Childhood trauma
revisited
Preamble:
In mid-June 2015 I flew to Edmonton to visit my sister and ailing
brother-in-law in Tofield, Alberta. My youngest brother, his wife and son were
also there, and in fact picked me up from the airport.
This nephew has been living in Montréal for some time, although he
grew up in Winnipeg. He rather surprised us when he came upstairs to the dining
table one evening with several photocopied pages from a book that he had
questions about.
Turns out my nephew had seen a sign about Mennonites and residential
schools at some kind of a demonstration in Montréal. He knew enough about our
people's history to question that and so went to the nearest municipal library
to do some research. There he found T. D. Regehr's Mennonites in Canada 1939-1970, A People Transformed. The pages he
had photocopied where from the section on Missions to Natives, notably, pages
336 and following. He knew that some of these pages referred to his grandfather
and wanted to know more from us about that.
The backstory:
The grandfather my nephew was referring to is my father, Edwin
Brandt, who began his career working among the Indians in Canada (as everyone
called them at that time) as described in the first pages of this section of
the book. The author recounts first how the United Church of Canada was able to
get Mennonites to serve in their teaching and church work as Conscientious
Objectors during World War II. My father has told me about how he went to
appear before a judge with a proposal to do this, but I had not realized this
background.
So it was that he taught for 2 years at what was then called Island Lake,
Manitoba. Later this community would be divided into Garden Hill, St. Therese
Point and Wasagamack. Then, when the war was over he became a minister for the
United Church in the nearby community of Oxford House. Before he really began
this, he was married to Margaret Enns from the rural community of Burwalde
north of Winkler, Manitoba, in the Morden Bergthaler Mennonite Church, her home
church, even though he was Mennonite Brethren background himself. Thus it was
that they began this period of service as a married couple, and I joined them
in December 1946 as their first child. I was actually born in October, but my
mother and I did not come back north until December, which is another story in
itself. During this time, my father really became close to these communities,
began learning the Cree language, and was able to even read and write its
syllabic adaptation devised by English missionary James Evans, a 19th century
Methodist missionary to these people.
Then, in the winter/spring of 1947-1948, my father and mother
provided relief for Stanley Collie and his wife who, along with Arthur Tarry,
had formed the Canada Northern Canada Evangelical Mission in Buffalo Narrows,
Saskatchewan. They then signed on as missionaries to this organization and we
moved in the summer of 1948 to Grand Rapids, Manitoba, where the Saskatchewan
River flows into Lake Winnipeg, where we carried out this work for 9 years.
This was a so-called ‘faith mission,’ which meant that my parents
had to work hard among churches with whom they were familiar, even traveling to
others across the western provinces at times, to raise funds to support their
work. Now, at the same time, the Conference of Mennonites in Canada, of which
my parents were members, began developing their own mission work in northern
communities, Mennonite Pioneer Mission (MPM). It has long been my suspicion
that this led to decline in support for my parents from their home Mennonite
constituency. Even we as young children were certainly aware that our standard
of living had dropped the last year we were in Grand Rapids. Youngsters that we
were, we especially noticed it, I am almost ashamed to say, in the low-priced
quality of the Christmas presents we got that year!
In any case, that summer we joined the Mennonite Pioneer Mission and
moved down Lake Winnipeg to the tiny community of Loon Straits, 8 miles across
the lake on the east side from where the highway passed from Winnipeg to
Matheson Island. We children noticed an immediate change in our circumstances
in this community. It was in many respects a Christian community and we
understood that our father and mother were moving there as much as a pastoral
team as missionaries in the traditional sense. We knew that we had been invited
there, perhaps in part to take the place of a couple who had been leading the
church work in that community. They were of Plymouth Brethren background, at
least the wife was, and had moved to her home community. They made their home
available for us to rent to begin with. They had already built a chapel just
down the road from their home.
We made friends with all of our peers in the community and enjoyed
attending school there. We pretty much had free reign to wander the community,
in contradistinction to the limits that had often been placed on us in Grand
Rapids. Mind you, of course, we were getting older.
Seven months after moving there, in March 1958, the family whose
home we had rented decided to move back. They joined us in our work in the
community. The wife was my Sunday School Teacher. We thus had to move but were
able to find lodging in a small log house which had one room on the main floor
and 2 bedrooms, if you call a curtain a wall, on the 2nd floor. Around this
time, the mission decided that they needed to build a reasonable home for our
family of 7. Much material was donated and bought and brought across the lake
on semi-trailer trucks before the ice went out that spring. Then, many
volunteers, including many of my mother's relatives, even her father, came and
donated their time and expertise to help build the home in the summer of 1959.
We were able to move in before winter. It was a fine three-bedroom bungalow in
the style of the times with a central-air furnace in the basement, which also
contained a pantry and a large enclosed cistern which the roof drained into via
a system of eaves troughs. Thus, we were ensured a good supply of water for
washing. Our drinking water "ran" (meaning for the most part that my
father and we children carried it) from the lake.
The summer of 1958 we had acquired a couple of portable shacks from
the Mennonite-run logging mills that operated out of the community in winter
and used them to house a Bible camp, that had previously run in Matheson
Island. When we moved to this new home, the shacks were moved there and a large
dining room-kitchen under a durable canvas roof with screened walls was built. We
began to have annual summer camps there that summer of 1959. Children came from
Bloodvein River, Matheson Island, Pine Dock, Manigotogan, Riverton, Gimli,
Selkirk and Bisset. Besides local children, some of these were relatives of
members of the community and others were children who were attached to our
missions in Matheson Island and Manigotogan. The MPM had not at that time yet
established a full-time mission in Bloodvein and never did in Pine Dock. It was
serviced mainly from Matheson Island. Again, we were helped by volunteers from
our churches in the South, including one of my mother's sisters and one of my
father's brothers.
Then, I believe it was in the early spring of 1960, there was a loud
knock on our door late at night. We children found out quickly that the local
leader of the Plymouth Brethren (PB) origin group and a couple of others,
including I believe the Mennonite teacher who actually boarded with us, came
with a shocking message for my parents. They were told that this Plymouth
Brethren group no longer wanted anything to do with them and that they were no
longer to show up in the chapel or carry on any work from there. Needless to
say, this caused a strained relationship between this teacher and our family as
he continued to board with us until his term was up anyway. It was my
understanding that his older brother, who had also been a teacher in the
community the previous year, had not looked favorably upon his brother's action
in this regard. Indeed, there were 2 other female teachers of Mennonite background in the community who
also thought, perhaps with the idealism of youth, that it was better for them
to throw in their lot with the Plymouth-Brethren group.
Now, I should say that there were a lot of family dynamics behind
all of this. The leading couple of the PB group had enlisted the support of one
of his brothers and 2 of his sisters. Those were basically the families that
went with them and all the rest, you could say, stayed with us. This included
one of this man's own brothers, who was not known as a Christian, but was our
neighbor. The rest of the group that stayed with us were only related to all of
the others in that their fathers were brothers. It was well known in the
community that the group that we were no longer welcome with had always
somewhat looked down on these others, as they had not really accepted the
Christian way as this group understood it. They were also looked down on as
most of them were deemed to have less white blood in them. Therefore, the group
that stayed with us were certainly not inclined to go with the PB group against
us.
There is another element to the story that I'm going to mention. As
was mentioned in Regehr's book in a quote from Henry Gerbrandt, the Secretary
of Mennonite Pioneer Mission at the time, the leader of the PB group had left
the work in Loon Straits for a while because of an injury. Indeed, there was
somewhat of an opinion in the community that he had never been mentally the
same since. In fact, some saw him as having turned into somewhat of a paranoid
recluse. As a physician, I know full well that head injuries can certainly
cause changes in personality. Family loyalties also certainly run deep. I think
these factors were as much at play in all of this as that my father had really
done anything wrong. Now, as a senior myself by now, I certainly know my father,
who is still living at a healthy 95 in his retirement, was not perfect. However,
I think this came quite out of the blue for all of us.
Needless to say, it made life somewhat difficult in the community
for the next 2-3 years before we moved to Winnipeg to be replaced by another
mission couple. However, all of the children and young people saw through what
their parents were doing. I think this says something about what was really
going on as well. The PB could not even convince their own children that they
were the ‘good guys’ and we were the ‘bad guys.’ Their children could not attend
church with us, nor our youth group or children's clubs, let alone the summer
camp, but we continued to attend school together and play with one another
after school. I suspect this was to some extent even typical teen-age defiance
of what their parents were up to. You people have an uncanny ability to see the
hypocrisy in their elders. I remember potato/corn/wiener roasts and circle
games that we joined in together on a regular basis. At recess time in high
school 2 of the sons of this other group and I, who were in the same Grade,
went often to the home of one of them for tea, as it was just down the road
from the school.
Perhaps, as was quoted in this book, the local people were jealous
of our new home, as it was certainly the best in the community at the time.
However, the brother of the leader of this faction himself built a new bungalow
along the same lines at much the same time as we did, so it was not entirely a
one-off. But I know my parents. They were humble and sincere people who really
had the welfare of the local people at heart. As pastors, they visited the
parishioners regularly. We went out of our way to take different ones of them ‘south’
for medical care, for business. My father was quite a Jack-of-of-all-trades and
he helped the members of the community in whatever way he could, even with a
welding machine and small Ferguson tractor, stone-boat and sleigh we acquired.
At one point, before the split, we had even taken this leader's nephew with us
to stay at our grandparents' farm in Winkler for an extended period of time
while he was treated at the local hospital for poison ivy. So much for
gratitude.
Afterwards:
Prior to our leaving Loon Straits there had been some discussion of
our moving all the way across the continent to work among the natives in
Arizona in the southern US, but that never happened. Instead, we moved to
Winnipeg, where my father obtained a year of further education at Canadian
Mennonite Bible College, and I graduated from high school in Winnipeg a year
later before attending this school myself.
My father's education had included Bible School at Herbert,
Saskatchewan, followed by further education at Prairie Bible Institute in Three
Hills, Alberta. The former was basically a Mennonite Brethren school and the
latter was non-denominational. Circumstances in these years and subsequently
have always left me with the distinct impression that those who were in charge
of the mission by this time, some of them with university degrees, simply
thought my father did not have enough education to be the kind of missionary
they were looking for. Indeed, he may not entirely have measured up to their
expectations, but he and my mother were certainly loved and respected by the
people they served, except for this splinter group.
Indeed, sometime after completing that year of CMBC, my father
opened an agency, still under under Mennonite Pioneer Mission, in the heart of
Winnipeg, to work with Indians who were coming to Winnipeg to look for work and
attend school. Youth Opportunities Unlimited was a storefront operation at the
corner of Notre Dame Ave. and Langside Street. My father and volunteers from
the local churches and CMBC provided tutoring, assistance in looking for work
and housing as well as opportunities to learn other skills and simply
socialize. Bible studies were also held at this location.
By this time, I was well into my own education at CMBC and thinking
about my future, in essence no longer living at home. Thus, I am not as
well-informed about what all went on with that endeavor. However, I again also
picked up from my father the impression that this work was not really
appreciated for the ground-breaking effort that it was. However, I know again
from my personal experience traveling with my father to many Indian-Metis Conferences
and Friendship Centers as they were called in those days, that he was doing a
good job of building relationships with these communities.
However, in 1967, my father, my new stepmother, my 3 youngest
brothers and a new stepbrother moved to Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, where father
became pastor at the Grace Mennonite Church there. That, sadly, was really the
end of his work with Mennonite Pioneer Mission, Metis and First Nations people,
as we now know them. To this day, I have never herd a negative word about our
Fist Nations neighbours from my father. That certainly helped nurture my own positive
attitude to them.
