The Lansdowne Letters: Everyday Lessons in Our Common Humanity

When my father taught at the Church of England Indian Day School
in Lansdowne House in 1961, he met the Ojibwa people for the first time.
During his time in the isolated northern community,
my father came to know the local Ojibwa well
and appreciated them for the wonderful people they were.





When my mother and we five children joined him in the North,
we were the only white children, except for three other white babies.
My father encouraged us to become friends with the Ojibwa children.
On our first full day in Lansdowne House,
my father chased all five of us outside to make friends with
and to play with the neighborhood kids.

Neither of my parents had any problem
with us visiting our Ojibwa friends in their homes;
and we were warmly welcomed, especially Barbie and Donnie
because they were so young and cute
and the Ojibwa love children dearly.




In school my father treated us the same as his Ojibwa students, 
with the exception that he had to provide 
my brother and me with a more advanced curriculum
because we were academically ahead of his students;
and in my case, I was the only student in Grade Five.



He went so far as to enroll
my four-year-old sister Barbie in kindergarten,
so she could become friends
with her fellow kindies and first graders.

He hoped that she would help him
teach his young Ojibwa students more effectively
by talking with them in English
and by modeling what he wanted them to do.





At recess he expected us to go outside and play with our classmates,
and he left us on our own to work out any squabbles and problems that arose.

There was no special treatment
because we were white and my father's children.
We used the same outhouse behind the school,
and we drank the same wretched powdered milk
and ate the same yucky nutritional biscuits
that the government required the Ojibwa children to eat daily.
We had to wash and brush our teeth along with our classmates.

When the nurse came to treat the students with a louse-killing, powdered drug,
my father made sure nurse Mike O'Flaherty deloused me first.
Lord help me, I think it was some form of DDT, 
and Mike thoroughly applied it to my scalp before tackling any of the others.




My father's one concern about the Ojibwa was something he hadn't anticipated.
The Ojibwa girls were a little unsure about me as an older, assertive white girl
(likely I was the only one they had ever met),
and they preferred to play with Barbie and Donnie who were younger and oh so cute.

So with the exception of our next-door neighbors, Fannie and Nellie,
I played with the boys.
As a matter-of-fact, I found the Ojibwa boys fascinating,
much more so than the boring, regular white boys I had known.
My parents were quickly deciding to send me out to boarding school the next year.




My father considered the Ojibwa and other "bush Indians"
cheerful, loyal, faithful, and honest.
But the quality he considered their most delightful
characteristic was their sense of humor.
The following anecdote was one of my father's
favorite stories about Ojibwa humor:

"When I was at Lansdowne House,
I lived with the Catholic teacher at the mission,
because the Protestant residence had burned down the previous year.
The mission was on an island, and my school was on the mainland.
It was therefore necessary for me to commute by canoe
four times daily across about six hundred feet of water.

This was quite a chore for a person who had never seen a canoe before.
I must confess, my daily commuting was remarkable,
not for the skill which I displayed in canoeing,
but for the frequency and variety of accidents and mishaps
which were the result of my abominable canoemanship.





The population used to take great delight
in gathering on the shores every morning
to see what new trouble Shawganish could think up for himself.

Shawganish means soldier or policeman,
and the Indians bestowed this name on me for the following reason.
I had just been released from the R.C.A.F.,
and I frequently wore air force battledress and greatcoat
in an effort to save my other clothes.

When I left Lansdowne House, Old Costar Wapoose, the chief,
was down to the plane to see me off and to say goodbye to me.
He spoke through an interpreter, and I was quite flattered
when he said that I was the first teacher who had been able to show him
and a lot of the other Indians many things which they had not known previously.

I was actually getting a swelled head, until Old Costar said
with a twinkle in his eye and a grin on his face,
"Teacher, during last fall and this spring my people and I
learned nineteen new and different ways of upsetting a canoe."




Later when my family lived in Sioux Lookout, Ontario,
I was shocked by the way the First Nations people
living in the town were treated with a damaging and demoralizing prejudice.
That was not how we had been taught to treat any people anywhere.
The stunning unjustness and unfairness of what I saw has never left me.

I have shared a lot about my father's thoughts on the Ojibwa people,
but very little about my mother's.
My mother spent many, many hours during my upbringing discussing with me
the inherent value and dignity of people around the world,
no matter their race, culture, religion, education, work, or sex;
the only difference is, I don't have a written record of her thoughts.

I do, however, have many memories of the Ojibwa-White Métis man
who became my mother's lifelong friend in the summer of 1961. 
Their mutual friendship and respect spoke volumes 
about the common humanity we all share. 

I have always been proud of my parents for teaching me by word and by example,
that all people are equal, deserving of respect,
and should be treated as we ourselves would wish to be treated.







Till next time ~
Fundy Blue



Boars Head Lighthouse
Tiverton, Long Island, Bay of Fundy
© M. Louise (MacBeath) Barbour/Fundy Blue


Notes:

1.  Bush Indians:
     My father used this term to collectively describe all the First Nations people who lived in
     Northern Ontario, the largest groups of whom were Ojibwa and Cree.

2.  Dad's Recounting of Chief Costar's Good-bye:
     Recorded in Dad's unpublished The Northern School Teacher:  A Hand Book To Be Issued To All
     New Entrants To The Teaching Profession In The Indian Schools In The Sioux Lookout Indian
     Agency, 1966, pages 30 and 31.

     I know that my father had seen a canoe previously; in fact,  I know that his father had given him
     canoeing lessons on St. Peter's Bay in Prince Edward Island when he was young.  I'm not saying
     that my father was a liar, rather that like all good raconteurs, sometimes he fudged facts a little
     to improve his story.

     In my draft of his handbook, he admitted that "in writing to Sara, I gave complete freedom to my
     descriptive talents, and perhaps even exaggerated on occasion, for effect ... ." I've taken this
     quotation out of context, but it is true of my father as a story teller.  The number of canoe
     upsettings slowly grew over the decades as did the distance  he had to commute by canoe
     between the island and the mainland.



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