Mouth of the River People

Experiencing violence and judgment from your own community and your people has been one of the most disheartening things I have both experienced and witnessed. One of my first jobs out of university was at a university. This particular job was with other native people, and is meant to support all First Nation, Métis, and Inuit students on campus. I was idealist and eager to learn with other native people, believing our shared history and worldview was enough to protect me from another awful experience at the university. In retrospect my expectations were not entirely unrealistic. While I am an idealist, what I really expected was a safe environment, one where there was fairness, respect, kindness, sharing, honesty, and support. I expected our work to be grounded in our value system. What I found instead was extreme nepotism, lateral violence, and a group of people who could only function within this pattern of nepotism and lateral violence with one another.

One day, a friend and a colleague of mine and I were out on a work trip to Maskwacis and discussing our experiences at the university. Both exhausted and disheartened by the politics and dynamics we were experiencing she said something that has never left me: Growing up with your culture is a privilege. Growing up with our culture is something so many of us do not have. This was a bit of an epiphany for me. I knew that the lateral violence I was both experiencing and witnessing by my colleagues was wrong, and it was extremely off putting to witness and experience. Shamed for not knowing what a prayer flag or a Sundance was. Met with silence and an ever distancing relationship when I asked. Seeing the staff interact with and validate their favorite students, while gossiping and ignoring those they did not like, or worse, those whom they deemed too white, by either their skin or their mannerisms.

Thinking of the hundreds of years of settler colonial history, of those of us who grew up urban, who were adopted out, whose ancestors and parents had their livelihoods taken from them through residential schools, the 60’s scoop, the Catholic Church, enfranchisement, the Indian Act, and the banal racism that is both a product of the past and the present, I realized exactly how right she was. It is absolutely a privilege to grow up with our teachings, our knowledge, and our language. Blaming those of us who continue to work through and dig ourselves out of the legacy of colonialism for our lack of cultural knowledge is lateral violence.  In my best moments, when I am feeling insightful and forgiving, I know this is both a consequence of colonialism and the result of those of us who are not secure enough in our identities to accept others. In my worst moments I think that they are right and that I am a fraud.

In my family our history is complicated and veiled. Nookomis went to a separate school ran by the catholic church and funded by Indian Affairs. My dad said she didn’t talk about it much but that she never said anything bad about it. Her hair was cut and she could speak and write in both French and English better than anybody he knew. She was a devout catholic and was not raised by her parents (one Algonquin and one French), but by her French grandparents. The 1921 census of Ontario lists nookomis as Philomene Antoine the one-year-old daughter of Michael Antoine (Nijkwiwsens). Under nationality “French” is initially written for Michael, nookomis, and her sister. It is then crossed out and replaced by “Indian.” I have often wondered about this story. Did they not want to be Algonquin? Were they ashamed? Were they trying to protect their family and their children? Is this census what sent nookomis to this school?

My dad was the second youngest of 12 children. He was extremely close to his mother and we grew up hearing about what an amazing mother and woman she was. For most of my childhood there was a black and white photo of her with one of her children, Simone I believe, in our living room. The photograph survived every furniture rearrangement and remodel my mother did in our living room. If almost everything else changed that photo was still there. She raised her 12 children alone and sadly passed on Christmas day, the day after my father’s 17th birthday. Something that profoundly affected him for the rest of his life.

Elizabeth, the youngest child and one year younger than my father was the person who he was closest to. As kids my sister and I often heard my father retell the story of how every Sunday him and Liz would stand on the side of the highway waiting for their dad to be dropped off by the greyhound bus. For years they would stand on the highway and watch the bus drive by, expecting their father to come home and for years they would turn around and go home without him. My name is Lyndsey Elizabeth.

Matawasìbi anìcenàbi, Mouth of the River People are now the Antoine First Nation. The maiden name of Nokomis that was generously gifted from the colonial government. A name that is now ours as much as it is theirs, a name that means family and resistance as much as it does colonization. My ancestors and our family live in relationship with Kitchi Siipi “The Great River”, also known as the Ottawa River, the Mattawa River, and Lake Nipissing. A territory that is divided by the colonial border that separates Quebec from Ontario. Dad’s family grew up a stones throw from Kitch siipi and the river became the colonial border between these two provinces. A literal divide of our homelands. Antoine is the past, present, and the future. Antoine is nokomis and her family, colonialism, land, cousins, community, and story. I am all of these things. My name is Lyndsey Elizabeth Antoine.

My grandfather is also Algonquin. I know very little of my grandfather or his family, knowing what I do from small stories dad has told me and my uncles extensive Ancestry account. I have one memory of knowing my grandfather existed as a child, of when he passed away. I remember my dad on the phone with one of his siblings arguing about attending his funeral. He refused and they rebutted.

“Why would I attend his funeral? I don’t have a dad; he was never a dad to me. He decided to leave and I haven’t had a dad my entire life. I am not going.”

This memory is so clear to me. I am sitting on the floor of living room and dad is in the kitchen. He’s on the phone that hangs up on the wall and is standing in the corner pacing slowly. It is only within the last few years that I learned was a toddler when moshums passed. I shouldn’t remember this but I do.

            I know he was an alcoholic and that he was in and out of his families life. He told his children to never tell anyone they were Indian and instead if anyone asked to tell people they were from Mexico.  I know that his mother had long grey hair, I imagine it was black when she was younger, and a big ‘Chamberlain nose’ that used to scare the shit out of my dad (his nose). She also had huge hands with long, skinny fingers (my hands). She wore beads and passed well into her 90’s. Grandma Chamberlain.

Most of what I know has been pieced together from a few family anecdotes, mostly in passing, my dad’s fragmented storytelling- stories that seem to miss a beginning or an end, that damn Ancestry account, the internet, my childhood and my dad’s visible trauma and suffering. I am very aware that I know of only few of my dad’s experiences that have made him the human he is today. Somebody who loves his family and his children and somebody who holds an abundance of pain and suffering. As an adult I can see that my dad is an extremely sensitive and loving person who has amounted to a shell of himself due to a childhood of trauma. An aunt saying to me the first time I met her: “had I lived through what the Chamberlain children experienced I would be dead.” It is a privilege to grow up knowing who we are.

I know very little because my dad literally moved across the country, left his family and his trauma, met my mom, had us kids, and never went back. I grew up knowing I was native but not much else. We attended Aboriginal Head Start and were partially raised by that community as we were involved with them for many years. We had our chosen family who looked a lot like us, many of them Cree. Dad never told me we were Algonquin, or at least I don’t remember it. I thought we were all just Indians and an Indian was an Indian. School didn’t tell me any different either.

There is a photo on Ancestry of Grandma Chamberlain and several of her children, and their children too. I remember showing this to my colleague at the university herself native with her own history and trauma and her responding

“Are they even native? They don’t look native. The kids do I guess.”

While I was eventually fired from this position and replaced by the secretary who was then replaced by the bosses’ niece it is taking me years to heal through this trauma. Wondering what it meant to be native, to be a part of a community, to live by our values. All experiences I was expecting to have and living the literal opposite. Being shamed for not knowing the way they expect a real native to, not having grown up on the rez, being too pale in the winter, adding further doubt to my ancestry and my legitimacy. One of them suggesting my dad check his status again, implying that this time, he would no longer be considered an Indian.

I let these people, whom I trusted blindly and wholeheartedly, destroy my self-confidence and deconstruct my identity. Whom I expected to conduct themselves with integrity and within our value system as Indigenous peoples. A value system based of love, humility, kindness, honesty, and respect. I wondered if they were right, if I was a fraud, and again I yearned for community, for our value system, for acceptance. In my worst moments I wanted to deny any Indian part of me. To instead live life as a passing white person.  Up until this point, learning was painful. Learning meant constantly putting myself in situations where I was doubted and belittled. Where I had to prove my worth and my “native-ness” in ways that I still do not understand.  

When I responded to an email sent out by my university to participate in a project through the Faculty of Education to be an elder’s helper, a wasykapeeyos, I did so reluctantly. It sounded like a great opportunity but my previous wounds had not scabbed over enough to let me trust anything that seemed good. Sharla proved to be loving, warm, and patient. She did not judge and she was easy to talk with. She connected and aimed for connection in a way I had not experienced elsewhere. Texting and calling, invitations to ceremony, joking. Blurring the line between academic professor and human relation in a way that initially made me uncomfortable as it was not something I was used to or conditioned to trust.

When she invited me to a Tea Dance in Maskwacis we went together. Neither of us having been to one before. Work had been demanding lately and I was exhausted by my kids and the emotional labour and energy it was taking me to do my job as a youth worker. When we arrived at the community centre it was full of people. In the middle of the room was an abundance of feast food: stew, hamburger soup, fry bread, baked bannock, three different kinds of rice pudding, pop, water, candy for the kids. The elders and helpers were seated in the centre of the room ready for the evening and to lead their ceremonial roles. The men were ready to drum and sing, a ceremony dating back as far as our peoples collective memory. We all brought chairs and sat in a circle two or three rows deep along the perimeter of the room. People chatted, hugged, and introduced themselves. All together there were at least 150 humans that gathered to celebrate the life and birth of a one-year-old little girl. An entire community had come together and fed one another for this little girl and her family. I was completely blown away by the gesture, something I easily would have taken for granted as a child. There were no carefully manicured invites sent out on cards purchased and decorated from a Walmart or a craft store. Instead, invites were spread by word of mouth, that moccasin telegraph. A room full of cousins, aunties, uncles, elders, friends, kokums, moshums, and community, here we all shared space together and it belonged to everyone.

The elders and the men smudged and prayed in Cree. Oskawâsis fathers family then passed around feast food to everyone in attendance. Food that was prepared with the intention of love and nourishment for the body and spirit: for each other, for the community, for our ancestors, and for this little girl and her family. It is a shared responsibility to take care of one another.  Next to me three or four grandmothers chatted and joked in Cree, laughing at one another, the language in its most living form feeding my spirit as I listened to them speak. When we were finished feasting we began to drum, sing, and dance as a group. As a child I didn’t understand that our songs had spiritual meaning, that they had patterns and predictability like any other song. Now I always leave ceremony humming a new song. We all danced moving our physical and spiritual bodies to the beat of the drum and the rhythm of the songs. When I hear drumming and singing I feel connection, I feel my ancestors both thousands of years back and those in the recent past. I feel a shared story with the people whom I’m with. It is healing to listen to our songs, it is healing to participate in a ceremony meant to look after one another.

This little girl’s mother is Cree from the community and her father is white. When the feast food was being shared her father and his family were there sharing the food. Her paternal grandparents and aunts and uncles were in attendance, taking pictures, dancing, eating, sharing in the ceremony. Nokum addressed the room first in Cree and then in English speaking of her daughter and her granddaughter. She spoke to her new family, the grandparents and aunt’s and uncle’s of her granddaughter. When she was finished she gifted the paternal grandmother with a ribbon skirt she had mended for her and welcomed her lovingly to the family.

This is one of the best examples of Miyo-Wîcêhtowin, to live together in harmony, I have witnessed. A favorite of my old colleagues was to talk about how much they disliked white people, labelling whatever they could as “white”. Creating a dichotomy of “us vs them”, creating an unamendable gap between the two groups. In this moment there was no “us vs them”. There was no animosity or judgment. There were two families, two communities, coming together and living and loving each other as one and a little girl whose identity was strong and validated. This is what I imagine our ancestors had imagined our life with settlers could have been like. We were honoring the work of our ancestors by coming together in this way. Honoring the Treaty and it’s commitment to being good neighbors, living together in peace and friendship, and taking care of each other’s children. And while there is much work that needs to be done on a societal level for Miyo-Wîcêhtowin, in this moment that word came to life and invited us to understand it’s wisdom.

In Cree tradition there is often a giveaway at the end of certain ceremonies. Everybody who attended gets at least one give away item and almost everybody leaves with more. At western birthday parties we often spend excessive amounts of money to buy the perfect thing for one person. Toys, expensive books, a brand name item, a board game. This tea dance was the first blanket I ever received at ceremony, I also received a small  dish scrubbing brush. At first take, this is not something you might expect to be a “gift” and it may even seem an odd item to gift.  But the blanket has been perfect for the start of summer, when my apartment was too hot for my large comforter. When I need the comfort of a blanket to sleep I use that one remembering how I received it, the stories and songs of that evening, the community, the little girl, both of her families as one and the acceptance of all. When I want to feel close to Nokomis I wrap that blanket around me.

The scrubber has washed my blender full of dried smoothie I should have rinsed out earlier, of food stuck on dishes in hard to reach places. These gifts, as little as they seem, mean so much to me. They take care of me in the simplest way. They are a constant reminder of what that evening stands for, and that in community, we take care of one another. Through these gifts we continue to take care of one another.  I took my leftover bannock to work the next day and shared it with my kids. We ate it with jam and butter, and we talked about ceremony and feast food. I no longer felt heavy or exhausted with my work. I was full of love and spirit from the night before and took great joy in sharing that with my kids, in sharing this food and experience with them. Feast food is medicine and holds spiritual power, it heals us all.

This ceremony was powerful. For the first time in years I felt the community and the love I had been yearning for from my people. I continue to be blown away at how our ceremonies embody love, respect, and connection whole heartedly. If we pay attention, they teach us how to be a good human. They provide us with the instruction and courage to live in good ways. They connect us to our past, present, and future and remind us of our sacred laws which teach us how we must relate to our human and more than human kin. They bring our ancestors into the present with us and allow us to heal. Ceremony does not discriminate, it does not judge, it does not hate. This little girls identity was embraced and validated. Our ancestors were with us in those moments. In my own healing, my dad and his childhood were being reconciled, nookims and her livelihood that had been selfishly taken from her lived on in her granddaughter, and in this ceremony. I imagine my ancestors from generations before were present with us, as were all of our ancestors, our languages, and stories, songs, and wisdom.  

This is what it feels like and what it means to lead a native life, with spirit and with community. It is a privilege to grow up with our teachings, a privilege many of my relations did not have, and a privilege I am living now. My parents named me Lyndsey Elizabeth Antoine Chamberlain, my dad wanted me to know who I come from.