The Lansdowne Letters: Deprivation

Deprivation.  
When I was a girl and I wanted to know what a word meant, I had two choices.
I could ask someone, or I could look the word up in a dictionary.
I learned early on, certainly by grade two,
not to ask my father for the meaning of a word.
His invariable response was, “Look it up in the dictionary.”

We only had one dictionary, a massive Funk and Wagnalls
with over a thousand thin pages filled with small black text and illustrations.
It was heavy, but I never really appreciated how heavy,
until at sixteen, I knocked out my sister Barbie with ours.

A Funk and Wagnalls Dictionary

ebay

To look up a word like deprivation was a nuisance for ten-year-old me,
and it usually led to a chain of words like deprive, destitute,
and dispossessed in my search for meaning.

I could intellectually understand a word like deprivation from our dictionary,
but I didn’t grasp the fullness of the word
until I saw deprivation with my own eyes in Lansdowne House.
Reality delivered a gut-punch.

A Remote Winter Landscape

The Father's Island

Lansdowne House, Northern Ontario, Canada

© M. Louise (MacBeath) Barbour/Fundy Blue

All Rights Reserved

I found it difficult to accept the living conditions of my Ojibwa friends.
My family had it hard.  
We had no electricity, no running water, no functioning toilet,
and we five children shared bunks in one of the four rooms in the forestry house;
but our home was luxurious when compared to the homes of my friends.

They lived in wood and tarpaper shacks.
Few were more than one room hovels
in which twelve and fourteen people crowded together.
Often the only piece of furniture was the wood stove
in the center of the log shack.

I slept in a down-filled Arctic sleeping bag on a bunkbed.
My friends slept on heaps of blankets and furs thrown in the corners of their shacks.

At night my father kept the oil burner going full blast
to drive out the cold of the sub-Arctic night.
My friends slept at 35 and 45 below zero in unheated homes.

The Forestry House

Lansdowne House, Northern Ontario, Canada

© M. Louise (MacBeath) Barbour/Fundy Blue

All Rights Reserved

My mother always served  us hot and nutritious meals.
Granted the potatoes, milk, and sometimes eggs were powdered,
and all our vegetables came out of cans.
Meat was whatever chunk of beef or pork
my father could hack with an axe
out of the buckets of frozen meat he kept on our roof,
out of the reach of the starving Indian dogs;
along with canned Spam and bully beef;
but the food was satisfying and regular.

My Ojibwa friends ate irregularly, mostly scraps of rabbit, moose meat, or fish
supplemented with porridge, canned milk, and lard which they bought at the Bay.
Many were malnourished, some starving.
Without the daily ration of milk and bannock received at school,
more children would have suffered vitamin and mineral deficiency diseases
and worse hunger.

Seen Through Donnie's Eyes

The Forestry House, Lansdowne House, 1961

Drawing by Donalda MacBeath

Text:  Dear Nana, This is a picture of our home.

Note:  Indian Gods (Dogs), Buckets of Meat Hung from the Eaves, 

a Box of Groceries on the Roof,

and the Weather Vane on the Chimney

© M. Louise (MacBeath) Barbour/Fundy Blue
All Rights Reserved

My brother, sisters, and I bathed once a week
in a round galvanized steel tub filled with water
which my mother heated on our gas stove.
My friends rarely bathed at all.

I had a home filled with books, toys, and music.
My friends had nothing.

I made few friends among the Ojibwa girls.
Ojibway society is male-dominated,
and from birth Ojibwa women were trained to remain in the background.
While the Ojibwa girls my age talked and played games with my younger sisters,
my brother and I wrestled and ran with the boys.

Consequently my best friend in Lansdowne House was Simon.
Simon was seventeen years old and in grade four, one of my father’s star pupils.
Simon had passed every grade in school,
but there had only been an Anglican school in the village for the previous four years.

Some of Dad's Boys at School

Simon (right) and George (second from right)

Lansdowne House, Northern Ontario, Canada

Photo by Donald MacBeath

© M. Louise (MacBeath) Barbour/Fundy Blue

All Rights Reserved

Normally a First Nations child had to attend school for two or three years
before his teacher could start teaching him any academic subjects.
The language barrier, cultural differences, parental apathy or hostility,
and resentment at being cooped up in the classroom
all interfered with a child’s ability to learn.

As my father used to say, to my current embarrassment,
“It takes about one year just to housebreak an Indian child,
and another to teach him enough basic English to establish communication with him."

As a result many of the Ojibwa and Cree children
in the northern fly-in communities were one to two years behind,
even if there had been schools in their villages longer than they had been in attendance.

Simon had twelve brothers and sisters,
a number of whom were in school with me.
They all lived in a one room shack with no electricity, running water, or sanitary facilities.

Their father was dying from muscular dystrophy
and could no longer work the winter traplines,
so the family subsisted on welfare.

Their only entertainment was the twice weekly movie shown on the Father’s Island,
usually an old Tom Nix western or The Three Stooges.  
Had Simon’s father been able to work, 
Simon wouldn't have been in school.
He’d have been working the winter traplines with his father.

The Three Stooges

L to R: Moe Howard, Curly Howard, Larry Fine

Wikimedia

Simon used to talk to me about life.
At seventeen he was curious about the outside world and had a strong desire to learn,
but Sally and Spot on Pleasant Street didn’t help him much.

Simon had been Outside once.
A rabid sled dog had bitten him,
and he had been flown to Sioux Lookout for a series of rabies shots.
The trip was the highlight of his life. 

Coming in for a Landing

Sioux Lookout, Ontario, Canada

Photo by Donald MacBeath, 1961or 1962

© M. Louise (MacBeath) Barbour/Fundy Blue

All Rights Reserved

Simon was smart, and he would have liked to further his education,
but he was too old to remain in school much longer.  

There was sickness everywhere:
malnutrition, muscular dystrophy, and tuberculosis.
The homes were crawling with lice,
and the school children were periodically deloused
by the nurse whether they liked it or not.

Some of the Ojibwa, especially females,
suffered from an hereditary disorder that deformed their hip joints.
They hobbled along lurching from side to side,
the women often burdened down with tikinogans, water, or wood.

Childhood diseases such as chicken pox were disastrous
because they could culminate in pneumonia and death.

Mother with Baby in a Tikinogan

Lansdowne House, Northern Ontario, Canada

Photo by Donald MacBeath

© M. Louise (MacBeath) Barbour/Fundy Blue

All Rights Reserved

I observed the living conditions of the Ojibwa around me,
and I gleaned more listening to quiet conversations
among my parents and their friends
over morning coffee or evening bridge;
but my raw, emotional understanding of deprivation 
came from my conversations with Simon.

Deprivation is more than the lack of basic necessities
such as adequate food, shelter, and potable water.
Over time, deprivation damages the psyche and ravages hope.

Simon and his classmates were the generation caught in a drastic transition.
Up until the early 1960s, the Ojibwa in Lansdowne House lived off the land,
following their traditional lifestyle of hunting, trapping, and fishing.  

The  government, in its attempt to prepare aboriginal people
for assimilation into mainstream white Canada, built schools
and encouraged the First Nations to abandon their ancestral lifestyles and settle in villages.
Their cultures were derided and their languages were discouraged.  

The white adults in our village facilitated the transition in various ways
and regarded white culture as superior to the primitive ways of the Indians.
But I, through Simon’s eyes, saw the changes as a loss of hope.

Simon wasn’t learning the skills he needed to follow the traditional livelihood of his people,
and he was not acquiring the education he needed to survive in mainstream society.
He didn’t fit into the old ways, and he didn’t fit into the new.
With no economic opportunity, no jobs, and nowhere to go to get a job,
Simon faced a bleak future.  

I don’t remember the exact words of our long ago, heart-to-heart conversations,
but I still feel his discouragement and hopelessness.

The collapse of the Ojibwa’s traditional lifestyle was sudden,
and before the end of the 1960s, the people in Lansdowne House
spiraled down into welfare dependency.  
By the early 1970s the social fabric of the community had unraveled, 
and the Ojibwa floundered in a quagmire of violence, vandalism, and substance abuse
in a squalid environment of derelict buildings, trash, and oil drums.

Lansdowne House became one of the most violent
and hopeless native communities in northern Ontario.

Source:
When Freedom Is Lost:
The Dark Side of the Relationship Between Government and the Fort Hope Band
by Paul Driben and Robert S. Trudeau, 1983

Rusted Surface of an Oil Drum

Flickr ~ Petur  License

I think of the children I knew, and I wonder what has happened to them.  
I can’t imagine what they must have endured,
for life during the last fifty years in Lansdowne House has been harsh and challenging.  

I think of Daisy and Fannie and Nellie and George,
but most of all I think of Simon.
He was my first real friend, the first one with whom
I exchanged thoughts and feelings of consequence.  

Deprivation was no longer a word, but a reality with the faces of friends.
I began to sense the injustice and the indifference of a random world
where some are born into so much and others into so little.
I wondered why, and I have still not found a satisfactory answer.       

Maureen McRae

Father's Island, Lansdowne House

Roman Catholic Church, Windcharger, and Dad and and Uno's Shack in Background

Photo by Don MacBeath
© M. Louise (MacBeath) Barbour/Fundy Blue

All Rights Reserved

Till next time ~
Fundy Blue



Beautiful Cove on Long island,
in the Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia
© M. Louise (MacBeath) Barbour/Fundy Blue
All Rights Reserved

For Map Lovers Like Me:

Surrounded by Water

© M. Louise (MacBeath) Barbour/Fundy Blue
All Rights Reserved

Lansdowne House, Ontario, Canada

Wikimedia