Dad and I are talking about family genealogy. He's describing the family history of a close relative; more particularly who their father was. We're trying to figure out if our relative is eligible for status under the Indian Act (this is itself another story). For me this is a story about Identity and belonging. It's about how we are connected as Indigenous people; it's about variations in Indigeneity. For Dad this is about understanding who one is, but it is a far more grounded and particular sense of belonging for Dad then it is for me.
I approach these questions with the kind of rigour I've learned as an anthropologist, all ready to jot down the genealogy from ego to ancestor. Dad's approach isn't linear. It certainly doesn't focus on the person in question the way my training would want him to do. So I listen, every once and awhile dropping a prompt into the narrative, trying to see if I can circle him back to what I was looking for. But he doesn't really pay attention to my efforts. His story move from points of his own intersections with the subject at hand. He circles around these moments, layering fragments of story; together these quilted pieces create a more textured account then my professional genealogy might have rendered.
Dad's sitting at his kitchen table. He can't really see things anymore, but he looks right at me when he emphasizes particular points. I'm more shadow and voice to him now than a visible presence.
He's had breakfast. I've made him a weak cup of tea. As he talks I type notes in an open file.
We've settled the story around a boy Dad went to school with. If I didn't already know some of the background to this story I would be really confused. As it is I'm having to connect a lot of dots. The first of which is trying to figure out why the story is starting here. Later I realize that this boy, George, was how Dad first came to know our relative's father. So for Dad, this is the starting point of the story.
Dad tells me: "George said 'You never knew who your damned brothers and sisters were, kids changing all the time.'"
George's mother ran what amounted to an informal foster home. She was Indigenous, her husband was white. At least I think that's the case but Dad's been shifting story lines. He ignores my clarification question. This couple lived above one of the bars in an apartment block downtown on third avenue.
In George's short sentence is packed an entire dissertation about informal care, childminding, and belonging. The idea that one's siblings could change daily is itself an intersting idea. But also the sense of flux and change tells us much about family and community and the needs for childcare.
Dad's telling me about the father now. "He was skinny, wore glasses, was a bootlegger and a taxi driver." I'm wondering to myself why does bootlegger and taxi driver always seem paired in my father's stories. I've lost the storyline. I'm not sure now if this was George's Dad or our relative's grandfather that's being talked about.
I wait awhile as Dad describes where he met these men, a gambling place down on second avenue in Prince Rupert run by a fisherman friend of his.
"We used to play wrinkle rummy there, 50cents a point (that seems a bit rich to me). I remember seeing him come into the club," Dad is telling me. He'd come up to George's Dad who was a handyman, you know. Carpentry and stuff, and Jimmy worked for him."
Okay were back to the father of our relative. This man coming into the club to talk with George's Dad is Jimmy*, our relative's father.
This is a more disjointed story then the ones Dad tells about fishing. Those stories follow a clear narrative line, explanatory details might be sparse (one needs to know what words like becket, gangion, shack, etc mean in those contexts), but the setting and characters and action are clear. This story, like others that tread close to family come across as more disjointed, more partial. Listening to these stories I find I have to hold a series of other small stories in my mind to be able to follow along.
"That's the first time I saw him" Dad says.
"Didn't really know who he was. But his Dad, the taxi driver and his mom, she was Haida, they'd come to town and leave him with George's Mom. Then one day, George told me, they just didn't come back. That's how Jimmy came to live with them. Next time I saw him he was seeing Florence*.
I know this last bit of the story was added years later on Vancouver Island. My father and George accidentally ran into each other in a harbour front coffee shop. They talked about old times. With Jimmy then coming into Dad's life he remembered George's connection and he asked him what he knew about Jimmy.
The story jumps forward in time. Now Dad's talking about when Florence introduced Jimmy to him. We bounce back to Jimmy's Dad and Mom. Dad sits silent. We say nothing and I think maybe the conversation's over. But we jump forward again to a the last time Dad was back in Prince Rupert in 2015.
"Eddie (Dad's nephew) and I were eating at Dolly's. Jimmy found us in the parking lot. He wanted to talk. 'Are you going to be around the house on the weekend.' Yeah, Dad says to him. It never happened. His cancer was to far advanced. That next weekend he died."
"I thought, like when a person dies, somebody looks up the relatives, but we heard nothing. I was suspecting Jimmy would drop by the house, but he'd been shipped to Vancouver because of his cancer. He was back [to 'Rupert] on the Monday, but then back down to Vancouver again and he died the next weekend."
Dad sits silent again. Our conversation had started with a question as to whether our relative was eligible for status. Locating Jimmy provided part of the answer, but not all of it.
Dad starts talking again but has now shifted to naming his maternal aunts and their husbands. All of these women married white men and lost status under the Indian Act. Lee Dell, he was white. Aunt Nettie was a Gamble, she married Lee. Sarah was a Gamble. Alice Gibson was a Gamble. My mother was a Gamble.
"I asked Gordy [one of Aunt Nettie's sons] one time about getting his status. Gordy just chuckled over it, he thought it was a joke."
Dad interrupts his own story. "Laurie* said the Dell kids used to tease them [Laurie and her siblings] about being Indian when they were little." It's a kind of meta-analysis of its own on why Dad's cousin might think being Indian was a joke. Aunt Nettie was unambiguously aboriginal. She spoke her language, kept relations with family, and yet her children claimed a white identity and teased their Indian relatives next door.
"Gordy said, "I'm no Indian. I'm white."
Dad told him "Nothing you can do about it, you're Indian."
Perhaps this is Dad's way of saying it doesn't matter who Jimmy was. The truth of being Indigenous existed in the social reality of simply being 'Indian.' One's mother was and so you are as well. Formal recognition didn't change anything about who one might be. Gordy had no status card, Dad has a status card, but there was nothing those cards could do about who they actually were.
I get Dad's lunch ready. Half a ham sandwich, more tea, and a biscuit.
It's raining and blowing outside. I hear my mother's wind chimes on the porch as the rain hits the windows. I think of the hours I sat in silence with Dad in the wheelhouse of his fishboat. Occasionally he points to to a landmark or a place as we go by. He tells a story about a person, a relative, a thing as
we move along. Travelling the coast was a path marked by small stories. These stories were strung into meaning because we were connecting them by our presence and passage over the water and through time.
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* = pseudonym.
