If the shoe fits ...

I got a new pair of moccasins.

I pulled them on and felt my knee ache from twisting my foot up to slip them on. A dull ache passed through my leg, reminding me that I’m old and probably shouldn’t have played sports with so much abandon for so much time.

The moccasins have a beaded design on the top, a tricolour diamond splitting upward into another, similarly-coloured diamond. I was told they were made from raccoon by an elder in Wabasca, Alberta.

I possess an uncomfortable amount of knowledge about Wabasca and the Bigstone Cree who hail from there. Well, uncomfortable for a lower-middle class white kid from Picture Butte.

See, Father Lacombe promised the Wabasca Indians that their way of life would never change thanks to Treaty 8. He told them their ways wouldn’t be driven out by the gold rush, roads, overfishing and white men hunting all around them. They’d already settled in the northern region of the province. That region was declared uninhabitable by the white settlers who were actually colonists. White people — like me — then found gold and oil in them there hills and the rest is still not history. In fact, to pretend that the incursion of big business that started with trappers and traders and led to miners is over is to ignore the oilsands development currently taking place in, on and around the region of Treaty 8.

Bring on the eugenics programs, racist social services, broken treaty promises, and residential school systems designed to kill “the Indian” in our indigenous citizens. It happened in Wabasca to the Bigstone Cree like it happened in Cardston, Stand Off and Brocket to the Blackfoot.

Want a sports take on this? Next time you see Wacey Rabbit or Colton Yellow Horn, consider their journey to professional hockey careers. It navigated waters you cannot imagine or relate to.

I was at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting once and a fellow said that for white drug addicts there was therapy and that for native drug addicts there was prison.

Consider that native Canadians have to pay for goods with quarters that put Tecumseh on one side and the British monarch who stabbed him on the back on the other. This is the same Tecumseh who won the War of 1812 for us, Canada.

Imagine being an indigenous voter who backed Justin Trudeau because he seemed sympathetic, at the very least, to their land claims and desire for cultural equality and now have to watch the smarmy fool pose for selfies while ignoring all his campaign promises.

I thought about all that as I admired my beautiful new moccasins. My friend Janine Peacock asked a Bigstone Cree elder, let’s call her Sakihaw, to make me a pair of moccasins. Janine’s a Cree herself, a survivor of trauma, never a victim of it. She’s proud of her heritage and takes an active role trying to heal her home community in Wabasca.

She’s also an evangelist. She extols the virtues of native ways but still never denies the vices they’ve absorbed.

I imagine Sakihaw asked who she was making these moccasins for. I see from a quick Internet search the word for me is Kakeeshaway, or “loud voice.” Sakihaw, an elder who has probably lost family to violence, addiction or worse. Sakihaw, who teaches young women how to sew moccasins and appreciate the old ways. Sakihaw, who has to hold back the tide of antipathy of a brutish, impatient society in favour of a more spiritual approach. While Sakihaw sews my raccoon-skin moccasins, I imagine she reads about another reserve boiling water, or one boiling it for another year. I imagine she knows there’s something wrong about sewing a pair of moccasins for a bigmouthed former journalist — just another loud, obnoxious white kid who snickered when the name “Chief Pi-A-Pot” was spoken in social studies.

You don’t meet any native Canadians who haven’t experienced racism or injustice at some point. It is a country with distinct boundaries and many things have been built to keep natives apart and away from the life the rest of us enjoy.

Of course, Sakihaw might’ve sewn my moccasins in five minutes without a thought. She may have been watching the Oilers game or griping about politics while needling away but I choose to think it was a much larger act of heartful giving. Kindness comes less easily to me. I do not receive it well, and do what I can to refuse it. These moccasins, given freely and without expectation, deserve a better response. They deserve a more sensitive awareness because that’s what they gave me (also, warm feet).

To me, these are not just shoes. Sakihaw sewed the leather together, slid the colourful beads into place and gifted the moccasins to Janine’s mother, who brought them down from the harsh, precious environment of northern Alberta. She handed them to Janine, who had asked for them to be made in a size 9 for my feet, then put them in a bag and delivered them to me.

These aren’t my moccasins, although I get to wear them. They belong to Sakihaw and the raccoon whose skin was tanned and stretched and sewn. They belong to the Bigstone Cree, who deserved better than they got. They belong to Janine’s mom and Janine’s family, who raised a woman so generous. I just get to wear them, and borrow their meaning and offer them some purpose, even if it’s just to warm my hairy, Hobbitish feet.

Janine’s husband, a lanky, well-dressed fellow named Zane, asked me if the moccasins fit.

I would like to let Sakihaw know they fit me perfectly.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays.