Way to go Willie, Way to go

I belong to a couple of FaceBook Groups that celebrate my hometown of Haney. Some time ago I realized that we really hadn’t said much about the Katzie First Nation, on whose traditional territory Haney rests. Here is the post I came up after a moment of reflection:

I offer my token of respect and acknowledge the stewardship exercised over these lands for countless years by the Katzie and their ancestors. I’ll also dredge up some old memories of my Katzie friends and offer those in a spirit of reconciliation. When I started school at St. Patrick’s elementary all those years ago, I was by all accounts a pretty energetic kid. These days I’d probably be diagnosed as hyperactive and dosed with Ritalin to slow me down and become more manageable but in those days the nuns probably offered up their exposure to me as a penance. Imagine me, if you will, as a kind of a “Dennis the Menace” inadvertently acting as an agent of God. Although I had enjoyed my idyllic childhood playing in the forest along the riverbank, I was eager to learn, eager to find out how things worked and eager to make friends. School, it appeared, was the apple from the tree of knowledge, the Rosetta stone of adult mysteries and, I hoped, a kind of a clubhouse filled with readymade pals and buddies. Not, in a word. It wasn’t to be the last time I over-idealized the unknown of course, and it took some time before reality sank in. During those first few days under the nuns’ tutelage, I discovered a kindred spirit in the young Willie Pierre, who was one of many kids at the school from the Katzie Reserve. Like me, Willie buzzed with anticipation, and soaked up information with a spirit of joy and delight. Like me, he had a lot of energy and not a lot of restraint. Like me, he valued learning something new over following the rules. Over time however, it became obvious that our very similar attitudes and behaviors resulted in very different reactions from our teachers. I was called inquisitive but Willie was called unruly. I was applauded for my class participation, but Willie was punished for being disruptive. And so it went as Willie and I and the whole class for that matter absorbed the lesson that one plus one doesn’t always add up to two. I regret that I didn’t show more grit and stick with our friendship, but unfortunately it didn’t take long for the status quo to become internalized and in all too short an order my early connection with Willie was broken. This is not to say that my overall impression of the aboriginal community in general, and the Katzie Nation in particular, was uniformly negative. My father, for one, accorded the Katzie a definite respect, which provided at least some counterpoint to the nuns’ swift (and frankly regrettable) judgment. I remember him speaking at some length about both Simon Pierre and Peter Pierre and while the specifics have long since fled my memory, I got the sense that Willie’s forbears were important elders and respected healers. I was always happy enough to accompany my dad on his house calls and from time to time I’d find myself on the rez. Mostly I’d sit in the car listening to the radio but sometimes I’d hop out and talk to whoever might be in the general vicinity. I can only hope that I wasn’t too much of an arrogant little person back then. More generally, it was a time when Chief Dan George of the Capilano stood up in Empire Stadium and delivered a historic exhortation supporting social justice, Haida artist Bill Reid became internationally famous, and Buffy Saint Marie created and sang a defining anthem of the anti-war movement, Universal Soldier. In many respects, aboriginal culture became “cool” although this didn’t necessarily mean that the pervasive prejudice disappeared. It didn’t; of course, it just provided some more contradictions for us to deal with. Over the years I wondered what had become of Willie. There are so many stories of tragedy surrounding aboriginal lives that of course I worried that perhaps life had not been kind to Willie and that the bright spark that had once blazed in his eyes had been dimmed. But a few years ago my mother and sister attended the 50th anniversary of St. Patrick’s School and who was there to give a blessing but respected Katzie elder Willie Pierre! They were both impressed by his eloquence and when I found out that he had achieved that role; I have to say I was both relieved and happy. Then, a while later, I saw a news report on the TV news of the grand opening of the new bridge over the Fraser. There, stationed behind the Premier, Gordon Campbell, was my old friend Willie. As the Premier pontificated and droned on, Willie started engaging in exactly the kind of behavior I remembered from back in Grade one, only this time much more welcomed by most in attendance. It was precisely the kind of thing that would have got the nuns hopping mad – unruly and disruptive behavior. Willie started to dance and chant and since he was right behind Mr. Campbell, he was pretty obvious. His chants started to overpower the political blather and so the Premier curtailed the speech and declared the bridge open. I chuckled and thought to myself “way to go Willie, way to go.”

David Trudel (c) 2012