Mark- Pikangikum First Nation

Brainwashing people into collaboration one activity at a time.

I’m back in Pik, and I’m proud of it. As has come out in other posts, a lot of the southern employees who come up here—teachers, nurses, police— don’t return for a second helping. In the case of police, this may be understandable; seeing all the worst parts of a place would make it very tough to imagine going back. But our job is relatively easy: we’re in each spot for a single month, teaching and learning from kids who are willing to show up voluntarily at the school portable for a three hour program during their summer vacation. We don’t have to deal with the month-after-month grind of a real teacher, and we don’t really have anyone keeping tabs on us except ourselves. Being your own boss and doing something that you believe in… what’s better than that?

It was strange to arrive here and see the house that I stayed in last summer burnt to the ground. We had hitched into town after getting off the plane and we arrived at the Pikangikum Education Authority to try to find our community liaison. I looked out at the lake, precisely where there should have been a row of teacheriges blocking my view. Um… damn.

We were put up in the hotel for a few nights. Apparently, a couple of weeks ago, a fight in the street had ended with the propane tank on one of the houses getting cracked open and lit. The explosion rocked the whole town, we were told. Although the spot we would have been staying was nice and I’m a bit bummed that we got this place with barbed-wire fence outside instead, I feel much worse for the director of the Education Authority and the members of the local family next door, all of whom lost their homes.

Anyway, it didn’t take long for pleasant things to start happening. Within a couple of hours, we’d run into our neighbours from last year, Chandler and Delana. Chandler at first pretended not to know us when we saw him at the airport, but then came screaming down the hallway of the hotel, yelling my co-counsellor Naomi’s name and remembering mine soon after. It was a real pleasure to see Delana again, the 5 (?) year-old who we allowed to attend camp last year despite her age. A year has changed her a lot, but she’s also as delightful as ever. Her English was nearly non-existent last year, but she’s now putting together full sentences and her vocabulary in both English and Ojibway has expanded remarkably. She recounted the story of escaping from her burning house pretty clearly and she didn’t seem fazed by what must surely have been a bit traumatic.

I guess that housing is a bit more fluid around here, with more than a dozen people sometimes stuffed into a little cabin. The housing is allocated by the band, and the sense of ownership is quite different. That’s one of the reasons why the barbed-wire fencing around our houses bothers me a bit, since it is so out of step with the way most people live and probably think.

Other kids who we worked with last summer have shown a lot of improvement in terms of English language as well. A couple of kids who we hung out with a lot, who arrived here from a Cree reserve in Manitoba, have been contending with both Ojibway and English. They can now be more or less understood in English and they pick up on most of what we say… which is a massive shift from last summer, when the height of our communication was chasing each other around while playing cops and robbers or them saying “backpack” repeatedly, which was a request for a piggyback. Pikangikum has near total native language retention, which more or less means that everyone learns Ojibway first and becomes an English-speaker later. This is really rare in Canada, even on fly-in reserves.

When one cop who we were talking to was saying that Pik’s problem is that it has no culture, we were tempted to point out this fact about language retention… what’s more cultural than that? But we left it alone. The police have been a bit stressed recently, we gather. On Canada Day, the day before we arrived, they supposedly beat up a disabled elder, and riots ensued. A friend of ours who just turned 19 (we made her cupcakes but her sister fed most of them to a puppy named Grace) told us about throwing rocks at the cops and popping their tires.

The police fled the town, taking the nurses with them. The nurses returned a day later, probably pretty shamefully, but it took a little longer to get police-presence back. There’s still a trashed police SUV outside the radio station. Allegedly, the new cops have been threatening people with prosecution who refuse to divulge information about the rioters.

Although I disagree with the cop’s sentiment about Pik having no culture, he said something interesting later on: “there was a fight here between tradition and Christianity,” he said, “and Christianity won.” The bible school that just left town is a bizarre phenomenon and the religious presence here is a bit disconcerting sometimes. Getting almost 200 campers to our 40 means that parents must in some way be willing to sign their kids up to have their souls saved. And the travelling “tent meetings” that are here every weekend bear witness to the way in which religion has become traditional in Pik and older ‘native’ religion has been sidelined as dangerous. I watched someone being healed in the parking lot by a local missionary yesterday and it scared the bejesus out of me.

Camp itself has been going remarkably smoothly. I’d like to think that it has to do with the kids getting more self-control and better at English, but I bet it is more related to lower numbers and a more experienced team. Whatever the reason, we’ve been able to run activities and games that flopped last year. We had a great paper airplane making competition last week, after which the winner instructed the rest of the participants on how to make his plane… Then everyone threw their planes together and they all went further than their original attempts… it was beautiiiiiiiiful. Brainwashing people into collaboration one activity at a time.

My team is made up of three returning councillors, one of whom has been with the program for five years now. This makes a huge difference in terms of knowing what to spend time and energy on, and what to let slide. It also means that we know a remarkable number of people in the community and we usually know who to talk to so that we can get what we need for ourselves or for the kids. The other member of our team is a cool hunter-type francophone from Sudbury, and although she’s sick right now she’s normally the toughest member of our team. On our downtime, we’ve been swimming, arguing with each other about who would beat whom in a fight, writing a radio play about literacy councillors on a fly-in Ojibway reserve, and watching a lot of Star Trek TNG on Naomi’s laptop.

The kids are strong here and I feel privileged to know them. Pik is indeed somewhat of a dangerous place (not as bad as the police say it is, though) and they’ve got a lot of fight in them for making it through that. I just finished Joseph Boyden’s collection of short stories “Born with a Tooth” and near the end of the book there’s a story about an old man on an Ojibway reserve who is talking to an ignorant and god-intoxicated priest. He tells the priest to be careful: “You think us Indians are children with little hearts, and your heart is big. Listen careful, Black Robe, for I want to help you understand these people. Their hearts are bigger than you know, and they know more about things than you guess.” I feel like the old man could have been talking about Pik.

All the love,

Mark.

PS: Some articles about my house blowing up and pik police! the police article is kinda police propaganda, but that's okay.

www.wawataynews.ca/.../OPP-remain-in-Pikangikum-after-dispute-over-arrest_20185 -

www.wawataynews.ca/.../Explosion-levels-teacher-s-complex-in-Pikingakum-no-injuries-reported_20184

PPS: gaddam, wish i was in ottawa right now... article about the cup coming to Brantwood park where i grew up playing hockey, largely quotes from my bro. http://www.montrealgazette.com/sports/Eager+bring+Stanley+Ottawa/3291371/story.html