1  Conditioned for Resilience

Dustin Fox

“Do you smell that?” my third-grade teacher asked her teaching assistant.

“Yeah, it’s like a . . . ,” she paused to point her little nose in the air and took a whiff. “A musty smell, eh?”

“Yeah, almost like pee,” my teacher replied, her eyebrows furrowed.

A strong wave of ammonia wafted through the class as the two women began to survey the room. The young assistant got up and began to walk around, circling us like a guard as we coloured our Thanksgiving-themed activity with our orange, red, and yellow crayons on the desks. The older teacher sat at the front of the class. She was a stout, older woman. She must have only been five and a half feet tall, but to us, she was a giant. She had the most intense red hair I had ever seen; it was short too. Her face is burned into my memory. She had a sharp nose, gold shiny glasses, and skin that was white as snow but would go as red as her hair when she was mad. She scanned over us seven-year-olds like a robot built for scaring kids, her eyes moving from left to right ever so slowly. Her eyeballs pivoted in their sockets searching out mine; I looked away. I felt her eyes burn across my body as she scanned to the kid on my left. This little Native boy was staring back at her. I should have told him to look away; I wanted to, but it was too late. The fear was in his eyes and piss was running down his leg; she found him.

“THERE!”

With one nod of her fiery red head, the younger teacher moved in on him like he had drugs or something. She whispered in his ear and he stood up, hiding his face in his hands. His tears seeped through the gaps in his fingers, like tiny streams off the side of a mountain. She escorted him out of the class with her freckled nose pinched and, with all our little eyes watching, hollered, “Woo! Your pee smells so strong.” The class burst out with laughter—that little roar of screams and giggles. She was trying to contain her smile as the students laughed. They turned the corner and left the room.

The bell rang for recess. As we ran around the corner and toward the doors, we saw our classmate. He was shy, too shy to ask to use the bathroom. He had his head down and was playing with his braid, rubbing and meddling with the fuzzy end of it. Kicking his little Converse shoes, he wiped his tears and listened to what the younger teacher had to say.

I walked by, the nosey little Native kid I was. “Don’t worry, kiddo. It happens,” she said with care. “Just go home and come on back tomorrow.” I ran out for recess.

His mom didn’t arrive until after recess. She walked in the classroom with that concerned motherly look. She had her turquoise Pendleton bag on her sharp skinny shoulder that poked through her black leather jacket and grabbed her little boy’s hand. They walked hurriedly across the room toward the red-headed teacher; the mom had a word or two with the teacher, grabbed her son’s half-finished Thanksgiving activity, and left with her boy. I remember her look of anger, like she knew something was up—something bad. Now that I’m older, I recognize that I have seen that look many times before. It was the suspicious look in one’s eyes when someone is talking about you behind your back. Not just any people but white people. She couldn’t have been older than thirty. Thinking about it, she must have been just a little older than I am now. But it’s like she knew the true nature of these teachers; she knew what they were doing, and soon, I would find out too.

Later that day, the class overheard a conversation between our teacher and another standing outside of the classroom. Since the class was told to be quiet, we could hear a constant stream of noise coming from the hallway. Sometimes we would hear full conversations—conversations about Mormon functions, trips to Utah, kids’ playdates, and concerns about the discussion at the community civic centre. This time we heard something different.

“Did you hear what happened this morning?” my teacher asked.

“No, what happened?” the other teacher replied.

“This Indian mother came in to pick up her son and was so rude about it.” The soundwaves of her unsuccessful whisper rang my eardrum, so I listened.

“He peed his pants. Now, my classroom stinks, and that dirty Indian is coming back tomorrow.”

I was shocked beyond belief. Is this what they said about all of us behind our backs? I didn’t understand then, but it didn’t take me long to understand why that mother seemed so angry, why she was so “rude”: because her twenty plus years of dealing with racist white people in southern Alberta took a toll. She knew what those teachers thought about her and what they thought about her son, even before they said anything. Now I see, ultimately, what white people around here continue to think about us—that we are lesser than, dirty Indians, and uncivilized savages. She knew. With that look, she showed me something so valuable as I was sitting there colouring my scene of pilgrims and Indians; I was shown racism, the uncomfortable interaction of synthetic kindness followed by an aggressive exit and behind-the-back insults. I’ve seen it too many times. I learned how all the talk about church functions, playdates, and the community of Cardston, ostensibly innocently offered, really meant “not fucking welcome.” Growing up here, I would have to learn this time and time again.

Going to school in Cardston echoed residential school for some reason. The reason(s) could be as obvious as being called a “dirty Indian” by a teacher or as subtle as being favoured or rewarded over other Native kids. And like residential school, not all the Native kids were Blackfoot. We had some kids who were adopted by families in Cardston and would pick up a common last name held by the Mormons in town. When we would ask where they were from, these kids would say “I think I’m Cree” or tell us that they straight up didn’t know what kind of Native they were; they just knew they were. Regardless of church affiliation or last name, we noticed they were treated differently too. I remember one time that same red-headed teacher pulled me aside after I finished a writing assignment and told me, “Dustin, we would like to put you into a special reading class. You’re not like the other Native kids; you’re reading is so much better!” She said it with such enthusiasm, like she was doing me a huge favour. You would have thought her own child was chosen for the class. Now that I think of it, I don’t know if she was helping me or herself. Maybe she thought she was upholding her Canadian responsibility of promoting multiculturalism. Either way, she was happier than I was. I didn’t want to take the class, but my mom made me; it did help. By this time, I had started to observe my teacher critically. My friends and I would have our elementary school recess discussions at the tire swing. Over the years, that swing was our own classroom; we learned so much from one another at that age, including who the racist teachers were. I learned through observation that our fiery teacher would pick out the good and bad Native kids—savage from civil. This was the same teacher who demonstrated the most petty and punitive measures for Native students. She would always give us “blue cards,” which were like civil citations for third graders. But one of my friends got it the worst. He was always fighting with this little blonde white kid, and since my friend was much bigger and knew how to fight, he would kick and chase that little kid’s ass around the class. This usually happened when the teachers were out of the room; one of them would always come back when the kid was on the ground crying. This happened a lot, but one of these times was especially bad.

My friend was sitting at his desk when the red-headed teacher approached him with an assignment. She started to scrutinize him in front of the class, as she so regularly did. She loomed over his desk with her furrows of anger and boiling red skin and asked, “Do you think this kind of work is okay? Are you dumb?” Looking down at him, she waited for his response, but he just put his head down. She snarled, asked her assistant to accompany her, and stormed out of the room.

The class was dead silent.

“What do you expect? He’s from the reserve,” the little blonde antagonist said aloud.

Only a couple of laughs were heard, then the loud screech of desks sliding across the floor followed. My friend was sprinting after the kid, zigging and zagging. The chase didn’t last long; only a couple of figure eights around the class and the kid was caught. My friend’s fists rained down like a hailstorm, as if the pain he was inflicting would erase the pain being brought on him.

They were both on the ground. The white boy was kicking and screaming, crying for help.

“GET HIM OFF!”

Usually these incidents only lasted a couple of seconds. This time my friend didn’t stop until one of us stepped in to pull him off. The kid was gasping for air, bleeding, and trying to stand up when the teachers walked in with the reprinted assignments. I could barely describe the rage in her eyes. They swelled; it seemed that every blood vessel in her eyeballs burst instantly when her racism struck yet again.

“Stop it! Get off him, you savage!”

Her scream was heard down the hall, and we all gasped. I was frozen.

She separated the two enemies. Her favouritism toward the kid couldn’t have been more obvious. She violently tugged my friend’s arm and brought him outside the class while the younger teacher checked if the kid was okay. He was. He had a busted lip and a bruise on his cheek. His eyes swelled and the tears fell, the white fragility leaking to the floor (Liebow and Glazer 2023).

Then, in the blink of an eye, the red-headed teacher was grabbing something from the supply closet. We didn’t know what she was going to do, but we knew it was meant for the “savage.” She emerged from the closet with a roll of green painter’s tape and started laying strips of it on the classroom floor.

She stepped aside and we saw what it was: a green box, about four feet by four feet, at the back of the class. She dragged his desk to the reserved area, told him to take a seat, and left him there.

His desk was about twenty feet from the rest of us third graders, making it impossible to communicate with him. She would tell him, “This is your box. If you leave this box, I will send you to the principal’s office.” Her anger didn’t seem to fade one bit.

“This,” she pointed her sausage finger toward the green taped square on the ground, “this is your jail.”

Thinking about it now, I realize that teacher has turned out to be a perfect metaphor for Canada. We were also put on reserved areas, out of sight from the majority of the population yet still expected to succeed the same as the rest of the population. This system was implemented while Canada became a country. Today, there are more than six hundred reserves in Canada, and according to Statistics Canada (2018), Indigenous people in Canada make up 4 percent of the population but are grossly overrepresented in correctional institutions. Men and women in every province across this country are being locked away in disturbingly high numbers. Most of these people come from communities that have been discriminated against for the past 150 years. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and Indigenous people have history. This history has been sustained and perpetuated into the present. I myself have had numerous little encounters with the RCMP. I have been handcuffed and put in the back of an RCMP vehicle, I have been carded and pulled over, and while walking down the street, I have had too many cops pull over and want to see “what’s up.” All in all, my experience with the RCMP has given me the impression that they are more suspicious of my behaviour than not. Their physical presence is needed in Canada because we are considered suspicious; therefore there is a need to display power—to keep the Indians in line. In fact, Indigenous people and the RCMP have a very long and dark history, starting with their involvement in the implementation of reserves to their policing during the genocidal Indian Act.

Now, stories consist of the Starlight Tours in Saskatchewan (Campbell 2016), where the RCMP in Saskatoon would leave Native men, without shoes, in the middle of winter, tens of kilometres outside of the city and tell them to walk back to civilization. Many of these men died. Other stories consist of Native women not being taken seriously while reporting a rape, sometimes being asked if they were “asking for it.” These stories are so common that they have contributed to the national issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) described in Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (National Inquiry into MMIWG 2019). This history is scattered with horrendous stories. Grounded in the narrative of colonization, the actions of the government and the RCMP were justified. I didn’t learn this in the school system. I have heard all these stories from my grandparents, parents, uncles, aunties, cousins, and friends, who all have stories recalling their experiences with the cops. For instance, my dad was fourteen when he was first manhandled, cuffed, and arrested by a cop; it was at a protest in Cardston. Stories like this are how I learned a very important lesson, one that was opposite from the one I was taught in school: that people who break the law are criminals, not bad people. I think some people have real difficulty defining the difference, especially white people. My teacher foreshadowed this so well.

My fiery-headed teacher would never see the white kid taunting my friend, never witnessed the insults of “savage” or “stupid Native”; he would even say degrading things about our community. All this would happen while she was out of the room. Honestly, if she caught him saying that stuff, I doubt she would have even done anything, let alone think of putting him in a box. We would always try to defend our friend from the wrath of the teacher and plead his case, but she never believed us. She was only a witness to his savage behaviour. She was our police. I know for a fact she made my friend hate school. Even at seven years old, we felt judged.

From grade three to grade five, I was the only Native in that “special” class. I felt judged by not only the teachers but all the other kids as well. The white kids in that reading class would leave me out of group activities, laugh when I couldn’t pronounce words, and always make degrading comments about my brown skin. Meanwhile, while I was in that class, some of the other Native kids would call me a “white boy” when I’d pass them in the hallway or play at recess. My stomach would start to hurt in these moments. My palms would sweat and my heart would race because I knew these moments would end up in some sort of push or shove from one or another, followed by a shouting match and, sometimes, a fight. All was necessary to validate my identity; at least that’s what I thought.

At the time, I could never understand why this was the case with some of the other Native kids, but now, I know it was because most of us associated the Canadian education system with residential school, the church, white people, and ultimately, assimilation. Moments of lateral violence would be common in my life and for most Native people living on reserves. This kind of violence is the worst because it goes nowhere. It may be one of the hardest aspects to deal with when it comes to growing up on the Rez; this was also inherited.

***

In my sixth-grade class, the teacher asked if we had any good jokes we could share with the class before going home for the day. One after another, we heard knock-knock joke after knock-knock joke, then one kid raised his hand.

“Go ahead, Joseph.”

He stood up from his desk and walked confidently to the front of the class. This kid was one of the smartest in the grade, let alone the class. He was athletic, good at math, and a prominent up-and-comer in the Mormon Church. Everyone adored this little white specimen.

He would piss me off so much.

Joseph slithered around the desks with a crooked little smile on his face. He knew he had a joke that was going to make some people laugh; he was too smart for a knock-knock joke. He stood at the front of the class, blue eyes full of excitement, and began his first day as a Mormon stand-up comic.

“What’s the difference between a bucket of dog poop . . . ,” the class burst out with laughter already, “and a Native?”

He paused for comedic effect, squared his shoulders, and smirked as he delivered the punchline: “The BUCKET!”

The room echoed with nothing but crickets and his weaselly little laugh. I saw the colour rush from my teacher’s face faster than she rushed to the front of the class. Her attempt to patch the racism with the old “Everyone is special” speech was futile. It was too late; the damage was done. The racism would slowly trickle down from teachers and adults to students as we got older.

I grew up on the Blood Reserve, but I went to school in a small, three-thousand-person prairie town called Cardston. The reserve has thirteen thousand members, which makes it one of the largest reserves in the country. Even though we were literally right across the highway from each other, it felt as if we were worlds apart. On one side, you have one of the largest Indigenous reserves in Canada; on the other, you have one of Canada’s largest Mormon communities. One of them is plagued with poverty, addiction, violence, and trauma. The other has a Mormon temple, a million-dollar golf course, little diversity, and some of the highest standardized test scores in the province. For some strange reason, my friends and I were perfectly stuck in between. Even though we couldn’t articulate our feelings well at that age, we felt our souls being split in two.

I hadn’t really thought of that joke until I started writing this chapter on the subject of racism, but it’s funny how many memories have come up, actually—funny in the sense that I have begun to take for granted how racist Cardston actually is and have normalized it. If you weren’t fitting in or abiding by their rules, then why not drop out or transfer to the school on the Rez? At least you wouldn’t deal with racist white kids, right? That’s what some parents and kids thought. A lot of Native kids would come to Cardston and quickly leave, not being able to handle the extreme nature of the school system; I don’t blame them either. On the contrary, other Native kids would use the old “If you can’t beat ’em, then join ’em” motto and not associate with other Native kids at all. Even at that age, we had to pick our poisons; my friends and I hung on to one another for dear life.

One thing the education system is really effective at is picking and choosing winners from losers. We were always taught that the Indians lost to the cowboys. So when these teachers would pick and choose Native students, being one of the chosen was followed by praise—praise from parents, teachers, and even other students. “You’re not like the others” operated as positive reinforcement, and you would be rewarded for being a “good Indian.” When I was chosen for that “special” class in the third grade, most of what I was writing about at that age would detail my obsession with hockey. But this time, we were asked to write about Thanksgiving. It was a holiday that didn’t mean much to me, honestly. It was only an excuse to eat turkey and spend time with family. So before we wrote about Thanksgiving, we had to learn about Thanksgiving.

“Okay, kids. Sit down. We’re going to tell the story of the first Thanksgiving.”

It was the fiery-haired teacher’s assistant. She couldn’t have been older than I am right now, so I’d guess she was in her late twenties. She was blonde, had pink braces, and would always wear a hoodie with the letters “BYU” (Brigham Young University) on it. Later I would learn what this was; it was the continuance of the religious culture of influence within the town of Cardston and the larger Mormon community. We were immersed in this culture.

She continued.

“When the pilgrims came from Europe on the ships, the Indians greeted them with gifts and food. They waited on the shore in their headdresses and costumes.” She would read this as if she was reading a Disney storybook, which hypnotized us kids.

“They put their supplies together and started to make the setting for the feast. They cut the wood for tables; they hunted the turkeys, mashed the potatoes, and picked the corn. They all had the most wonderful feast with the pilgrims. We gave them forks and knives and silver cups, so they let us live on the land. Ever since then, we have lived peacefully with the Indians, and we continue that tradition by having a feast every year.” She ended with a smile full of innocence, glee, and pink braces. “The end.”

This is a story we would hear every year. In grade three, we would have been relatively new to the story; I think that’s why I remember it so well. She told the story with such certainty and honesty; she believed every word. My young mind couldn’t perceive the colonial narrative that draped this simple story. All I paid attention to was the “we.” When we gave them “forks and knives and silver cups”; she wasn’t talking about everybody. We does not mean everybody. The story she was telling us was written with a colonial pen, through a colonial lens. This lens is home to more cynical things than just a peaceful Thanksgiving. It promotes the erasure of Indigenous people, supports the institution of slavery, perpetuates the degradation of women, and upholds the systemic mandate of white supremacy. This can be seen through practice and policy, such as residential schools and the Indian Act. The pen and the lens were crafted over hundreds of years through the global process of colonialization. Now, we were the heirs.

Nevertheless, we were asked to write about “what Thanksgiving meant to us.” The only choice I had was to write through the lens we were just taught. The fallacy was fresh. I remember writing something like “I think it was really nice that the Indians made peace with the pilgrims. That way, we were able to have school, hockey, and a chance to be smart.”

Oh, what a good Canadian boy, eh?

Thinking of how naive I used to be is sickening to me now. Whatever the full extent of my writing was, it got me into that “special” class.

This narrative really messed with my head. It made me believe I wasn’t like the others. It enabled me to push my own people away—because being a “savage” was undesirable, and I didn’t want that. So I would try to be a “good Indian,” but my desire to be “good” was embedded in an old system, one that needed to “kill the Indian in the child” (Burnett and Read 2012, 220).

Last I heard, Joseph, the stand-up comic from earlier, was married and on his way to becoming a doctor.

I wonder if he still tells jokes.

***

No matter how people come to learn about Indigenous people living in Canada, they will stumble on the historical instance of residential schools. The purpose of these schools was to “kill the Indian in the child” (Burnett and Read 2012, 220). Indigenous people supposedly needed to be civilized: because in the eyes of the government, “Indians” were an obstacle that needed to be dealt with, and quickly, for the sake of colonial expansion. The government operated through their belief of Indigenous peoples’ racial differences, differences that manifested from the Eurocentric idea that “[we] were unable to move forward along the linear continuum of civilization, that we were waiting for someone to come along and lead us in the right direction. To free us from ourselves” (King 2013, 79). So they came for the children.

The Canadian government implemented the national policy of residential schools, with assistance from various churches. This is why we have so many different religions on the reserve; our souls appeared to be up for auction. Through the power of church and state, instances of sexual abuse were not only common but routine. Physical and emotional abuse were horrendously apparent and recurring within these institutions, which would lead to toddlers and teenagers dying by suicide. Some kids would be sold in the Sixties Scoop (Dart 2019) and never saw their homes or families again. Now, at least where I am from, they have turned these old residential schools into apartments and housing for tribal members. One of them was turned into a tribal community college; it was burned to the ground.

This education system forced generations of children into these morally tainted institutions, which led to waves of individuals who were and are trying to numb the trauma with alcohol, drugs, and dysfunctional relationships; some committed suicide. One thing we learn is that there is a difference between living and surviving; people in the struggle know this distinction. This condition is only a by-product of the differences perceived by settler colonizers, which is the variation in civility and physical attributes. If the people who made it through residential schools were lucky enough to not have been sexually abused or died of disease, abuse, starvation, or suicide, they would have just made it out with a Canadian education—or in other words, left the school as a civilized individual who held the same Eurocentric values as their abusers and were able to function in civilized society. They left as individuals who have been amputated from the way of life that kept their ancestors alive for so long. I say “they” and it sounds so abstract; I think this is also part of the problem.

To white people, most of this chapter will be in the abstract, the way most of our social problems as Indigenous people seem to be abstract. Instead of using “they,” I could easily say my grandpa, grandma, aunties, uncles, and father left residential school with these conditions. This has left an imprint on my personality, my emotions, my relationships, and most importantly, the respect I had for my people and myself. This is the way the Canadian government worked to assimilate the Indigenous population, and it worked for the most part. These schools produced the first generation of civilized Indians, Indians who were educated, which was a step in the direction of being labelled “civilized.” Yet the schools produced the antagonistic relationship between Indigenous epistemology and institutionalized Eurocentric education, deeming one as inferior to the other. These schools created, as Stuart Hall would characterize, a discourse.

Hall states that “discourses are ways of talking, thinking, or representing a particular subject or topic. They produce meaningful knowledge about that subject. This knowledge influences social practices, and so has real consequences and effects. [. . .] The question of whether a discourse is true or false is less important than whether it is effective in practice” (1996, 205). The Canadian government took this knowledge about Indigenous people being uncivilized and needing to be helped, whether it was true or false, and used it to influence their decision to implement social practices (residential schools) that led to real-life consequences—consequences that left lasting effects on our identities. Our family members left these schools with reminders of our supposed inferiority; they left with an implicit sense of being lesser than their oppressors in every way. Many of my family members have alcohol and drug problems. I have had family members drown themselves in alcohol until they were on life-support with liver failure and yellow skin. Unfortunately, many of us know how addiction looks and feels. We also know, too well, what the crushing weight of grief feels like. So we love because we know we won’t live for very long.

Coming from Cardston High School to the University of Lethbridge was strange for a lot of us. The most noticeable thing for me was that the amount of explicit racism was almost non-existent. One perfect example I could think of is this Mormon kid I went to high school with: he would yell the N-word out of habit. When he would get a bad grade in class or when he would stub his toe, he would just yell “N**GER!” at the top of his lungs. Not one teacher, principal, or counsellor who heard him would do anything about it; only us. That was Cardston. Now, if that kid tried to say that in university, he would be shamed out of the building. This is the explicit racism I’m talking about. We observed white people like this. They acted as if everything was for the taking, as if everything was theirs; we were taught the opposite.

This sense of inferiority, dependence, and hopelessness was not an accident; it was the plan all along. To kill the Indian meant to kill the sense of community and to solidify their sense of individuality. Even though the last residential school closed in 1996, Eurocentric values are still being reproduced in the education system and continue to be taught. In university, racism isn’t explicit but implicit. Curricula still have this primitive versus civilized narrative when it comes to Indigenous people, or most just forget to talk about Indigenous people altogether. I bet a majority of students in the psychology field still don’t know that Abraham Maslow developed the hierarchy of needs while observing Blackfoot kids in residential school (Ravilochan 2021). Regardless, we still have to learn the narrative. Various fields are practicing Indigenous erasure and claiming their values are superior through the same discourses created by residential schools. In the twenty-first century, these differences and assumptions about Indigenous people are still taught—just not in the way residential schools went about it, with the abuse and all. Instead, they used subtle ways, ways in which Indigenous people would be willing to learn these values and continue to be “civilized.”

It’s not an accident for people living in Cardston to behave this way. As a matter of fact, the discourse of Native savagery is more ingrained in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints than any of us thought. In Thomas King’s book The Inconvenient Indian, he explains how the church actually implemented a “special” program for Native children:

The Mormon church, or the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter-Day Saints (LDS), has for years maintained an impressive collection of photographs of Indian children, taken when the children were first brought into the church’s Home Placement Program. This was a program in place from 1947 to 1996, through which Native families were encouraged to send their kids off-reservation to live with Mormon families, the expectation being that these children would have a greater chance at success if they were raised and educated in White society. The purpose of the photographs was to track the change in the children’s skin colour, from dark to light, from savagery to civilization. Indeed, The Book of Mormon specifically teaches that dark-skinned Lamanites Indians, as they accept the Mormon gospel, will turn “white and delightsome.” (King 2013, 69)

To think that these teachers, principals, counsellors, and students were all part of the church—and how much this played a role in my socialization as a child, teenager, and young adult—is really f*cked up. Some teachers would sneak some Mormon rhetoric in with their lessons, even advise some Native parents to join the church; that’s if the missionaries didn’t get to them first. It makes me wonder if they were keeping an eye on my complexion, wondering if I’d slowly turn from savage to civil. Yet it isn’t like the story of Indigenous people being sold, coaxed, and caressed by some God is new, especially in Canada.

My family chose the Catholic Church. In fact, I was a dedicated holy roller as a kid. I loved going to church with my family and worshipping white Jesus, especially his birthday. Most of my immediate family bought into Catholicism; the concept of good and evil was ingrained in me. Some of my cousins were Anglican, and I have uncles and aunties who are Full Gospel; they worshipped in tents out on the reserve. And yes, I have Mormon family members. Some of these religious family members saw our traditional Sundance as “witchcraft,” saying it was the “devil’s work.” They would also label anyone who attended as a “devil worshipper.” They forgot our belief in God is only 150 years old, and if the white man brought our family God, he brought us the devil too. In all but one of those beliefs, the white man reigned.

My grandmother on my father’s side is still very traditional. She would bring me to the Sundance, and she still talks to me in Blackfoot. Over the years, I have come to appreciate these things more than I ever have before. Even as I write this, I think back to growing up in a small town like that and realize that I’ve had to compromise my identity all my life. My whole life I was taught by white people, worshipped their God, spoke their language, and was influenced by them in more ways than I can count. From kindergarten through grade twelve, my education was taught by the heavily religious; then into university, it was the godless. Regardless of religion, I was taught one narrative of history, one truth, one view of the world, one way of thinking. I was taught to be Canadian. Play hockey, support oil, eat Alberta beef, support farmers, and most of all, be a “good Indian.” Don’t make too much noise, don’t speak that language here, don’t cause a scene, don’t be a savage—or else. This is how I lived most of my life, trying to be a “good Indian.” In elementary school, I won a poetry contest because I wrote a Remembrance Day poem; I faked sick and didn’t go.

This desire to be “good” only caused this rip in my identity to lengthen and sprawl; it almost tore me in half. My wanting to be “good” in school would also rip my relationships with friends apart. Most of us were exposed to alcohol, sex, and drugs at a really young age. On the Rez, these things just kind of came along with the trauma we inherited. My cousins and I would see our parents start to party on a Friday evening, keep going, and leak into the Monday morning. We would rent movies and order pizza, but I missed a lot of Mondays throughout the years. We would wake up to the smell of cigarettes and stale beer and hear the lonely sound of Don Mclean’s “American Pie” echo throughout the house. This is where some of us would start experimenting with smoking cigarettes and weed and take sips of the leftover beers our parents left after they would pass out. This was normal for us but alien to the Mormons, and they treated us as such.

As I got to be a teenager, some of my cousins and friends started to drink regularly. When my parents found out, I wasn’t allowed to hang out with them anymore. In turn, I would be called a “white boy” by some friends or told I was scared or even that I was acting “too good” for them. This was one of my first experiences with lateral violence. We would fight among ourselves, characterizing one another as savage, just like the teachers. I would be teased because I was doing well in school, and out of anger, I would turn and make fun of those kids for not. It’s difficult to admit this because I feel like a hypocrite. I wish I could tell you that I was fighting the good fight my whole life, but that’s not the case. At one point, I was ashamed to be who I was. As rapper Earl Sweatshirt (2012) says, “Too white for the black[foot] kids and too black[foot] for the whites. Going from honour roll to crackin’ bike locks off them bicycle racks.” I could relate, except I was Blackfoot and still felt stuck.

Unfortunately, the feeling of being civil does not substitute for a collective loss of identity. I have witnessed so many of my people and friends drop out of high school and post-secondary and end up having addiction problems or being dependent on government institutions for the duration of their lives. Some of them have ended up incarcerated or, worse, dead. I’m twenty-four now, and I’d like to think I’m one of the lucky ones. I say this because I myself and many of my childhood friends have been pulled into social black holes in southern Alberta. I like to call them black holes because once you cross into that event horizon, it seems that all hope and light are swallowed. From dealing with the RCMP, to dealing with racism and discomfort throughout school and the community, to buying drugs and witnessing gang initiations in the neighbourhood, to dysfunctional relationships—we could have been pulled into any one of these black holes while trying to find ourselves in the cosmos of the colonized. But it still feels like the Rez and southern Alberta, especially Cardston, are worlds apart.

One planet has its own creation stories, language, humour, friends, and families, but this planet is also stricken with addiction, lateral violence, jail, and trauma. These things made it impossible to give a shit about what the other world was offering—or had the opposite effect and made entering the atmosphere of the other planet the sole objective of our mundane lives. Nevertheless, across the highway, on the other planet, there was the school, and despite the racism, it was one of the only ways I would get out of there.

Unfortunately, some of us spend our whole lives trying to pull ourselves out of the gravity of one world, unknowingly putting its importance over the other, always being shaped and torn by the pull of both worlds, forever having two choices, two decisions, two ways of thinking. I am not saying I have found my way, nor am I declaring there is only one way to best understand this identity rip. But for me, it came through an understanding that being Brown in Canada puts you in a position where things such as unfairness, mistrust, and inequality are not only commonalities but certainties. I learned this through history, not the one taught in the school curriculum, but the one taught to me by my parents, my uncles, my aunties, my grandparents, the land, and the literature that was never going to be offered in a Mormon school. Blackfoot history, our history was the buffalo, the mountains, the prairies, the language, and family lineages. All aspects of our history were essential to the survivance of the Blackfoot world, but our relationship with all these aspects was disregarded when it came to my formal education. When that teacher called that young Native what she did or when I heard that white kid’s racist joke, it wouldn’t be the last or the first racist experience for myself or any other Natives in that class. It was only but a glimpse of what we would be exposed to for the rest of our lives and what the schools in southern Alberta would condition us for, what we would have to be for the rest of our lives: resilient. From Cardston Elementary, Junior High, and High School to the University of Lethbridge, I have felt the discomfort of racism and the gravity of these various black holes—if not first-hand, then I was holding the hand of someone who was about to be pulled away from me and into the darkness. Before I knew how to articulate this split, rip, or fracture of my identity, I could only feel it. I could never put into words the divisiveness taking place within myself. I only knew the struggle of being put in the middle of things, having the burden to choose between one world and the other. Being stuck in between these two extremes caused this rip or tear in my identity that I have not been able to articulate until recently.

I struggled with seeing the world through the eyes of a “savage” and “good Indian” until I read someone who felt the same. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote this over a hundred years ago, yet it holds such truth now, especially for a young Blackfoot man like me:

The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people. This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten thousand people—has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make them ashamed of themselves. (Du Bois 2013, 128)

With Du Bois, his struggle was being a Black man in white America, trying to understand why he feels like himself and his people are a problem in white America’s eyes. I struggle with being Indigenous in Canada, more specifically a Blackfoot man in southern Alberta. The actions of both Canada and the US were influenced by the notion that we were somehow lesser beings because of our physical attributes and cultural differences. The experiences we have had are very different, from slavery to residential schools, but one commonality seems to be that we all have this sense of seeing ourselves through the lens of white people. As Indigenous people, we have been put into this category of being two things. On one hand, we are Blackfoot or whatever tribe we are from. We have had our own traditions, stories, and traditional territories long before Canada was even an idea. Our stories are a convoluted web including history, family, and depictions of the land as it was thousands of years ago. It was only 150 years ago that my people were still living on the land and with the buffalo. Only recently were we exposed to the colonial narrative; only until recently we were savages and “dirty Indians.” On the other hand, we are Canadian. The Great White North. We drink beer, watch hockey, and love multiculturalism. We are a country whose reputation of politeness is an international joke. When in reality, Canada has tricked the world. People forget about residential schools, the Indian Act, the ongoing genocide of Indigenous women and girls, poverty, trauma, incarceration, and the fact that most of us don’t have access to clean water or adequate health care. Being Indigenous and Canadian comes with its own set of problems, but these problems are put under the spotlight of racism to be analyzed and amplified, from pipelines to health care, drug addiction, and violence. The ubiquity of this identity rip and racism can be consuming at times because colonialism is everywhere, the people and the land. Now that this veil has been lifted from over my eyes, I will never look away.

I could only assume that Du Bois would also ponder the plethora of the societal problems his people faced. You can learn a lot through observation and theorizing, but experience is so essential in learning what is most important. For me, the concept of “double consciousness” was the theory that cradled my experience and articulated it so well. But before I read the theory, I had the experience. There was a time before I even realized there was a veil, a time before which I would be consumed with a head full of undesirable contradictions—“savage” and “good Indian”—contradictions that related to my family, friends, community, and self-perception. There was a time before I knew what the beauty of my culture could do for one’s inner peace; I had to experience inner chaos, the chaos that was out there, in the cosmos of the colonized. Southern Alberta is scattered with black holes that constantly pull and tug at one’s potential, identity, and life itself—from racist students, teachers, cops, and the media, to the Eurocentric education and criminal justice systems, to the local drug dealers and gangs that are on the Rez. All are by-products created by the discourse of colonization and racism that are all present in this convoluted social web on the Rez. We have been taught to forget our history, customs, and language. We have had our children and identities stolen, our customs and languages beaten out of us, and our traditional territories diminished to nothing but pinpricks on a map.

As I write this, social problems in southern Alberta have evolved. Our people are dying from the opioid crisis (Chacon 2019), which is spreading like nothing ever seen before. Pills seem to be the drug of choice for people who want to forget the trauma they’re struggling with. Meanwhile, our people’s addiction issues continue to spiral. It seems we are enabling contemporary racial discourses of “savage” to blossom, as if addicts are the failed projects on the assembly line of civility. Even local doctors in Cardston and Blood Tribe members have started to lose trust in each other (Southwick 2019), if there ever was any trust at all. Instances of racism within and outside the clinics by Mormon doctors have been reported—if not officially, then through word on the street. Also, crimes between Indigenous people and settlers throughout Canada have widened the gap to reconciliation. This is clear when looking at the continued genocide of Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG), the injustice that came with the death of Tina Fontaine (Maclean 2018), the compromised relationships between us and the RCMP (Tucker 2017), and more locally, the crimes of community members (who have also attended Cardston High School; Schmidt 2018). More recently, the Blood Tribe won a forty-year court battle titled the Big Claim. After sifting through a century of evidence and oral testimony from our Elders, as Grant (2019) reports, a “Federal Court judge ruled in favour of the Blood Tribe, finding that Canada shortchanged the band when the boundaries were drawn as part of 1877’s Treaty 7. The reserve stretches 1,400 square kilometres across the southwestern Alberta prairie, from west of Lethbridge and south to Cardston.” Reparations are in order. But until then, the tension between the Blood Reserve and town of Cardston may start to become more intense, especially when considering the history of Alberta and treaty rights.

Despite all these issues and despite the lingering notions of hopelessness, we are still here, surviving the storm.

***

I want to defend Indian reserves since I believe too few politicians, academics, and newspaper columnists make this case. In fact, if anything, it seems as if most take the opposite approach—they run down our homelands. In my eyes, it appears that most opinion leaders deride those places Indigenous peoples love the most. Of course, there is a lot of critique, and such analysis must be crisp, loud, and clear. I never want to shy away from addressing the serious problems found on reserves, and I have made this a focus of my work too. At the same time, such evaluations must be balanced to account for how many Indigenous peoples feel about their reserves and larger traditional territories. They love them. They would die for them. Many do die for them. When people choose to stay on reserve or move back to one, they statistically shorten their life span. Yet they do this anyway, because, despite all their challenges, there is also love at home. Reserves are a well-spring of family life, language, culture, sustenance, tradition, social belonging, and meaning for many Indigenous peoples. The public is often misled into thinking that Indian reserves are unremitting sources of unfailing misery because of this lack of vigorous defence of reserves. This is not the case; reserves are complex spaces that also contain humour, care, concern, sharing, mutual aid, and deep spiritual and physical connectedness. (Borrows 2019, 46)

I stopped believing in God when I was eleven years old. I always found the Western manifestation of God to be a projection of fear toward the unknown while also casting judgment on what is known; this is how the Sundance became home to “devil worshippers.” Furthermore, after learning what happened to our people in these schools and in the name of God, churches filled me with a tummy-turning discomfort, so I stayed away. I still only go when I have to. Stories of residential school would reinforce this decision. I always found more spiritual satisfaction when we would be fishing or hiking in the mountains than I did in church anyway. That calming sound of the river rippling over the rocks mixed with the smell of pine makes sitting in church seem only spiritually punitive. My interests would lead me to read about and watch documentaries on ecosystems around the world and the animals within them. Then I would go outside and try to learn about the animals in southern Alberta and how they interacted with one another. But what I didn’t realize was that most of what these books and documentaries were teaching me about the ecosystem was already known by my people.

See, being brought up Catholic, going to a Mormon-dominated school, and having my Blackfoot identity disregarded were all part of the objective to colonize the mind. I didn’t know who I was; a lot of us don’t. I didn’t know who I was until I failed out of university my first year, until I tried my first drug, until I had my first drink, until one of my friends died. I didn’t know what the point of any of this was until I learned about my culture—the very thing the government tried to kill inside of us.

I failed out of university my first time. I didn’t know what to do when I got there. I was undecided about being a grizzly bear biologist or a journalist. Being undecided for so long allowed school to fade into the background, and before I knew it, I was being asked to leave. I took a year off to work in the asbestos industry with an uncle. I made more money than I ever had up until that point. I was doing whatever I wanted. But I still felt stuck. So I decided to go back to school: the community college on my reserve.

Everything was 100 percent Blackfoot. This was the first time I had ever had a class where every student and instructor was Blackfoot, and just as importantly, so was the curriculum. Up until then, I was only taught to know who we were perceived to be: failures, savages, “dirty Indians,” undesirables. All I learned was the narrative. Finally, the curriculum would talk about issues relevant to our lives. The lessons would weave together the land, history, and our families as we experienced this trauma together. There are many social issues on our reserves, but the reserve is home. I love my home and everything that comes along with it. This chapter is about everyday and institutionalized racism, but at the core of it is Indigenous resilience. Resilience comes with love and with understanding one another’s trauma, understanding that we all come from generations of people who survived Canada’s genocidal project. Our communities are loving, supportive, strong, humorous, and complex. Throughout the years in Cardston, we would rarely talk about Blackfoot people, even when we would learn about Aboriginal people in social studies. We would always learn about tribes in the US or out East, like the Mohawk, Mi’kmaq, and Cree, but the lessons were as shallow as the story of Thanksgiving. We never knew about Indigenous philosophies, Indigenous epistemologies, traditional territory, or the extent of our intelligence. And for once, I was learning.

We learned about the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the Indian Act of 1876, the signing of Treaty 7 in 1877, the 1969 White Paper, and the Red Paper that followed. All were government decisions to take the children to school, corral us on reserves, and “help” us assimilate into the rest of society—again, make the transition from savage to civil. We would also discuss how colonization took place in the mind and left an empty space where only fragments of one’s Blackfoot self existed. This is where I started to see the colonial narrative and where it differs from the Blackfoot paradigm. Just these fragments of my culture were powerful enough to offset all the years of formal education I had received. For once, what I was learning was relevant. I took every class I could until I had enough credits to transfer to the university. This time around, I wasn’t stuck between majors. When I was accepted back into university, I chose sociology as a major and took every Indigenous studies class I could register for. Being critical toward the narrative continued into my post-secondary education because I was beginning to know who I was and where I came from. Knowing where I came from gave me a connection to my ancestors and what they fought for while also grounding me in the very landscape the university is built on.

Most of what I learned at Red Crow Community College was Blackfoot centred. So when I got back into the university, I wanted to learn more. I was so happy to be reading so many other Indigenous academics and their theories. I was reading Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, John Borrows, Glen Coulthard, Alicia Elliott, Tanya Talaga, Cindy Blackstock, Harold Cardinal, Greg Cajete, Thomas King, and many others and being taught by people like Leroy Little Bear, Betty Bastien, Linda Many Guns, Maura Hanrahan, Beverly Hungry Wolf, and the other Native students in those classes—all of whom have their own stories of resilience and have come back to share it with our people. All have come to fight the perpetuation of ignorance by unconditionally loving our communities and perpetuating our culture. Now, the number of Indigenous people who are lighting up the literature world is truly inspiring—from writers such as Alicia Elliott, Tanya Talaga, Thomas King, Waubgeshig Rice, Eden Robinson, Lee Maracle, and Darryl Mcleod, just to name a few; to Indigenous people emerging into the music world, such as Tanya Tagaq, A Tribe Called Red, Jeremy Dutcher, Melody Mckiver, Jordan Cook (Reignwolf), and Snotty Nose Rez Kids; to all the people visually bringing about their work in the film industry. These people are all but a sliver when it comes to the vast number of Indigenous artists directing this Indigenous renaissance. In the words of Alicia Elliott, “Our art carries a weight that goes beyond a song or a poem or a dance. By surviving, by creating meaningful work that ensures our cultures and languages can survive too, we’re showing our ancestors our love. We’re still here because they were there. Their pain and trauma wasn’t for nothing” (Elliott 2018). I couldn’t agree more.

Furthermore, in academia, I was honoured to have attended Leroy Little Bear’s philosophy class. He would discuss the five aspects of our Blackfoot philosophy: flux, energy waves, spirit, relationships, and renewal, all of which are ubiquitous throughout one’s physical and emotional journey as well as the planet and the universe itself. It would take another chapter for me to even scratch the surface of the philosophy, but there is something to be said about a group of people who were able to live sustainably for thousands of years without having to suck the life out of the earth through pipelines (Little Bear 2015). Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017), in her book As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance, combines her experience with Glen Coulthard’s (2014; another Indigenous academic) theory of “grounded normativity.” Theories such as these are crucial in understanding Indigenous paradigms as well as the communities that give them life. Simpson articulates grounded normativity as “ethical frameworks generated by place-based practices and associated knowledges” (2017, 22). Simpson is Anishinaabe. This means that the knowledge she has heard throughout her life is specific to the place she comes from. The stories told by our grandparents and parents originate from somewhere; that place is traditional territory. As Simpson says, “I believe our responsibility as Indigenous peoples is to work alongside our Ancestors and those not yet born to continually give birth to an Indigenous present that generates Indigenous freedom, and this means creating generations that are in love with, attached to, and committed to their land” (25).

These territories contain certain animals, ecologies, and landmarks. An Anishinaabe story is not going to have the same landmarks as a Blackfoot story because the region and landmarks are different, and so is the knowledge. For example, the buffalo, or iinniwa, are integral to Blackfoot culture. They are respected in all aspects of life; we depended on them for material things such as food, shelter, clothing, and everyday items, but they were also an essential piece of our way of life. Our Sundance and the various societies within it continue to be examples of this relationship. Iinniwa were a source of knowledge, teaching us animal behaviour and how to move about the landscape while the seasons change. We learned from them in this way, through observation and interaction, which is why we are working diligently to bring the buffalo back home. It makes ecological sense to preserve this animal’s habitat because the buffalo are a key species in the ecosystem of the Plains. We knew this through our philosophies and creation stories that enabled the reciprocity of respect toward this animal. This respect became intrinsic to our knowledge and to our relationship with the land; this is traditional ecological knowledge. This knowledge comes down to what we learn from our grandparents and parents about the traditional territory of our own people. We hear the stories they told and how our relationship with the buffalo was intrinsic to the land along with the sustainability of it. These stories were not only for entertainment, but they were history and ecology lessons. The knowledge comes from the land and our communities. As Indigenous people, we have the ability to see two worlds. We have a Western scientific point of view, but we also have the ability to see the world through the eyes of our ancestors, and even though our lives have been so fragmented because of colonization, we are still here, and we’re not going anywhere.

***

In Blackfoot, we have the word Noohkiitsitaat. It translates to something similar to “bear down,” or to “wait it out,” or to almost “endure” something. The translation gets lost in English, but stories help with that.

When a blizzard or thunderstorm is approaching, a herd of buffalo will make their way to the top of the rolling hills. Once they reach the top of these hills, together, they face the storm as it looms. Once it swallows the landscape, iinniwa close their eyes and dig their hooves into the ground below. Surrounded by the disarray and chaos of the storm, with their eyes closed, they face it head-on and become immovable objects waiting it out.

In the storm we are trying to survive, we, too, need to become immovable objects conditioned for resilience.