Being Indian is like Greek or Italian right?

I want to start from the beginning with this blog.  As a child, I knew that my grandfather was Indian/ Métis.  He was really brown and not like the rest of the family.  I interpreted this as meaning that he was probably Greek or Italian, the most brown people I could think of as a child.  There was no pride in being Métis.  It was not something we talked about.  Strange in a way, given the family my Grandfather came from, with one brother Jim Brady a Métis leader and another sister an honarary Chief.  As far as I understood we were white - the blank slate- the unknowing privalaged.

I wore my mucklucks and didn't think much about where they came from and what that all meant.  I had no sense of the broader conversations going on about First Nations People and repatriation of the constitution.  Even thought I was following politics from the 1984 election.  I had no language or traditions or history.


From Jumaka


I knew my mother felt her father a harsh man, prone to substance abuse and unwilling to work despite a great skill with machines.  There was no explanation for any of that and the man I knew was patient with me and not a drinker, if strange at times - prone to dark moments.  I knew he kept a buffalo head in his basement in a giant crate, and he got it by spending all the grocery money once long ago.  I knew the buffalo must be important to be kept so many years.  The head was named Willy.

In retrospect there were so many hints that we were not just white, that this man had a complicated past.  These were people who did not go to church, even when most people still did in the 1950s.  These were people that had no issue with their daughter dating a Chinese guy in the 1960s or being divorced in the 1970s.  These were warm outgoing people who never had many friends. There was a wall of silence around everything.  You did not talk about the past.  (I didn't even know that my parents had been married for five years until I was 25.)   I didn't know that I was anything but the "default" colour and culture.