There have been and continue to be attempts to revive Aboriginal religious traditions, but the grim truth is that an awful lot of this past has been forgotten and any meaningful recovery is going to take a huge amount of time and dedication on the part of those sincerely desirous of seeing a renaissance in our day. This is an area where the churches could help, if they could set aside for a while their arrogant assumption that the white man’s God and the white man’s Saviour is the only way of salvation for the world. My experiences at Big Trout had begun to teach me a lesson that I would take a long time to learn.*
In May 1998, I returned to Big Trout with my wife Susan for a week to mark the fiftieth anniversary of my first visit there. Much had changed. The Hudson’s Bay store is gone. In its place is a large Native-run supermarket complex, which includes a clothing store, hardware store, deep-fried-chicken outlet and gasoline pump. The old clapboard church that also served as my school is gone as well. Today’s school, with about 270 pupils from grades one through eleven, is much like schools everywhere, down to obscenities scribbled on the exterior. There’s a huge gymnasium and a computer room. Modern bungalows stand where teepees once were the norm. Some are in top condition—others are eyesores. But most at least have oil heating, a refrigerator and a TV set.
But there were less positive aspects as well. There is a growing crisis of diabetes, tuberculosis and other diseases. The detritus of consumer technology—machines, twisted snowmobiles, rusting vehicles, a million plastic containers—smother parts of the town in ugliness. Their annual cleanup was scheduled for the month following my visit, but like the rest of us, Big Trout residents have bought into the disposable society. And behind the growth and signs of prosperity is another dark shadow. As some angry teenagers told us, “There’s nothing to do here.” Hundreds of similar Native communities across Canada still lack safe drinking water. The infant mortality rate continues to be a national scandal. The plight of our Aboriginal peoples remains a disgrace.
When I first came to Big Trout Lake in 1948, these were an economically independent people to a large degree, living off the land. Today, much of the settlement is on welfare.
Susan and I loved the people. I was deeply moved to meet so many of my old students and to make new friends. But I came away feeling very sad. These people, as one former chief said, “need a deep healing of the spirit” in order to find a different future. The current Truth and Reconciliation hearings will hopefully be a small step in that direction.
* In June 2010, hearings began in a Truth and Reconciliation Event, a five-year project aimed at healing wounds in the Aboriginal communities of Canada caused by the residential schools. It has a budget of $60 million and is a product of the largest class action in Canadian history, brought by former students of the schools against the federal government and four churches who were involved. The church-run, government-funded residential schools began in the 1870s and the last one only closed in 1996. Children were taken, often forcibly, from their parents and traditional way of life. They were forbidden to speak their Native tongues or practise their culture. They were forced to become Christians, and many were physically or sexually abused. See editorials in the Toronto Star, July 24 and 25, 2010.
4
“THE LORD IS MY
LIGHT”: MOTTO OF
OXFORD UNIVERSITY
MY FATHER KNEW all about the Rhodes Scholarships many years before I was eligible to apply. Candidates had to be male (a restriction that thankfully has long since been removed), be in their final year at a Canadian university, and have a thorough track record of academic and athletic achievement together with some signs of leadership potential and of concern for the welfare of others. Cecil Rhodes, born in 1853, an imperialist who had made a fortune in the diamond mines of South Africa, created the scholarship fund in his will in 1902. It was to be the world’s first international study program. Ideally, Rhodes wanted the impossible: fully rounded individuals who would take back to their countries of origin the gifts offered by an Oxford education (something he didn’t complete all in one session because of poor health). When my father started to campaign and exhort me to apply, I wasn’t optimistic.
Several well-meaning but misinformed key people, some of whom I had hoped to put down as my necessary references, told me fairly directly that these scholarships always went to the sons of the educated “well-to-do” in Canadian life. The not-so-subtle subtext was that an east-ender whose parents were working-class immigrants from a family where nobody, at least in recent generations, had ever gone to university didn’t have a hope in Hades of getting the award. Recent studies of successful Rhodes Scholarship applicants over the years show this perception to have been quite erroneous. Fortunately, my father convinced me to move ahead with an application. I had the high marks, and while I wasn’t extremely proficient in any one particular sport, I had played intramural basketball and hockey for Wycliffe College. I was also a member of the university history club as well as the leader of a growing young people’s Bible class at a downtown church. And I had spent the three summers at Big Trout Lake teaching Cree children.
All of this was noted in my application, which was sent in early October 1950. Some weeks went by and then a letter came inviting me to a reception for the candidates from all over the province. It was held one evening near the end of November at the large Rosedale home of Roland Michener, himself a former Rhodes Scholar, who was eventually chosen by the Queen to be the Governor General of Canada. Although the Micheners were warm and hospitable, I felt self-conscious because all the guests knew that only two of us would be chosen to be Ontario’s scholars when we went for our formal interview on the coming Saturday. Quite naturally, we were all busy assessing our competitors while being ultrapolite. Because I didn’t drink at that point in my life, I was one of the very few people who didn’t have a glass of sherry or white wine to hold on to. I was seized with a kind of stage fright and felt certain I would be perceived as altogether too shy and awkward. It was a great relief when the evening ended and we said our goodbyes.
On the Saturday, however, as the hour for my interview drew closer, I felt increasingly calm and ready for anything. It seemed to me that I had nothing to lose and everything to gain by going in and doing my best. Perhaps my lack of optimism somehow lent me a certain poise, I don’t know. The interview was held in a lovely, familiar reading room on the second floor of Hart House. When I went in, I was shown to a chair facing a panel of five or six men, all of them former Rhodes Scholars, all of them distinguished in some branch of Canadian life. There were a couple of professors, a noted medical authority and a judge. They took turns asking probing yet friendly questions about my plans should I be selected and go on to Oxford, about my views on the future of religion, and in some detail about what I thought of the federal government’s policies regarding our Native peoples. It was in fact a truly relaxed and stimulating experience. As the chairman thanked me and showed me out, he whispered, “Well done.”
I went for a long walk around Queen’s Park to try to settle down and then went back to my room at Wycliffe to work on a piece of Greek prose composition that was due on the coming Monday morning. It was by then around five-thirty. Because it was a Saturday, the college was nearly empty; almost all of the boarders had gone home or were out for the evening. The theological students had left for the parishes where they assisted on weekends. It had grown dark outside, and the place was almost unnaturally silent.
At about six-thirty, the third-floor buzzer rang out with my particular signal code. I went to the top of the stairs and shouted down to the student who was tending the front hall desk, “Who is it?” He yelled back, “It’s somebody for you, Harpur.” I tore down the three flights to the phone booth below. A deep male voice asked, “Is that Tom Harpur?” I said it was and he announced, “Congratulations, Tom. You’ve been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and will be going to the college of your choice at Oxford next fall.” I managed somehow to thank him and hung up. For a moment I braced myself against