"In A Canoe, Chasing My Métis Grandmother Like a Dummy" by

“Creation is designed so that each being is fulfilled through relationship with another.”

—E. Richard Alteo

My grandma Carrière’s family comes from Manitoba, near St. Boniface: the traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene peoples, and the homeland of the Métis Nation. This is Treaty 1 territory. My Métis family is from an area referred to by the European settlers as the Red River colony. Many of the Carrières moved to British Columbia when my grandma was a girl. I was born and raised on the unceded territory of the Stó:lō people. I now live as a guest on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil Waututh peoples.

Positionality is important, so let’s get something out of the way right now. I didn’t grow up with knowledge of my Métis ancestry. This is not going to be a story about how I magically connected with my Indigeneity, because that magic doesn’t exist. I was, and still am, an outsider. Because both my mother’s settler (Icelandic) and father’s (Cree-Métis) families were marked by alcoholism, abuse, and occasionally violence, my parents made the difficult decision to separate from family. It didn’t happen all at once; my childhood was a series of negotiations, reconciliations, and breaks with extended family members in various states of mental health. When things were going well, I had grandmothers. Most of the time, my mother, father, sister, and I were like a family on a deserted island, trying to write a new history. I didn’t question this. When you’re a kid, you just assume that everyone’s family is like yours.

How do we know who we are without a firm grasp of where we came from? I know this isn’t a particularly original question, but it’s still a biggie. A question that launched a thousand transformative journeys and mid-life crises. Not every family has a well-documented family tree, a history passed on from generation to generation, beyond say, the odd bloodline celebrity. Oh yeah, I’m related to Queen Victoria, Jessie James, Genghis Khan. That’s the part people talk about over drinks at a party. Probably because the family we know is usually too complicated for small talk.

At my grandma Carrière’s funeral a few years ago, I met my Métis extended family for the first time. They were warm and welcoming, but I learned that, living away from St. Boniface, many of them felt separated from their Métis background as well. My dad’s cousin Roxanne had completed the family genealogy, and she talked about it with him. The work she’d done later allowed my dad and me to apply for citizenship with the BC Métis Nation. Most of the relatives I was meeting for the first time seemed to identify more with their French Catholic upbringing. When my dad spilled grandma Carrière’s ashes into the Alouette River, the river he’d learned to swim in, we sang Amazing Grace, for lack of anything better. I started researching my background, and found that, although I have Métis blood, this means little without a healthy, reciprocal relationship with the Métis community. Feeling ashamed about how little knowledge I had, I was too intimidated to seek out the local Métis organizations. So, I launched my (clumsy) campaign to forge a connection with the land instead. People can (and will) reject you, but it seemed to me that the land would probably be willing to accept me.

For some reason, I didn’t go to St. Boniface. I told you, it’s a clumsy campaign. Instead, I went north.

Rookie mistake.

To be fair, a really good-sounding opportunity had presented itself: an opportunity to spend twenty-one days canoeing the Peel River Watershed in the Yukon and Northwest Territories. Not the land my family comes from. I crossed my fingers and hoped that any land would do. I did a lot of push-ups and planks. I bought a lot of fleece clothing. After a flatwater certification course, twelve of us set out on the Ogilvie River. We launched six loaded canoes from the side of the Dempster Highway, north of Whitehorse. The team included artists, scientists, and even a documentary film crew. We’ll get to that later.

While on the canoe trip, I planned to take notes for a memoir about spirituality, identity, and stories. I imagined my grandma Carrière as a mythic character—someone who could guide me through the difficult times and teach me about myself while I paddled. I should also mention that I hadn’t been in a canoe since I was ten years old, around the age when, after years of dancing around it, we finally made a fairly pronounced break from grandma Carrière.

This is the part of the story when you probably assume that either calamity or hilarity ensued. And you’re right on both counts. My grandma Carrière was not an Indigenous “wise woman” who might have provided a settler fantasy guide into the remote wilderness. Nope. My grandmother wanted no part of her Métis identity, and her heavy drinking ensured most of the family wasn’t speaking to her anyway. I’m not sure why exactly, but most of the extended family wasn’t speaking to my dad, either. She collected porcelain dog figurines and rattan furniture and dressed like a Florida pensioner: a blue-rinse perm and a polyester pantsuit. She denied her Cree background to anyone who wasn’t family, and only used a French accent when she was drunk, then she would swan around like Edith Piaf. Three or more dachshunds were usually at her side, until she was too old to take care of pets. My dad chose to cut her out our lives for most of my childhood, but I know he still sent her chrysanthemums on her birthdays. By the time I was an adult, I resented her absence so much, I didn’t want to get to know her. But then, after she died, I changed my mind. I wanted more than her, though. I wanted roots.

The thing is, no matter how badly you want it, it is very hard to plug yourself into a culture you weren’t raised in. And to do it without a supportive community is nearly impossible. All I knew for sure was that I was so tired of being an island.

Imagine you and I are sitting somewhere noisy, like a downtown chop house and oyster bar, hunched over the warm glow of our iPhones, and I’m telling you this story:

The bible had it wrong, darkness wasn’t a problem in the beginning. There was actually too much light. Carleigh was in a canoe on the Peel River. It was September. The sun was high in the sky and piercing, but offered little warmth.

Carleigh reached into her dry bag to pull out her sunglasses. Her arm went shoulder deep into the bag and she grasped for their familiar feel, between the rain jacket and the writing journals. She found them, but when she pulled her hand out of the bag she felt them snap between her fingers.

With a grimace, Carleigh opened her hand slowly. The sunglasses—cheap, mirrored cop shades she bought for the journey to Burning Man seven years ago—were still mostly intact, but one of the arms was broken. The sun glinted off them and made her see spots.

She put the one-armed glasses on her face, hoping she might be able to coax them into place between her toque and the scarf pulled high over her cheeks. She crunched up her nose and lowered her eyebrows. It didn’t work.

Carleigh turned around and showed the glasses to Jordon, who was in the back of the canoe.

“Look at my glasses,” she said, and then regretted it. Jordon must have his own worries and concerns for the day, she thought. She shouldn’t bug him.

“What about them?” Jordon said, squinting at her and leaning forward in the canoe.

“Nothing, never mind,” Carleigh said, and she hid the sunglasses away, in the pocket of her PFD.

Maybe at this point in my story, your phone will buzz, and you’ll take a quick look. Maybe you’ll take a quick drink of your vodka soda. Maybe we’ll talk about how cute the waiter is. When you think about my story, you might see a handful of busted sunglasses in your mind’s eye. But what I saw on that afternoon was the future—fifteen or so days spent squinting into the sun for seven hours a day. A tiny discomfort rendered massive when added to the discomfort I was already feeling. It was too much. I thought about my grandmother, and whispered a few words to her. “This sucks, Grandma C. Please help me deal.”

When I have your attention again, I’ll go back to the story.

The canoe bounced and pulled a little as Carleigh and Jordon bumped against a rock.

“Hey,” Jordon said, “remember to keep an eye out for trees and rocks. I can’t always see what’s coming from back here.”

“Okay,” Carleigh said. But she had trouble thinking of anything else but the sunglasses, and how uncomfortable she was, and soon she started to feel very sorry for herself. Fat tears formed in her eyes and blinded her. She was still feeling sorry for herself when the canoe hit a partially submerged rock and turned sideways into some rough water. She and Jordon were nearly pinned.

“I’m sorry!” She called to Jordon, who swung himself around to lean into the angle of the canoe and adjust his technique.

“Paddle hard,” Jordon said, and Carleigh blinked the tears out of her eyes and paddled hard. They righted themselves, and paddled to shore.

Carleigh apologized again to Jordon. She apologized to all her team, who were a little freaked out. They decided to take a lunch break.

“What happened?” Jordon asked. He was upset, but could see Carleigh felt terrible.

“Look,” she said to everyone, even though she felt like a jerk. “Look at my sunglasses, they’re broken.” They all had their own lists of agonies to consider. But they looked anyway.

“Shit, I can fix those,” Jordon said to her. “Gimme fifteen minutes.” He went to his tool kit and took some glue and a small rubber sleeve and wrapped it around the arm of the glasses. Then he tied some string from one arm to the other so the glasses could sit around Carleigh’s neck when she didn’t have them on.

Carleigh took the new and improved sunglasses from Jordon, and thanked him. She walked down to the river’s edge and sat. The sun was lower on the horizon and level with her eyes, so she put on her sunglasses. When she did, Grandma C appeared in the space between Carleigh’s eyes and the lenses.

“You’re lucky I was there,” Grandma C said. “What do you mean?” Carleigh said, “I asked you for help and I nearly got pinned on a rock.”

“Exactly,” Grandma C said. “I put that rock there to remind you why you’re here.”

“Really?”

“No, dummy,” Grandma C said. “I can’t put rocks where rocks don’t already exist. I can point out what a great lesson that rock had for you.”

“To pay attention?”

“And to ask for help when you need it,” Grandma C said. “But not from me. There are people here who want to help you. Their lives depend on you. Your lives depend on each other.”

Carleigh hadn’t thought of it that way.

This is a clumsy story, but it’s my story. It’s the only story I’m fully qualified to tell. There’s some good teachings in there: the importance of community, asking for help, trying to honour ancestors even when they’ve been problematic figures in your life. Because I’m a storyteller, I know how to put those things in a narrative, but I haven’t learned how to live them yet. There’s a lot I don’t know.

“Where do you begin telling someone their world is not the only one?”

—Lee Maracle

Though it’s a commonly used word, there is no “Indigenous” culture. There are instead the unique cultures of hundreds of Indigenous nations and peoples. So, with this in mind, I tentatively offer you this rumination on community, storytelling and culture, inspired by some of my research. I remind you to keep my positionality in mind as you read. Books don’t replace experience, but that’s where I started my education. One such book is E. Richard Atleo’s Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth World View.

The Nuu-chah-nulth people come from the west coast of Vancouver Island, and their culture should not be considered interchangeable with the cultures of those who call the Peel River Watershed home: the Tetlit Gwitch’in, Vuntut Gwitchin, Nacho Nyak Dun, and Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, among others. However, in Tsawalk, Atleo works to establish what he calls an Indigenous worldview—a belief in the inter-connectedness of all things. Humans are inextricably linked to nature, and to each other, for better or for worse. I feel like this shared worldview makes Atleo’s discussion of Nuu-chah-nulth storytelling applicable here.

Spoiler alert: when it comes to the nature of existence, western society may not have all the answers. Atleo feels that current western ideology, with its extreme emphasis on rationality, tends to separate itself from human characteristics such as emotion and spirituality. No big surprises there. He believes that this fragmentation in western thought, this resistance to focus on the inter-relationships and connections between the mind and the spirit, may be a limitation and not a strength. He quotes Richard Tarnas in calling it a “psychic lobotomy.” I like that.

So why would we, as beings striving for a deeper understanding of ourselves and our environment, purposely lobotomize ourselves?

Understand that Atleo is not calling out the Age of Reason. If anything, he’s offering reason a helping hand. As he says, “The theory [of Tsawalk] suggests that while the human mind is necessary for human cognition and for accessing and acquiring information, it can also be a conduit for spiritual information that can compliment or complete or further illuminate our understanding of existence.”

So really, Tsawalk is high-fiving reason. But it’s also saying, “hey, have a seat, reason. Sit back, and let me blow your mind.”

But back to my story, which is neither in the language of the Nuu-chah-nulth, nor the Tetlit Gwitch’in, nor the people in my family: Cree, French, Icelandic. It’s a Carleigh special. It’s mostly fiction, though I really did break my sunglasses, and Jordon really did fix them. While I’m sure it was exciting, you might have found my story a little lacking in context. There’s a reason for that.

In Nuu-chah-nulth storytelling tradition, since stories would have been shared and passed down through families living on the same land for generations, it wasn’t necessary to provide information to listeners about a story’s location. So when I told you I was on the Peel, you’d know right away that it originates at the confluence of the Ogilvie and Blackstone rivers, in the Northern Yukon. You’d know that September is a crazy time to be there without adequate preparation. These days, you’d also know that it’s one of the largest and last protected watersheds in the world, and is under threat of expanded gas and mining exploration.

When my buddy Calder asked me to paddle the Peel for his film project, I didn’t think twice. As a guide and outdoor enthusiast, he’s taken many long canoe trips. Being an artsy guy as well as an outdoorsy guy, he had something a little different in mind than your usual enviro-doc. Calder invited five other artists and me, with varying degrees of tripping experience, to paddle the Peel with him. Five hundred kilometres. Twenty-one days. It was pretty intense.

While travelling and making the film, Calder told me to keep in mind the theme of Canadian identity and what it means to live in a country with wilderness like this, that most people never get to see. He called the project an exploration of art, science, and Canadian identity. I liked the sound of that, considering my own identity dilemma.

On the river, my grandmother was little help. Maybe because I didn’t know how to let her help. My upbringing had convinced me that I was an island, and that counting on other people was for wusses. Alcoholics will always let you down, this was an important lesson of my youth.

Towards the end of the trip, I met Alice Vittrekwa. Her family has always lived in the Peel Watershed. She and her husband hosted all twelve of us at her family’s fishing camp. After they had fed us and shared some of the history of the place with us and made room for twelve sleeping bags in a wood-stove heated cabin, she and I got to talking. Our conversation eventually turned to my grandmother. When I told Alice about the alcoholism, she pursed her lips.

“It’s not your fault,” she said.

She didn’t expand on that—what she thought I might be blaming myself for. Not getting to know her while she was alive? Not being able to forgive her? Trying to posthumously re-write her into somebody she wasn’t? Or all of the above? This was an unexpected moment of shared language. The language of Al-Anon. I nodded at Alice. I don’t know, maybe it was the vulnerability I felt after so many days outdoors, maybe it was the glow of the campfire in her eyes, but I believed her.

“when you see the land naked, look again
(burn your maps, that is not what I mean),
I mean the moment when it seems most plain
is the moment when you must begin again”

—Gwendolyn MacEwen 124

Another thing that is implied in Nuu-chah-nulth storytelling is the idea that community is a natural phenomenon. Although an individual may identify a need or formulate a plan on his own, the community will work together to meet that need. So in Atleo’s telling of a Nuu-chah-nulth story, if son of Raven identifies the need for light, he may hatch a plan on his own, but it’s a given that the community will support his quest. Get it? I’m not sure that I get it, yet. Settlers like individuality, self-made men. Or, in a colonial context, men who profit from the land and resources of others.

On the trip, something wonderful happened with my fellow travellers. We learned to count on each other. As days went by on the river, our group developed shared themes and stories, even if it was about how hard it is to zip up a tent when your fingers are frozen, or that day I accidentally got a bunch of sand in the pasta salad. Throughout the day I’d gather up moments and make them into crude poetic offerings that I’d read around the fire every few nights. So when I referenced a beach covered in fossil-pocked rocks, or the laughably cliché rainbow that showed itself at the moment I asked the universe for a sign that I was meant to be there, people knew exactly what I was talking about. We were building our own community, if only for a short and highly concentrated period. With no electricity, no laptops, no cell phones, we remained pretty plugged into each other. Anger or frustration made waves we all felt to some degree. When the science assistant went rogue for a day, having had enough of being told what to do, some of us kept his breakfast warm for three hours, in case he came back. Others grumbled.

Here’s a little piece I wrote about that. This time, let’s imagine I’m telling you the story over a fire, at Jericho Beach. To our left is the city. In front of us, across the water, are the clear-cut hills, housing developments creeping toward the peaks. To our right, a peekaboo view of unobstructed ocean.

This evening, I am an explorer on another planet. A planet where I paddle a canoe on mercury, and the thick, heavy atmosphere burns liquid nitrogen. Where the wings of startled birds make a hovercraft whoopwhoopwhoop as they pass, and that’s the only sound until they land again. Gaetan and I are way out ahead of the group, but the bow position and his gift of amicable silence lets me pretend I’m alone here, and I’m not afraid. Dip my paddle in and pull.

Gaetan is pretty quiet tonight, which suits me fine. Today he was at the bottom of our social hierarchy. The outcast. These things always happen in groups, somebody pisses somebody else off, and everybody gets in on it.

Yesterday Gaetan had had enough of group dynamics: waking when we’re told, eating when we’re told, keeping within earshot in case there’s a Grizzly. So he separated himself. We didn’t see him all day. He missed the pancake breakfast, though we kept them warm for him as long as we could. He missed the evening fire, when we all talk about one thing we’re thankful for. He was probably thankful for some time to himself. But people don’t like it when you deviate from the pattern, disturb the groupthink.

Yesterday, I ran laps up and down the beach by myself, but I stayed within earshot. When the pancakes were ready, I ran a few more laps. I don’t like being told what to do, either. But I’ve come to count on the group, since it’s comfortable. At the evening fire, I said I was thankful for a day to myself. I’d spent it writing in my journal, a hundred paces down the beach. Sang a little to the canyon walls, but I didn’t see my face in the rock.

This morning, when Gaetan asked me to paddle with him, I gladly agreed. Although we’re paddling the biggest canoe today, the one with all the heavy gear, we’re both strong. It wasn’t long before we were way out in front. He talked a little about feeling like he didn’t fit in, and I told him I understood.

Early in the trip the Peel was narrow and frothy, now it’s wide and sluggish. Soon we’ll slow down, rejoin the group to find camp for the night. But in the meantime, Gaetan and I dip and pull through mercury. Tonight, we’re not afraid of anything.

I was lucky to have the opportunity to learn a little more about what it’s like to be part of a community like this—even the rough parts—but nothing about this experience was inherently “Indigenous.” I could write another whole essay on this. For one thing, any one of us had the opportunity to leave at any time, and that’s just what we did after the trip was over, while the Tetlit Gwitch’in, Vuntut Gwitchin, Nacho Nyak Dun, and Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in peoples, who have lived on the land for hundreds of years, are now fighting the threat of gas and mining interests in their territory. We were tourists, and privileged ones at that.

Remember my quest to win acceptance from the land? I now believe that idea was based on an ingrained settler mindset that the land owes me something. Same goes for my history. Instead of honouring my history, I tried to re-write it. I don’t want to be an island, but it’s not grandma Carrière or a romanticized lure of my Indigenous or Icelandic ancestry that holds life’s answers for me.

If anything, I’d say my life’s best lessons are going to come from responsibility. The desire to learn about where I came from and who I belong to, and the understanding that none of this history excuses me from my role as a settler on stolen Indigenous land. The desire to contribute and answer to a community, to my family, to my loved ones, and to the land, not the other way around. An appreciation of those who are willing to hold me accountable, because that is a sign of acceptance, no matter how much it stings. Those things take a ton of work. Settler habits die hard.

Photo by Flickr user Martin Cathrae