One Native Life Read Online Free Page A

world is a shape-shifter. Light eases things back into definition. Their boundaries are called from shadow, beginning to hold again, and the land shrugs itself into wakefulness, purple moving upwards into pearl grey.
    It’s good to be up and working at this time. I can feel the power of life around me, and as the letters form on the screen, race each other to the sudden halt of punctuation, I understand where the need to write comes from. It comes from this first light breaking over everything, altering things, arranging them, setting things down into patterns again and tucking shadow back into folds behind the trees. It comes from the need for communion, for joining with that Great Mystery, that force, that energy.
    I have always wanted to write. There isn’t a time I can recall when I didn’t carry the desire to frame things, order things upon a page, sort them out, make sense of them. But learning to write was a challenge, an ordeal.
    It was a different world in the early 1960s, harder maybe, colder, and the idea of Indians was set like concrete, particularly in the parochial, working-class confines of a northern Ontario sawmill town two hundred miles from nowhere.
    The school sat between the railroad tracks and the pipeline in a hollow between hills above the mill. We kids sat with the thick sulphur smell coming through the windows and the spume of the stacks on the horizon above the trees. In the classroom I was ignored, put near the back and never called upon for anything.
    They said I was slow, a difficult learner, far too quiet for a kid and lethargic. They said I hadn’t much hope for a future, and after they had held me back a year they just let me be. But I wanted to learn. I was hungry for it. I went to school every day eager and excited about the things we were supposed to learn.
    But I couldn’t see very well. No one had spent enough time with me to discover that. I was slow to pick things up because I couldn’t see the board. Even down at the front of the room, where they put me sometimes so they could keep a better eye on me, I could never discern the writing on the blackboard. Everything I learned I learned by listening hard to what the teacher said and memorizing it.
    When I was adopted, I was sent to my first big school. There were hundreds of kids enrolled in that school in Bradford, and it seemed as if I walked through waves of them on my way there that first day. Going through those big glass doors was terrifying.
    The Grade Three teacher wanted to introduce me to the class, so she asked me to write my name on the blackboard for the other kids to read. I went to the board, leaned close to it, squinted and began to write. I heard snickers at the first letter and open laughter when I’d finished.
    I’d written my name upside down and backwards. To the rest of my classmates it was strange and hilarious, but it was how I’d learned, and I felt the weight of their laughter like stones. Walking back to my seat that day I felt ashamed, stupid and terribly alone.
    But I had a teacher who cared. She walked me down to the nurse’s station herself and waited while I got my eyes tested. Astigmatism, the nurse told her. Terrible astigmatism. Then the teacher listened closely as I explained why my writing was wrongly shaped.
    I had taught myself to write by squinting back over my shoulder. When we were taught to write in script, I wasn’t given any attention, wasn’t offered any help in forming the letters. So I watched the kid behind me and I mimicked what I saw. What I saw was upside down and backwards, and that was how I had taught myself to write. I could spell everything correctly, but it was skewed.
    I got glasses very shortly after that, and from then on things were different. Once I could see what was written on the board, my ability to learn accelerated and I graduated from Grade Three with straight As. Even in penmanship.
    For that teacher I wasn’t an Indian. I was a kid in need. So she took the