Paddle to the Sea
I still remember the gynmnasium where I watched Paddle to the Sea for the first time. It wasn’t my school, it was my friend’s school. I had gone to school with Sheila and Deanna that day specifically to see this film and I have no idea why. My suspicion is that my mother had found out about the film, maybe I had told her about it after Sheila or Deanna told me they would be watching it, and my mother wanted me to see it. Although she had moved me away from my father’s Ojibwe relatives and made no attempt (or perhaps had her attempts rebuffed, I don’t know) to keep me in touch with them, she ensured that I was keenly aware of my heritage. And so, one day when I was younger than 8 my public school self went to my friend’s Catholic school and we sat on the gymnasium floor and watched Paddle to the Sea.
During elementary school, I watched the film Paddle to the Sea. An Ojibwe boy carves a wooden model of a man in a canoe with the words “Please put me back in the water. I am Paddle-to-the-Sea” on the bottom. He sets it in the snow, which melts into the streams and creeks that carry the carving to Lake Nipigon, about sixty miles north of Lake Superior. Paddle-to-the-Sea makes his way down the Nipigon River to Lake Superior, then through each of the Great Lakes in turn, and eventually up the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Atlantic Ocean. There, the little wooden man in the canoe is picked up in the fishing nets of a French trawler and taken across the ocean to France. Along the way, Paddle-to-the-Sea gets stuck in various obstacles and is rescued by various people, who inscribe on him the places where they picked him up and return him to the water.
I was fascinated by this story that was about me and yet not. The boy isn’t identified as Ojibwe; I am inferring that from the location. The area around Lake Nipigon is Anishinaabe territory, and in that area, the people are mostly Ojibwe Anishinaabe. As a child, I knew that’s where my father’s people were from, even though I didn’t yet know them. In the book, he is just an Indian boy without a name, and the story isn’t really about him, although it circles back to him at the end. Paddle-to-the-Sea makes it to France, and eventually a newspaper article is written about the carving and all the places it has been. The Indian boy is a grown man by this time, working as a fishing or hunting guide, an anonymous Indian doing anonymous Indian work. He sees the newspaper article but doesn’t draw any attention to himself as the carver of the boat.
This story about Paddle to the Sea begins my third chapter. Third month, third chapter. I apologize for missing February but somehow that month was over in about 5 minutes and we’re already a week into March. My second chapter deals with monsters and other hungers, so if you are keen to follow this chapter reflection each month in order until the book launches in September you can read the essays on Wendigos. The first is the regular Aambe connection of two books, the second is for subscribers only and talks about this book in particular.
In this chapter the story of Paddle to the Sea becomes a way to think about all the un-named places that surround us. The way that settler colonialism moved across the continent, removing people but leaving their names behind without context. You may be named after your great grandfather but without the accompanying stories about him and why your parents chose to connect you to him in that way your name is just Bill or Edward, it means what the dictionary says it means and not what your family says it means. Place names are like that too. And on this continent they surround us, but their context has been pushed aside.
What I want to think about instead in this reflection is the way that Indigenous people see themselves vs how we are seen. Because I’m reading David Mura’s book A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing and he begins by talking about WEB duBois’ double consciousness. The awareness that how I think of myself differs from how white people think of me. And I was aware of that from a very young age. As I said, my mother ensured that I knew of my heritage even if neither of us had any context for it.
Her lens was shaped both by an entirely inadequate educational system as well as her own experience living among native people in northwestern Ontario. People who, because Pelican Lake Residential School was still in operation, had little reason to trust a white teacher from down south. It wasn’t only the priests who abused the children. The white ladies from down south weren’t always kind either, although I have no reason to believe that she herself was unkind. But these people who had experienced decades of residential schools and white ladies from down south had no way to know that. She tried to build relationships, but according to my father she didn’t say long in any of the communities and relationships are hard to build when you are mobile. In less than 5 years she lived and taught in three different towns, so her lens is very much one of the outside observer. And so was mine.
I felt that distance, the tension or contradiction in the double consciousness of how I thought of myself as native being much different from how she thought of me, from how my teachers and classmates thought of me, from how movies and television presented me. Even though these things were my only context for being native, still I felt that distance. I felt that absence as part of that double consciousness, they expected something of me that I knew I couldn’t give them. I had the name, but no story to go with it that wasn’t filtered through whiteness.
Paddle to the Sea is written by a white man. A white man who was surrounded by Indigenous names, ghosts and relics of people he never saw. No wonder the book isn’t actually about that native boy who grows up to be a man. It is about white people handling a native artifact, it is about their perspective and their actions. It is about white people rescuing a native toy, the journey, this mythic quest of a little carving would have failed before it even left Lake Superior if it wasn’t for white people. That’s the message of this book that purports to be about a native boy and that’s the message of the white gaze. A gaze that sees us as artifacts and problems that need solving. That sees us as ghosts to be questioned or exorcised depending on the need of whiteness.
We don’t know how the native boy sees himself, how the man he grows up to be sees himself. I know I’m reading a lot into a children’s story but it’s a powerful story when you really think about it, if for no other reason than it tells young children how to see us without telling them how we see us.
I remember watching this movie, and I liked it. But if my mother wanted me to see it to help me understand myself, it did not. It only reflected back my own invisibility.