Firewater by Harold R. Johnson

Author:Harold R. Johnson [Johnson, Harold R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Politics
ISBN: 9780889774377
Google: owePjwEACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 29441519
Publisher: University of Regina Press
Published: 2016-01-15T00:23:21+00:00

16. The Land

All wealth comes from Earth. All our clothes, our houses, our cars, gas and oil, our televisions, our iPods: everything is provided by that old grandma. We take the oil out of her body and make it into plastic. We take the iron from her and make metal. We take the trees that grow on her and make paper and build our houses. The cotton in our shirts grew out of nutrients she provided. Absolutely everything humans have built has come from the raw materials we take from Earth. Nothing comes from outer space except sunlight; well, and the odd meteorite.

Everything that kiciwamanawak built in this country came from materials they obtained by being adopted by our ancestors. All their cities, their railroads and highways and pipelines, all come from Earth. kiciwamanawak obtained the right to be here and to share the earth with us when our ancestors adopted them. They have done well for themselves. Canada is a very wealthy country. But few Canadians understand where their wealth comes from: most believe it comes from something magical called the “economy.”

niwâhkomakanak, we now live in two worlds. We have our traditional world and the new world of work and employment and massive resource extraction and manufacturing. Most people in that other world believe their way of being is natural and necessary, that there could be no other way of being. In the economy story, everything depends upon how well the stock markets are doing. We have uranium mines in our territory and some of our people work there. The mines hire more people when the price of uranium is high and lay them off when the market drops. No one really knows what makes the markets go up and down. It’s magic.

The economy story has many turns and twists to it, even though the main plot is easy to grasp. It’s a story that kiciwamanawak tell to themselves and to others as though it is a true story, and perhaps to them it is. Remember I told you about how their stories are always put forward as absolute truths? But if you step back, step outside the story and look at it, this one too is simply another fiction.

Our stories, like kiciwamanawak stories, are also filled with magic, but our stories are rooted in the land and are about our place on the planet and how we came to be here and how we shared this planet with the plants and animals and with each other. People and animals could talk to each other then. And the earth and the four directions, not the economy, were what was filled with magic and power and what guided us.

I have been a writer for a long time now and know that the stories I create come from my place here on the land. Everything I write comes from here. Even as I sit and write these words, looking out my window at the forest, looking at the logs that make my cabin walls, looking at the grass and the river, I am filled with a sense of place.

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