History Of Aboriginal-Mennonite Relations
Thursday, October 12 to Saturday, October 14, 2000
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Keynote Addresses:
- Maria Campbell, Grandmothers and Medicine: Women of Two Cultures
- Menno Wiebe, From Bloodvein to Cross Lake: A 25 Year Synthesis
Event Summary
There is a joke told in German about how Canada got it's name: With hand on his brow to shield his eyes from the sun, Columbus scanned the shoreline, looked to left and right, and announced, "Keina da!" Nobody there.
It's a joke with a deep barb because it makes light of a myth propagated to justify the displace of peoples who had inhabited the land for thousands of years prior to Columbus' arrival. It was a myth promulgated in order to make room for the European settlers who would follow in his wake – and Mennonites, like other immigrants to Canada, benefited from the myth.
Novelist Rudy Wiebe, who's writing life has in large measure been inspired by the history and plight of Canada's first peoples – The Temptations of Big Bear and more recently the story of Big Bear's great-great-granddaughter, Yvonne Johnson, A Stolen Life – put it succinctly: "Mennonites in their marvelous ignorance, moved onto land (in Paraguay), they didn't have a clue who it belonged to, just as they did here in Manitoba."
Of Scottish, Cree and French descent, Maria Campbell, was born on the trapline in what is today Prince Albert National Park. "I didn't know the people who lived down the road from us (when I was a child) were Mennonite until I grew up," she said. It wasn't until she read Wiebe's first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many, that she recognized Mennonites as "people who came to this country to practice their religion and in order for them to do that our people were displaced."
This and related issues were examined at the fifth annual symposium hosted by the Chair in Mennonite Studies at the University of Winnipeg between October 12 and 14.
Theme:
History of Aboriginal-Mennonite Relations: Two Peoples Explore Their Sometimes Parallel Histories
There is a joke told in German about how Canada got it's name: With hand on his brow to shield his eyes from the sun, Columbus scanned the shoreline, looked to left and right, and announced, "Keina da!" Nobody there.
It's a joke with a deep barb because it makes light of a myth propagated to justify the displace of peoples who had inhabited the land for thousands of years prior to Columbus' arrival. It was a myth promulgated in order to make room for the European settlers who would follow in his wake – and Mennonites, like other immigrants to Canada, benefited from the myth.
Novelist Rudy Wiebe, who's writing life has in large measure been inspired by the history and plight of Canada's first peoples – The Temptations of Big Bear and more recently the story of Big Bear's great-great-granddaughter, Yvonne Johnson, A Stolen Life – put it succinctly: "Mennonites in their marvelous ignorance, moved onto land (in Paraguay), they didn't have a clue who it belonged to, just as they did here in Manitoba."
Of Scottish, Cree and French descent, Maria Campbell, was born on the trapline in what is today Prince Albert National Park. "I didn't know the people who lived down the road from us (when I was a child) were Mennonite until I grew up," she said. It wasn't until she read Wiebe's first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many, that she recognized Mennonites as "people who came to this country to practice their religion and in order for them to do that our people were displaced."
This and related issues were examined at the fifth annual symposium hosted by the Chair in Mennonite Studies at the University of Winnipeg between October 12 and 14. The themes was "History of Aboriginal-Mennonite Relations."
But people did not gather to point fingers. They came to probe a relationship.
"This is indeed a unique meeting," said Dr. Royden Loewen in his introduction to the weekend's proceedings, "in the sense that here are two peoples getting together to talk about their histories" – not the history of Mennonite Aboriginals as some had interpreted the theme, but "two distinct peoples."
Canada's Aboriginal peoples and Mennonites have lived parallel lives with many similarities – their close ties to the land, their minority position, their emphasis on equality, their commitment to spiritual values – and with many points of contact.
The question posed by the symposium, Loewen suggested, was one of inter-ethnicity: How in relating to each other have we evolved or changed?
Banned from their traditional hunting grounds, Campbell's people became "Road Allowance People," their homes "strung along the highway.
"What happened very quickly," she said in her Thursday evening keynote address, "is that place names were changed. Within a matter of hours, our history was wiped out."
And then the black cars came and took the children and Campbell didn't see her sisters and brothers for a long time. She "ended up" in Edmonton in the 1960s and, because she spoke fluent Cree, began working with her people. "I carried a great deal of anger," she said, "and it was that anger that fueled my work."
In the course of that work Campbell met Mennonites, she thought, for the first time. "I didn't know the people who lived down the road from us (when I was a child) were Mennonite until I grew up. All I knew is that they were people who never smiled and that was kind of scary."
There was one exception among the people who didn't smile, "the Mrs," a Mennonite woman who used to help Campbell's Grandmother, a midwife, with deliveries. The two women would sit by the willows and grind medicine roots. "I don't know how they communicated," she said, "but they were always talking and laughing, each in their own language."
With herself as a young girl narrating, Campbell told the story of the two women, Cheechum and "the Mrs," one Aboriginal the other Mennonite, and at the heart of the story young Maria turned to her dad and asked, "Why did we call her the Mrs'? What was her name?"
"Me. I don't know," he answered. "That's what his old man he called him. It sure is funny isn't it. That old lady, he didn't have a name."
Aboriginal peoples and "the Mrs" had a lot in common, Campbell suggested. Both were invisible. And at the end of the weekend, she reinforced that observation. "Baking bread and cooking food is ceremony," she said. Until institutions recognize that, they will not be fully human "because they don't have a Mother. The Mother is half the circle."
"It's been an amazing week," Menno Wiebe, patriarch of MCC's native ministries, concluded in his closing keynote speech, From Bloodvein to Cross Lake: A 25 Year Synthesis. "It began with Thanksgiving Day, also called Columbus Day. On the same day we celebrate conquest and Thanksgiving. Those two just don't go together for me.
"Turkey, cranberries, corn . . . are all gifts from the people who domesticated these things. Thanksgiving Day is one of the few holidays we didn't import," he said, chuckling at the irony.
"It was also Full Moon."
Full Moon. Full Circle. What goes around, comes around.
Before he died, Campbell’s father jokingly dropped a bombshell into her life. "You're either a Mennonite or a Lutheran," he told her.
Campbell was stunned.
Priests were not readily available on the trapline in 1940, but Campbell’s Catholic mother wanted her oldest child baptized as an infant and she was. But by whom? It is not clear by whom. It was a minister, not a Catholic priest, and he may have been Mennonite. While it would have been unusual, there was a Mennonite church nearby, Leonard Doell of MCC Saskatchewan confirmed, and sometimes ministers made exceptions to the Mennonite practice of adult baptism. Campbell may be one of those exceptions.
Widely known for her autobiography, Half-breed, and the author of six other books, Campbell is currently visiting professor at Brandon University.
Events hosted by the Chair in Mennonite Studies have developed a reputation for their wide range of interesting and challenging topics, but also for their abundance: 25 presentations and 3 keynote addresses in two-and-a-half days. The weekend's presenters, both academic and vocational, youth and elders, historians and missionaries, writers and storytellers, came from the three Prairie Provinces, British Columbia and Arizona.
Participants filled Eckhardt Gramatté Hall at the U of W almost to capacity on Thursday and Friday nights and fluctuated between 100 to 150 people during the day.
Marilyn (Brass) Iwama, for example, heard of the symposium just two weeks in advance and flew in from Halifax, hoping that the weekend would shed more light on her own story. Married to a Japanese man, she was born to a Scottish-Cree mother and a Mennonite father, Iwama is in Halifax on a post-doctoral fellowship through the University of British Columbia.
Symposia are held at roughly the same time annually and full proceedings will be published in the Journal of Mennonite Studies. Next year's theme will be Mennonites in the City.