Part 2 ~ From houses to technology and education as tools of oppresson

 

The breakfast table gives us a place to think

Over the years my story has taken on the shape of an hourglass. There is everything that happened before Kitamat village took me in to train as a village pastor ~ and everything that has happened after.

The people in the village, in particular the people of the United church in the village, at least at the start, believed that the only way this was going to work was if they treated me somewhat like a rather large and slow child. Someone who needed the gentle help of the elders both spiritual and physical (as in grandparents). So, an important part of my training needed to be my visiting with the elders in their homes.

This was not as easy as it sounds. At the start I walked up the front steps and knocked on the door of one house, and I wasn't allowed in. I had made the mistake of wearing my Sunday go to meeting suit and carrying a briefcase. The young man who answered the door thought I was a Jehovah Witness, he wouldn't let me in to visit his grandfather.

I mention this only to point out that my supervisors in the village were absolutely correct. I did need to be trained up. I quickly ditched the briefcase and started wearing jeans and a comfortable shirt when I wandered around the village and knocked on doors.

The stories I'm about to share point out the power of technology to change a culture. I believe that the record shows in the case of the native population on the West Coast of Canada that the technology was intentionally used to commit cultural genocide. You of course are free to make up your own mind. And if you want to there is a contact address at the bottom of this presentation where you can get hold of me and let me know your opinion.

 

We didn't have door knobs

 

Although I don't have the exact day and year of L's birthday I'm sure it was somewhere around 1900. His father and his grandfather in particular could conceivably have known no white people. His son married a white woman.

One day when I went to visit he was the only one in the house. This gave me an opportunity to ask him a question I'd never been able to ask before. I asked him what was the greatest change in the village he had lived through.

I was expecting that it might have been the measles epidemic? Perhaps the time when the Kemano people joined with the Kitamat people as one people and moved into Kitamat village. Perhaps he would have mentioned the residential schools. But he mentioned none of these.

He looked at me, took a little time to think, and simply told me, 'we didn't have doorknobs when I was a boy'.

This man, in his lifetime, had gone from not having doorknobs to watching people walk on the moon. 40 years later I still haven't grasped the totality of what he told me. However, I would suggest to you, it's worth thinking about.

It is also worth realizing That the change from door latch to doorknob, from a long house to a government approved 2-bedroom bungalow, from being isolated on the northwest coast to being a village beside the world's largest aluminum factory populated by whites of all nationalities was not accidental.

This was all done by the Canadian government and the transnational capitalist class. Nobody asked the opinion of the Kitamats.

 

Electricity and the harm it did

 

I was having a cup of coffee with A. And I asked him one of my favorite questions:

• what do you think did the greatest harm to the Kitamat culture?
  

His answer wasn't what I expected; he told me that it was electricity. I suppose I looked a little puzzled because he took the next hour or so to explain to me the history of electricity in the village.

I won't give you his answer here. But I will give you an overview of the culture on the West Coast of Canada pre contact. With this overview you may begin to understand why he would think electricity had done the most damage.

It's probably not politically correct to put it this way but it's the only way that makes any sense. Pre contact the culture on the West Coast of what is now Canada was absolutely unique. It was what used to be called a high culture. By this I mean that they had their own religion, their own governing style, they had ways of deciding who owned which resource, they had a history that went back thousands of years. They were also basically a Stone Age culture and semi nomadic.

I know, Stone Age culture makes it sound like it's barbaric, ancient, something out of the history books. But the only metal they worked with or in was copper. Which they used to make jewelry and as a form of wealth when they pounded it into a copper shield. But for everyday living their technology was pure Stone Age.

The kitamats as well as far as I know every other tribe, nation on the West Coast lived a life based on the clan. But it was clan with a twist: leadership was not guaranteed because of birth to a high-ranking family. Leadership had to be earned. And the way you earned it was to organize your people so that over 5 or 10 years they would earn enough wealth so that you could buy your position. The need to be able to organize your people was what guaranteed the leaders of the people, we're the very best of the people.

When the first traders came to the West Coast with implements made of steel they totally disrupted the native culture. What before had taken decades to achieve was now achievable within years. Better knives, better traps, better hammers and saws. All of this allowed for an unprecedented surge in personal wealth. A system that worked because it took years for leaders to be trained and matured was destroyed.

What survived the first traders was but a pale glimmer of what once had been. The people still needed one another but not nearly so intently. The final blow to the old ways was the introduction of electricity.

You're going to have to do a little thinking here. But when you do, your mind may be open to just how electricity allows you to be primarily an individual rather than a member of a clan.

You don't need to have a work team that you go with to get firewood for heating your house or cooking your food.

You don't need other people to help you with laundry because you've got a laundry machine now. Not only that, but you don't even need the rec center or the feast hall because now you've got radio and television to entertain you.

The great irony is that the Kitamats bought their own generator, with their own money, ran it themselves, and destroyed the remnants of their own culture

 

If you can kill the language, you bury the culture.

 

After I had been in the village for a few years I was given the responsibility of a village name. The name they gave me translated into English as 'Bringer of the Gentle Wind'. I needed all the gentleness that I could find when I asked the following question:

• Why didn't you train your children to speak your language?
  

I asked this question to more than one person. The one thing they all had in common was that they had attended residential school. Very few of them had willingly attended residential school, but they all had. Here's a paraphrase of the answer they all gave me:

• I didn't want my children to suffer what I suffered because I spoke my own language and not English.
  

The Canadian government, many of the Christian churches of Canada, and the transnational capitalist class who controlled them had found the ultimate way to destroy the native culture and assimilate the people into the workforce that they needed ~ They created the first generation of native people in Canada who thought and acted just like the colonizers; because they spoke and thought in the colonizer's language.