re: blogging........can be a pain in the ass these days........no one does it?!?!

hello friends, fans, foe and family,

a new rant/non-fiction/story for your consideration, expect more while i am still above the ground!

hugs and love,


CB


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Blogging:

It’s a pain in the ass. Why do I do it? I’m not sure. In 2008 I started this blog and keep it going, I guess it’s because it’s a sort of tangible record of my time here and what has happened in the past ten years. Looking back I remember starting my blog at a coffee shop downtown T’kemlups called “Zacks Tea and Coffee.” I was lost and how no idea to get to where I am now. I had had a book deal with an aboriginal publisher that had folded and lost my final edited version of my manuscript in the chaos and shuffle of going under. My editor, famous aboriginal author Richard Van Camp didn’t have one either and it all really sucked. He had helped me get the book deal in the first place, which I am thankful for, because he plucked me out of obscurity and got me gigs and published in literary magazines and was a fine mentor. Then he separated from his wife, sadly, and then moved to the big city and I was on my own after that, which really sucked as well.

Never underestimate the power, no the value of a mentor. Someone who has been there, done it, seen it all and lived to tell about it. We don’t have nearly enough mentors in NDN country. Nor enough father role models either. I believe it’s because of the damn residential school system. For over a century it divided families, killed languages and nearly destroyed an entire nation of Aboriginal people. I grew up in a wildly different world than my kids. It was violent. Chaotic and I saw my mother get abused many, many times. Both her and my father went to residential school, the same one in fact, St. George’s in Lytton, BC. Right near the heart of Nlaka’pamux territory, across from the Stein Valley, our centre of the universe. Richard was a good mentor, a fine one who helped me navigate the complicated world of contracts, deals and publishing. This is something I hope to do one day as well with an author. To never forget my roots and beginnings in this crazy creative world I live in and now watch my kids following in my steps.

In many ways, my relationship with my parents is complicated. I feel sad for them. Angry. Frustrated. And for many years, I was lost. I had no direction, no guidance from them, because they were lost in their pain and suffering as well. My mother entered residential school at 5 or 6 and didn’t leave until she was 16 when she was pregnant with me. Haha, and I laugh now because I think I was conceived at a residential school. Years later, I met a famous blackfoot aboriginal artist named Adrian and he too was conceived at a residential school and we laughed about it. The irony of it all right? Now as a parent, with children becoming little entities or rather tall entities on their own paths, I do my best to help them. I never really had parents. I said it. I’m sure if my mother reads this it will hurt, but it’s true.

She was taken to residential school, forcibly, so young and had so little contact with her own parents, my grandparents, that when she had me, she wasn’t ready or equipped for it. She was angry. For a decade in that hellish nightmare of physical pain and sexual abuse called St. George’s residential school she lost her language and family. She had older siblings at the school, but children were forbidden to talk to one another, as well as speak their own language. The few times she saw my grandparents was during the one or two times a year they were allowed to visit and it was in the gymnasium, surrounded by hundreds of other parents and weeping children who just wanted to go home. Fuck you Canada. That’s what you did.

So now I am a parent, and I am adrift in a world and not sure where I am going or what I am doing for a living. I guess I tell stories for a living. I make films and art that tell a story as well. I also write songs too, that are very cinematic and instrumental. The unifying them I would say is sadness and anger. Even as I near fifty years old, one half of a century, the fire burns bright and with fury. Sometimes I let alcohol dull the blade and flame, because it drives me mad, and it tempers the rage. Other times I stoke the flames and let it out creatively. Either way, I have to keep going and try to be a good dad, reclaim my language and culture and try to find time to mentor others on their path as well. Only now am I figuring things out, time, pressure and experience has forged the path I am on now and I hope I never lose it.