At Dawn Our Bellies Full_Iwama

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Iwama: “At Dawn, Our Bellies Full” 249 Iwama uses the image of the medicine wheel, with four directions corresponding to four different aspects of life, to organize her meditations on the meanings of food. Within the residential schools and internment camps, food was laden with emotional and symbolic significance. The participants’ memories encompass the meager rations that were made available by the institutions, the subversion and secrecy through which boys and girls supplemented their rations, and the nostalgic memories of home evoked by thinking about different foods. Food was also gendered, with men and women recalling different memories of finding, sharing, and consuming food. Girls might be assigned to take part in cooking and serving food to others, while boys, perhaps enacting a form of masculinity, might steal food or lead protests against the quality or quantity of the food. Using food as an analytic lens, Iwama posits that these places of hardship became also places where gender was enacted and cre- ated by children. “At Dawn, Our Bellies Full”: Teaching Tales of Food and Resistance from Residential Schools and Internment Camps in Canada Marilyn lwama I didn’t know then that what I really wanted none of us would ever have. I wanted an unbroken line between me and the past. I wanted not to be Jfragments and pieces left behind by fur traders, soldiers, priests, and schools. —Linda Hogan, Solar Storms Our nations are reclaiming. We are breaking the silence that for so long has been our history. Everywhere, Indigenous peoples are taking positive steps to address their experiences. We are shed- ding pain and healing spirit. . . . Each story given, as a gift, is an act of resistance. An act of healing. —Linda Jaine, The Stolen Years I am going to talk about stories of food and resist- Arms is a collection of interviews that Deiter con- ance that women have written about two places of confinement in Canada—Indian Residential Schools and the Japanese Canadian, or Nikkei, internment camps of the Second World War. For this purpose, I rely primarily on two texts that offer adult recollections of childhood con- finement: Constance Deiter’s From: Our Mothers Arms: The Intergenerational Impact of Residential Schools in Saskatchewan and A Child in Prison Camp by Shizuye Takashima. From Our Mothers’ ducted with members of her family who attended Residential School. In the prose poem A Child in Prison Camp, Takashima tells the story of her own confinement in the internment camp at New Denver. Because the transformative process of restor- ing humanity is essentially educative, these nar- ratives have value as pedagogical tools. In the process of their telling, the stories construct a body of cultural experience. As teaching tools, the

P . pap o 250 Part Vil The Gendered Classroom stories instruct the hearer in the means of revital- izing cultures once threatened with extinction by official programmes of assimilation and genocide. The stories of A Child in Prison Camp and From Our Mothers’ Arms return cultural knowledge to individuals by placing food in narratives of trans- formation, abundance, service, and struggle. Their telling resituates the storyteller and the lis- tener within community. In this way, “community becomes a Story that is a collection of individual stories” (Cajete, 1994: 169). I have several reasons for considering narratives of internment with the help of the sacred circle (Fig. 25.1). Two points require empha- sis here. The first regards the universality of the sacred circle, its function in the perception of “the continuity and interconnectedness of events and conditions of all living beings” (Calliou, 1995: 52). When Black Elk (1988) received his great vision, he saw “the whole hoop of the world” (43): And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for 1 was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all Water IR BREND L Fire Winter Old age (night) Conflict Cognition Wholeness B T L N e o things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And 1 saw that it was holy. (43) While the sacred circle is a central component in an aboriginal world view, the view is of all the world, able to accommodate and comprehend the stories of all those who people the world. Secondly, because the circle is sacred, it requires far more than an intellectual apprecia- tion or grasp of its meaning. The sacred circle is not simply an idea, nor is it to be taken lightly. Full understanding of the circle is reached after years of apprenticeship with elders, after years spent (Dearning wisdom. Because knowledge of my First Nations heritage came to me in my mid- dle years, 1 approach the sacred circle with the tentative step of a young child and the certainty of faith. There is no authority in my words. Earth Autumn r Adulthood _ Spring (evening) Childhood !n}ommg) w Service Individual Creativity £ Physicality Spirit ) Growth Transformation Air Summer Adolescence (mid- day) Nourishment Emotion Abundance Figure 25.1 The Sacred Circle. Adapted from Bopp (1984), Calliou (1995), Dyck (1998), Hampton (1995), Sun Bear and Wabun (1980), and Weenie (1998). Do I really I wear raised whit to terms wi onial worlc One of my | ness. I'd bet guilt, yet e that comes colour” an¢ “white” soci of my Euras stand what i After all, th and trying t [ust abor album was of my “new been kept fi a new toy, | members of what was, to rally thest age. But I als earlier the of whitenes: obvious tor Simply surviv resistance. But schools also re: often choosing of their resistar strange; it was ¢ not enough to k stole food from some schools, t economy in stol to kitchen duti favourite hiding ous legs of the b Parents and chil food. In spite of peoples kept th was only, for a ti Removing . central to reali

R i e e T TSR Do I really want to talk about this? I wear whiteness like a skin. After being raised white and educated white, after coming to terms with being white in a not-so postcol- onial world, 1 learned about the Cree in me. One of my first emotions at the news was happi- ness. I'd been carrying a generous share of white guilt, yet experiencing the “rebound racism” that comes with being married to “a person of colour” and mothering mixed-blood kids in a “white” society (Frankenberg, 1993). I was wary of my Eurasian children thinking I didnt under- stand what it was like to be the racial underdog. After all, these days trying to be white is out, and trying to be native is in (Taylor, 1998). Just about the time my new Buffy St. Marie album was wearing out, the sobering significance of my “new” identity—and the fact that it had been kept from me—hit home. Like a child with a new toy, I was blind to the discomfort some members of my family were experiencing about what was, to me, a reason for celebration. I tried to rally these reluctant ones to celebrate our herit- age. But I also wondered why I hadn’t questioned earlier the contradiction between our family story of whiteness and the other story that was now so obvious to me in the family photo album. Simply surviving uprootings is one kind of resistance. But many children in the camps and schools also resisted in other imaginative ways, often choosing food as the focus and channel of their resistance. Residential School food was strange; it was of poor quality, and it simply was not enough to keep the students healthy. Children stole food from school kitchens and gardens. In some schools, there was a thriving black market economy in stolen food. Girls who were assigned to kitchen duties had their own subversions: a favourite hiding spot for booty was the volumin- ous legs of the bloomers they were forced to wear. Parents and children demanded better and more food. In spite of Residential School, First Nations peoples kept their food practices alive, even if it was only, for a time, in memory. Removing children from their homes was central to realizing assimilation: confinement Iwama: “At Dawn, Our Bellies Full” 251 interrupted the transmission of culture in each nation. Traditional food practices went under- ground, and students were nourished by their food only in memory or during family visits. At Christmas or summer vacation, mothers and grandmothers would stuff the little ones with bannock and jam and hot tea and roast meat and potatoes and fresh sweet berries. Back in school, the children comforted themselves by calling up memories of this feasting. As adults, they began recalling it on the page. Geographical displacement was also a key to the assimilation of Canadian Nikkei. Many Nikkei who were sent to the camps were leav- ing the relative comfort and security of Powell Street in Vancouver. Powell Street was the place where Nikkei lived closely together “for the sake of mutual protection and the human need of compan- ionship” (Kitagawa, 1985: 218). The neighbour- hood was also the only source of Japanese food. A similar cultural enclave thrived in the Vancouver neighbourhood of Kitsilano. For Nikkei, removal to the internment camps meant a life of exile lived in a strange climate, among strange neighbours— without the familiar food of home. Their stories of clearing the land for gardens, foraging in the woods for berries and mushrooms, and generally “making do” are thus tales of resistance and sur- vival, pedagogical tales of individuals finding their place in community, and of communities making a home. East On the sacred circle, east is the place of springtime and childhood, the home of fire and the creative spirit, the place of transformation. In the lives of peoples who have known a history of exclusion and discrimination, wintertime stories of struggle and conlflict predominate, but tales of springtime do exist: But anyways, some of us used to just sit under the oak trees and these acorns would fall down. Then we would pretend that they were nuts and they were very nice you know. They tasted > good. And sometimes when the boys were 6vZ

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