Rainbow Colours
 Call me an Indian,
preferably a north American Indian, but, please don't
call me a 'First Nations Per-sons'. It sounds too stiff,
too academic, too pretentious, too bureaucratic and too
English. There is a black and yellow race. Why shouldn't
there be a brown colour for us? It would be more
accu-rate.
Under
The B
Scratching furiously away at
the Bingo scratch card one day
last week was a woman caught up in an emo-tional Bingo
binge. Bent over a news-paper container, butt in mouth,
lost to the flow of human traffic bustling around her, it
was obvious that she was in need of a quick, Bingo fix.
What was so strange about all of this? Right behind her
were the doors of a Bingo parlor. Gamblers Anonymous,
where are you?
Wet
Eyes
Most of us cried large tears when
viewing the movie, 'Dances With Wolves'. The portrayal of
white injus-tice and waste was so true and painful it
rocked our emotions. Which brings up the question: Do we
weep more freely and only in the darkness of a theatre?
Where are the deserved tear when one of our brothers and
sisters lie drunk and crumpled on the sidewalk of our
cities? Are we ashamed and afraid of our humanity? We
shouldn't be either.
Sex Times
A recent, international survey on sex
to determine who did it most often revealed that the
Russians, not the sexy French or Spaniards, rated a high
score of three to four times on a daily scale.Pass the
bannock please! We all know that the North American
Indian by-passes that score before breakfast. Maybe
that's why we were not in-cluded in the survey. The
Japanese, on the low scale, only make love once or twice
a month. Sushi anyone? I don't think so! The Saint Of the
Square He's gone from us now. His phantom-like ways were
with him right up to the end. Then, he just disappeared,
quietly, mysteriously, but we all know that he is dead.
It was his time. Like his favorite drink, Aqua Velva,
(the blue kind) our thoughts of him are sweet and acrid.
He was a lovable anomaly in our lives, and for those that
didn't know him
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he
was an excuse for deri-sion and laughter. 'Aqua Velva Ray' carried around a huge,
bulbous nose that dominated a quiet, sensitive face. It
was his badge of suffering and cour-age. Purple and
pitted with the dirt of World War Two, and battered from
decades of alcoholism, it was the cruel, controlling
barometer in Ray's life. It kept him apart, away from the
taunts of society, and also the warmth. Home-less, by
choice, for the past twenty years he slept outside,
facing the elements, his small body infused with the heat
of alcohol. How do you make a tribute to a person
like this? How do you glorify a man that was loved by
bankers, by brokers, by thousands of people from
different stations in life, and those without station?
How can you call this man strong and courageous, gentle
and kind? A man constantly bathed in the fragrance and
bite of shaving lotion and urine who slept in gutters and
scarred Cathedral Square with his presence for so many
years? You can only allot him praise if you were
fortunate enough to have spent some moments with him.
The army of people that knew Ray well
knew of the motor that pro-pelled him on. Fueled by pure
kindness he was always helping others that werelost and
frozen in the desperate throes of alcoholism. He would
buy them wine, nursing their wildness with calming words,
while he settled for shaving lotion; a drink he claimed
gave him the most bang. His disdain for social values and
items were expressed. Belts and bracers he discarded long
ago, and much to the horror of the genteel, his pants
were always falling down. It could have been stemmed from
an impish show of con-tempt to an unkind world. We do
Know that it was not vaude-villian. Although there was a
strong likeness to Charlie Chaplin's beloved tramp the
distinction ended there. Charlie was comic. Ray was very
real. Each one gave us compelling reasons to want to help
them, to nest them. It was the quality of bewilderment
and pathos that captured our hearts. But there were other
diamonds that sparkled their character and stood out. In
Chaplin's tramp, it was artistry and genius. In Ray it
was the soldiers human dignity in the face of adversity
and laughter. Twenty five years ago a man sick from
alcohol sat on a park bench in the city of Calgary. Ray
bought the man a bottle of wine and sat with him for
awhile. Shortly after the man sobered upand changed his
lifestyle. That man was me. Ray, the soldier, had won
another battle, not for himself, but for someone else.
Raymond Douglas was an Ojibway Indian
from Orilla, Ontario
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