About: jackrabbit
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Name:jackrabbit
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- Aloha, Shalom, Bonjour, Danse, Hola, Konichiwa! Spent a portion of my childhood living on a Native American reservation in Canada because we used to man the post office there. So my culture is a mix between my own ethnic Dutch-Scottish-English-Irish-Austrian-Romanian, and Native culture. My Mom was a military brat who assimilated French, Japanese, and Hawaiian culture, so I also have those in my culture mix too. I've lived fourteen places, spread among two countries/one continent and an island. That's the short version!
2008-05-21 08:48:04
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Posts by jackrabbit:
Snorkeling with Green Sea Turtles video
Here’s an even better snorkeling video, since I had much more footage to work with. My brother filmed it and I edited it and put it to Enya’s ‘Only Time’. Footage taken in Hawaii at Hanauma Bay.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7cUZHzyZ_0
Snorkeling with Sharks
I was recently in Hawaii and my family and I went down in a shark cage to watch Galapagos sharks feeding on the surface. We were out on the North shore in about 400 feet of water, and my brother shot footage with a snorkel-mask camera. I put some clips together to music and posted it on youtube: (The Youtube player makes a couple parts rather pixelated for some reason, sorry about that. The part that seems to have pixelated the worst is the section with the bubbles when we’re surfacing.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDDnLlhQ9zU
Aerial flight Video!
I made a Youtube video with footage from a flight from Canada to Florida, U.S.A. and put it to music. Tell me what you think! I’m an amateur cinematographer, but my capablities with this were pretty limited because I was just shooting from the film mode of a small digital camera. I still think it turned out fairly well.
Okay, I don’t know how to embed youtube videos directly into my post, so I’ll just paste the address here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YD8Pzn_sfA
Humorous Hawaiian
I lived in Hawaii for a short time (few months), as did my Mom in her childhood for a much longer time (four years). There are a lot of Hawaiian words which would cause a lot of English speakers to do a double-take, here’s a few:
SPAM - It’s a food, not a mass-email. Canned meat, to be exact, kind of looks like the inside of a hot dog, but comes in a big square lump, and besides luau pig it’s pretty much Hawaii’s national meat :). They even put it on their sushi, haha. During Y2K the joke was that Hawaiians were dashing around stocking up on water, flashlight batteries, and Spam.
PUPU’S - Appetizers/ hor d’oevres. Yes, pronounced exactly like it looks - poo-poo! What an appetizing name for appetizers (not).
PIPI - Meat/Beef. Pronounced pee-pee, just like you thought. So, if you cut spam up into little squares and put them on a plate, you are offering pipi as pupu’s. LOL
ONO - Great tasting. Sounds like Oh no! The pipi pupu’s are ono…
GRIND - Eat. (Not actually Hawaiian language, just Pidgin English). So, I grind the ono pipi pupu’s. (You have to try saying that randomnly during a meal. Stun the entire party into silence.)
BRAH. Brother/friend. A version of bro. Yup, it is pronounced bra, like the women’s undergarment. So, brah, I’m gonna grind the pipi pupu’s. Mmmm, ono!
Backyard Gastronomic Adventures
One of the major TCK traits is our adventuresome-ness in food…
Well, food adventures don’t always have to take place in foreign cultures or countries - ours last night started in our own backyard. My brother found some recipes for grasshoppers (I think the bigger version in other countries is called locusts), and since we’d never tried grasshoppers before (but have had ants), we thought, grasshoppers live wild right here in the fields, so lets catch some! Which my brother and sister did, and brought the grasshoppers home whole and alive, then stuck them in the freezer to kill them. Then, we fried them in butter, and voila, hor d’oevres (appetizers)! I was expecting the grasshoppers to be, well, kind of gooey, but fried they are crunchy and have a nutty flavor. Various members of my family compared the taste to toast, puffed rice, or fried eggs. They have a very nice aftertaste. Now we’re going nuts with recipe ideas - grasshoppers in salad, in pasta, in tempura batter, in omelettes, in melted cheese, in barbeque sauce… Pound them into powder and use them in breads and soups and pemmican… We’re trying to catch as many as we can before winter comes and kills them all off. They’re an excellent source of protein, and hey, it’s free food! I can just imagine the horror of any of our friends though to come over and find us hauling grasshoppers out of the freezer and frying them for breakfast…
Note: grasshoppers should have their legs and wings taken off before eating as these parts could contain parasites.
Now, we’re gleefully trying to figure out where we can get other edible bugs and grubs… We’ve decided that maggots are probably best gotten in bulk from the fishing store (people here use maggots as bait on their hooks to catch fish) since those maggots are fed on fruits and vegetables and are quite healthy to eat. Crickets we figure we can get from the pet food store (people often feed them to their pet snakes, spiders, etc). Pet food stores feed crickets on sawdust and newspaper (I’m not kidding), and this affects the flavor, so it’s best to bring them home live and feed them on vegetables etc for a few days before eating them as they will have better flavor, we’ve been told. I will let you know what maggots and crickets taste like as soon as we’ve tried them (and I’m sure a few of you have already eaten them yourselves).
And we also found out that any fish under three inches can be eaten safely raw, and whole, without needing to be gutted. This means you can eat minnows right out of the stream or pond (providing the water isn’t too badly contaminated, I guess.) I haven’t gotten a chance to try them yet raw (I’ve eaten lots of whole minnows dried and salted), but my brother and sister did - they wen’t down to the creek, caught some minnows, and ate them right there. My sister says they’re not that great whole and raw because their guts are kind of gooey and squishy, she preferred them cooked over the fire. I’ll have to try it for myself and see what I think. Minnows are also free food…
Any of you find yourself eating ’strange’ things out of your backyard?
Fried grasshoppers:
Minnows:
Wildlife in the yard!
Pics I found of some of the wildlife we have walking around on our lawns in Canada, especially in the Rocky Mountains of the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia. These are elk, also called wapiti, and are a very large species of deer. Other animals that often wander onto lawns in the Canadian Rockies are bighorn sheep, mountain goats, moose, deer, and occasionally cougars (also called pumas or mountain lions, they are around the size of a small to medium leopard). We once had a bear walk up our sidewalk!
What kind of wildlife often winds up in your yard?
For Brice
Same person, different clothes - how ethnic dress influences other’s perceptions
Below I am posting an interesting series of photographs taken by one of my top-favorite photographers, Rakesh Syal. It shows the same man, in different ethnic dress. Notice how one’s perception of him and even of his ethnicity change with each new wardrobe, even with simple changes of headress and glasses, etc. A fascinating study.
Wilderness Memories
I previously posted Reservation Memories, where I talked about my memories of life on a northern Canadian reservation, and talked about the dust and fish and garbage and feral dogs, etc. With all that one must wonder why I love being up North so much. I decided here I would post some artwork by Daniel Smith that reminds me of the Canadian wilderness that surrounded the reserve.
This is exactly what the North (the Canadian Shield/Subartic) looks like. The rocks, the river, the trees, the sunset light coming from around the bend - just looking at this I can smell the fresh air… and hear the buzz of mosquitoes:) We never did see grizzlies, but we had a lot of encounters with black bears. Most were good encounters. However, although people are so afraid of grizzlies, black bears are actually the more agile and aggressive of the two species. They can also climb trees, negating that escape route. Anyone who wants to go into the wilderness where black bears live, here’s a tip: you know how they tell you that if you are charged by a grizzly, to drop to the ground, on your face and knees in Muslim-prayer-position, with your arms around your head? This is to protect vital organs etc, and usually playing dead will placate an upset grizzly. Warning: do not ever do this with a black bear. Black bears are equal parts playful, curious, aggressive, and predatory, and rolling up and playing dead will cause a black bear to literally go into a frenzy trying to roll you over and pry your knees away from your vital organs. It actually heightens their predatory instinct. With a black bear, first walk slowly and steadily backwards - never run, they have good eyesight (contrary to popular opinion), good smell, and are agile and faster than you. If this fails and they attack, you have to fight, same as with a cougar. Go for the nose and eyes. Just dispensing sage advice for anyone who wants to try Canadian wilderness backpacking in black bear country.
Anyway the above picture reminds me of the absolute peace, quiet, and utter tranquility to be found in the wilderness [barring violent bear, moose, bison, or wolverine encounters 
] I remember the most peaceful and carefree times of my life were spent fishing in the wilderness. It was like being in heaven.
This shows the deep, beautiful snows. The snow can get deep enough to swallow a man, especially in the valleys. Even moose, seven feet high at the shoulder, can have difficulty plunging through the winter snows. The thing about the snow is that it is so clean, and the wilderness becomes so quiet in winter. But it gets so cold the moisture in the air freezes, and the sound of these frozen moisture particles hitting each other causes a sound like buzzing electricity, so you can ‘hear’ the air. You can see, it too, each small ice fragment sparkling and glittering and flashing in the sunlight. But you have to wear a scarf or ski mask because breathing in that kind of air is like breathing in glass shards. When you’re dressed properly, you hardly feel the cold even at 50 below zero, because the air is dry. Winter is immensely peaceful and serene. I used to walk into the woods and just stand there, listening to the air. These times, also, were like heaven. And there were no mosquitoes!
The loons, the fog, the sunlight strobing through the trees - what memories. Loons have the most haunting, beautiful sound on earth. Their long, wavering call is like a cross between a wolf’s howl and the song of a humpback whale. It is so beautiful it almost makes me cry. They also have a laugh like a hyena.
I’ve included two links below to loon sound clips. The first link below has a quicktime clip of guitar music with the sound of loons in the background. This one shows what a beautiful sound they make.
http://www.silverlakemusic.com/jl/landloonT13.mp3
And this page has a realplayer clip of the loon’s four calls: the yodel, the wail, the tremolo, and the hoot.
http://www.vtfishandwildlife.com/get_the_lead_out_looncall.cfm
Cultural Customs: Door-Knocking
Once I found out I was a TCK (in June, I think!) I started thinking about all the cultural differences between north Canadian Native culture, and south Canadian suburban white culture. There are actually a lot of differences, some subtle, some blatant. One my family still laughs about is door-knocking.
In white suburbia, you go to a door, and if there’s no doorbell, you rap on the door three times (knock-knock-knock), wait a bit, and then do another set of three. If there’s still no answer and you’re really desperate, you might knock hard five times, and then you pretty much give up and go home. Or, if it is a good friend and the door is unlocked, you knock to let them know you’re there, open the door a crack, yell “Helloooo!” and then step inside.
The first difference in native culture is natives don’t knock as a rule. If the door is unlocked, doesn’t matter if they’re a complete stranger, they just walk right on in. It’s almost an insult to one’s hospitality if a guest feels they have to knock. You can immediately tell the ethnicity of a visitor - if they don’t knock, they’re native, if you hear somebody walk up the steps and start knocking, you know right away that they’re white. And then the house occupants start laughing at them, because knocking on an unlocked door is so, well, white, and dorky and socially backwards.
However, it all changes if the door is locked, especially if the native wanna-be-guest knows you’re home and not answering. Remember how I mentioned white people do a polite 3x knock, wait, do it again, and then usually leave unless they throw in a last 5x ‘hey is anybody home‘ knock? Well, once you get a native person to actually knock, they do not stop. Until you open the door or they get bored, whichever comes first. See, on a reserve, there’s nothing pressing they have to go do (the government pays them, so most don’t have jobs) and they’ve got all day.
Once at seven in the morning, a native man -who’d come to the door to propose marraige to my Mom, no less - started knocking. We were sleeping. He did not stop knocking. We woke up. We did not want to let him in. He knocked for half an hour. At the tail end, he got so frustrated he began kicking the door. (Very romantic marraige proposal.) When we were certain he’d left (at now seven-thirty a.m.) we opened the door to find a pointillism drawing of wildlife sitting on the step. He was proposing, alright - leaving the drawing was just the same as if in white culture he’d left a diamond ring.
My Mom did not marry him.
What are your cultural experiences with door-knocking or customs of house-entering?
Expecting Death
When you live in a place where violence and death are commonplace and you expect any friend or anyone around, at any age, to die at any time, how does this effect the way you deal with later life experiences, and your whole outlook on life, friendship, and security?
Perhaps people who’ve lived in war zones or areas with high violence or civil unrest or even a ghetto could relate to what I went through in my childhood. I viewed it as normal and didn’t even realize, until yesterday actually, how much it affects how I handle life.
On the reservation where I spent a part of my childhood, death was rampant. Those who survived were the lucky ones. Violence was an everday part of life - I grew up hearing constant gunshots. Drinking and drugs also caused a lot of death, either from overdose, car accidents, or walking around in a T-shirt at -40 and freezing to death. Besides that there were feral dogs, bears, and starving wolves who would come brazenly into town and attack in broad daylight. The knowledge everyone I knew might possibly not be alive later in the day was just a normal part of my existence. No person was safe, not even young children, from the violence. Sometimes children were the source of violence. Even now, whenever I mention a friend or aquaintance from the reserve, I always add the obligitory suffix: “That is, if they’re still alive.”
I wonder if this is the reason I constantly fear the death and funerals of my family and friends, even all the ones off-reserve and in safe areas. I read the obituary pages in the newspapers constantly to check if anyone I know is dead. And when people do die, I seem less affected by it than the rest of my family, even when I was really close to the person. I kind of block it out and rationalize: ‘People die. Everyone dies.’ I don’t know if my style of grieving is healthy or not. I grieve a little bit initially and then I pretty much stop. I’m able to bury death quickly and move on, and yet I feel somehow on a deeper untouched level that I really can’t handle death well at all, and this is why I block it out. I appear cold and callous sometimes.
On the one hand, I think being surrounded by constant death and the possibility of death gives one a proper respect for the fragility of life and the vincibility of even the strongest. And yet I think it has really hampered my ability to fully relate to people because all I think about a lot of the time is “They might die.”
Anyone else experienced this?
Good book for missionary kid teens
Picked up a book recently because it looked like it had a TCK theme. It’s a young adult novel called Fool’s Gold, By Melody Carlson, about a missionary’s daughter from Papua New Guinea who comes back to the United States. The book starts out with her cultural out-of-placeness, and moves on to her beginning to drown in America’s materialistic superficial money-focused fashion-conscious culture.
TCKs will identify with the culture clash and many will identify with the bewilderment and America’s obsessive materialism, but I think the ones who will identify most are missionary kids as it examines the character’s questions about God, her missionary lifestyle, and her struggle with the world of materialism, booze, and sex. It’s written by a Christian author so there’s non of the anti-missionary slant that’s present in a lot of secular books and movies (such as The Mosquito Coast). Also, anyone who has a shopping addiction might find this book quite helpful as it’s the first one I’ve seen which examines how and why people get addicted to shopping, and the euphoria, psycholigical highs, and then come-downs that go with it.
What language do you dream in?
I’m interested to find out what languages people dream in when they speak more than one language.
I mostly dream in English, since it’s my mother tongue, but I often dream in Spanish, a language I used to be at least moderately fluent in. The strange thing is that I’ve lost a lot of my Spanish and can’t speak it/remember words for things in daily life, (I used to hang out with a lot of Columbians and Mexicans in high school, but now that I have absolutely no one to speak Spanish to, I’ve lost an incredible deal of it.) and yet when I dream in Spanish, I understand it perfectly and converse in it just fine. Then when I wake up I can’t remember how to speak it! So, I know all the Spanish I knew is buried in my brain, waiting to be resurrected by going back and studying it again. But it still seems very strange that I dream fluently in Spanish, when my mother tongue (and the language I primarily use at this time, because of where I’m currently living) is English.
Does anyone else dream in a language that they used to speak but lost? And understand/speak it perfectly in the dream but can’t when they wake up?
Does anyone else dream in a language they’ve learned but which is not their mother tongue, not the language spoken at home, and is not the language they primarily use?
Or, if for example you’re living in North America and have learned and speak English but your mother tongue is something else, say German or Mandarin or whatever, which language do you dream in?
Third Culture Foods
By definition, third culture is blending another culture with your parent’s culture, so your culture ends up neither one nor the other.
I think we blend foods too - at least I do. For example, I grew up eating fresh tofu (as opposed to packaged supermarket tofu, ugh), since my mother’s third culture was Japanese/Hawaiian and that got passed down to me. Actually, I lived in Hawaii for awhile too. Anyway, she’s also Dutch, and chocolate is a very big cultural food with the Dutch, so I also grew up having chocolate sprinkles on my buttered toast in the morning (hagelslag), as this is a Dutch breakfast tradition.
The TCK part begins when we’d mix Japanese with Dutch - we used to take fresh tofu, and pour chocolate syrup and sprinkles on it and eat it with (gasp) a knife and fork for dessert. The first time I told a Japanese person that, they were horrified and disgusted. Chocolate and tofu? Eeew eeew yuk! They actually doubled over and looked like they were going to vomit… I never told another Japanese person about it after that….
And, we eat sardines straight out of a can with fork or chopsticks, horrifying our Filipino friends who eat sardines but always in recipes and never straight alone.
It must be a TCK thing, eating other culture’s foods, but not quite properly, or mixing them in strange ways with our own culture’s foods. Anyone else do strange TCK concoctions like my chocolate-syrup-and-sprinkles-on-tofu dessert?
Eye contact
What’s your culture’s social etiquette regarding eye contact?
I grew up for a portion of my childhood among the Native and Inuit, who regard direct eye contact as a form of rudeness, insult, disrespect, and challenge. The only time eye contact is used is when you want to communicate something across a room without words. Eye contact is especially rude if you are meeting someone for the first time, or if they are older than you, most definitely if they are an elder.
This custom doesn’t seem to translate well into white North American life. I’ve been told constantly that I need to look at people when I’m talking to them, that I appear rude, shy, shifty, and untrustworthy! Because when I’m talking to someone I always (respectfully, as in native culture) look down at the ground, or at their shirt or their nose or the wall or my hands, anywhere but their eyes. My eyes constantly dart all over the place, trying to find somewhere else to look while I’m talking. It must appear strange and disconcerting to most people, I guess, and probably doesn’t help me in job interviews or anywhere else.
I’ve gotten to the point where I actually notice when I’m doing it, but i haven’t been able to stop it yet. I can’t force myself to stare into people’s eyes when I’m talking to them, it just seems so awkward, hostile, and confrontational.
Any others who have experienced this? Any suggestions on how to get over my long-standing third-culture habit of avoiding eye contact?
Hot Dog Etiquette
Youtube video: http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=T69HDek6a3k
This video was made by someone as a gag, and yet it points out the cultural and social customs we attach to something so simple as eating a certain kind of food - in this case, the American hot dog. It made me think of the fact that someone from another culture or country coming to America could commit all types of gaffes and faux pas doing something so mundane as attending a barbeque. Eating hot dogs is ubiquitous to American culture and yet it could prove a social minefield to anyone unfamiliar with all the customs we don’t even realize we’ve attached to eating this particular food! Maybe this video would actually be helpful as part of a series - American culture 101!
Switching languages, switching personalities
Interesting article from Yahoo news:
Switching languages can also switch personality: study
Tue Jun 24, 11:33 AM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - People who are bicultural and speak two languages may unconsciously change their personality when they switch languages, according to a U.S. study.
| ADVERTISEMENT |
Researchers David Luna from Baruch College and Torsten Ringberg and Laura A. Peracchio from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee studied groups of Hispanic women, all of whom were bilingual, but with varying degrees of cultural identification.
They found significant changes in self perception or “frame-shifting” in bicultural participants — women who participate in both Latino and Anglo culture.
“Language can be a cue that activates different culture-specific frames,” the researchers said in a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research.
While frame-shifting has been studied before, they said this research found that people who are bicultural switched frames more quickly and easily than people who are bilingual but living in one culture.
The researchers said the women classified themselves as more assertive when they spoke Spanish than when they spoke English.
“In the Spanish-language sessions, informants perceived females as more self-sufficient and extroverted,” they said.
In one of the studies, a group of bilingual U.S. Hispanic women viewed advertisements that featured women in different scenarios. The participants saw the ads in one language - English or Spanish - and then, six months later, they viewed the same ads in the other language.
Their perceptions of themselves and of the women in the ads shifted depending on the language.
“One respondent, for example, saw an ad’s main character as a risk-taking, independent woman in the Spanish version of the ad, but as a hopeless, lonely, confused woman in the English version,” said the researchers.
What’s wrong with me?
Uncle Dan,
This’ll be kind of long and I know you have lots of people asking you questions all the time but please bear through if you can. I want to know if it’s normal to, out of self-preservation, assimilate to the culture of people who have terrorized you, trying desperately to be seen as ‘one of them’. This is what I did, and I’ve been having an identity crisis ever since. I know you’re probably not a psychologist/therapist and I don’t know if this is a question you can answer, but thought I’d give it a shot. Some extra background info on the situation can be found below:
(I posted the following in response to another person on the general forum who asked me if I’d ever go back to the Native reservation I lived on from ages 11-14. )
Would I go back? For nostalgia’s sake maybe. I love the land, the vast wild forest… but the reserve was violent and dysfuntional, and though I have a lot of good childhood memories there, I also have some very bad ones.
My situation as a white on the reservation was made doubly confusing by the fact that I don’t necessarily look white. My father was Romanian and I inherited his dark hair and olive skin. The rest of my siblings inherited the other side of the family - fair hair, pale skin, light eyes, and freckles. I don’t even look related. The trouble was that I was immediately accepted as native, until people saw my family and discovered I was white. As I got older, I began to distance myself from my family, pretending I didn’t know them, as a manner of self-preservation. Because if I was native, I was safer than if I was white. Hatred of whites was especially virulent among the gangs of kids who harassed us, constantly hurling epithets and telling us how every aspect of ourselves and our habits was inferior and stupid to the native way. Reverse racism. I began to be ashamed of my European heritage. I only wanted to be native. Talk native, act native, think native. I braided my long hair, tied it with leather instead of a hairband, wore feathers, became more native even than the native kids. Which caused huge racism when I came back to white culture looking, talking, and acting native. I would then become ashamed of my dark hair and olive skin, asking my Mom why God cheated me and didn’t make me born blond-haired and blue-eyed like the rest of my siblings. I was caught eternally between two worlds, between two shames.
I think the most difficult thing about living on the rez was never being able to defend myself from the kids who would attack us. They’d start out by harassing us verbally, then it would progress into spitting on us and shoving us, and fairly soon it would escalete into outright physical violence that would leave us running to hide beside a large wolfdog chained in the forest who loved us but hated the other kids. He was a giant of an animal, rippling with muscle, and the strength of his jaws was tremendous - he was almost full wolf. The kids were terrified of him and would back off once we were with him. But that was a passive form of defense, although probably the safest. It was mentally humiliating that I could never hit them back… even when we were being physically harassed, or when I had a guy put his hand down my shirt, I was unable to defend myself because in a place without any law enforcement, it’s like a predatory jungle. I knew reacting back physically could mean we’d die. I knew the kids would bring more of their friends with them, and lie in wait for us, ambushing us on back roads or in the schoolyard or even at the door of our house. Because that was the way things worked on the reserve. It was war. If you didn’t have any reinforcements to call in, you’d be slaughtered. And there were more kids on their side than ours. Every single one of those kids who harassed us had access to loaded rifles, axes, and hunting knives, and I knew they’d use them if pushed. They were violent kids - shooting and mutilating animals, setting buildings on fire… The product of the violence,neglect, poverty, hopelessness, despair, drugs, alcoholism, corruption, and murders they’d grown up with their entire lives. I didn’t blame them for the way they’d turned out. But I knew better than to defend myself.
Would I go back? I’m older now, trained in self defense, and no longer afraid of those kids. They’re grown up, many of them probably dead, and the abuser-victim power they had over me is no longer there. I could face them today. They made me strong. But who purposely returns to a war zone? I remember the gunshots at night, the bullet holes in the windows, the vigilante justice… I don’t want to have to walk down a street as alert and tense and ready as a soldier. No. I don’t think I’ll go back.
The crazy thing is, these kids who hated me, who abused me, who terrified me, who made me conform completely to their culture for survival… now theirs is the main culture I’ve assimilated with my own, the one that makes me a TCK, the culture I feel more comfortable with. I’ve never adjusted completely back out of their culture. Isn’t that a bit messed up? Is that normal? Or is that Stockholm syndrome-ish?
Thanks for listening to my LONG rambles. It’s just the first time I’ve ever been able to open up about the pain and fear I went through. It was kind of a part of my experience that I’d supressed, instead I’d always focused on being nostalgic and wanting to go back. Boy, I’m a case, aren’t I?
Pictures - Reservation Memories
As I mentioned in my previous post (Anyone else who has lived on a native reservation?) I thought I’d post some pics I’ve found off the Internet that remind me of the reservation, if anyone’s interested. It’s not spectacular vistas, just stuff that makes me kind of flash back. There are certain pictures, certain smells, certain sights that make me flash back to the rez*: houses without glass in the windows, with garbage bags taped up against window frames instead… seeing a dog wandering around loose… hearing a certain kind of bird that I know only by sound, not name… hearing gunshots at night… smelling sewage… seeing garbage strewn on the side of the road… smelling fish bait…
*P.S. Rez/The Rez is what people who have lived on reservations call them.
Reminds me of the interminable road through the forest which was the only link to the outside world. 100 miles away in one direction was a town, and 200 miles in the other was a ‘town’ also… which had only one store with everything in bulk. You wanted candy, bubblegum, you had to buy that in bulk too.
There was no phonebooth on the rez, but there was a giant spotlight on the roof of one of the barred-window, paint-peeling buildings, that illuminated the vast darkness of the forest night. In a place full of people with guns and feral wolfdog packs and wild bears, seeing that light and being able to step into the circle of its brillliance where nothing could hide and surprise you, was a safe feeling.
‘Twas a walking bridge across the river on our rez, not a train bridge, but just the same, I’m always reminded when I see this pic. Reminded of fishing off the bridge and hauling fish straight up to the railing where I could grab them, or swinging them towards the bank where a waiting person could net them for me. The friend I talked about, the truest friend I’ve ever had… our friendship started right on that bridge when he and his mom were walking across and I pulled a fish up out of the murky water. They’d never seen a white person fishing off their bridge before and were so impressed we became friends on the spot.
I have another memory of the bridge… teenagers in a truck stopping and leaning over the side while I was down on the bank, and one pulled out a black pistol, firing it at me - and I ducked to the ground with my hands over my head until I saw the orange end of the pistol and realized it was a cap gun. They drove away laughing, and I was shaken for days. Cap gun pranks aren’t funny on a reservation like that where there are bullet holes in the bedroom window and you try to fall asleep at night with the sound of gunshots, and at any moment someone could kick down your door and shove a 30.-06 rifle in your face and blow you away, just because they’re ticked off or drunk. The place was known as The Murder Capital, and there was no 911 to call… I never, ever, even to this day, have been able to find the humor in that cap gun prank. But I love the memories of fishing off the bridge on hot, lazy summer afternoons…
This pic happens to be of a barn, but the peeling paint reminds me of the condition of the houses on the rez. This barn is in better condition than most of them though. It’s got glass in the windows for one thing…:)
Actually this whole picture reminds me exactly of the rez - the derelict houses, the shoddy wire fences, the gravel and dirt roads, the unkempt yards, the weeds… the only thing missing is a forest backdrop.
Ah, yes, does this ever bring back reservation memories. The tires and abandoned tapes with their innards trailing, the blowing bags and crushed pop cans, and especially the liquor bottles, everywhere. Also everywhere were animal bones… a moss-encrusted moose skeleton, left in it’s entirety after it had been shot and butchered, the white bones full of axe marks… and in the yards, thrown to the dogs, fresh moose bones and fish bones still red with peices of flesh… they eventually rotted in the sun and filled the air with stench… Also left for the dogs: fish heads and guts, shining slimily in the sunlight… Yeah, there were pieces of animal carcass everwhere. I tripped over maggot-infested dead beaver in a friend’s yard (we emptied our water guns on the thing, trying to drown the maggots. Didn’t work.), and there were bear paws hung on someone else’s clothesline, to ward away evil spirits… on another reserve I found a dog’s hide, the only thing left after a half-feral pack had turned on him and devoured him. Funny how I look at a picture of tires and suddenly I’m reminded of the pieces of animals I saw everywhere. It was normal, usual, part of living in a place where hunting and fishing was the main source of food. The only ones out of all those memories that disturb me are the liquor bottles and the dog’s hide…
This picture captures both the bleakness of the rez, but also my memories of the people there. Broken and strong at the same time, so many of them had been through so much. I always found it amazing that amid all the violence and drugs and alcohol, there were still beautiful people. Inner beauty is what I’m talking about. I remember a man in his seventies, did not drink, spoke four languages, always wore dress shoes, and possessed a quiet dignity I’ve never forgotten. He knew all the old ways of survival and would go live out in the wilderness alone for weeks at a time. I think he was happiest there. He told me stories of the animal interactions he’d see while he sat quiet and still in the forest, observing.
And I remember a woman, my best friend’s mother, who’d grown up her entire childhood in the forest with her family, never seeing a glimpse of the outside world or even other people. She was gentle and delicate, but strong. There was something of the wind and the snow and the silence of the wilderness that she seemed to hold within her.
I remember another friend, brain damaged from being attacked with a hammer by someone enraged and drunk, but he was a beautiful person, always helpful, always doing and building things for other people, and he loved dogs and children. He was riding his bike along the highway when a trucker drove by and the side mirror caught him full in the face, taking it off. He survived, had plastic surgery. I visited him in the hospital, he recognized me even though he hadn’t recognized previous visitors. He talked to me in his language and I wasn’t fluent so I’ll never know what he said. It was the last time I saw him. He later died after being bit by a dog. The bite wound punctured his artery and he bled to death because no one knew first aid. It seemed so ironic that a man who survived his skull being bashed in with a hammer, who survived his face being ripped off by a passing semi, would die from one puncture wound. I’ve never gotten over his death.
And, I remember a young guy, always cheerful in the middle of such bleakness and violence. You always knew when he was coming because you’d hear the sound of whistling. One day while he was hitchhiking three men from the rez kidnapped him, dragged him into the woods, and beat him half to death. No-one knows why. They were drunk. They left him for dead. He was alone in the woods three days, but he survived. I remember the first time I saw him after that, he was pale as a ghost. I’m told by others who remember, that his face was battered and cut up. But strangely, I don’t remember that. I was a child and the only thing I remember is that he never whistled anymore, ever again.
Well, those are only a few of my many memories of the other side of Canada. It’s a third world place, in a first-world country. I know they weren’t all happy stories. But even if nobody reads or likes this post, it’s been cathartic for me.
Anyone else who has lived on a native reservation?
I’m dying for someone to talk to who can identify with and understand my experiences! I lived on a native reservation in northern canada on and off for about four years of my childhood. There was no running water, no police, and packs of wild wolfdogs roamed the streets. Sound familiar to anyone? Than please reply to my post! I’ve been back in white suburbia for years but am still in culture shock. I can’t seem to ever really adjust back. I’ve met all kinds of cool TCKs on this website who’ve lived all over the world, but so far nobody who understands reservation life from personal experience. Everyone I talk to answers my life stories with ‘Oh my goodness!’ and I feel more like a sideshow - hey, listen to the stories of this kid who lived in the wild, wild northwest!
Anyway, if you’ve got the ‘been there, done that’ Rez T-shirt, respond to my post. I’ll be glad to hear from you.
By the way, I’ve uploaded some pics I’ve found that remind me of the reservation, if anyone’s interested. They’re on a new post called Pictures - Reservation Memories. It’s not spectacular vistas, just stuff that makes me kind of flash back. There are certain pictures, certain smells, certain sights that make me flash back to the rez: houses without glass in the windows, with garbage bags taped up against window frames instead… seeing a dog wandering around loose… hearing a certain kind of bird that I know only by sound, not name… hearing gunshots at night… smelling sewage… seeing garbage strewn on the side of the road… smelling fish bait…
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