For Joshua by Richard Wagamese Read Free Book Online

only negligence my adopted parents were guilty of was ignorance of the fact that I was created to be, and would always be, an Ojibway. They could dress me in all the right white clothes, send me to white schools for a white education, and try to inculcate the right white values in me at home, but I was always going to be what I was created to be: Ojibway. No amount of discipline, punishment, religion, lecturing, or preaching was ever going to make me anything other than what I was created to be. They were ignorant of that. They believed that doing their best for me, providing for me, keeping me safe, teaching me to live the way they lived would recreate me in their image. But I was never meant to be white. I was meant to be Indian and I deserved to know who I was. But I was never given that. I was never given the opportunity to learn anything about my tribe, culture, history, language, philosophy, or even a craft or skill. I was given nothing to help me learn to live as the person I was created to be.
    That I was different was obvious enough to my classmates. Heading into my new school that morning I knewwhat to expect. The glances, the whispers, the outright finger-pointing, and the war whoops from the omnipresent class clown. Then, later, the teasing in the schoolyard, the taunts, the cruel humour of children. Later still, the fistfight with whomever was chosen to put me in my place. And later still, alone in my bed, the silent, bitter tears and the words again in my head—“See, you don’t belong here. You’re not good enough for them. You’re unlovable, unworthy, and unwanted. If they wanted you they wouldn’t treat you like this. If there weren’t something wrong with you they’d like you.”
    That’s what I always saw in that photograph. I never told anyone how I felt. I didn’t know that I could. I just suffered alone until alone began to feel more natural than any other way of being.
    By the time I was a teenager I was miserable. We’d moved three times. We’d lived in Bradford for three months before leaving for Orangeville. We stayed there a year, then moved to a farmhouse between Mildmay and Walkerton in Bruce County, where we stayed three years before moving finally to St. Catharines, Ontario. In every new town I went through the same agony of trying to feel like I belonged—in school, in church, in the neighbourhood. I was always the only Indian kid and I discovered very quickly that racism and ignorance has the same vocabulary no matter where yougo. Name-calling, teasing, fighting, and constant putdowns were a part of my every day and I endured it all alone. I never told the Gilkinsons about any of it or how I felt in the face of it all.
    I experimented. I tried leading the class in grades. I tried being the best at sports, being the funniest, the most outrageous, the most unpredictable. I tried everything I could think of to displace the fear and inadequacy I carried in my belly. Nothing worked. The more roles I played the more confused I got about who I was supposed to be, and the more confused I became the harder I tried and the more I failed. The fear of being rejected, abandoned, and isolated was stronger than anything.
    By the time we arrived in St. Catharines I was thirteen. The moves left me feeling very insecure, as if my life could be disrupted at any time and I would wind up anywhere, seemingly on a whim. I was afraid to try to make friends because it always felt so terrible to have to move again and leave them behind. It felt like there was always another train station and another waving, weeping person letting them take me away again.
    It was 1969. The last tumultuous vestiges of the sixties were still very prevalent in the teen culture of Dalewood Senior Elementary School where I entered Grade 8. To becool was paramount, as I suppose it still is. Unfortunately for me there were a few things blocking my ability to achieve coolness. First, the Gilkinsons were a very frugal family. Clothes