those who would alter our ways, stamp out our cultural connections and annihilate all that was not patriarchal, sexist and racist. It no longer seems relevant. I refuse to throw away life. I grant no one the authority to destroy anyone's life or toss it away. I extend permission to no one to throw away stone, flora or fauna in dumping grounds, which are no longer places. There are a growing number of people in Canada who share this attitude, who sit next to me and push back on the throwaway culture. These people are the harbingers of a new Canada, a nation of people who promise to be 10,000 times more beautiful than anything we have seen before. We are all huddled about in kitchens across the country, separated by distance, unified by sentiment, searching for that small moment of peace; the moment that comes with understanding, trying to figure out how in the world anyone could celebrate the past 500 years of history and the man who initiated it all—Columbus. We all know that some day this half millenium will be referred to as the “Lost Days of Columbus,” and we look forward to that day.
Reprinted from Trivia: A Journal of Ideas 19, Spring 1992
about the author
Lee Maracle currently holds three positions at the University of Toronto: distinguished lecturer, teacher of creative writing in the English department, and First Nations writer in residence. Her published books include: Bent Box; Sojourner's and Sundogs; Ravensong; Bobbi Lee; Daughters Are Forever; Will's Garden; I Am Woman.
