On a bench at Kits Beach, on one of those stunning sunny days we’ve probably already started taking for granted, I met with psychotherapist and author Dave Waugh. We were supposed to talk about his book Evolving Soulfully, but our conversation glided like the wind-born gulls on whose droppings we were seated.
The report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) had just been released. It was shortly before National Aboriginal Day, which was last Sunday, and now we are in the countdown to Canada Day. We’ll get to Waugh’s new book, I promise, when it is officially launched in the fall. But I got waylaid by the story of Waugh’s own history and how it seems a microcosm of our country and its people.
Though he didn’t have any personal investment — or so he thought at the time — Waugh was one of the many Canadians who attended some of the hearings of the TRC. He didn’t know what to expect, and the experience overwhelmed him.
“I witnessed the elders there sharing their grief at some of the horrific abuse they endured and I found myself sobbing,” he told me. “I really had to hold back on my grief because I didn’t want to overshadow their experience. I was right behind a man who was really hurt. I could really hear his vulnerability and the truth in what he was sharing.
But I walked out stunned asking, ‘What does this have to do with me? I’m a pretty emotional person but why did that impact me as strongly as it did?”
Human empathy demands that we feel a response to narratives like those shared by First Nations survivors of residential schools. But Waugh is in touch enough with his feelings to suspect something else was at play.
He recalled an earlier pivotal moment in his life.
“When I was first training in counselling, one of the classes I was in was called Family Systems and Substance Abuse. Probably 90 per cent of the class was First Nations people. My project was to create a family tree, a genogram, but then in this course we had symbols for addiction, divorce, illnesses, stuff like that, so by the time you’re done, you could see trauma going down certain branches of the family tree.”
Waugh is descended from a francophone mother and an anglophone father and his heritage — that of the country’s so-called “two founding peoples” — placed him in a painful cultural situation.
“I stood in front of the class with my knees shaking, thinking, it’s my ancestors that really traumatized your ancestors with the residential schools and this kind of stuff,” he recalled. “Then it was fast forward to 2013 when I went to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and I dug deeper [into genealogy] and found, sure enough, there’s First Nations on my father’s side of the family.”
More than 300 years ago, a male ancestor married an Iroquois woman named Medicine Fishwoman. She converted to Catholicism and was baptized Marie.
The day Waugh and I sat on Kits Beach, news was fresh about Rachel Dolezal, the Spokane, Wash. woman and erstwhile NAACP leader who identifies as black but who was born white. We discussed the dangers of cultural appropriation and Waugh was careful to insist he is making no claims on the history of others. But he is deeply immersed in the spiritual practices of many cultures and he subscribes to an idea of the one spirit, or what Buddhists call Big Mind and Sufis call the “indwelling divine.” The new knowledge of his roots, he says, made it seem like “the whole story of Canada started to emerge.”
“I realized that I have these three rivers in my blood, the English, the French and the First Nations,” he said. (In fact, Medicine Fishwoman/Marie came from Trois-Rivieres, Quebec, he notes.) “I’m still trying to grapple with that. It’s too long ago to claim any status or anything. But in my blood is the whole history of Canada in some ways.”
Looking across Burrard Inlet where, if plans are approved, exponentially more oil tankers will soon carry resources abroad, Waugh expressed admiration for the First Nations people whose culture demands that they act as stewards of the land. It is an attitude he says all humans must adopt or risk extinction.
A propos of no particular faith or cultural tradition, Waugh has adopted a number of Earth-related rituals. He points to a weeping willow, a talisman in his life, the place where several decades ago he says, “I kind of put my stake in the ground and said, This is it. This is the place I’m going to build a life.”
The ashes of his father he spread in the ocean here. His mother’s ashes are by a nearby cedar.
“I often do little rituals over here imagining the shore, my father, is caressing the beach of my mother,” he said. “So there’s this beautiful relationship to the land. The more that I see it as sacred space, the more meaningful this place becomes for me.”
Rumi, the Sufi mystic, said the core wound of humanity is separation from nature, Waugh says.
“We are nature. We are made up of those elements,” he says.
Returning to the stewardship of the First Nations in environmental protection — he especially credits the Tsleil-Waututh Nation for leading the fight against increased pipelines and tanker traffic — Waugh sees First Nations modelling for the rest of the world a healthy attitude to integrating ourselves and the natural world. His journey to discovering the different nations in his own family line is a process that, if extrapolated, could have positive implications for the world, he believes.
“I think there’s some hope for the environment with them leading us all to discovering our indigenous soul,” he said.
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@Pat604Johnson
