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Into every life, it is said, some rain must fall. In journalism it's Every ink-stained wretch in the business - from the old-timer pecking it out on an ancient Smith-Corona to the young shooter smoking along at Mach 2 on a chrome-plated, super-charged, four-barrelled IBM - wonders the same thing. Is there anybody out there? Does anybody ever read this stuff? Agree...disagree...couldn't care less? Editors grow old and die waiting for that one great Letter to the Editor. Layout and Paste up people scurry hither and fro at deadline time, frantically searching for a picture or a poem to fill the space that had been reserved for readership letters. Columnists sit, with bated breath and tightened sphincter muscles, in tingling anticipation of that one small indicator that Life exists beyond the newsroom. What's going on out there...in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Braves...uh, Aboriginals? Did the cat get your tongues...the kids eat all your ballpoints...blow all your stamp money on bingo again? Everybody's crying about the "lack of communication," in our personal lives, in our communities and in our political organizations, but few are doing anything about it. Have we been permanently frightened in silence by a long history of tyrannical Indian agents, despotic village priests and bullying Indian Act band councils? Have we spent so much time, huddled in the reeds of fear, waiting for our collective and individual bogeymen to go by - that our silence has become permanent? Does the Buckskin Curtain hide only a silent vacuum? Surely there must be something going on out there someplace that warrants an opinion, a commentary, an irate Letter to the Editor.... Are there still epidemics of gas-sniffing and suicide?. Are religious orders and government going to get away with those residential schools? Does anyone care that Indian Affairs is once more making noises about getting off our backs. Can't anyone encourage them to move on to greater things - a little faster? What about some of these insipid politicians - white and red - wafting about in vaporous clouds of their own flatulent oratory. Any chiefs with their hands in the cookie jar? How about band offices turning into employment agencies, where the only criteria for a high-paying job is a pulse and the ability to vote for your benefactor? Comment? Yes...no...maybe so.... There's a cultural renaissance taking place. A new order is rising - like the mythical Firebird of old - out of the ashes of it's own destruction. One of the problems of the old order was that it was an oral one. Nothing was ever written down. There are no bibles or history books and too many people - white and red - think our history began in 1492 - with the arrival of the white folks. Others, particularly the "born-again Indian" set, are just making it up as they go along. Redneck organizations are using our silence to take chunks out of us - with impunity - in local and mainline newspapers, magazines, periodicals. There's a lot of stuff going on in Indian Country - good and bad. When are we going to start writing in to our newspapers and web sites about it? Gilbert Oskaboose was a retired Ojibway journalist who wrote a weekly column here on FirstNations.com. He passed away in 2008. Gib was a residential school survivor. During his retirement, Gib was engaged in a class action law suit against the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) and the federal Department of Indian Affairs for their respective contributions to a residential school lost childhood. As Gib would say, "Write on, young native writer, write on...." His hope is that young writers will pick up their pens and use their voice to comment and describe the world we live in. The pen has been now been passed to you, the next generation.
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The
Silence in Indian Country