On Being A Settler

By Isabella Mori

I am a white grandmother living in a place called Canada. Or, let me try this: I am a settler living on Indigenous land.

What does it mean to be a settler? When I first heard the term applied to anyone – mostly white people? – who is not Indigenous, I felt uncomfortable. Somewhat insulted, actually. I came here from Germany in 1982! I didn’t ‘settle’ like Israelis in Palestine or like farmers in Manitoba in the 1800s who plonked themselves down on fertile land and said, this is mine now. The term ‘settler’ made me think of the Monopoly man, sitting down somewhere with his fat behind, money bag in hand, smirking with disdain at the losers who didn’t have the smarts to amass as much fortune as he. That wasn’t me!

It occurs to me now that I saw that term depicted in my mind as much as a caricature as the ‘Indian’ I had grown up with. Germany, my birthplace, was and still is fascinated with ‘Indians’ and as a child, I, too, loved the books by Karl May, a shady character who wrote reams of adventure books without ever having been to the countries he supposedly portrayed. His most famous hero was the ‘Indian’ Winnetou, portrayed in movies by the white French actor Pierre Brice, who impressed mostly through his noble-savage sexiness.

Caricature that he may have been, I probably arrived in Canada more with the ‘noble’ part in mind than the ‘savage.’ To some degree that could have been influenced by having lived in Paraguay for two years before I came to Canada. Whatever the questionable history of Spanish and other colonizations in Paraguay is, for a number of reasons, the most-often spoken Indigenous language there, Guaraní, is very much alive and truly a national language. That keeps the image of Indigenous people there at the forefront, if only nominally. Together with my German noble-savage fantasy, this experience made for some expectations when I came to Canada. But almost everywhere I expressed it, my interest in Indigenous history and life met with blank “what-is-she-talking-about” looks.

I entered this enormous expanse of land that stretches from the territories of the Mi’kmaq to that of the Nootka, from the Inuit to the Anishinabek, carrying with me a backpack. Which was, by the by, made by a Paraguayan man who surely must have had some Indigenous ancestry, crafted in the – most likely colonial – leather style sold by Indigenous people on the hot streets of Asunción.

Heavier than that was the other baggage that I brought with me. Generations of landed gentry are etched into me on my father’s side, and generations of theologians, teachers, merchants, and doctors on my mother’s. There was also an explorer, Ludwig Becker, the illustrator of the Burks & Wills expedition. Each generation was dotted with people who, like me, were hungry for other countries, different landscapes, new language sounds, music yet unknown. But we can’t be confused with nomadic First Nations because we weren’t nomads – we were and are visitors, explorers, and, like my father’s forebears and – settlers. Uninvited visitors.

One of the reasons why I ended up in this country called Canada was my on-again-off-again boyfriend who had decided to emigrate to Canada. Backpack on my back, and half-formed ideas and my history and personal baggage somewhere on my inattentive mind, I arrived one morning at his doorstep, took off that backpack, and settled. Within an hour, boyfriend took me to a ravine in Oakville, Ontario, where he lived, on the traditional territory of the Anishinabek, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), and Ojibwe/Chippewa peoples. I climbed into the lap of that beautiful, lush piece of land, walked through grass taller than my white-woman stature, heard the fish splash, and saw more dragonflies than ever in my life. It was an instant falling-in-love, there in the ravine, here in this country. I settled into that falling-in-love down in the ravine, like heavy honey settles in the bottom of a cup of steaming, fragrant tea.

To a degree, I suppose one falls in love with something or someone familiar. There must have been something I recognized on that hot summer day in July of 1982, a peacefulness perhaps: I still remember how comfortingly far-from-everything that place felt. But all in all, I’m probably more the type that falls in love with the unknown, with the not-me.  Is that my forebears’ spirit, the hunger for the different?

Love and hunger – they can be so dangerously close. Unconditional love is gentle, appreciative, giving, freeing. But that’s usually not what happens when one falls in love. Falling in love is marked by desire, and desire is hunger. I want more! I want it all! More yet! This grasping, gasping, ravenous desire, celebrated in millions of love songs all over the world, from Elvis to Rihanna.

Back then I knew nothing about how to love and respect a place. It wasn’t in my city-dwelling, land-owning, explore-to-dominate bones; my history hadn’t taught me about that. I’m thinking of Pelka'mulox now, the father of N’kwala, the man after whom the Nicola Valley and Nicola tribe in the Merritt area 270 km east of Vancouver is called. In his long life in the 1800s, N’kwala was grand chief of the Okanagan people and chief of the Nicola Valley peoples, an alliance of Nlaka'pamux and Okanagans and the surviving Nicola Athapaskans, and also of the Tk'emlúps te Secwe̓pemc in the area around the place that is known as Kamloops.

What I read is that Pelka’mulox was one of the first people to encounter North West Company traders. He described them and their lifestyle to another chief, who found that story so preposterous that he called Pelka’mulox a liar. This started a row that ended Pelka’mulox’s life. The settler-explorer-landowner lifestyle, the life I grew up with, was just too unbelievable, but even from afar, through a story, that lifestyle managed to kill an Indigenous man.

There’s also my buddy Alf. Mi’kmaq on his father’s side and Mohawk on his mother’s. Alf’s lifestyle, the life he must live to keep bread on the table, kills him. He would much rather put venison on that table that he has brought in himself, or salmon caught from a canoe. But he has to settle for, has been saddled with, driving big, loud vehicles that poison the air my fore-settlers took as their property.

I’ve known Alf for over two decades. It was his wife, another immigrant, who mentioned maybe ten years into our friendship that his mother was a residential school survivor. How his grandmother would steal to the school fence day after day so that she could at least see her daughter. Alf doesn’t like to make much of his Indigenous heritage. Being ‘Injun’ wasn’t such a good thing in the sixties and seventies when he grew up.

Alf and I, we love trudging through the woods together, and have long conversations that are at times so hilarious that we have to stop and catch our breath. He understands the land way better than I do but he doesn’t call it that. Instead, he talks about his time as a Scout master, about being out in the mud during his army time, about all the time he got lost in the bush – “but I’m never lost, I’m always right here.” He trusts the land. I’m learning to trust with him, learning that the land likes me, is always inviting me, despite all the harm done to it. I’m learning to love it back.

The Anishinabek, one of the peoples who had lived in and around Oakville for a good ten thousand years, have seven sacred teachings, among them respect, humility, and (mutual) love. It’s not that I did not respect the land, or was against mutuality in love, or that the concept of humility was unknown to me. It just didn’t occur to me that these ideas could apply to the physical place I had so quickly settled into, or that there were any teachings to consider. I had only the vaguest, vaguest notion of connectedness, such an important concept for Indigenous people.

That ravine in Oakville – I was not able to do more than give it the label “beautiful,” and it makes me think now of a plantation owner branding his slave. Utterly unable to perceive it with my conscious mind, somewhere deep I knew, though, that much more was taking place; rather than me stamping a word on that ravine on the outskirts of Oakville, I was being received by the land some call Turtle Island.  (‘Canada’ and ‘America’ being names that were given by the colonizers/settlers.)

In Oakville, I became pregnant. The boyfriend who had by then turned into a husband (now ex) saw a painting entitled ‘Mindemoya’ and instantly fell in love with the name. So my first child born in Canada got the Ojibwe name Mindemoya.

Did we give her that name or did we take it? It certainly never occurred to us to consult with an Ojibwe Elder – that would have been miles away from our thinking. We were, however, curious about the name. In the beginning, we didn’t even know it was Ojibwe – it just sounded really nice. The cadence of Ojibwe, Cree, Inuktitut and other frequently spoken Indigenous languages was not only unfamiliar to us; we did not know these sounds and languages were anything to know about.

We did start asking around about the name’s origin and finally heard one of the legends of Mindemoya told to us by a white poet, Peter Jones. Mindemoya, he said, means something like ‘Old Woman’ in this language called Ojibwe. We also heard a few legends about her. Our favourite was the one where the Old Woman sacrificed herself by jumping off a rock; in return, the hope was, Spirit would save her people from starvation. It’s our favourite version but I’m wondering now, is it a settler version?

At some point we realized Mindemoya was the name of a place on Manitoulin Island. It may have been then that it started to slowly dawn on us that there was something important about connecting place, name, and Spirit but if that was the case, it was only in a faint and intellectual way. A few years later, we drove through Northern Ontario. It was the first time that I felt some sense of Spirit in the trees and earth and the awe-inspiring Northern Shield.

The baby Mindemoya, the Old Woman, was my first true entry into the Indigenous world. An uninvited, uninformed entry. We could say we settled the name Mindemoya, took it without asking because, well, there wasn’t anyone around to tell us otherwise. That’s a colonial thing: something appears to be lying around, no-one’s fighting you, so you take it.

My maiden name is von Huendeberg – “Of the mountain of the red deer hind.” (The hind is the female red deer.)  It was good to take my now husband’s last name, Mori. It means ‘forest’ in Japanese. His first name is Glenn, also a forest name. These names, too, call me to the land.

The people who were of – owned? – the mountain of the hind most likely owned serfs, seeing that they were ‘landed’ Germans in Russia and the Baltics, where owning serfs was commonplace among landowners and families like my grandfather’s, small-potato aristocrats. In other words, they were slave-owning settlers – not on Turtle Island, not in the Caribbean, but in Eastern Europe. Russia ‘gave’ them land, meaning that they took it from the people who lived there originally and handed it over to the ‘landed’ gentry so that they could occupy it for Mother Russia. Colonialism and the hunger for land that Indigenous writers like Thomas King talk about so eloquently thrives everywhere, in all sorts of forms.

Yes, I come from a family of settlers. My mother and father didn’t own land or serfs anymore – I grew up poor, my father the proverbial starving artist – but some of the mindset still remains. A small example: I find it easier than my husband, who comes from a family of Japanese Canadian farmers, to take without asking what I need – little things, a cup, a roll of duct tape – and I more naturally occupy space in our home with books, chachkas, paintings. I also think nothing of hiring someone to clean the house, something my husband is not particularly comfortable with.  

It was natural, too, that when I lived in Paraguay, I had a servant, a muchacha, meaning ‘girl’. Everybody had one! ‘Everybody’ meaning all the other immigrants and relatively well-off people I knew. The ‘girl’ was a few years older than I. Her name was Chinita. I patted myself on the back for paying her a few pennies more than average. She worked more hours than I and was a wonderful second mother to my little son, my first child, born in Germany. Only once, for a minute or so, did I meet one of her own children. I made eight times more money than she. She probably was at least part Indigenous. Being a settler, a colonizer, comes easy to me. How different am I really from the Monopoly Man?

So here I am now, settled on this land that the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Watuth call home. There is no treaty; the land has never been ceded or otherwise negotiated.

It takes only a few steps to walk over to the Tea Swamp Park. The creek that used to be there, like so many others, has been built over. Frances Bula, one of Vancouver’s historians, tells us that it used to be a beaver pond in a dense forest with a rich flora. One of the plants that grew there was a type of rhododendron that had a variety of healing properties that Indigenous people used by brewing parts of it – hence, the “tea swamp.”

I was invited by the people who teach Indigenous Cultural Safety courses where I worked to look at where I’m settled but also what my cultural history is and what lands, physically, I come from, to feel what it means to be connected to land and to ancestral land. We all come from the Earth; what did that particular piece of earth where I was born and raised look, sound, feel like? Eventually, I wrote this poem:

I’m from a big old city,

an old house that survived war bombings

a big old city flat with long hallways,

with paintings everywhere, and records and old books;

a cold, old kitchen.

I’m from a father who smoked cigarettes

in communist-red packages

a mother who believed in unions.

And going deeper, farther, older, from the forest,

I am of wolves and of red deer.

I am a grandmother, and thrive among the trees.

I’m from a grandfather

who gathered egg shells for the compost

and rosehips, raspberries and dandelion.

I’m from a mother

who hiked with me through Alpine meadows

and who I herded out into a man-made park for hours on end

to snatch her from the death-claws of depression.

I’m from my own story

of loving, settling on, one landscape after another

the blue sky, green brush, and red earth of Paraguay

the cliffs and luminescent sands of Chile

the meadows of my homeland Germany

the deep ravines of Anishinabek land.

And here I sit in Rupert Park

land of the Tsleil-Watuth,

land sloping down the narrows,

with willows planted on them. White people willows.

A golf course. White people golf course.

Right by a highway. White people highway.

… and wonder:

what would this land be like had settlers mingled peacefully

with those who’d stewarded the land for many thousand years?

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Isabella Mori writes novels, short fiction, poetry and nonfiction, and is the author of three books of and about poetry, including A bagful of haiku – 87 imperfections. Isabella’s work has appeared in publications such as State Of Matter,  Kingfisher, Signs Of Life and The Group Of Seven Reimagined. An alumna of The Writers Studio, Isabella is the founder of Muriel’s Journey Poetry Prize which celebrates socially engaged poetry. A book of nonfiction about mental health and addiction is planned for publication with Three Ocean Press in the spring of 2024.