Taking Note(book): 'Real Indians' and 'Real Whites'

 

I was at a workshop up at Sun Peaks last week, a gathering of Secwépemc folks continuing their work on the standing up of the Secwépemc legal order.  It was so nourishing to spend time with stories (stseptékwlls), and language.  At the end of the gathering, the Research Directors (Racelle Kooy, Sunny Lebourdais and Bonnie Leonard) gifted me with a package that included this little book.  At first, I thought it was an old copy of an actual Bobbsey Twins book.   I had a serious flashback to being here at the lake in the summer, and going to the Salmon Arm public library to work my way through the Bobbsey Twins, Trixie Belden,  Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys (the goal being to read through every book in the series)! 

 

I was suprised to see that the book was coil bound, and then, when I opened it, to see someone else's name in it, and crossed out!  This made me even more excited (since I love things second hand). Ooohh ...  the thrill of imagining the other hands that had once held this book!

But then, as I tried to flip through, I realized that it was a (commercially produced) notebook.  I got the joke!  Some smart person had pulled together a notebook structured like a Bobbsey Twins book to send someone down memory lane. What a perfect idea.

There is little in the world that I love more than a notebook, and this one was interlaced with random pages from the original text, leaving you with fragments of the original story separating clusters of paper for writing.   Lovely! And so, I started flipping through, wondering about which pages had been chosen.  The beginning started (as books so often do), with a Chapter Index.  My eyes slid down, coming to a stop on Chapter 12: "Real Indians". 

Sigh.  An icky feeling emerged in the pit of my stomach, as I reflected on quiet forms of racism and stereotyping, about my love of these books as a child, and my absolute lack of remembrance of any 'real indians' featuring in the story.   So... I headed out to the interweb, to see if I could find the text from the book itself.  Magic of the internet took me to the chapter:

•  https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Bobbsey_Twins_at_the_Seashore/Chapter_12

Basically, the boys head off for a small adventure in the woods, noting that "they say the Indians had reservations out here not many years ago".  The boys looks at rocks, imagining them as arrow heads, or hatchets, become scared of noises at night (imaging them as approaching indians?), and then are relieved to follow the sound of a cowbell back to their home.   That is it.  

Real Indians?  Nope.  Indians imagined as part of a vanished past, a matter of childhood imagination.  This children's book was published in the US in 1950.  In Canada, the Potlach ban ends in 1951.  In both cases (book and potlach ban) there is a large cultural/legal practice of erasure and ellision.  What to say. 

Of course, I really appreciated the additional little joke that Racelle, Sunny and Bonnie had added for me with this gift.... and its important reminder of the work that continues to lie ahead of us, as we do the work of untangling past narratives.  And then my mind skittered sideways to think about the relationship between "Real Indians" and "Real Whites." 

In 1910 (40 years before this Bobbsey Twins chapter), an alliance of Chiefs from the Secwépemc, Nlaka’pamux, and Syilx Nations sent a letter to Sir Wilfred Laurier (then the Prime Minister of Canada), to remind him of his obligation to respect the lands, rights, and title of the Indian peoples. In it they use the phrase "Real Whites" to decribe the first white people who came to their territory in respectful ways, building respectful relations (mostly french fur traders), and to differentiate them from the later whites (mostly anglo settlers in gold rush), who came with violence and theft.  Here is a passage from the Memorial: 

The Shuswap Nation Tribal Council (SNTC) has a pamplet with some background context plus the rest of the text of the Memorial to Sir Wilfred Laurier.   

• https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5f73b6c38840660a19c6d7e4/t/5f860cde1ad6726ebbc86e83/1602620648396/1910+Memorial+to+Laurier+1910+brochure.pdf

I find my mind returning to the Memorial often, thinking about how it invites us (me, who spends so much of my time in Secwepemcúl'ecw?) to situate and conduct ourselves as one of the 'Real Whites'... to do no harm, and be a good guest.  

Anyways.... what a great notebook, and a great reminder of the need to remember to look back as well as forward, and to reconsider the multiple ways that the past can remind us of both things we love, and of things that continue to need our attention and rethinking.

There is of course more to think about, with this little notebook, and its scattering of pages.   For example, this fragment that gets at the young girl who leaves school to work, as her father is out at sea (some gender and working class stuff in here).

... or this one, taking up the propensity of "college boys" to engage in (toxic masculine) patterns of bullying. 

Indicators about gender, and power, and violence laid out in children's literature as reminders for us all?