Witi Ihimaera - Uncle's Story

We walked out into the street, and when Roimata saw the car she screamed so loudly that Franklin almost dropped everything he was carrying.

‘Oh, my God —’

Parked at the kerb was a limousine, sparkling white and as long as a city block. It was the kind of car movie stars arrive in at the Academy Awards.

‘Quick,’ Roimata said, ‘we must get somebody to take a photograph of us with the car and the chauffeur.’

She gave a passerby her camera. She found a chauffeur’s hat on the front seat and commanded a rather startled Franklin to put it on. Then she draped herself across the bonnet, blew a kiss, and the photo was taken.

By comparison, our hotel was small.

‘Ah well,’ Roimata said. ‘It had to happen. Back to being just the executive officer of an organisation nobody ever heard of in a country at the bottom of the world.’

She showed Franklin where to put her bags in the room and offered him a tip.

‘That won’t be necessary, Madam,’ he said, smirking happily.

‘What’s so funny?’ I asked.

‘Oh nothing,’ he said.

He opened the door to my room, which was about the size of a cupboard.

‘I do hope you enjoy Survival 2000. I am, and it hasn’t even started!’

The next morning, the telephone woke me up. I thought it would be Roimata wanting to go across to the conference venue for the opening ceremony.

‘Well?’ Auntie Pat asked, ‘have you spoken to Cliff Harper yet?’

‘Auntie, I’ve only just arrived.’

I tried to stall, thinking fast about what I should tell her and what I shouldn’t. But I knew in my heart the best thing to do was not to keep Auntie Pat’s hopes up. I hated the idea of her assuming a meeting might take place when, so far, all the signs were that it wouldn’t.

‘Cliff Harper didn’t show.’

‘What do you mean he didn’t show?’

She made it sound as if it was my fault.

‘The man I spoke to when I rang up from Los Angeles to arrange the meeting in Chicago didn’t show. He said he wasn’t the man I was looking for. He may be the wrong Cliff Harper.’

‘It’s him,’ Auntie Pat said. ‘I know it’s him.’

‘No, Auntie,’ I answered. ‘You only want it to be him.’ I took a deep breath. ‘If it is Cliff Harper, he’s married and has a son. He could have more children, for all I know. I can’t go barging into somebody’s life if they don’t want me to. I’ll ring him again and try to talk to him.’

There was silence at the other end of the telephone. For a moment I thought that Auntie Pat had hung up. Her voice came sliding down the line, striking me in the ear.

‘Michael, you are not to let this go. Do you hear me, Nephew? Do you hear me?’

‘Okay,’ Roimata asked me cheekily when she finally met me in the foyer, ‘are you ready to go?’

Roimata had decided to be totally glamorous. When she came down the stairs in her red dress and long greenstone earrings I couldn’t help doing an appreciative wolf whistle.

‘I’ll tell Carlos you did that,’ she said.

We took a taxi across the Alexandra Bridge to the Museum of Civilisation. The trees fringing the deep swirling Ottawa River were turning red and there was an invigorating bite to the wind. The museum appeared — and it was breathtaking. It seemed to have been layered into the land, long slabs of honey-coloured stone contoured to fit the slope down to the river.

There’s nothing like the first day of a conference. The foyer of the museum was packed with people registering, meeting and greeting, shouting and rushing from group to group. Of course, Roimata, with her flair for the dramatic, couldn’t just stand there unnoticed. As soon as she saw all those people — representatives of First Nations throughout the world — she was moved to karanga.

‘Tena koutou nga iwi o te Ao, tena koutou, tena koutou, tena koutou —’

Her voice soared across the foyer, cutting through the hubbub. People turned to see where the spear of sound was coming from — and that is when we began to chant our way forward.

‘Well,’ I whispered to Roimata, ‘that’s one way to make an entrance.’

We may only have been two, but our people have always said that where there is one, there is a thousand, where there are two, there are two thousand. When we stand, we do not stand alone. We bring our culture with us.

From among the crowd came a familiar face. He smiled at me, and bowed to Roimata.

‘I see that the Maori delegation from New Zealand has arrived,’ Franklin said.

He took us in hand, introducing us to the organising committee and, in particular, its chairman.

There were very few people I’ve taken an instant dislike to, but Bertram Pine Hawk was one of them. He was young, handsome in an arrogant kind of way, and had that sense of well-oiled assurance that would one day make him an ideal candidate for State governor. Franklin went up in my estimation when I noticed that there was no love lost between him and Bertram either.

‘Would you mind,’ Franklin asked me, ‘if I introduce you and Roimata to some of the other delegates? They will look after you.’

Lang, Sterling and Wandisa were all around my age. Having grown up with Western movie images of Indians as tall, muscular and looking as if they could eat six white folks a day, I was surprised to find how small they were in stature and how unassuming in appearance. Certainly, I was not prepared for the sly irony of their wit and banter.

‘I’m Okanagan,’ Lang said.

‘And I’m Dakota,’ Sterling said. ‘Lang’s a mountain Indian, I’m a plains Indian. Plains Indians generally stay clear of those mountain people.’

‘If I was you,’ Wandisa said, eyes twinkling, ‘I would stay clear of them both and just stick with us Inuit.’

I couldn’t help laughing. ‘Sounds just like home.’

‘So how come you’re all friends?’ Roimata asked politely.

‘Us? Friends?’ Wandisa answered with mock horror. ‘Oh, no, we just happen to be standing together.’

At that moment a drum began to beat. A woman in ceremonial Indian dress appeared at the top of the escalator and began to call us to the First Peoples’ Hall. I saw an old man look across at Lang and frown.

‘That’s my grandfather,’ Lang said. ‘He’s the chief of my tribe. He doesn’t like me consorting with a plains Indian and an Inuit.’

‘The thing is,’ Sterling whispered conspiratorially, ‘the three of us all met at university and Lang’s grandfather thinks Wandisa and I are responsible for having made Lang, well, stray from the beaten track.’

The way Sterling said it made me wonder whether there were other meanings within his words.

‘Oh, Michael, look —’

Roimata was gasping as we went down the escalator.

We seemed to descend into the past. The First Peoples’ Hall opened before us, a spectacular row of totems, carvings, canoes and great houses commemorating the ancestral cultures of Canada’s West Coast: the Tlingit, Nishga, Gitksan, Tsimshian, Haida, Haisla, Heiltsuk, Nuxalk, Oowekeno, Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuuchahhnulth and Coast Salish. As we descended, the totems and great houses rose above us. I was unprepared for their scale, their sheer size and psychic impact.

‘We used to live in a world that must have looked like this,’ Lang said, taking Roimata under his wing. ‘It was inhabited by Beaver, Thunderbird, Lightning Snake and other supernatural beings, and they supplied us with all our needs. We fished the seas for whales, seals, sea lions, halibut and codfish. The spring rivers gave us shoals of oil-rich eulachon, and salmon returned to spawn in the streams where they were born. Seaweed and shellfish were gathered along the shore. We culled the tall dense forests for the massive cedar and yew to build our villages; we cultivated spruce roots for weaving, and salal, thimbleberry and huckleberry. Then Europeans arrived in the 1770s —’