Racism, Canadian Style

As experienced by Ontario's Lieutenant Governor early in life

Out of Muskoka
James Bartleman
Penumbra Press
187 pages, hardcover
ISBN 189413131

ne summer's day in 1939 , when a sudden storm blew up on Ontario's Lake Couchiching, there was panic at the home of the lake's most famous resident, Stephen Leacock. The adult son of Leacock's cook had taken to the water a few hours before in a flimsy sailing canoe. Leacock launched his motor boat and found the canoe capsized not far from shore. He hauled the young man out of the water, ­impervious to the latter's insistence that he could easily make his own way back to land. Later, Leacock made sure to inform the Toronto Star of his heroic exploit, and the story was picked up by the international wire services, even appearing (doubtless to Leacock's keen pleasure) in The Times.

The young man involved in this misadventure was the father of Ontario's current lieutenant governor, James Bartleman, whose recently published memoirs describe a remarkable life and family background. His father Percy was a ne'er-do-well charmer with a liberal streak of irresponsibility and a penchant for the outdoors. Having spent several years during the Depression as a hobo, he had returned to Ontario and married a Chippewa woman from the village of Port Carling in the northern lake country of Muskoka. (His bride, Maureen, had been just 14 , and all four of her children were born before she reached the age of 22 .) The young couple began their married life near Maureen's Indian relatives in Muskoka, and supported themselves by cutting firewood, picking blueberries and catching fish, with the product of their labours sold to local farmers as well as the tourists who descended on the region each summer.

During the war, they moved to Welland in southern Ontario, so Percy could try his hand as a steelworker. But by 1946 , his love of the outdoors had reasserted itself, and his family—which now included two sons and two daughters—came back to Muskoka. That summer, they occupied a tent on the outskirts of Port Carling. For six-year-old James and his older brother, Bob, it was an idyllic time. By happy coincidence (at least for the two boys), their makeshift lodgings were situated near a garbage dump:

We were proud of our large tent, and considered that our location close to the village dump presented opportunities rather than disadvantages. Granted, the dump had its own distinctive fragrance, and the permanent black cloud of smoke from the burning orange crates, cardboard, scrap lumber, and discarded furniture was not to everyone's taste. But where else could one find treasures such as slightly soiled but usable toys and somewhat torn but still readable comic books, and see wildlife (including raccoons and skunks) in profusion, not to mention flocks of seagulls and crows, which constantly circled over their culinary delights.

Once autumn brought an end to these warm-weather pleasures, Percy managed to rent a cottage for the winter. But the Bartlemans were told they had to vacate the premises by the time the tourist season started in May. In any case, the cottage was hardly luxurious. Uninsulated, it featured most memorably an outdoor toilet that offered virtually no protection during the bitterly cold winter that followed. Meanwhile, the two Bartleman boys attended the four-room Port Carling Elementary and Continuation School, their academic trials (both were woefully unprepared for their studies) matched by less cerebral challenges in the schoolyard. As the more Indian-looking of the two, Bob bore the brunt of the racial taunts repeatedly flung their way. But James, too, was a recipient, and the two brothers grew used to defending themselves from these slights as best they could.

Meanwhile, their mother was finding her own feet. Maureen Bartleman (née Simcoe) was very different from her carefree husband. Intense and serious, she suffered frequent bouts of depression, brought on by childhood hardships at the hands of her alcoholic mother. As an adult, Maureen had nothing to do with this woman; her father died when James and his siblings were still quite young. But the rest of her extended family were often nearby, in a collection of shacks known as Indian Camp, inhabited by a disparate group of Chippewas and Mohawks during the summer months. It was a place where Maureen's children were always welcome, as Bartleman fondly remembers years later:

The ground was carpeted with pine needles and the air was filled with the perfume of giant white pines. The cabins exuded the fragrance of sweet-grass, fresh birchbark, and strips of white ash that were used for making baskets. The Chippewa language is, by its very nature, soft, and conversations were in muted tones. Saturday nights, with their roaring parties, were enlivened by brawls between young Chippewas (always including one of my uncles) and Mohawks, as some vague memory of ancient wars between the two peoples surfaced.

Maureen's influence on her children extended far beyond her heritage. She became the real head of the Bartleman household, with the tacit coopera­tion of Percy's own parents, who were devoted to their errant son's offspring. James's “white” grandparents moved to Port Carling from Orillia, and built a modest house just next to Percy's own shack. This proximity meant they had a significant influence on their grandchildren's upbringing.

For the youthful James, his grandparents' calming presence was crucial, given his ambivalent attitude to his own father. An attentive parent in his own wayward fashion, Percy Bartleman routinely downplayed the importance of formal education, and stressed instead an appreciation of nature. Marriage to a Native woman did not stop him from making racial slights. When angry at James for some transgression or other, he would often chide him with the warning that he would grow up a “shiftless Indian.” For the son, this careless statement was far more painful than the taunts of “dirty half breed” levelled at him by schoolyard peers. His father's gibe “would render me speechless with a rage mixed with helplessness, guilt, and fear. Rage came from a profound feeling that my father's comment was deeply unjust to my mother, my brothers and sisters, and to all Indians. Helplessness and fear came from a suspicion that perhaps my father was right; could it be that my Indian blood had condemned me to come to no good, no matter what I did in life?”

The young boy proceeded to prove his father wrong in the only way he could. By the age of eight, he was diligently working as a paperboy, an experience that over the years honed his entrepreneurial abilities, as he helped to support the family by taking orders for the illegally gill-netted fish caught by his father. This contraband was delivered by James to his customers wrapped in old newspapers and hidden in his carrier bag. On occasion, he would also accompany his father on his illegal fishing expeditions:

We would wait for moonless nights with cloud cover to mask the starlight and then walk through the dark to our canoe at the water's edge, with only the occasional spark from my father's pipe betraying our presence. My father would take the net out of a large packsack and place it in the canoe. We would push quietly out into the current, never removing our paddles from the water, to avoid making splashing sounds, and propel our canoe along until we reached a good spot to set the net. My father would return alone in the early hours to haul in the fish while the family slept.

As the years passed, Percy Bartleman's dependence on such clandestine forms of money making waned, and the family's place in the community solidified. Mau­reen had begun working as a cleaning lady and part-time cook in the homes of tourists. She soon used her employment contacts to acquire the position of lockmaster on the village's waterway for her grateful husband, as well as a series of odd jobs for her sons.

By James's teen years, his self-confidence had blossomed, and he did well at school. But the village of Port Carling was changing, with fewer Indians returning to pass the summers in the nearby camp. By the 1960 s, the abandoned shacks had fallen into disrepair and were torn down. For Bartleman, the gradual departure of his maternal relatives was a passing to be mourned: “I was losing a window on a people and culture that formed part of my being, but I never discussed the matter with my family or friends.”

Meanwhile, one of his summer jobs would cause his life to take a dizzying turn. He was offered a job on one of the island estates that dotted the Muskoka Lakes. It was a job his Indian grandfather as well as his father had each held in turn, on a property owned by a wealthy American couple, the Clauses. James remained at this job for seven summers:

The owners arrived each spring in their company aircraft, accompanied by an Irish cook and household help, the first black people I had ever met. The Clause family were unfailingly cour­teous, and never condescending. They kept a busy social schedule with their millionaire friends from the United States who maintained similar establishments throughout the Muskoka Lakes, particularly the so-called “Millionaires' Row” at Beaumaris on Lake Muskoka.

One day, during the summer of 1958 , when Bartleman had just finished grade 12 and was planning to become an elementary school teacher, Clause asked to see him on the front veranda of the family compound. “The request was unusual,” says Bartleman, “since my contacts with the head of the family had been confined to a respectful greeting each morning when I entered the living room to light the fire.” This time, however, Clause told him that he had been giving some thought to Bartleman's future. If he was interested in obtaining a higher education, Clause would finance him out of the same fund he had set up to underwrite the schooling of his grandchildren. Clause would also pay for him to attend the high school of his choice to gain senior matriculation. It was a life-transforming moment:

After stammering out my thanks, I stumbled off the porch, my mind numb. I suddenly realized that I could be anything I wanted to be…I had no idea whether I had the aptitude or the intelligence…but I had the blind confidence of youth. No challenge was now too great. I remember walking back in a daze to where I had been cutting wood, staring at huge white cumulus clouds in a deep blue Muskoka sky and listening to the lapping of Lake Joseph water on the shore of that deserted part of the island.

It did not take long for the changes in his life to begin. Within a few months, he had moved to London, Ontario, along with his paternal grandparents, to complete his pre-university studies at one of the best high schools in the province. Although he initially found the experience terrifying, he stuck out the course, and the next year enrolled in a four-year history program at the University of Western Ontario. Having weathered the previous year's trial by fire, he now had confidence in his intellectual abilities. As he immersed himself in his studies, however, he came to an unwelcome discovery—middle-class Canadians were as uncomfortable around aboriginal people as his working-class peers in Port Carling had been:

As far as I could tell, there were no Aboriginal students other than myself at Western at the time and few students or faculty members had ever met an Indian. Their knowledge of Canada's Aboriginal reality came, intellectually, from their history courses if they were in the Human­ities; their personal contact came from driving through slum-like reserves in southern Ontario, or from seeing skid-row drunks staggering from one beer parlour to another in downtown London.

Each summer he would return to Port Carling and continue his work for the Clauses. His father had finally realized that his son had worldly success in his grasp. Percy boasted about this fact to all who bothered to listen. “Always seeking female admirers, he sought to live vicariously, chatting up local waitresses and trying to arrange dates for me,” says Bartleman. As for relations with his elder brother, these were now highly problematic. Bob's own aimlessness led to jealousy, and using any pretext, he would engage in what were ostensibly playful tussles. At times, this envy-driven horseplay would become so intense that Bartleman wondered whether he would have to live somewhere else during his summers.

Occasionally when back in Muskoka, he would meet students with whom he fraternized at Western. Often these encounters were unsettling. Most notable was an incident involving a daughter of one of Canada's richest businessmen. (Bartleman does not reveal her name.) After accepting an invitation from the girl to spend a weekend at her family's Muskoka property, he discovered that her parents presumed he must be a male gold-digger intent on wedding their daughter. A few days later, he saw the family again when their yacht passed through the locks at Port Carling. All of them, the girl included, ignored his greeting. “I laughed the matter off, considering that the incident demonstrated social mores more befitting Jane Austen's eighteenth century Britain than twentieth century Canada,” says Bartleman. But the stark contrast with the easy-going geniality and generosity of the Clauses could not be easily forgotten.

Once he had acquired his undergraduate degree, Bartleman returned to Western to do graduate work, again thanks to Clause's funding and now also a government scholarship. But he soon realized he had made a mistake, and dropped out after just a few months. Embar­rassed at having let down the Clauses, he was nonetheless determined to see the world. The rest of that academic year he worked as a high school teacher, and by spring had earned enough for a transatlantic air ticket.

Europe, once he got there, was a revelation. Most important was his realization that in his new surroundings his mixed roots were an attractive attribute rather than an indelible stain:

To my surprise, I discovered that on the other side of the Atlantic, Indians were regarded as courageous, warrior-like, and endowed with an inherent ability to commune with nature, as well as victims of brutal colonial aggression. Exposure to the romantic notion of the noble savage, which goes back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century, and to Karl May's depictions of the heroic exploits of Native Americans in popular literature at the beginning of the twentieth century, had left its mark.

This attitude was as unrealistic, in its own way, as the ill-willed condescension that had been the norm back in Canada. But Bartleman, now a good-looking young man possessed of ­considerable charm, was in no mood to disabuse the Europeans he met (particularly the young women) of such useful misconceptions. After journeying through Britain, he took a ferry to Norway and hitchhiked northward. By the time he reached the Arctic Circle, he had exhausted his meagre financial resources. He decided to cross into Finland and make his way to the Canadian embassy in Helsinki. There he was received by an elegant French Canadian vice-consul. “She told me the Canadian government would not advance funds, but offered to send a telegram to my mother for help,” Bartelman notes. “ I decided at that moment that the foreign service was really for me and that it was time to learn French.”

The money he soon received from his mother allowed him to return to England, where he taught at a secondary school in Essex, until the dullness of his duties drove him to London. After a stint as a night porter in a student residence, it was off to the continent. Passing through the Hague, an affair with a girl who lived there led to her parents' insistence that he be their houseguest. Here, under the parents' watchful eye, Bartleman found himself introduced to the classic refinements of a European bourgeois household:

The family's home was in Wassenar, one of the most exclusive neighbourhoods in the Dutch capital, if not in the entire country. The head of the family was never seen without a jacket and tie, even on weekends. The evening meal was always preceded by cocktails—invariably Dutch gin, taken straight, with kroepoek (a shrimp cracker) as a snack; wine was served at dinner; knives were held in the right hand and forks in the left, not constantly shifted back and forth during the meal as in North America. (No elbows on the table, no thumb on the dish, no crackers in the soup, and don't even think of licking the plate, even in jest!)

Once he had imbibed enough of such training—especially valuable, given his aim to be a diplomat—he decided it was time to return to Canada. Soon he was back in Port Carling for yet another summer. Following a year's teaching in southern Ontario, he passed the exams to join the Department of External Affairs, and was ready to embark on his dream to pursue a diplomatic career.

The next three and a half decades gave him a chance to work in a wide range of countries, including Cuba, Israel and South Africa. Despite the success of his professional career, however, the demons of his Muskoka youth still plagued him: “I found it impossible to come to terms with the village life that had shaped my being. The consequence was that in my own mind I remained an outsider, with an uncertain identity in Canadian society.”

These reservations were to break out yet again into full-fledged anxiety after a horrifying incident in 1999 . In February of that year, while ­serving as Canada's envoy in South Africa, he travelled from Pretoria to Cape Town to attend Nelson Mandela's retirement speech to Par­liament. For Bartleman, it would be an especially symbolic moment, given the prominent role Canada and its foreign service had played in helping smooth Mandela's rise to power. But fate intervened. Soon after arriving at his seafront hotel, Bartleman answered his room door to find a heavy-set man who said he had been sent to check the ceiling fan. When he turned to let the man in, he felt an electric stun gun against his stomach. Despite the numbing electrical surge that ripped through his body, Bartleman was still able to fight back.

“I saw, as if from afar, that I had knocked my assailant to the floor,” he remembers, “but he was rising to his feet, the look in his eyes no longer neutral, but angry and determined…Without thinking, I drove my fist into his face. Overpowering pain engulfed my hand. It was as if I had hit a piece of concrete. At the age of 59 , I was too old for this kind of nonsense.”

In short order, the man broke Bartleman's nose, which “precipitated a cascade of blood over my body, onto him, and over the rug and the bedroom furniture.” Bartleman complied with the man's orders as his hands were bound behind his back with neckties, and he watched his captor go through his suitcases. The man grew increasingly angry with his meager findings of 1,200 rand (about $300 ). Bartleman must be a rich man, since he was well dressed and had arrived at the hotel in a chauffeur-driven limousine. Where was the rest of his money?

Bartleman tried to convince him that there was none: as a diplomat he received a good clothing allowance, but he was not well-off. His captor was evidently unnerved to leave the scene with so little in the way of a reward. “He pushed me forward on the bed and started to force a piece of underclothing down my throat; he wanted to be sure I wouldn't raise the alarm as he made his getaway.” His nose already filled with congealed blood, Bartleman knew he would suffocate unless he managed to remove the gag. He was able to spit it out. Then, as his persecutor began to stuff it back in, he begged for his life. He spoke of his own family, and promised to be silent as his torturer departed.

The man eyed him carefully, then paced the room. As he did so, Bartleman told him that the cashmere sports coat and Hermes tie that he had stolen from the wardrobe suited him, as did the Jaeger-LeCoultre watch he had taken from Bartleman's wrist. The man approached him again, but this time with a distracted air. He told him he would let him live. But before he left, he threatened him one more time, telling him that if he called out or provided the police with any details, then the members of his gang (called the Gestapo) would kill his family. He turned to leave, but before he reached the door, he turned around and came back.

“I thought he had changed his mind and it was the end,” says Bartleman. “Instead, he said, ‘I'm sorry,' and left the room. I was devastated. This petty thief, after brutalizing, humiliating, and robbing me, was now seeking to deny me the right to hate him.”

Bartleman's brush with death caused hardly a ripple in the South African press. In a nation that now has more than 26 , 000 murders a year and a rape taking place every four minutes, a crime of such limited magnitude received little public attention. But the incident made headlines in Canada. Bartleman, meanwhile, could not overcome the distress the incident had caused. “I was shaken to the core…It was as if the groveling I had had to do to survive had destroyed my sense of identity and resurrected old struggles over existential issues that I had come to terms with as a child and youth.”

Soon after this incident, Bartleman retired from the foreign service. Then, in 2002 , came yet another opportunity, with his appointment as Ontario's lieutenant governor. His immediate predecessor, Hilary Weston, brought uncommon enthusiasm and elegance to the position, and managed to raise its public profile in an age when Canadians are becoming increasingly apathetic about their monarchial institutions. Bartleman has the potential to make an equally valuable contribution. In this symbolic office, the hardships and successes of his life take on added resonance. While he has not used his personal story as a stage for political pronouncements, he does not need to. As the details of his life show, even extraordinary luck and remarkable achievement cannot erase the malignant effects of the subtly racist attitudes that still often underlie the treatment of aboriginal Canadians. Books such as this memoir, with its matter-of-fact portrayal of these attitudes and the incalculable harm they have wrought, cannot help but hasten what will hopefully one day be their final disappearance from Canadian society.

Mark Lovewell