Indian Summer

I was in a four-man plane flying north over the Gulf of St. Lawrence, over icebergs ten stories high, heading from Boston to an Indian settlement 50 miles south of the Labrador border. Two months earlier, the man flying the plane had told me about towns along the north shore of the Gulf, isolated fishing villages unconnected by roads of any sort, abandoned in the wilds of the Canadian sub-Arctic. And he told me about a program that he had started in 1961 through which people spent summers in these towns, teaching vital skills that no one up there knew how to teach. Like swimming. Every year, several fishermen die when they fall overboard five feet from land and are unable to swim to save themselves. Because they've never learned, because the water is so cold.

But, he said, volunteers from Canada and the United States had begun to teach in ponds, had even convinced towns to build their own primitive swimming pools in which towns-people could be taught the basics of survival swimming. And there were other volunteers running a canoe camp for children from all along the coast, teaching them how to stay alive in the wilderness that is a very real part of their everyday lives.

So I went. And as I sat in the tiny plane, I listened to the Rev. Robert A. Bryan, the amazing man, talk. He was excited to be returning to the coast, to the scattered villages of no more than 300 people each that make up the parish where he is the travelling Anglican minister.

"Ever since I was young I wanted to fly north," he said. "I can remember vividly long walks with Admiral Byrd, him telling stories about his adventures, about flying, about the Arctic.

"And I knew of the great Dr. Grenfell, taking young men out of the crowd, telling them about Labrador, Newfoundland, Greenland; and about the people up there, who had nothing. Then they'd tell their families that they were going north with Dr. Grenfell for four, maybe six months, not to worry about them, not to try to get in touch with them. They'd get on board Grenfell's boat and wouldn't be heard from until they returned one day out of the blue.

"So I got this plane, and 14 years ago flew north to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. I landed near an island and went ashore to a town of 200 people. Some one told me I was in Harrington Harbor..."

The only thing I knew for certain was that I hadn't a clue as to what was about to happen. That I would be living with Indians who lived across a river from a white town called St. Augustine, that there would be another American girl with me, that I would be teaching swimming, sailing and anything else I wanted, was all I had been told. Visions of igloos, wigwams, communcation gaps and teaching swimming among icebergs flashed vaguely through my mind. Yet the strangest thing of all was that, from the very beginning, there was no doubt in my mind that I would go.

St. Augustine

Eight miles from St. Augustine, beyond the mouth of the river, 40-foot high icebergs hover silently on the surface of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The supply boat hasn't been able to come this far north since last October. It's now the second week in July and word has come from the next town down the coast that the freighter Fort Mingan--the lifeline connecting these northern coastal villages to southern Quebec--is on its way. So now on "the white side" of St. Augustine, they've begun to prepare for its arrival. Beer bottles crack and shatter on the rocks by the landing. Water-proofed families of 14 pile into the small dory-like boats that, in the fierce sub-Arctic winter, carry fishermen far out into the Gulf in search of seal.

Directly across three quarters of a mile of river, beyond the sandbars that have appeared at low tide to wallow in the shallows like huge sea lions, there are signs of activity on "the Indian side." Small children scamper from house to house--16 identical government prefabs staring blankly across the blue through 16 identical broken picture windows. The wind sends whirlwinds of dust spinning frantically over the grassless strip of riverbank and single row of Monopoly board houses. Eventually, three or four boats, loaded to the brim, start off down the river to the estuary where the freight boat will dock. As they go behind the hump of sandbars, both water and boat disappear while heads and torsos are still visible. From across the river you are left with the impression of groups of Indians skateboarding along at top speed behind the sandbars, motionless from the waist up.

Thirty years ago the Indians in St. Augustine didn't use the Hudson's Bay Store across the river, and consequently didn't care when the freight boat came or didn't come. Although unable to cultivate the barren land, they lived on moose, caribou, bear, beaver and small game which they hunted in winter. And when the river thawed in late May, they would fish for trout and salmon in its swollen waters. Today they keep themselves alive on beer, potatoes, bread and candy bars bought with bi-monthly welfare checks. In spite of a special concession from the Canadian government for unlimited hunting and fishing rights, fish have been scare this year on account of the protracted cold, and it's a lot easier to ride a Skidoo across the frozen river in mid-January to buy canned Irish stew than it is to go out and kill a moose.

Life on the Indian side is, above all, domestic. Husbands sit around at home, play with the children, fix boat engines and take their wives across the river to the Hudson's Bay Store. Welfare is the primary, if not the only, source of income. A few of the younger men go south in winter to work in a lumber camp; the rest stay in St. Augustine and concentrate on staying warm. The women are strong and sensible, the dominant figure in a domestic life where the man's role as hunter has been phased out by external forces over which he has had no control. Babies, and the per-petuation of a shrinking race, are of central importance.

With only 97 people on that dusty strip of riverbank out in the middle of nowhere--50 roadless miles from the nearest Indians--a definite tribal cohesion, not traditionally characteristic of the Montagnais tribe, has developed by necessity. The problem of existence is a communal problem dealt with in a communal way. Everyone is expected to contribute in such tasks as chopping wood, carrying water, cleaning the houses, cooking, raising children, keeping warm. To the children, there is very little difference between one house and the next, one parent and the next; not because no one cares but rather because everyone cares. Two years ago, the 17th identical house burned to the ground in 20 minutes. No one was killed in the fire, but one child was missing for two days. He was eventually found asleep in the house next door. The bond that binds these people is rarely found among more advanced peoples. Without the use of physical discipline, there is an inherent respect for one's elders, for the sacred privacy of each member of the group, and for the unspoken moral code. Social divisions on the basis of age are uncommon where close friendships often embrace different generations.

The Chief

Pierre Tenegan is a wiry little man dressed in one permanent pair of bluejeans, a mangy checked lumber jacket, a 1950s ski hat and striped track shoes. He is the chief. His functions being primarily spontaneous, he preserves the peace by banishing drunken men to the hills behind the houses and stopping children from stampeding into the empty schoolroom or playing with the useless firehose that found its way in there along with four enormous pairs of fireman's boots. Gifts from the Great White Government. Out of the pouring rain, Pierre would bring in firewood for our stone-cold stove and water that we were too lazy to get for ourselves.

Never having been forced to live within the confines of a reservation, the Indians of St. Augustine have avoided so far many of the chronic problems faced by Indians in the United States. Alcoholism, for example, is not a problem. Drinking--beer only--is done in three or four-day sprees after the arrival of welfare checks or when cousins and friends from down the coast come to visit in the summer. Rather than violence, their drinking seems to invoke depression for the most part. Drunken men wander up and down the boardwalk in front of the single row of houses, singing, wailing and tapping on window panes in search of companionship. They are simply ignored. One evening, from our broken picture window, we watched the sun disappear behind the hills up the river. Suddenly, a drunk man broke the stillness, driving his Skidoo wildly along the muddy riverbank, shouting to himself and to his wife who stood surrounded by children in the doorway of their house. The Skidoo lurched over the bank and down to where a boat was tied to a log. There he threw it and himself into the boat, announced that he was off for La Romaine (a primarily Indian town 150 miles south along the coast) and headed down the river. Three days later he was back chopping wood in front of his house.

I lived on the Indian side in summertime. By three in the afternoon, the picture windows are dark with myriad blackflies whose incessant buzzing makes silence unbearable. The scourge of the summer months, these minute beasts congregate in St. Augustine to revel in the poor drainage, ubiquitous trash and human filth. Most of the Indian children are under 12, and their resistance has not yet developed. They are beseiged with impetigo--a skin disease manifesting itself in open sores all over the body. Every blackfly bite that is scratched becomes an oozing sore, attracting more flies. Relief is guaranteed only with the coming cold weather when the flies will die.

Medicine, dispensed by the proverbial Florence Nightingale across the river, is still a novelty--therefore to be avoided. Prescriptions are seldom followed and infant mortality is high. Several times a week, the familiar orange helicopter from the hospital at Blanc Sablon, the border town between Quebec and Labrador, lands on the riverbank to collect and deposit patients on the orders of the nurse. It is not unusual for parents to try to convince her that healthy babies are in fact sick, thereby placing the child in the hands of the hospital and reducing the burden of extra dependents until the child is old enough to contribute something to the domestic struggle. In their eyes, this is not a question of irresponsibility, but simply of convenience.

Eleven years ago, the Quebec government made an abortive effort to round up the shrinking Indian population of Quebec into one town, La Romaine. It is hardly surprising that the Indians of St. Augustine, accustomed to a somewhat nomadic life in tents, were unhappy when hurled into the comparatively "civilized" French town where the already indigenous Indians were caught up in alcoholism and crime. So in the middle of a brutal Quebec winter, they left La Romaine and made their way back up the coast. Only four families survived that journey to pitch their tents near the narrow strip of riverbank where the government houses now squat. Three years ago, it was decided that tents were not, in fact, what the Indians should be living in. So 17 identical, color-coordinated homes were pulled together, each with its own toilet, snazzy stainless steel kitchen sink and modern electric wiring. Unfortunately, no one ever got around to bringing water to the pipes, and when the six-month-old generator was broken by an inebriated 16-year-old, it was never repaired. So skeletal street lamps now cast dark shadows across the boardwalk and it takes three trips to the river to flush a toilet once.

The harshness of the sub-Artic climate, the long winters and loneliness of vast expanses of wasteland have traditionally inspired in inhabitants a fear of the supernatural. Yet old superstitions seem to have died out on the whole and have been replaced by Roman Catholicism. Twice a year, the Belgian Roman Catholic priest from La Romaine spends a week in the tiny church which the St. Augustine Indians built for themselves under his supervision. To make up for lost time, he performs continuous masses, weddings and baptisms--all in Algonquian, the language spoken by the tribes of the sub-Arctic cultural area south and east of the Hudson Bay. Children eat potato chips and play tag in the aisle, baptismal water appears in a peanut butter jar, and everyone, scratching incessantly, squashes blackflies that gather at the window panes. At the wedding of the cheif's son, he and his bride sat in armchairs in front of the altar while wild dogs wandered in and out at will.

Ignorance

Life on the Indian side possesses a calm that must be closely related to the unique Indian sense of time--or perhaps timelessness. Goals and time limits rarely, if ever, enter their lives, so the concept of wasted time has no meaning. Women would sit alone in the house where I lived, staring out the window at the river for five or six hours on end, not moving, not talking. The third night I was there, still in the clutches of the American drive to be always producing, going somewhere, I sat for hours in the house of a young Indian, listening in the growing darkness to one crackling tape recording of Indian songs being sung by cousins down the coast in La Romaine. The batteries were all but dead, reducing the singing to a dull moan, so he would take them out and put them on the stove every once in a while. And it would sound like singing for a few seconds, then slow down again. A drunk man came tapping at the window, calling "Nikahan, Nikahan," who sat still in the gloom until the man stumbled away under the northern lights.

It is more than unfortunate that generations, even centuries, of the calm, unperturbably Indian state of mind has bred a dangerous inability to form a unified group and thereby capitalize on their strength as the most exploited, insensitively-treated minority that white North Americans have ever walked all over. None of the people with whom I lived are able to recognize the vital need for creative, effective leadership and solidarity, either within this particular enclave or on a larger scale. Few recognize the significant role of education in achieving these things, the need to encourage their children to take advantage of what excruciatingly limited opportunities there are--for whites and Indians alike on the coast. So that someday mysterious letters from high places will no longer go unread into the fire, and representatives sent to the Ministry of Indian Affairs in Quebec City will begin to guide the federal government out of a myopia of ignorance.