My Uncle George was always on the go. He’d be on a goose shoot, a duck shoot, or a prairie chicken hunt, or planning one or the other. In the winter, he’d be out ice fishing on the frozen lakes of central Alberta. He’d bring the birds back, weighing down the trunk of his yellow ’54 Ford. He’d repainted it himself, after the rust started eating into the original. But that’s what he enjoyed, painting bright colours on his car and hanging out at the summer cabin he shared with my mother, brothers, and grandparents on one of the lakes west of Edmonton.
The best times for me were when he brought a big goose for dinner. My brothers and I would pluck the feathers and George would gut it. Then my mother would cook it up with bacon on the sides, basting it as it cooked, then making a thick rich gravy to go with the potatoes, while her highbush cranberry sauce would just be wonderful with the wild flavour of the goose meat. Heaven!
Sometimes George would tell stories to me and my brothers about fur trappers and about adventures in the bush and prairies around Alberta. I didn’t realize where he got these stories. I thought he just made them up. But many years later, I realized that he had probably been told these same or similar stories by his uncles who were fur traders in northern Saskatchewan.
George also liked taking photographs of his various duck hunts. Some of them were pretty spectacular, with dozens of ducks arranged on racks, surrounded by George and his hunting buddies, holding their shotguns as if ready for another shoot.
One time, on a fall afternoon when George was visiting my mother and our family, he placed one of his photographs on the fireplace mantle. He really liked this one. He’d had it enlarged and framed, and he was colouring it by hand, to bring out the colours in the ducks and in the clothing of his hunting buddies. It looked really wild with all the dead ducks and all the long guns. His hunting buddies really looked like they were experienced hunters, and I had no doubt that they were. They looked like they spent a lot of time in the bush, living off of wild game. I looked at George and his buddies in the photo, and I started to wonder.
My mother had said to me, on a few occasions, that our family had aboriginal ancestry, but she never said more than that, and she only talked about it after she’d finished at least half of her daily bottle of whiskey or vodka. As I looked at George’s photo, I thought again of what my mother had said. Finally, I decided to ask.
“Uncle George, do we have Indian ancestors? Are we part Indian?”
George had watched me look at his framed photo and the men in it, his hunting buddies. He probably knew what had prompted my question.
“No, we’re not half breeds,” he said defensively. Pointing at his framed photograph, he gestured toward one of his buddies and said,
“Him, he’s a ‘breed, but not us.”
I looked at the photo. He had pointed to one of his buddies who had noticeably high cheekbones, a pistol and hunting knife on his belt along with his shotgun, and whose narrow piercing eyes were looking straight at the camera.
“We’re not ‘breeds,” he said again.
He sounded defensive, as if he was hiding something. I thought about George’s high cheekbones and my mother’s. I didn’t say any more.
About an hour later, my mother left the kitchen and came into the living room, sitting on the couch opposite the fireplace and the mantle with George’s framed photograph still on it. She had had quite a few drinks by then, certainly into the second half of her bottle of vodka. She seemed to be in a good mood to talk. I knew that without any liquor, she wouldn’t talk at all; she wouldn’t say anything. But if she was close to the bottom of the bottle or into the second one, she just got stupid. But now, she looked about right, talkative but not stupid drunk. I started to ask her some questions.
“Mother, do we have Indian ancestry?”
“Yes, we do,” she replied with a sheepish tone in her voice, as if she was telling a secret she wasn’t supposed to say.
“Yes, we’re part Indian,” she continued.
“Is it way back? How far back are our Indian ancestors?” I asked. “And how are we related? Which of us has the Indian ancestry?” I continued.
Slurring her speech again, but still coherent, she replied, “Through your grandmother, your Grandmère.”
Shocked, I let what she had just said sink in. I had thought that our Indian ancestors would have been hunters, like the ones in George’s photo. But then I realized that, of course, my Grandmère, with her bois brulé skin colour, her quiet demeanor, her bright coloured beadwork, was my link, my link to my Indian history. Her father and her uncles would have been hunters, just like George’s buddies, just like her son George. It started to make sense.
My mother left the room, gone to baste the goose and to pour herself another drink. I followed her into the kitchen. She had just closed up the oven door and was starting to light up a cigarette to go with her vodka. I started to ask her some more questions.
“Mother, why don’t we ever talk about our Indian ancestry?”
“Oh, they don’t like us to bring it up. They don’t want us act like Indians. They don’t want us to be Indians.”
I knew who she was talking about. My father, her Scottish husband, never said good things about aboriginal people. And my grandfather, my French Grandpère, was intent on expressing his own French heritage and culture, not the culture of his Métis wife. So it was something to keep secret, something to hide, something to pretend did not exist.
I learned to hide my ancestry, to keep it a secret from my friends, from my teachers, from my bosses, from everyone that I thought might be racist and might express hatred to Indian people. I assumed the worst in people, so I kept the secret from just about everybody.
I learned to keep secrets. As I got older, I learned to keep secrets about being two-spirited too. Keeping secrets became just a way of life, something I just did to keep safe, to keep myself from being discriminated against. It was my way of life, just as I was Métis, just as I was two-spirited, I kept secrets.
“No, I’m not half breed. I’m not a ‘breed.”
