Throughout my years of hitchhiking I have had a number of
rides from individuals from various First Nation communities. However, most of
those rides have been quite short and I have always gotten out feeling as if
there was so much more that we could have talked about. This time I got lucky.
My driver, a member of a First Nation community in Ontario, had lots of stories
to tell and was glad to share them. He was also very clear in his values and
how he approached life. What made him a particularly great driver was not only
could he clearly articulate why he thought native spirituality was important,
but he was able to debate, to listen to other approaches to understanding life.
He may have been one of the most non-judgemental persons that I have ever met.
He was firm in his belief system, but he was certainly not threatened by mine.
My driver, John, had, like so many other Aboriginal
Canadians, had a fairly difficult life. He had been consumed by alcoholism and
all of the consequences of that disease. He had had a number of run-ins with
the law and at one point had been at risk of some rather serious jail time.
While we did not talk about it, I think he had been married more than once. He
certainly had a number of children and grandchildren. In fact he was on a cross
country tour to visit various children, grandchildren and cousins. If I had
stayed with him all of the way, he was going to end up on Vancouver Island
after having seen folks in Regina. Calgary
and a few spots in BC.
While John's original trade was as an iron worker, he had
worked in a number of fields, had gone back to school as a mature student and
had a couple diplomas and degrees. He was a deeply spiritual man. He, along
with his wife, practiced and taught the values, the spirituality and the medicines
of his heritage. He appeared to be knowledgeable about plants and their
medicinal value. He had had the opportunity of teaching some of his knowledge
at the community college level. It was clear from the way that he talked that he
lived his life the way he taught it. Open and compassionate. I suspect he was a
natural and compulsive teacher. As I am - at least the compulsive part. But
there was never any sense of competitiveness between us. He was delight to
spend time with.
At one point towards the end of our journey he said that we
had not really solved any of the world problems. I suspect he was right, but on
the other hand we had ensured that two people, about the same age but with
almost unimaginable different life experiences, had managed to debate,
sometimes with disagreement, and to explore those differences. More importantly
we had discovered that in spite of those profoundly different life experiences,
we had found the similarities in our values and in our beliefs.
There are times where I wish that I had a tape recorder with
me as I travelled. There were parts of the conversation with John that I would
like hear again. My comments about angels, his about honouring one's ancestors,
the importance of having a spiritual grounding, the absurdity of the Canadian
government's stand on land settlement, how decisions are made, consensus government
in the North-West Territories and so much more all combined and flowed into a
seamless piece that at least for me validated the belief that we can live and
work together. The single point that I think we would have come to a more
serious disagreement revolved in his contention that if the Europeans had never
come to North America, the Indigenous peoples would have evolved into a
peaceful, environmental respecting small groups. Whereas I wondered if given
another couple of hundred years if nation states would have evolved and become
as controlling as the European states.
In looking back, I realize that while I have not, in my life,
had to accept discrimination or injustices, John had. He had had to learn how
to forgive those who had perpetrated or at the very least had allowed those
injustices to occur. One can only admire a spirituality that allows a man who,
in spite of the challenges imposed upon him by an uncaring society, can still offer
help to folks like me.
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