James Bartleman's "As Long as the River Flows" story of the struggles of First Nations
'Grieving of the people' - Scenes of desperation in Northern Ontario led to James Bartleman's first novel
By Mark Medley, May 1, 2011
James Bartleman, lieutenant-governor of Ontario from 2002 to 2007, often visited the province's First Nations communities.
A review of James Bartleman's Novel - As Long as the Rivers Flow
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When James Bartleman arrived at Wunnumin Lake First Nation, in the remote reaches of Northern Ontario, three kids were already dead. A suicide pact was robbing the community of its youth, and Bartleman, the former lieutenant-governor of Ontario, had been invited by his friend Stan Beardy, Grand Chief of the Nishinabe Aski Nation, to take part in a healing circle. He remembers how the surviving teens came into the room, hoodies pulled up and heads bowed low, like "monks in prayer."
"They wouldn't look up," he says. "And their faces just looked like they were in terminal depression. And I could see that they wanted to die, too."
In First Nations culture "there's a blur between dreams and reality, where dreams are reality," explains Bartleman, 71. "There really is no differentiation between the supernatural and the natural."
Still, Bartleman was struck by what he was told; that after the first teen died, "the others reported that person came to see them, to say 'I died, it's your turn.' Then the second one died, and the two went to see the third. That made a tremendous impression on me. That this would happen. The desperation of the kids, and also the sense of obligation.
"I thought this is something which needs to be told in a novel."
The novel, As Long as the Rivers Flow, is dedicated to the memory of these lost youths, and to their parents and grandparents, many of whom were victims of Canada's notorious residential school system.
The book tells the story of Martha, who at age six is sent away to a residential school on the shores of James Bay, where she is tortured by nuns and sexually assaulted by a lecherous priest named Father Antoine. When she returns to her home on Cat Lake at the age of 16, Martha is a broken woman. Her son, Spider, suffers from fetal alcohol syndrome and is soon taken away by the Children's Aid Society and adopted by a family in Toronto.
Bartleman is sympathetic to his characters while exposing their flaws. After Spider is taken from her, the narrator notes, "She should have been a better mother. She had not taken care of (her baby's) basic needs and had been a drunk. Her friends lived aimless lives and neglected their kids. She deserved what she got."
Years later, after giving birth to a daughter named Raven, Martha sets out for Toronto to search for her son, while back in Cat Lake, Raven struggles to find reasons to live. It's not, Bartleman says, "an indictment of white society," but rather a novel showing how a wrong committed against one person can echo for generations.
"My role, I thought, was not to be a spokesman for the native people," he says. "It was not to be a propagandist for native causes and to adopt a black-and-white position ... but to try and come to some sort of understanding, and have the people who read the novel first of all look upon it as a novel, not as a pamphlet or a piece of propaganda."
As Long as the Rivers Flow is Bartleman's fifth book, but represents his first attempt at fiction. He achieved some success with the memoirs Out of Muskoka (2002) and Raisin Wine (2007), both of which explored his childhood in Port Carling, Ont., as the son of a white father and Chippewa mother, but felt a novel would better suit the kind of story he wanted to tell.
Still, much of the book is rooted in fact; he accompanied organizations like the Salvation Army and the Anishnawbe Street Patrol as they met with those living on the streets of Toronto; he spoke with numerous survivors of residential schools; and he made many trips to Northern Ontario during his time as lieutenantgovernor. "In a sense, the book is a culmination of five years of travel in the North," he says. "I went to too many funerals, and saw the grieving of the people."
Bartleman also drew on one particularly frightening moment from his 35-year career in the foreign service: In February 1999, when he was Canada's high commissioner to South Africa, Bartleman was assaulted and robbed in a Cape Town hotel room by a man wielding a stun gun.
"I went into a big tailspin in which a lot of old issues of racism and things like that came up from when I was a child," he says. "I had lots of nightmares, and I had depression. I came out of all that, but I knew what it was like. (So) I was able to speak from the inside when I talked about, for example, Martha's depressive episodes. What I was writing was in a sense my own experience of how far down you can go."
Ultimately, the book is an uplifting read -the original title was The Healing Circle, after all -and Bartle man hopes its message of hope will appeal to a wide audience.
"I don't know -I mean, you can dream big -I would hope that this book would appeal to marginalized people everywhere -not just native people," he says. "So those are my dreams. Whether that will happen, who knows?"
Regardless, he's already deep into a second novel.