Believing

Rose Mary and I were in a talkative mood,
            and we had covered many topics already
            when she declared:
            "I don't believe in God!"

I inquired:
            "What do you believe in?"

She stretched and waived her arms:
            "I believe in the mystery of the stars,
             and in the depth of the oceans.
            I believe in respecting nature,
             in using its resources wisely,
             and in caring for everything I touch."

She smiled:
            "I believe in silence, music, rhythm, and colors,
            the small pebble, the rugged mountain,
            the graceful butterfly, the majestic tree,
            and the life I gave to my two children."

Her eyes sparkled:
            "I believe in the dignity of each person,
             in their intelligence and creative spirit.
            I believe in respect for anyone's choices,
             solidarity and freedom for all people."

She was nearly singing:
            "I believe that each person
             must fight alienation,
             strive towards fullness in life,
             the destruction of all injustices,
             and the creation of a more humane world."

She stood up and was ready to dance:
            "I believe in love, the lively children,
             the committed couples, and the wise elders.
            I believe in the soft skin of my baby,
             and in the wrinkles of my grandparents.
            I see myself in all, and all in me."

She whispered:
            "But I don't believe in God."

The next day I happened to read
            Saint Paul's letter to the Romans (10:20):
            "God said:
             `I was found by those who were not looking for me.
            I appeared to those who were not asking for me'"
                                     - Rene Fumoleau. Reprinted with permission.

Rene Fumoleau: The true reality of time is too precious...
      - (Heron Dance issue 14, 1997)

In 1996 I interviewed Rene Fumoleau whose poetry I had become familiar with from a radio show in Canada, Morningside. For over forty years, Rene had been an Oblate priest in Dene Indian villages and camps. The traditional lands of the Dene people consist of a vast area in Canada's subarctic stretching from northern Saskatchewan to the Rocky Mountains and to north of Great Bear Lake. Over the one million square kilometers of muskeg forest and stunted trees, of thousands of lakes, of twenty-four hour a day sun in summer and darkness in December, a few thousand Dene lived. They speak a language essentially the same as the Navaho people -- in pre-history the two nations were one. The Dene of northern Canada were relatively isolated until thirty years ago. Only recently, with the discovery of large oil and mineral deposits on the Dene's traditional lands, have white people have shown any real interest in the inland subarctic.

            I had lived with the Dene myself for two or three months when I was sixteen. I hitchhiked up to Yellowknife wanting to live in the bush with Indians. I ended up spending a summer fighting forest fires north of Great Slave Lake with Dogrib Indians, a Dene group. They were good to me -- a humble, warm people. They were still living in close relation to the land. Then, most Dogribs were still not speaking English and had no concept of the country called Canada.

            Rene retired from the priesthood three years before our interview and now lived in Lutsel Ke (Snowdrift on older maps), a Chipewyan Dene village on the Northeast arm of Great Slave Lake, a few hundred miles from the nearest connected road. During our first conversation, I asked Rene about the role of the Roman Catholic church in the exploitation of the Canadian North and the devastation of the aboriginal cultures. My bias showed through, I think. I asked him if he had any thoughts on something Gabriel Gely had said during my interview of him (Heron Dance, February 1996): "To conquer the Indian and the Inuit, we first sent the Church who told the people that their beliefs were wrong. Then we sent the trader to bleed them to death. That has been the history of civilization. You can't read five pages. It makes you vomit. There is no humanity in so-called civilization. Taken wholesale, from the Inquisition to today, Christ has been used, not served." When I offered this view to Rene, he responded: "Yes there was destruction. There is no doubt about it. But there was also enrichment."

            What I noticed most about Rene as we talked was his humility and patience. His poetry captured my attention because of its simplicity, its directness and because, behind the writing, one senses a life truly lived. He calls his poems `stories'. In communicating a point, particularly a difficult or important one, Dene prefer the indirectness of a story. Many of Rene's stories provide a glimpse of some of the subtleties of a way of life that has now largely disappeared.

Rene died in 2017 at the age of 93. Here are some excerpts from our interview.

            `Dene' translates into "Like the land," or "People of the land." As Rene said to me, "The word `Dene' has great richness in their culture. It celebrates their relationship with the land they travelled for tens of thousands of years. That land represented freedom to them. Instead of life as a linear progression -- school, university, career, retirement -- life was a cycle. Instead of jobs and houses and cars, life revolved around changing seasons and massive caribou migrations. Sunrise and sunset. At the center of all of the cycles was the land. They used to say, `The people don't own the land. The land owns the people.' On the land, everything is interconnected. In those interconnections, the Dene experienced mystery and celebrated it."

            Rene arrived in Denendeh in 1953, a freshly ordained priest from France. "I came with the mentality of the fifties, thinking that I had a lot to teach and not much to learn. That was a difficult situation. In school I had learned of the beautiful pink spots which represented the French colonies on the map of the world. I learned about the "most Christian Kings" -- the French ones. ...I learned to hate the Germans and the English who had been at war with France so often. I also learned to dislike the North Africans who had been resisting their colonization by France ever since 1830. ...There was an Algerian leader and his tribe of thousands of people, goats, camels, and sheep who had evaded the French army for seven years. One day the French cavalry caught up with them and charged, with swords high, through their camp, killing, destroying, and burning. And do you guess how I felt looking at a drawing of this attack? Oh! I was so proud. It was my country, my army! We had to kill a few thousands of these Bedouins to teach them a lesson, but at least, the survivors could be civilized, learn how to speak French, and possibly be baptized. ...

            "Whites in Canada are raised to think that Indians are good for nothing, that they haven't done anything good so far, and that they are lazy and dirty. We didn't have those kinds of suspicions in Europe. For us, the Indians were still the noble savages with feathered bonnets and galloping horses on the prairies. White Canadians have the same ideas about Indians as the French have towards the North Africans. I know it would be very difficult for me even now to work with North African people because of what I heard sixty years ago when I was a child. ...

            "I landed in Fort Good Hope, among the Hareskins (a Dene group), in spring 1953. I thought that these people would be extremely happy to see me, even if they had not invited me, didn't know I was coming to their country, and had not been consulted about my going there. ...I thought all I needed to know was how to say Mass in Latin to save them from eternal damnation. My religious training had taught me that God is very good and that people are very bad, and that we all, but particularly aboriginal peoples, need specialists to bring God down to us, or to take us up to God. In the process specialists control our religious lives. But I found that churches cannot control a people who do not confuse religion and spirituality."

            "Spirituality, whether Buddhist or Christian, is that you are in God and God is in you. It is something inside rather than external. The last words of Jesus to his apostles were: `You are in me. I am in you. The Father is in you. You are in the Father.' That simple philosophy was very close to what the Dene people were living. And so the Dene relate to Jesus. They say, `He knew freedom. People couldn't pull him one way or push him another way.' He rejected all criticism and laurels. Jesus talked of his experience of sunrise and sunset, lakes and spring and water and trees, fish and clouds, and rain, seeds, birds. The Dene followed the same process. Jesus helped people understand the spirit that lives in each of us. That we are each a mystery. There is something greater than the self. And you have to become yourself and to do that, you have to let that spirit work in you -- work and work." Rene said to me, "The Bible is a great book, but thinking it has all the answers is very dangerous."

            "Many of us think we have to tell a lot of things to God. We think we have to pray, pray, pray and say how much we love God and what we want to do for God. We are so busy talking to God that God can't talk to us. Spirituality is accepting the spirit to come. Opening our mind, our heart, our spirit to whatever the spirit wants to give. The spirit has a lot to tell us. But in our society we are not used to listening. We talk too much. We are in a hurry. Nature can teach us how to just listen. Listen to the silence in oneself. That silence can be a great teacher. To see oneself. Travelling for three days in the bush in winter -- it is so quiet. You have time to think. Gradually, you come to feel the spirit everywhere. There is a lot of silence out in the bush and by the lakes. The constant communion with the reality of nature and seasons and climate, lends itself to inner peace and patience."

            For a people who lived on the land, the difference between religion and spirituality was particularly apparent. Rene observed that, "To the Dene, religion was in church, in the village. Spirituality was on the land and in the seasons, with history, with prophets who guided the people through the ages, with dreams, silence, listening, freedom. Birds who are messengers of the spirit world. ...Religions are always based on divisions -- divisions of culture or language. But spirituality is a big underground river. Anybody can dig a well into that river. All people meet on the spiritual level. That's what I learned during my years here in the north."

            Rene remembered giving a sermon at a Dene camp during his early years as a priest. With the passing of time, he realized that the sermon had been all wrong, and even insulting to the Dene. Years later he asked them why they had not corrected him. They responded, `You were young. We thought you would be smart enough to understand some day. We had to give you a chance.' They were allowing me the time to grow."

            Rene also describes another, similar, experience. "One day after a long explanation about sin and the Ten Commandments, I asked a group of Dene what was really the worst sin of all. After some discussion together one person said: `We all agree that the worst sin people can make is to lock their door.' Slowly, I saw that I had a lot to learn from these people. I learned that I could receive as well as give. All cultures have things of beauty to offer. The more different we are, the more we can enrich each other if we will only listen. The more we share the more we enrich ourselves. Sharing is the Dene way."

            Now he says that perhaps the most valuable lesson had to do with the spirituality of the land. "What I learned from the Dene was that nature is spiritual, that the roots of man are in nature, and that a life on the land, uncluttered with the products of the modern world, is a life connected to the spirit. The seasons go around. The water and the trees and the stones. The whole of creation is very spiritual. To the Dene the land is alive, a giver of gifts. A mother. Differing views of the land are at the root of most misunderstandings between the Dene and Whites regarding work, housing, lifestyle, schooling, spirituality, or the exploitation of resources.

            "The dominant white culture, because it is highly mobile, has difficulty understanding the Dene concept of history, of relationship to creation. Traditional cultures see the land as a place plus time, place plus tradition -- rich with history. A storied place where events took place, not only personal stories but cultural, social, and political events. Land encompassed obligations, rights, responsibilities where a community built a special identity and destiny; the land is where people are born and die, but the nation lives. As a Dene friend once said to me, `The way we think of the land is the way we think of God.'"

            In our conversations, Rene constantly referred to freedom as a central concept in the Dene culture -- the freedom to grow, the absence of time constraints and time enslavement. He illustrated this with a story: "One older woman in Fort Good Hope was telling me stories of her life: `My husband and I,' she said, `we have always lived in the bush, hunting, travelling everywhere, fishing, trapping; and we raised five children.' She told me of her winters in the bush with her family, of travels through the mountains to hunt caribou, and summers when they made dry fish for winter, and about all the long trips they made on foot. I remarked to her: `You and your husband, you must have worked so hard all your life!' `Oh, no,' she replied, `I told you already, we never worked, we lived in the bush all the time.' They had simply done what was to be done, and there was nobody to push them around. Everything was life. Everything was family. There was also lots of time when they didn't have a lot to do but they didn't see it as `time off.' For a Dene the true reality of time is too precious and too important to be used as a reference for insignificant things. Time meant the rhythm of the earth and human growth; the seasons, the families, the sun, and the cycle of life. They didn't break time into different chunks. They just lived. Fishing was a spiritual experience, and walking the land was a political statement. The Dene say, `White people know how to make a living, but us, we know how to live.'

            This same philosophy of freedom had a great influence on how the Dene brought up their children. Rene explained that children were seldom disciplined but instead were allowed, even encouraged, to make their own mistakes. In the process, they developed a sense of their own abilities and self-worth that is often lacking now in both Dene and White adolescents. Any man or woman by the age of fourteen or fifteen could manage anything in any situation. Rene tells one such story in his poem Back! (see inset).

            As Rene said, growth takes time, "The Dene believed that everything takes place in the bush when it should, which is often not very fast. You have time to develop into who you are. You can't push any process in nature. The clock is irrelevant. Trees don't grow by the clock. Clouds don't drift by on time." Rene talked of a canoe trip to a neighboring village during his early years in the north. The trip there took three hours, the return trip three days because of storms. No one particularly cared. The weather was accepted for what it was without comment. The land determined the pace. And at times, the rhythms of the land would dictate whether they had enough to eat or not.

            Native American cultures tended to have an extremely subtle and refined code of human interaction -- a code that might be described as common courtesy taken to the extreme. These social norms enabled three or four families to live together in a winter cabin on a trapline, and enjoy each others' company. Chiefs or band leaders were looked to for advice, but lacked the power to give orders. Leaders were more like facilitators, consensus builders. Everyone's opinion was respected and considered. Confrontation was avoided. The majority didn't trample the minority. In daily interactions, both criticism and compliments were rare. As Rene said, "They wouldn't call attention to themselves. They didn't want to show that they were stronger or smarter or a better hunter than anybody. Those things weren't mentioned." By de-emphasizing ego and individuality, potential disagreements were more easily avoided. This extended to the way children were brought up. Rather than asking a child to do a chore, a mother or father would say, "The firewood is getting a little low." or "There is not much water left." Young people were allowed to grow at their own pace, and gradually came to understand their role in the community.

            Rene said to me, "They established a cultural conduct that was very, very interesting for me. Conditions were so harsh sometimes that the group needed the help and support of everyone in the group. You couldn't live in this country in isolation. They had a sense that the material possessions you own are not important. What is important is to have a lot of friends. They shared whatever they had. Everything was at the service of everybody. The strength of the Dene culture was in the blending of strong personal characters together with a strong sense of interdependence. Individuals had to be able to acquire food and the other basics of life -- sometimes for oneself and one's family, but often also for other members of the community who had recently been unsuccessful at the hunt. And you never knew when you or your family might depend on a neighbor for enough to eat. From a young age, people learned to survive in the bush, on the land, with the cold and the trees.

            "I think the goal of life is to become oneself," Rene said. The title of his book of poetry is Here I Sit. When he first arrived at Fort Good Hope, he noticed that an old man would sit on the river bank for hours most summer days. He appeared to be doing nothing. Eventually the young priest asked him why he sat there. "Hejon Wida," the elder replied, or "Here I sit," meaning, in effect, that "This is the right place and I'm the right person to be here. I have now blended all my good days and bad ones. ...I have become the person I was called to be."

            "What is beautiful about the land," Rene said, "is that everything is so different. Everything was a creation: the trees, the storms, the fish, the people. We are each products of beauty, of a loving Creator. That love is expressed in the variety. We each have different gifts and different weaknesses. We also each have responsibilities to use those gifts, because if we do not, they will be lost forever. Sometimes we lose sight of that in a world dominated by sameness. Mass production by the millions. In the Dene culture, the value of the individual was treasured. The emphasis was on becoming more of a person rather than on having more things."

            "Now, the money and television culture that dominates the south has invaded the north. That culture tells us that we need more and more of everything. We need more and more money. We need more gadgets. In today's situation the strong rule. Individuals become very strong, but they become strong or rich or famous for themselves. Specialists provide us with water, fuel for the furnace, clothing, food, housing. Living on the land like the Dene used to do, you did these things for yourself. The Dene culture enabled people to discover their own resourcefulness.

            "East versus West, heart versus head. White people have ideas. Aboriginal people have visions. The land is a wonderful gift, but its wealth is seductive. We may forget its mystery, its demands, and our responsibilities. ...The temptation of Christianity has been to talk of God, and to ignore the land; the temptation of the modern world is to talk of the land, and to ignore God and history.

            "Seventeen years ago, the chairman of Imperial Oil Company declared in a speech in Calgary: `The Canadian oil industry should be moving into our most promising Arctic properties like an army of occupation.' Since the sixties, the government has lured or forced the Dene from small to larger camps and then to villages. The government built comfortable houses to encourage the

Dene to abandon the land. Now, disconnected from the land, insulated from nature, the Dene are largely removed as an impediment to the exploitation of the resources.

            "When I arrived in Denedeh in Spring 1953 there was no airstrip in Fort Good Hope. At times, we received the mail every four or six weeks. There was no telephone, TV, radio reception. All of these things have changed since then. A highway connects many communities to Edmonton and Yellowknife. Villages not connected by highway have regular air transportation. Television satellite dishes pick up 95 channels.

            "In the late sixties and early seventies all dreams were possible. The Dene experienced a political and spiritual revival. In the north, the native people were not parked on reserves like they are in the south. We dreamed of a society based on justice and cooperation where all peoples could work together. It seems that that dream has lost its power and vision. But I still believe that the Spirit is at work everywhere. I see many people working to build a better life for themselves."

            Now Rene lives in Lutsel Ke. "I wanted, to retire with the people, without any responsibility or commitment of any kind. I walk for an hour or two a day and get a feeling of admiration for nature. A feeling of silence. A feeling of being part of everything that grows around the lake. Starting in May, I can put my little canoe in the water. There is still a lot of ice drifting on the lake, but by then there will be some open water around the village. I will put my canoe in the water then."  

Rene Fumoleau's wrote two or three books of poetry about his life in the north including Here I Sit. 

Back!

In December 1976, I visited Radeli Koe (Fort Good Hope),

            where I lived from 1953 to 1960, and also in 1968-1969.
It's always a joy to meet the K'ahshotine again.
Their name means Big Rabbits' People, or Hareskins.
Hares, always abundant in their territory, provided food,
            and their hides, cut into strips
            were woven into warm clothing and blankets.

Radeli Koe, a few kilometers from the Arctic Circle,
            is known as the coldest place in Denendeh.
During my one week visit,
            the thermometer stuck at minus 40 degrees,
            and I drank a lot of hot tea in every house.

At the Takalay's home, Jane explained:

"We were trapping at Canoe Lake since October.
My husband and two boys came back by skidoo.
Our two small children and myself,
            we flew back in a small Cessna, yesterday."

Their oldest boy, fifteen years old,
        had not been mentioned, and I inquired:

"What about Eddy?"

"Him? he's coming back with our dog team.
He left three days ago, he'll be here soon." 

I had travelled the Canoe Lake trail by dog team.
            and remembered it was one hundred and ten miles.

While the conversation was going on,

I thought of fifteen-year-old Eddy,
travelling by himself for three days,
setting up his tent every evening at -40,
having to feed himself and the dogs,
aware that nobody was closer than fifty miles,
and that any mistake would be his last one.

As we talked, laughed, and drank tea,
            dogbells rang outside near the house.
Little Ben looked through the frosted window:

            "Eddy is back."

Eddy tied the dogs to their posts and walked in.
The fur around his hood sparkled with frost.
He took his parka off, dropped it onto the floor,

rubbed his mukluks one over the other,
walked to face the big woodstove,
bent over slightly, rubbed his cheeks,
stretched up, flexed his arms back and forth,
turned around, bent and stretched his legs,
turned once more, rolled and relaxed all his muscles,
inviting the heat to invade his body.

Life was going on in the house:

baby slept on the couch,
two children played on the floor,
a boy prepared a pelt stretcher,
and mother watched a pot on the stove
while conversing with me.

After a while she turned to Eddy:

"You came back?"
"Yes, I came back."

Such simple words after such a trip!
But what intense pride flowing between mother and son thinking:

"Of course my son came back, he is a man."
"Of course I came back, I am a man."

Addiction

"Tanya, why do addicts return again and again
            to what they have done before?"

 "I guess they can't relate to the real world,
           and they feel secure only with old routines."

"Why do they close all doors
            between themselves and the rest of society?"

"Addicts look for simple solutions to life.
They create artificial relationships
            with their own minds, with each others,
            and the whole of creation."

"Whether an experience is a good one or a bad one,
            they seem to simply need it."

"They can't appreciate each others' qualities,
            so they merely repeat previous patterns."

"Do they rely on external features
            to block out their own feelings?"

"Most addicts probably don't like their addiction,
            but they use it to avoid facing their fears."

"Don't they feel the need to assert themselves
            and to be responsible for their own lives?" 

"Wally, many people may not even know
            that alternatives exist.

 "But the more often addicts get together,
           with no personal strength to share,
            the more dependency they create for each other."

"And the less they are able to leave their pack." 

"Tanya, you never drank too much, you never shot drugs.
How did you learn about addiction?"

"I wasn't talking about booze and drugs."

"I mean, in your past, were you addicted to something?"

"Yes, for twenty years I was addicted to religion."

There’s a short video interview of Rene on CBC television here.