Medicine Unbundled by Geddes Gary;

Author:Geddes, Gary; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Heritage House
Published: 2017-05-05T20:00:00+00:00

twenty-four

Here’s the Scoop

Manitoba figures prominently in Canada’s Indigenous history, not only for the Louis Riel and Red River Resistance of 1870 and the Northwest Rebellion of 1885, led by Métis military leader Gabriel Dumont, but also more recently for the notoriety of MLA Elijah Harper. Born in 1949 at Red Sucker Lake Reserve in northern Manitoba, Harper was a residential school survivor and a graduate of the University of Manitoba. His fame, like that of Riel, had to do with his stand against injustice and encroachment on Indigenous rights and freedoms. When he held up an eagle feather in the provincial legislature and refused to ratify the Meech Lake Accord on the grounds that it had been negotiated with no input from Indigenous leaders, Elijah Harper changed the political dynamic in this country permanently.

Although I knew little of the region’s Indigenous people, my first encounter with them was very personal. While doing research for my doctoral thesis at the London Library in 1971, I took a month off to travel in Europe and North Africa. In Morocco, I received a telegram informing me that my brother Jim Geddes had adopted two boys: Mel, whose Cree name was Deer, or Wêpâyôs, and Fred, whose Saultaux name was Rabbit Skin, or Waboozwyaan. The boys, who were half-brothers, had apparently suffered neglect and abuse in their former foster home. Without understanding any of the long-term ramifications of what we now refer to as the Sixties Scoop, this struck me as a wonderful expansion of my world. I could not wait to meet my new nephews.

Although the boys were good-natured and appeared to settle happily into their new home, their lives began to unravel during the teen years, as racism, peer pressure, and lack of confidence led them to experiment with drugs and alcohol, which resulted in a number of run-ins with the law. Their downward spiral was heart-breaking. Fred was killed when the car he was driving without a seatbelt flipped on a gravel road pinning him underneath, and Mel ended up in a wheelchair with both legs amputated, eventually dying from diabetes as a result of alcoholism and a bad diet.

Jim would later adopt two more boys. Henry, who had suffered from fetal alcohol poisoning and been a glue sniffer as a child, would die from a blow received in a Winnipeg bar. Norman, thankfully alive and well, is married and living with his wife and son in Saskatoon. Even before I learned anything about the Sixties Scoop, I could not help but feel that my family and my country had failed those boys.

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