TWO QUOTES ON SHARING AND RECIPROCITY

    What does it mean not to give what you have? What does it mean to have nothing to give? Two short passages from venerable Canadian voices.

  The first passage is from George Manuel & Michael Posluns' The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (1974). Manuel was a Shuswap from the Kamloops area of southeast B.C. He was a major figure in the Native organizations of the 1950' and 60's.

There were other signs that the strength of the old order was being sapped away, in that last year before I went away to school.

The word went around very quickly when someone had killed a deer. It meant fresh meat on the tables in many different homes. If the animal had been killed near the village the hunter would return for help to carry it home. If the kill was made at some distance from home, he cleaned and quartered it on the spot, unless it was a smaller animal that he could sling across his shoulders. It was a grand sight to see a man walk into the village like that. The drying racks were prepared. The smoke houses were fired up. Even in the best of seasons, when it was an everyday sight, your eyes did not tire of seeing good food brought home. When I remember those days I still feel a deep longing for food that was a true gift of nature.

An animal was more than good food. Skins for mitts and gloves and bedcovers. Sinews for sewing. Oils for working the skin.

That fall, I remember, was the first time when a man of our village refused to share a deer he had killed. Instead of giving away the heart, the hindquarters, and the forequarters, he gave only the neck and kept the real meat for himself.

The man was disgraced and totally ostracized. Ostracism was the only punishment we knew in those days. It had many different forms according to the nature and seriousness of the offence. A child might be ignored by his parents for an hour if he was insolent; a thief might be banished from the village by the elders for some months.

What that man had done was worse than thieving; it was as if he had beaten an old woman or molested an infant girl. Even that comparison is uncertain, for those offences were as unknown to our village as a refusal to share. But the power of the elders and the chief were declining. He could not be banished. I doubt that anyone talked to that man before that winter's snow was gone.

That same man was the first person to own a car on our reserve. He had been disgraced and ridiculed throughout the Shuswap. But he was a pioneer in introducing European progress.

The following is from Chief Dan George's 1970 essay "My Very Dear Good Friends", from The Only Good Indian: Essays by Canadian Indians (Waubageshig, ed.). He was hereditary chief of the Squamish, a Coast Salish people of Vancouver. In the 1960's, he became well-known as a film and theatre actor. (the unmarked elipses are in the original)

Was it only yesterday that men sailed around the moon...You and I marvel that man should travel so far and so fast...Yet, if they have travelled far then I have travelled farther... and if they have travelled fast, then I faster...for I was born a thousand years ago... born in a culture of bows and arrows. But within the span of half a lifetime I was flung across the ages to the culture of the atom bomb... And from bows and arrows to atom bombs is a distance far beyond a flight to the moon. (...)

And then the people came... more and more people came... like a crushing rushing wave they came... hurling the years aside!!... and suddenly I found myself a young man in the midst of the twentieth century. (...)

Do you know what it is like to feel you are of no value to society and those aound you? To know that people came to help you but not to work with you for you knew that they knew you had nothing to offer...?

Do you know what it is like to have your race belittled and to come to learn that you are only a burden to the country? Maybe we did not have the skills to make a meaningful contribution, but no one would wait for us to catch up. We were shoved aside because they thought we were dumb and could never learn.

What is it like to be without pride in your race, pride in your family, pride and confidence in yourself? What is it like? You don't know, for you have never tasted its bitterness.

I shall tell you what it is like. It is like not caring about tomorrow for what does tomorrow matter. It is like having a reserve that looks like a junk yard because the beauty in the soul is dead and why should the soul express an external beauty that does not match it? It is like getting drunk for a few brief moments, an escape from ugly reality and feeling a sense of importance. It is most of all like awaking the next morning to the guilt of betrayal. For the alcohol did not fill the emptiness but only dug it deeper.

And now you hold out your hand and you beckon to me to come across the street... come and integrate you say... But how can I come? I am naked and ashamed. How can I come in dignity? I have no presents... I have no gifts. What is there in my culture you value... my poor treasure you can only scorn.

Am I then to come as a beggar and receive all from your omnipotent hand? Somehow I must wait... I must delay. I must find myself. I must find my treasure. I must wait until you want something of me... until you need something that is me. Then I can raise my head and say to my wife and family... listen... they are calling... they need me... I must go...

Then I can walk across the street and I will hold my head high for I will meet you as an equal. I will not scorn you for your deeming gifts and you will not receive me in pity. Pity I can do without, my manhood I cannot.

I can only come as Chief Capilano came to Captain Vancouver... as one sure of his authority... certain of his worth...  master of his house and leader of his people. I shall not come as a cringing object of your pity. I shall come in dignity or I shall not come at all.

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