1: Love and Ambition

      I come from a Métis working-class background. Every year from May to October, my dad helped load and unload freighters on the docks of Penetang, a small town on the southeasterly tip of Georgian Bay. He drew unemployment insurance and fished and hunted the rest of the year. When I was a kid, I got along well with everybody — Métis, white, and Indian. We all went to the same elementary school and my friends came home with me to eat Mama’s tarte au sucre and to listen to Grandpapa’s stories of his days first as a fur trader and later as a soldier in the trenches during the Great War — as he still called World War I. We played cowboys and Indians late into the evenings. Everybody wanted to be cowboys, even the Indian kids — nobody read any racist meaning into it — at least not when we were really young.

      My friends made me welcome in their places — the Métis and Indian mothers fed me hot bannock topped with brown sugar and the white ones gave me peanut butter cookies. But as the years went by, and as we grew older and started high school, our relationships changed. The white kids found excuses to avoid coming to my place. A couple of Métis friends made ugly racist remarks about the guys from the reserve when they weren’t around and stopped inviting them home. Then, one by one, the Indians dropped out of school until there were only a handful left, and when the white and Métis kids ran into them on the streets, they pretended they didn’t know each other. When white kids from families moving into town to take jobs at the shipyard showed up at school, I overheard some of my Métis buddies tell them they weren’t really Métis. They were pure French they claimed — pure laine as they say in Quebec. But they were as brown-skinned as me or any Indian, and I could tell the white kids didn’t believe them.

      It was around then that I began to understand the complexities of racial identity in our small town. The Indians, I saw, were at the bottom of the social scale. The Métis, because of the white blood of our fur-trader forbearers, ranked higher than Indians but still lower than whites because of our Indian ancestry. To be white was to be at the top. It was simple enough. Then one day I went with my parents on a shopping trip to Toronto. A group of Franco-Ontarians from somewhere up north were laughing and joking among themselves in French as they waited for a movie theatre to open on Yonge Street. “Speak white, you French bastards,” someone shouted from out of the shadows. That’s when I found out that white people discriminated among themselves as well.

      I’m proud of the fact I never pretended I was a dark-skinned white — an Italian or Greek, for example — even though I might have been able to get away with it. I loved my brown-skinned parents and my dark brown-skinned grandpapa, and wouldn’t hurt their feelings for anything in the world. As a child in elementary school, I had worn my identity lightly. As a teenager in my last years of high school, exposed to the atmosphere of prejudice permeating the halls, I asserted my pride in my heritage. Although basically shy, I began telling anyone who would listen that Louis Riel, who led the Métis nation in two disastrous rebellions against Canada out west in the nineteenth century, was my hero. I put a Métis flag on my bedroom wall and took to wearing a Métis sash on the anniversary of his death. I may have overdone it, but for the rest of my life, I have bristled whenever anybody spoke ill of my people.

      Life was otherwise good. I did well in school — not surprising since I was one of those lucky people blessed with an exceptional memory. It wasn’t photographic, but it was as close as you could get. I could store away and recall almost everything I read or heard. “It’s a gift from God,” the parish priest told me. “But don’t let it go to your head. You’re no smarter than anyone else, but it’s an aptitude that’ll help get you through school and when you look for a job.”

      By high school, I had earned enough money from working alongside my dad on the docks in the summers to buy myself a 1950 Ford hardtop sedan. It was rusted and sometimes wouldn’t start without a push, but it had a manual shift and I could beat any of the other guys who drove Chevs or Pontiacs in street races. I also had a girlfriend, Corinne Lalande, an Indian girl from the nearby Christian Island reserve who lived with relatives in town. We had known each other since we were kids in the same grade in elementary school, but we hadn’t paid much attention to each other until high school when we defied the unwritten convention and started to hang out together.

      She took me to pow wows and I took her to Métis fiddling contests. She took me canoeing in the waters around Christian Island and I took her horseback riding, my favourite weekend sport throughout high school. Her folks invited me to their house for meals and my family made her welcome at my place. Eventually, she started coming home with me every day after school and we’d do our homework together. She’d join us for mass and share our big lunches on Sundays. At these times, Grandpapa made her laugh, telling her his grandmother had been a good Catholic Indian from the Cat Lake Indian reserve in northwestern Ontario, winking at me and saying that Indian girls made the best wives.

      But Corinne and I didn’t need any encouragement from Grandpapa to take our relationship further. In those days, most young people in Penetang — and across Canada for that matter — married young, sometimes when they were still teenagers. We were madly in love, walking around hand-in-hand, causing a stir because she was so beautiful with her long straight black hair, clear skin, and classical Indian features. I wasn’t bad looking in those days either, being tall with European features and light brown skin like so many of the Métis guys. We talked endlessly about sharing our lives together and decided that after high school, we’d enrol in one of those one-year business schools that taught typing, shorthand, office management, and bookkeeping. She’d focus on typing and dictation with the goal of becoming somebody’s private secretary. I’d concentrate on typing, file management, and accounting, and look for a job as a payroll clerk in the shipyards after graduation.

      We decided that as soon as we got jobs, we’d have a wedding service in my family’s parish church followed by a reception and dinner at the community hall over at the reserve. By that time, we’d have picked out an inexpensive apartment to rent — something over a hardware store or Chinese restaurant. We’d save every penny to buy a vacant lot close to my parents and eventually we’d have the money to put into building on it. I was good at working with my hands and would do the work myself, with help from my dad, grandpapa, and my cousins and uncles — all the members of the Cadotte clan.

      Like a lot of other couples just