Staring down white privilege
Crossing the River: An Unsettling Memoir
by Sandra Hayes-Gardiner
Calgary: BixBooks, 2023 [title can be ordered by email at sandrahg@shaw.ca ]
$20 / 9781777296759
Reviewed by Sage Birchwater
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Like most non-Indigenous Canadians who grew up in the mid-twentieth century, Sandra Hayes-Gardiner took her white privilege for granted. She was born and grew up in the northern Manitoba town of The Pas, at the confluence of the Pasquia and the Saskatchewan Rivers. Her dad ran several businesses there including a mortuary, a funeral home, a hearse that doubled as an ambulance, and a general store.
Crossing the River is the author’s personal journey of atonement – coming to terms with her birthright of white privilege. The book gives voice to a different narrative of Canada’s history and offers personal insight into the meaning of reconciliation. Hayes-Gardiner says Canada’s education system did a good job of silencing the true story of Canada. Now it’s time to walk through a new and more inclusive door.
She credits the learning she received from the Elders and Knowledge Keepers in the Cariboo Chilcotin during her 20 years in the region for turning her perspective around. “It was pivotal for me in my unlearning and still is.”
Across the bridge from The Pas, on the other side of the Saskatchewan River, is the Cree community of Opaskwayak. Hayes-Gardiner says the two communities are side by side, but were divided by more than just a river.
“We were divided by history, language and culture,” she writes. “Typically my generation of Canadians was raised with little knowledge of First Nations history.”
She invites us on a journey every Canadian can take. Digging into her own story, she beckons the reader to reconcile and make new a flawed historical perspective of Canada that doesn’t tell the true story of our colonial past. Growing up in the 1950s and ‘60s, she absorbed the notions of continuing racism and prejudice and gathered her own set of discriminating beliefs toward Indigenous people.
When she headed off to Winnipeg to study for her social work degree, Hayes-Gardiner says there was no mention of the word “colonialism” in the lessons of Canadian history. “I didn’t know the concept. I was living at a time when only the partial truth of Canada was told.”
When she moved back home to The Pas with her lawyer husband at 24 years of age to work as a social worker for the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA), she knew almost nothing of her Indigenous clients. She was responsible for removing “at risk” children from their families, often sending them to residential school.
She was profoundly affected by the brutal murder of an Indigenous woman near The Pas in 1971, and eventually began listening to her intuition and following her abiding curiosity, and the wisdom of Elders and Spirit.
It wasn’t until Hayes-Gardiner moved to Williams Lake and the Cariboo Chilcotin region of central British Columbia in 1979 that she became aware of St. Joseph’s Mission residential school just down the road. That’s when she started to clue into the darker side of Canada’s colonial past.
“I heard very little of the Indian residential schools, even though we had one in The Pas where I grew up. Now I was being educated about a different Canadian history.”
In her role as a counsellor and therapist working with many Indigenous clients, Sandra’s perspective shifted.
Canada never had an “Indian problem,” she insists. Rather, Canada’s historical perspective was a “white” problem. Canada’s white settler community, which included her, had its own healing and learning to do. Or more specifically, its “unlearning.”
Toward the end of her tenure in the Cariboo Chilcotin, Hayes-Gardiner was introduced to the KAIROS blanket exercise. This is where blankets are placed all over the floor representing the Indigenous communities that once occupied the whole of Canada. One by one the blankets are removed as the narrator describes historical events. The author eventually was invited to be a facilitator of this powerful empathy-inducing process.
“Canada’s moral landscape was changing. I could feel it and see it,” she says.
Sandra’s story of “crossing the river” between two communities, is both symbolic and literal. Her early career as a social worker for Indigenous families provides the context for facing learned biases and internalized racism. This led to the author’s advocacy work with Indigenous communities and un-learning as she faced Canada’s real history with Indigenous Peoples.
She says her twenty years working as a psychotherapist in Williams Lake and the Cariboo Chilcotin turned her historical and social perspective around. She is grateful for the wisdom shared with her by Secwepemc and Tsilhqot’in Elders.
At the end of the book, Hayes-Gardiner shares her most recent personal experiences in her birth community of The Pas. At the conclusion of a Blanket Exercise workshop there, she returns a pair of mukluks she received 60 years ago as a Grade 12 student, to her dear friend Cecilia Jebb Ross. Cecilia’s mom, Evelyn Jebb, made them originally.
“I had been using them in the Blanket Exercises as a part of the cultural art, telling participants that they had been made by a well-respected Cree Elder from The Pas. I laid them on the blankets along with sealskin mitts from Iqaluit, moosehide moccasins and gauntlets made by Tsilhqot’in, Secwepemc and Cree Elders. It was only then I realized the mukluks needed to be left in this territory. They belonged to Cecilia if she wanted them.”
“Oh yes,” Cecilia told her.
After many emotional goodbyes, Cecilia carried the mukluks as they drove together over Bignell Bridge the author has crossed hundreds of times.
“I feel as if I’m crossing the river for the very first time,” she concludes.
Crossing the River is available at book stores in Williams Lake and Calgary, or can be ordered directly from the author by contacting her by email at sandrahg@shaw.ca.
A portion of all book sales will go towards a bursary at the University College of the North in The Pas, Manitoba to support students focused on reconciliation.
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Sage Birchwater, a long-time resident of the Cariboo-Chilcotin, has written several books about the area including Chiwid (New Star, 1995). Born in Victoria in 1948, Birchwater was involved with Cool Aid in Victoria, travelled throughout North America, and worked as a trapper, photographer, environmental educator, and oral history researcher. Sage served as the Chilcotin rural correspondent for two local papers for 24 years while raising his family south of Tatla Lake. He has also lived in Tatlayoko, where he was a freelance writer and editor, and Williams Lake, where he was a staff writer for the Williams Lake Tribune until his retirement in 2009. His other books include Williams Lake: Gateway to the Cariboo Chilcotin (2004, with Stan Navratil); Gumption & Grit: Extraordinary Women of the Cariboo Chilcotin, (2009); Double or Nothing: The Flying Fur Buyer of Anahim Lake (2010); The Legendary Betty Frank (2011); Flyover: British Columbia’s Cariboo Chilcotin Coast (2012, with Chris Harris); Corky Williams: Cowboy Poet of the Cariboo Chilcotin (2013); Chilcotin Chronicles (2017), reviewed here by Lorraine Weir; and Talking to the Story Keepers: Stories from the Chilcotin Plateau (Caitlin Press, 2022), reviewed here by Richard T. Wright. Editor’s note: Sage Birchwater has recently reviewed books by Lorraine Weir, with Chief Roger William, Trevor Marc Hughes, Hamilton Mack Laing, Mykhailo Ivanychuk, Adrian Raeside, and Matti Halminen for The British Columbia Review.
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-25: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, Maria Tippett, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
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