An Onkwehonwe in Kanata

I just spent the better part of last week in Winnipeg, dealing with that lovely and burgeoning example of the best of aboriginal promise, APTN. I had a lot of fun – their membership is bright, brave and willing to do a lot of things, and they shine with the brilliance of promise and the novelty of speaking in our voices in a way the majority of Canadians have never seen before. I salute them and their youthful courage, their ambition and drive. They made me feel proud. But you know what... I have to say I found Winnipeg incredibly depressing. I shouldn’t because it’s probably the one place in Canada where the indigenous reality of this country is reflected in the population, but damn, the in-your-face clarity of our post-colonial reality was too intense, too heartbreaking, too concrete for me to celebrate what should be a success story. The evidence of our degradation and colonization was everywhere, in the methed-out skinny teenagers with scabs all over their faces, in the rail-thin e...

I've been having a low-grade headache all day. It feels like a low pressure headache, the kind I'm susceptible too. It makes me grumpy. And being grumpy is not a good thing for me. I tend to direct grumpiness outward. I think it's a Wolf Clan thing. Most Wolf Clan people I know are grumpy just by reflex and we like to let people know it. Just so you can participate in the pain as well. Hey it's a pack thing! I once read a "clan horoscope" thing that talked about the traits of people in the various Haudenosaunee clans and it was actually hilarious, because the two clans I'm most familiar with -- Wolf being my own (and all my mother's family) and Bear (my father's mother's family -- just go along with it) were preternaturally right on. For instance, it said that Wolves are generally kind of arrogant, know what they want and how to get it, and are quite generous even though they will always remind you of just how generous they are -- bang on. And ...