Sherry Lawson – Indigenous Storyteller

Orillia just celebrated its 150th anniversary a couple of years ago and we got letters from all kinds of different municipalities around the county and further all the way to Toronto saying that we are a First Nations Community and we’ve been here a long time and would we come and help them celebrate their party, because Canada was 150 years old and so too was the City of Orillia (the town/village back then).

So we thought about that and asked our old people and our young people and they said, “150 years is an arbitrary day for us and means nothing, we’ve been, so our creation story tells us, that we’ve been here since the beginning of time, we were placed here very carefully by our creator in this special gathering place”. 

So I helped the Chief draft a letter out to all of those mayors and townships and all of those other people who’d asked for our help. They wanted us to come and bring our dancers and our drum and the whole flavour of First Nations People. It was a whole year of invitations. We wrote a lovely letter saying thank you and that we understand that this is a big year for you and your municipality and the country of Canada, but to us, it is an arbitrary day, because we have been here so long.  We celebrate daily all of the many gifts we’ve been given. We are still a very grateful people despite our sometimes chaotic history and we will not be available to bring our dancers and our drummers, but what usually happens when you have a big party, you have a cake and we will come and help you eat that cake. So their requests stop coming in after that.

And if you read just a history book – the history of Simcoe County and the history of this City, there is very little mention of First Nations People. We forget that up until 1830, this is where we were living – right where we are sitting – downtown. Yes, and Champlain, when he arrived in this area, back in the 1600’s, spoke about the native people who greeted him and helped him. His men were very sick after their long ocean voyage. A lot of his men had scurvy (we suppose) and our medicine people helped to cure them. We fed them and gave them the very best and my father would say, we had a very lax immigration system. We welcomed everyone. It was a place of gathering, known as that for 100’s of years. First Nations People gathered in this area where the two lakes meet to have large meetings.

There was a meeting there when they started to talk about the Residential School System and all of the Chiefs were called in from everywhere to discuss whether we should do this or not. I’ve been told that it was actually some scribes from the Catholic Church that took notes from that meeting and that at one point, they were kept at Strawberry Island, where the retreat used to be for the Catholic clergy – those minutes were kept there.  I really don’t know where they would be now, as that property has been sold. All our Chiefs stood up and talked about how we had an opportunity to give our children a better future. The government told us the schools would be good for our children – would teach you reading and writing and how to survive in this place and thrive. So, at the end, there was a vote and they said yes we would let our children go.

We know now that the dark history has come out, just as it is coming out about the Sixties Scoop. We have many from our community who were involved in both of those things. We have stories in my community as well when those children were taken and those stories still live on in the minds of 60 and 70 year olds, because in our community there used to be a train track that ran across the back of the reserve and the government people came and they went from door to door, starting at the south end walking up to the north end asking for all of the children. They then herded them onto the train and took them away.

It was my grandmother who told me this story – more than once, and I used to say, “Grandmother, why are you telling me this so many times?” She said I had to remember every word of it, because it would be important in the future. She said that when she was standing there at the train tracks and all of the children were taken on board, the train took off to the north. We now know that most of our children were taken to Sault St. Marie where they went to school, as far away as possible so we couldn’t get to see them. She said the men were standing there not saying anything as they waved at their children and the women were crying and wailing. She remembers those tears for a long time after. So we were without children for a long time.

As children were born, the train kept coming back to pick up the rest of the children. We know now what that did to our history, what that did to our soul, what that did to change the face of our future and how, even though I was not a child who went to those schools, I have that cultural memory, from my family, my community and the other stories that have come out.

The Sixties Scoop was bad as well, when the Ontario government, along with the Federal government, because you couldn’t come on to a reserve those days without permission from the Indian Agent. It took a lot of our children in the 1960’s – just scooped them. We know now that a lot of our children were given to other families and a lot were sold to American families and they never came home and they never knew where they were from.

I have a dear friend – he and his six siblings were scooped during that time and they were all split up. They came home when they were in their 20’s. Their parents spoke Ojibway, didn’t speak English and didn’t belong. It was a very tough time for them and even now, in his 60’s, he deals everyday with that loss and grief.

We’re fortunate, in what people around this area call Rama, Rama Reserve, Rama First Nation. Rama is not a word in our language. Our traditional name for our community is Mnjikaning which is ‘people of the fish fence’, or the ‘place of the fish fence’. There is a special place where the two lakes meet that we now call Atherley, where our fish fence still exists under the water.

For 5000 years, we retrieved those fish in the Spring, because we were promised by the Creator that they would gather for us. We were told also that when the fish gathered at that time, they would hold council and they would decide which fish would give up its life for the two-leggeds – for us. So there was great ceremony involved with catching the fish – tobacco had to be put down, prayers had to be said to give thanks for what we were about to be given.

Another thing that a lot of people don’t know, is that we lost our hunting and fishing rights here for our people in this area. For many, many years, when I was a child, back in the 60’s, I would go out fishing with my father, and catch a lot of bass and pike and he had one of those metal stringers that you put fish on and I had to take it next door to the neighbours dock to hook it on to their dock. That was that my job when we got back.  I said to my dad, “why don’t we leave it – we’ve got a hook to put on our dock so the fish can be in the water”. He said we don’t have the right to take the fish and if the Indian Agent or someone from the Government comes he’d have to go to jail, so we leave them at the neighbours, because they can retrieve the fish. So through all of that, I guess, I’ve had old people tell me that one time or another in our life, we were all poachers, because we were illegally doing what we were supposed to be doing from the beginning of time.

When you fast forward to today, our children, our grandchildren, didn’t have the advantage of knowing those ceremonies and how important the fish life, the bird life, the frog life – all of those things, where one must give thanks and lay down your tobacco. Our children now don’t know that. They don’t know that when you are in a fishing derby, you should be laying down tobacco and saying a prayer for the life you perhaps are about to take.

So we settled that Williams treaty, in the last 18 months, with the different levels of government and it was many decades of fighting to have them recognize that we have been here since the beginning and they can’t take that away from us and we need to have that back. As part of that settlement, my community and others in the Williams treaty area have been given money to help with those cultural things and try to re-establish the history that have lost – to teach our children in the school how to set a snare, what they should be doing when they capture the bullfrogs and we eat their very succulent white legs. So there is another layer of loss that some of us grieve and are unaware of.

My people have been here since the beginning  and when Ojibway and native people in general gather, there is a lot of laughter – you’d think there should be a lot of tears when you think about all we have been through. There is a lot of laughter and the old people in my community have told me many times when I was young, that it was often the laughter that kept us going.

We’re going to be here for a long time and we might not be in exactly the same shape as we were 150 years ago – sometimes it’s better, sometimes it’s worse, but our stories tell us we will be here until the end.