Exceptional Circumstances. James Bartleman
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go ahead, Luc. Get your concerns off your chest. We need honest debate.”
“I think it was a big mistake to read the document that way. It wasn’t put in context.”
“It seemed pretty straightforward to me.”
“Not to excuse the Iroquois,” I said. “But their actions were no worse than what the so-called civilized Europeans were doing at that time in history. Dominican priests were acting as agents of the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal and torturing and burning people by the thousand at the stake to save their souls. Innocent people throughout Europe and in the American colonies were being put to death for witchcraft. Anyone suspected of breaking the law was routinely tortured in those days to get confessions before being put to death. The Inquisition threatened Galileo with torture if he didn’t deny that the earth moved around the sun. You got to consider context,” I said. “The behaviour of the Iroquois has to be seen in context. Indians today shouldn’t be judged by the actions of some warriors in the heat of battle centuries ago. Reading that old report like that hurts the feelings of Indians today. Context is everything.”
“I’m sorry if I’ve upset you,” was all he could say.
That just got me even more worked up and I carried with my angry rebuttal. “And what makes today’s white people think they’re more humane than the seventeenth-century Iroquois. Most, if not all, of the so-called advanced countries in the world, including Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, and the United States, hauled millions of Africans across the ocean to lives of slavery in the Americas throughout the eighteenth century and most of the nineteenth century. The United States and most Latin American countries treated Indians like vermin fit only to be exterminated. In this century, the Germans murdered civilian non-combatants by the million during World War II. Even in Canada, as we meet here today, the government is dragging Indian children from their homes to be sent to be brainwashed in residential schools.”
Fairbanks let me go on until I calmed down and said my response was exactly what he had hoped to stimulate. “I want you to feel deeply about history. I don’t want you to take my word for anything. I don’t want you to take the word of a priest writing about a slaughter that took place a few miles from here without making up your own minds on who was in the right.”
But nobody else said anything. Corinne began to cry, which made me feel awful. I think Fairbanks realised he had made a mistake but didn’t know what it was. “It wasn’t my intent to demonize the Indians, if that’s what’s bothering you. I just wanted you to think for yourselves.”
He then asked a number of questions to stimulate debate, but nobody spoke up and the rest of the period was spent in an embarrassing silence. When we filed out the door at the end of class, however, I overheard Hilda Greene, her lips curled in derision, whisper to one of her friends, “Indians were savages back in them old days and they’re savages today. My dad says it’s in their nature and they’ll never change.”
When we went back to history class the next day, an unhappy Fairbanks said he had received calls from parents to say he had gone too far in reading the Jesuit Relations. Someone had told him he was a sadist, out to titillate and not educate their children. Looking my way, he said someone else said his presentation lacked context. The chairman of the school board, who hinted his contract might not be renewed for the next year, had called to complain.
“The people of Penetang obviously want their history to be portrayed as it is in movies, with all the bad things happening off screen and all endings happy ones,” he said. “But I can’t teach that way, and I’m going to take a job somewhere else next year where the locals are more open-minded. In the meantime, I have no intention of saying anything more in this class about Indians or Huronia.”
The incident made a lasting impression. Grandpapa used to say the Métis had inherited the best of what our white and Indian ancestors had to offer. We were better singers and fiddlers than the French, better tap and square dancers than the Scotch, better trappers and canoe men than the Indians, and braver and better looking than the whites and Indians. He said these things to make me laugh, but I believed there was a grain of truth to them. But the remark of the girl about the inherent savagery of Indians planted a tiny seed of doubt in my mind. Did my Indian blood condemn me to come to no good, no matter what I did in life? Was I genetically predestined to failure? Was the real reason I always made a big show of expressing pride in my Métis identity an attempt to mask internal doubts?
I hoped not, but wasn’t sure. But suddenly, I no longer wanted to become a payroll clerk, or to live in a basement after I got married, find fulfillment helping raise a family, and spend my time sitting in a screened porch. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I wanted to prove to myself that a Métis was just as good as a pure laine Franco-Ontarian or the son or daughter of settlers from the old country. To do that, I’d have to set my sights on becoming something different for the rest of my life. I’d have to go to university and become an engineer or a school teacher, something to prove myself to people like Hilda Brown.
The next day, after classes were over, I went to see Fairbanks in his classroom before he left for the day. If he was mad at me for taking him on in history class, he didn’t show it. In fact, he was delighted when I told him I was thinking of going to university and wanted his advice. He probably thought his reading of the Jesuit Relations had led to my decision to rethink my ambitions in life.
“If you don’t go to university, what would you do?” he asked, smiling broadly.
“I’d go to Business College and study to become a payroll clerk. Then Corinne and I’d get married and settle down here in Penetang.”
“You’d be making a big mistake,” he said, no longer smiling. “Not the part about marrying Corinne. She’s a fine girl, but you have the ability to go far in life and you’d soon be bored in a clerical job. In my opinion, you should take a four-year honours history program and apply to join the Department of External Affairs as a Foreign Service officer. You love history, especially diplomatic relations, and have an extraordinary grasp of the subject. In fact, in twenty years of teaching, I’ve never come across a student with your abilities. You would have to study hard and pass some tough exams, but you’d get in.”
“But I’m not sure I’d want to spend a good part of my life outside Canada. And Corinne probably wouldn’t want to leave the Georgian Bay area.”
“Why don’t you ask her? Her answer might surprise you. But if you don’t want to become a diplomat, why not become a high school history teacher and get a job in this part of the province when you graduate? ”
Although I didn’t let it show, I was by then excited at the prospect of going to university. But I still needed some reassurance. “But none of the guys around here go to university,” I said. “Everybody’ll think I’m a snob.”
“No they won’t. They’d be proud to see one of their own getting ahead — and you’d be a role model for the Métis and Indian youngsters. And don’t be intimated by the cost. Your dad can speak to some of his contacts on the freighters and get you a job as a deck hand for the summer. You can take out a student loan to pay the difference. You have no excuse not to do it. Don’t waste your life in a dead-end job.”
My parents were supportive when I told them my plans to go to university. At last the Cadotte family would be able to count a white collar professional in its ranks! Corinne said she was pleased when I told her I now wanted to go to university to become a high school teacher, but didn’t look at all happy when I said the wedding would have to be postponed. Afraid she’d be really upset if I told her Fairbanks had recommended I apply to join External Affairs on graduation, I didn’t even raise the possibility. In retrospect, I think she guessed I was holding something back because she then said — a little too fast for my liking — that she’d now drop her plans to be a private secretary. “I’ll take the three year program offered at the Soldiers Memorial Hospital in Orillia to become a registered nurse. That way both of us will be professional people, and have the money to buy a proper house and not have to start our lives together living in a dark damp basement.”
When I told her