Bush Parties and My Stupid Cousin R--s

In Grade 6, via an uncle's second marriage, I received two new cousins on the farm. It was a blessing, as I had previously been the only person my age for many miles, and certainly the only one without religion for many more.

Parents would think that the brothers were bad influences, but at the time, that was just what I needed. R----l and C----s, only a year apart from each other, one younger than me and one older, constantly abused each other and were fairly inseparable. They counted moving to the farm as a big blessing, which was a surprise to me. At the age of 11 I already felt that living so far from a town was a massive injustice no child should have to bear.

The farm was a big playground to them. They brought two ATVs (more on those in a later post) and contrary to previous assertions that I didn't know any first nations people, they were 1/8 Metis (which they only shared with me) and thus able to sport an enviable tan.

R--- and I became friends and enemies; we competed in school for popularity and grades. The brothers taught me how to take a ribbing.

C & R were born to party. In Grade 11 we laid enough pressure on the four brothers who ran the farm that they let us throw a party in the gravel pit on our land. By that age we had figured out that while parents always wanted to chaperone a party, chaperoning most often involved checking in once in a while to make sure things weren't totally out of hand. Meanwhile, the parents had their own little party in the house. The gravel pit was a mile from the nearest house, so we could count on the parents not checking in too often, which made for the best parties.

A massive bonfire was supplied; we took the fencing machine and drove two large posts into the ground and suspended a canopy made of silage bags between a stack of gravel and the posts. Enough room for thirty people sitting.

In small towns when you have a party, everyone knows about it and a big deal is made out of who is invited and who isn't. R---l was socially conscious and thus very choosy about his invitations, C---s was not and invited everyone. So, of course, we ended up with more of C---s friends than R---l's at the party. That night, forty or more came to the party and much was drank. A girl from Grade 10 had a panic attack, started screaming and yelling... she nearly kicked out the windows of S---t's car.

Near the end of the party, M--- V---, a tiny guy and a well-established asshole, began dragging flaming logs to the top of a gravel pile and throwing them down toward the crowd. Sparks sailed through the air and R---l, as the host, took offense.

R--- was much too drunk to responsibly act on the problem. He started yelling at M--- and ran, swooning, up the gravel pile. It is much faster to slide down a pile of rocks than run up it, so M--- just dropped to his behind and, amidst a landslide of small stones, slipped down the pile. So when R--- got to the top, the crowd of flaming log throwers were already at the base of the pile. A few of us were atop the mountain of stones with R---.

It was a great vantage point. We could see rows of tractors and other implements lined up a mile away, the lights of the main farmyard shining, the creek reflecting the moon on its meandering path to the North Saskatchewan river, the distant highway with its idle flow of cars between Lloydminster and Onion Lake. It was far enough from the fire that the air was clear, cool, and already heavy with dew.

Distracted, we hadn't yet noticed R--s, arms and neck tense, with a large round sandstone in his hand. He and M--- screamed. R--- threatened to throw a rock at M---. M--- dared him to do it. So R--- heaved that big sandstone with everything he had.

M--- held his ground. He stood directly North of the pile of stones. The stone arced up into the air, lost in the moonlight. The party fell silent. The crackle of the fire was the only sound. Then CRACK. It landed, like a laser-guided bomb, directly on the peak of the hood of R---'s own car, at least 20 metres from the actual target. Lobbed from forty feet in the air, the stone had enough force to invert the curve of the hood and pop the latch open. Another moment passed in silence. Then laughter. M--- laughed. He cackled. He rolled in the gravel. Then he gathered up his entourage and left.

R--- had to buy a new hood for his car. That night seemed to be the start of a long downhill slide for him that lasted years. He drank more and more. Accidents and bad luck clung to him like flies cover a cow-pie. When I went away to University, I started to tell stories about him. Stupid Cousin R--- became a genre of story.

Later, we reconciled and today, he's responsible, doing well for himself, a single dad.

White Guy

I grew up on a farm 50 north of Lloydminster, nestled in a fertile crook in the North Saskatchewan River. My family's farm is big now, one of the few left in the area, and those farms left are either defunct or still growing. Less than 10km north across that same river sits the Onion Lake First Nation, a place I only visited twice in the 17 farm-bound years of my youth. I never had a single friend from Onion Lake, except for the blessed feeds of HBO and ESPN they rebroadcast from the Reserve.

First was Muffy, a girl in my kindergarten class. She was different from the rest of us. Like most prairie towns, my class of 25 was full of white people, mostly anglo-saxons and one Iranian refugee, and Muffy. In grade six we were joined by a girl from Hong Kong. Anyway, with Muffy, I knew she was different but didn't understand why her skin was a different colour. I didn't connect her features with the Reserve, and the Reserve's existence was all I knew about the First Nations. I was not a very sociable kid and never got to know her, but I recognized her as a fellow outcast. I avoided her for fear that I would be further alienated from the class by her friendship. By Grade 2 she was gone. She had moved away and I remember regretting not getting to know that girl who looked different from us.

Next was the C---l family, A-----a and D-----e and their youngest brother, Darren. In that way that rural places work, through overheard adult conversations and school-bus rumours, I had gleaned a vague understanding of their family tree. Their family was a mix of Cree and Metis and white people. Remarriage meant that the first generation of kids from their mom was Metis, and the second group of kids was full-blood Cree. Despite the fact that the whole family spoke three languages, Cree, English and French, they had a bad reputation in the school and D----e dropped out. My mom was good friends with one of the oldest kids, K--y, whose second marriage was to one of the C--lls. She was probably the most intelligent person I knew as a kid. Later I babysat for them and borrowed books from her massive attic library.

In school there was this weird relationship with the people who everyone called Indians. At the time the First Nations kids even called themselves Indian. We had to differentiate them from people from India by saying "you mean from India?" I would guess that one guy in my class was either partially black or Metis, but neither he nor his family ever owned up to it; instead he was one of most vicious racists in the class. First Nations were made fun of in the same way that the kids made fun of Tracy, the girl from Hong Kong. Racial names were attached, they were accused of being stupid. Adults branded them as being bad kids, to be avoided, though Darren was better behaved and smarter than most people in my class, and by my graduation he was one of the more popular kids in school. He dropped out that year, in Grade 11. I was school bus friends with Darren but it didn't run very deep. It's not like we talked about our feelings or how he really felt when someone called him an Indian or a Nigger. I always felt a weird sense of guilt about what he had to experience but, then, I never did anything about it, either.

He was the end of it until I left and went to University. I had a good Cree friend there - just one - who sat on the Students' Union. He was Cree, too, and he had great stories about transforming his life by getting in touch with the elders at the Native Centre. It ran a little deeper, because we drank together and worked together. Then I left University and met a Metis guy in Toronto.

I don't know how important the final count is. The point is that as a white guy, I feel a profound sense of alienation from First Nations people. So today, when I had a long call with Calvin from the Youth Centre at Onion Lake, I kept blustering on the phone about why I wanted the First Nations and Onion Lake to be a part of this film. I know this is part of the story: I need to reconcile the prejudice that informed so much of life on the farm. If I am to integrate this experience into myself, I have to face up to it. There was an unexplainable gap between the Aboriginal history we learned about in school (all two weeks of it) and the Indians we knew (all three of them).

Can I do that by spending a few days interviewing people on the reserve?

It's official.

Thanks to the faith of some good people at SCN and Image Pacific, we are headed to Saskatchewan in less than two weeks to finally start shooting. This will be a reunion of sorts with my Director of Photography, Jason Wessel, also a displaced prairie boy. We're heading into the good ol' heart of darkness, that place in Saskatchewan where almost everybody leaves... the farm.

Something like three quarters of all young people leave rural areas and only a few of them go back. It's been happening since the Great Depression. "There's nothing to do," we say. But something in me started twitching four years ago when I moved to Toronto.

A recurring dream: standing, alone, in a field full of barley, the green heads swaying in the wind. The smell of fresh air, of vast fields of green releasing oxygen into the air...

Toronto is such an indulgent place. Great food, the perpetual rush of pedestrians and streetcars, incredible wealth all around, the convenience of knowing I can order a sandwich or 1000 full colour business cards at 4am. No matter how much you have or don't have, there is always room above you. It's easy to take for granted.

When that dream started calling me, I started to believe I was missing out on something really important. I felt that old people had the answers. The things old people remember first-hand are being forgotten. I felt especially guilty of disregarding them.

Only 75 years ago, people were on the brink of famine in this country, and yet we seem to have so little regard for others in the same predicament today. It would be so easy to slip into another Great Depression. The scale of that trajedy, looming majestic in the minds of these ninety year olds, is nothing compared to what's being experienced in Africa. Should that happen here, would we have the wisdom, skills, and resources to stand on our own? Only the old people could tell me.

So I quit my job and flew west, talked to my grandparents and my 90 year old Uncle Vernon, to my 89-year-old neighbour Tom Campbell, and to talk to other elders in the First Nations. We're also talking to young people like me, except that these people have stayed and built something at home. The people of the Canadian Prairies hold a secret, and I want it.

Over the last two years I've realized that as much as anything, this is an internal journey for me. I want to know why I had to leave the farm, why the place that calls to me so strongly just isn't my home.

Jason said to me once that the story of Saskatchewan is the story of all Canada. This year, we're going back in search of that story.

LATE HARVEST enters preproduction on August 15, 2005.