THE WORD ON RESERVES
James Bartleman hopes books will make the lives of First Nations people better
Former lieutenant-governor James Bartleman’s mission to get books to remote native
communities.
The writing bug has bitten deeply into James Bartleman’s soul. Since 2002, the former lieutenant-governor of Ontario has written seven books, including two novels, the latest of which will be released in June.
Bartleman, who is a Chippewa from the Rama First Nation, has made it a life mission to effect change for First Nations peoples in Canada.
He is a witness to the Idle No More movement — something he has publicly supported — and he has launched efforts to bring reading material to remote reserves in his home province and elsewhere since he left office. His is a deeply felt commitment that stems from a childhood on the fringe in the area of Port Carling in Muskoka, once a prosperous native village usurped by white settlers.
But Bartleman had what many young aboriginal children of his generation did not have — a stable home life and in particular a loving and committed mother who, despite her own hardships, wanted her son to get his education. And so he did, going on to a stellar career first as a high school teacher and then as an esteemed member of Canada’s foreign service before being named the first aboriginal person to be Ontario’s lieutenant-governor. But the memories of his youth and the story of his Chippewa mother’s life remained etched in his mind.
Bartleman is by nature a problem solver and he sees his writing in that context. He came to it fairly late in life though. When he was lieutenant-governor, he began a draft of what would become a memoir in an attempt to come to grips with “who I was” and to get past a vicious beating he received while he was Canada’s high commissioner to South Africa.
“I am aboriginal, but I was not a First Nations person until 1985 when I was brought into the band because of changes to the Indian Act. My mother had lost her status when she got married at 14 to a young white man. They were married for 70 years and had four kids.
“She couldn’t live on reserve and we weren’t accepted by white society, so I was kind of a screwed-up guy.”
This first book opened the writing floodgates. He wrote four more “memoirs” and his first novel. He also became very active on a number of fronts, helping young native people, battling stigma surrounding addiction and battling discrimination.
He was appalled by the suicide rate on northern reserves, so the former teacher thought that reading might hold a key to change and began a program that has delivered millions of books to reserves for the use of young people there and established summer reading camps and book clubs, called Club Amick, for young readers. He has also, with the help of the Ontario government, established the James Bartleman Aboriginal Youth Writing Awards, which give out six awards of $2,500 each. It gets good response each year, but the stories and poems themselves are troubling.
“It struck me that 90 per cent of these short stories and poems are stories of the most sad instances of marginalization and abuse. Of the girl walking through her reserve and at home the parents are fighting and there is no food and the furniture has been sold to buy OxyContin. And she walks through the dusty street of the reserve and looks through the window of a neighbour and the family is sitting down to dinner. There’s lots of food and everybody is smiling. And she just wishes she had a family like that.”
Bartleman sees that native youth across this country are in such a “terrible, terrible state — they are feeling that they have been abandoned by their parents, their chiefs and their country.”
He hopes by writing he will help build a growing bibliography of works by First Nations writers such as Joseph Boyden and Richard Wagamese to create a literature that presages real change for First Nations peoples, much as the writings of James Baldwin, Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison prepared the ground for the civil rights movement in the U.S. He also hopes that the rest of Canadian society will have its consciousness raised by these books too.
He has had some success. His first book, for example, is included in the curricula of some school boards across Canada.
Reading helped get Bartleman out of the grinding poverty that was the state of his early life. He learned by grabbing discarded comic books from the town dump, which was right next door to the family’s small home.
His next novel, The Redemption of Oscar Wolf, is the story of a young Chippewa man, but it also talks about the white people who lived in Port Carling and it is pulled out of three memories/ stories in particular that Bartleman has. One was seeing the original cabins built by the Chippewa founders of Port Carling, some being used as pig pens by the white settlers. The other is from his mother’s youth — she is in her 90s today and nearing the end of her life on her home reserve where she is well treated by her own people, he says. She told him about the wake of an elderly woman on the reserve that opens the novel, and the events surrounding the great 1931 fire that levelled parts of Port Carling, which Bartleman’s mother watched from across the lake.
Oscar is born to a mother whose capacity to love her child was essentially removed by her stay at a residential school where all the horrors of which we now know were visited upon her.
This woman, Stella, was herself deprived of mother love.
It is the missing piece in Oscar’s life that causes him to act out in anger and burn down a section of Port Carling one night in a fit of pique.
Oscar, though, is not irredeemable. He carries guilt for his act of anger and spends many years making up for it. He gets educated and then when the Second World War breaks out, he enlists, serving with distinction and courage in his search for redemption.
Through it all, he is bedevilled by a trickster figure called Nanabush. Tricksters are common in First Nations societies, Bartleman says.
After the war, he pursues and achieves a career in Canada’s foreign service, all the while trying to prove his worth against overt and covert racism.
Obviously, this is a life path that Bartleman well knows. And although the story is not strictly autobiographical, the author’s own life experience informs this story.
“I thought I would bring in that as well — since I had served in Colombia as a junior foreign service officer where settlers were shooting native people, and I had served in Australia — to show First Peoples all around the world have been pretty much pushed aside.”
For Bartleman, Idle No More is a cridecoeur, one that says, “I need to be recognized, I am not a non-person.”
While he hopes something positive will come from Idle No More, which he calls an uprising in favour of human dignity, his focus is to create understanding and have people walk in the shoes of other people.
And that means books with a social justice agenda and muchimproved education for young aboriginal people.
“You have all these priorities — housing, clean water — but unless the people are educated, you’ll never have trained accountants on reserves or technicians who can operate a modern pumphouse. You need to have people who can be the nurses and teachers. You need to have the possibility to dream” that education can give.