(Beginning…short series on my meetings with indigenous Canadians )
EPISODE 379 MEMORIES OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE ON CANADA DAY 2021: “LOOK, THERE’S AN INDIAN…GET YOUR CAMERA.”
alan skeoch
July 1, 2021
In my ten years of summer work in mining exploration I met many indigenous Canadians and two indigenous Americans. In retrospect
the experience is unsettling.,,but also joyful. Mostly joyful.
This is the closest photo I can find to illustrate a strange experience in late summer 1967…Northern Quebec.
My experience with indigenous Canadians is episodic … i.e. discrete stories unrelated to each other
but collectively important to me on this Canada Day 2021.
1) Summer 1957: I had been working in a tent camp near Chibougamau, northern Quebec for two months. Outdoor work
slogging through our Canadian coniferous forests. Tough work. No time for the niceties of civilized life
like a haircut or a bath in soapy water. Our crew was flown out to an old logging camp on the Opemiska
road…a wide gravel road where mining trucks had the right of way and precious few cars ever travelled.
Early One sunshine filled evening I climbed up on a rock outcrop overlooking the roadway. In a cloud of dust
a car came barreling along. Passed me by. Then braked and backed up. A priest got out along with
some well dressed passengers with cameras.
“Look up there…that is an Indian…take pictures if you want.”
They were looking at me then snapped a few pictures. And then they were gone. That was my earliest experience
with native people. I was the native person. I was caught on camera as if I was a moose or black bear that had
crept out of the forest. Yes, it was amusing. But in the back of my brain it was also unsettling. WhyWere native people
treated this way…i.e. ‘Things’ to be photographed then ignored?
And what made me look like an ‘Indian’? My skin was now dark…like leather. My hair was uncut. My skin a bernished leather.
I had given up the war with insect cannibals…let them have their victory if they could chew their way through smoke filled pores.
I was part of the forest. An oddity…a shadow. My existence was entertainment…captured then forgotten.
That moment in 1957 remains crystal clear in my memory. There was something about the moment ,,,those cameras snapping.
Something disconcerting. At the time, however, it was just amusing. “Look, there’s an Indian up there on the rock.”
Our crew of ten men were all Anglo-Canadians. That is we were all English speaking. Our linecutting crew,
on the other hand, was all Franco-Canadian. French speaking. Our two crews did not talk to each other. We lived
in the two solitudes of Canadian life.
What was missing? There were no indigenous Canadians on either crew. At least none to my mind. Yet not many
miles to the North West was the Mistassini Reserve…a large population of English speaking native people..
Chibougamau was a boom town. Miners…lots of them. Young men mostly with a few prostitutes available at
$20 a throw. All this was very surprising to me for I was just a Grade 11 high school student from Toronto. Voltaire’s
Candide as it were.
Where were our indigenous Canadians in this hurly burly world of Chibougamau? Where were they? They were not present.
They may have been here and there in the forested fringe but I never met one…never saw one….then I became one.
Where were they? This is…was… their land. Why were some of them not working the bush trails they
must have known so well. Why was a Toronto high school student doing the job.
Now it is year 2021 and I have never heard an answer. Where were they?
NEXT: PART TWO … BARREN LAND OF WEST ALASKA
THE ONLY time we were ever armed as geophysical exploration teams was the Alaska job.
But I remember meeting two Yupik indigenous people more than I remember this
rifle meant to scare off Kodiak bears. The memory of first contact with Yupiks does not
reflect well on me. Remember I was just a kid. The contact was fleeting but in retrospect
disconcerting. Coming in Episode 380