Mind 81an existence because it is composed of people who share these meanings and who
use them to share everything else that makes human life possible.
To suggest that there are human beings who might live without ‘organized
society’, therefore, is to say that there are human beings who live without society
at all. To suggest that a people might live without society is to imply that they are
living without language. And to imagine a people without language is to suggest
humans who are not quite human.
Think of an elder on the witness stand being quizzed about whether her soci-
ety is ‘organized’. Are there laws? the lawyers ask. Do you have rules about your
ways of using land? Do you collaborate? Do you live in anything that we can call a
society? To experience this kind of interrogation is to endure scepticism about the
obvious. The suggestion is that your people have not lived long on their lands, that
they have not lived there in the belief these lands are indeed theirs and no one
else’s, that they are not attached to these lands in any profound way, and that they
do not have customs or beliefs uniquely their own. To answer these kinds of ques-
tions is thus to respond to insults. Aboriginal people who take the witness stand in
land-claims cases often have an intense feeling of not existing; their history, their
homes, the integrity of their grandparents are all contested. To be obliged to prove
that which defines you is to have a sense that your very humanity is in question.
7
Imagine the crowded, roaring bar of the George on 96th Street, Edmonton, a
Prairie city in the Canadian midwest. The George is a rundown beer parlour in a
part of town where no one goes. No one, that is, except drifters, down-and-outs
and hard drinkers. There are Indians, some hookers, winos from many back-
grounds. It is a place to have friends who don’t ask questions, providing warmth
that has nothing to do with family or home and a chance to lose any sense of weak-
ness. The tables are crowded; the noise is a shrill mixture of shrieking laughter and
shouted conversation; fights break out. A tough place. But for all its toughness, the
men and women who come here are far more often generous to one another than
they are belligerent. Everyone has almost nothing; people give out drinks, ciga-
rettes, small change and advice about where to bum a hot meal. Everyone belongs
because they have all chosen, for a while at least – maybe a week or maybe a year –
to belong nowhere.
I went to the George every day for a few months in the spring and summer of
- It was my first fieldwork in Canada and my first encounter, therefore, with
‘Indians’. In this and other bars, on street corners, in abandoned shacks and at the
edges of a park, I talked and drank and laughed with men and women whose lives
reached into the Plains of the Midwest, to the Pacific Coast and to the forests of
the Subarctic. They spoke to me of spending time ‘in the bush’, away from ‘the
white man’. Sometimes, at night, when a slight drunkenness had not yet given way