Settler Relations

He had found the scissors, rusting and shivering among the basil five years later. He was fourteen and he had forgotten of these things, had forgotten of the horn-rimmed handle, how cold the shears had been, how weighty their whole body was in his hand, as though they had purpose.

He had meant to find the newspaper that the delivery girl always tossed haphazardly into the bushes and instead he had found these and the smell of old metal. He ran his hand through his untamed hair, feeling the cold dew from bushes kneed and knit itself down into his scalp. This was a morning in his hometown and he felt entirely unremarkable.

It was his town, he decided, which made his hair grow the way it did. All its small syllogisms and judgments, there’s no way hair could grow without being self-conscious. The physicists and theorists of the day had written large books about this, his brother would tell him. That things observed became different, changed the way they were, how they acted. This wasn’t the town’s fault, its observations. It was a small place. It was on the edge of a river and the edge of an ocean. There was water on nearly all sides, and when you stare at water long enough, the horizon melting into the waves, you don’t have much else to stare at but your neighbours. This town pretended to be ancient. It reveled in the iron clock in the ‘old district’, which was really just six or seven shops that had been there before the ‘60s. There was farmland there, and these farms, like all farms, smelled of dirt, and old wood, and made the whole town believe it was older than it was. Farmers and Fishermen, a whole culture of working and getting—flinging a lure off a ship, landing into the freshly-tilled land, the clay-red of it obscuring and obfuscating the fishing line.

He would find out, years later, that the cannery his grandfather opened and loved like beach glass was home to people whose lives he would never quite get close enough to see. There were record books and photographs that his father had kept, in one of those overwhelmingly-fatherly traits of hoarding family history. Canneries, it seemed, were employers of the people my town loved to forget, chose to forget. The Chinese men whose head-taxes would fund heady estates and municipalities—force my town to grow its borders, encroach on the reserve just 2 miles south.

And the reserve, oh the reserve, how my town hated it, how they would turn their noses up at it, the nerve of it to exist so close to their picket fences. My town was, and is white, whole streets and neighborhoods of white. The people here have forgotten what the sign of a reserve is or was or will be—that this land that they hold so dear, build large concrete slabs and bronze memorials of tractors and fishermen and god knows what else in memory of a history that they’ve constructed, wasn’t always ‘theirs’. A totem pole stands at the center of my town. Its carver not from around these parts, though no one seems to know that too well. The Tsawwassen nation did not build poles like this. And yet here it is, standing, like the cannery poles do now, mall remnants of what was, or what could be—only apparent if you know what you’re looking for.

And me, and these scissors and how I had cut my own hair in a bowl cut as a child. How I had taken the heavy dullness of these scissors and snipped around my whole head, except the back, which was hard to reach. My mother had come home that day and stared at me with a stern look which covered a laughter at the sight of me. She asked me why I had cut my hair this way, what I had done with it. I smiled and showed her where I had planted my own hair, told her I was growing my boyfriend out of the ground. My father had taught me about growing the week before and I knew of the bloodline of this small town. Her smile was gone by then, as she stared at small lumps of soil in her garden. She had taken the scissors from my hand. I never knew where she put them. I had looked.

Some things don’t grow in the soil. These were lessons I would come to learn. No matter how fertile or how well you tend to them, some crop always spoils. But here, in a garden I’d almost forgotten about, were a pair of scissors, growing and pulsing their whole being up and out, across the narrow streets of my hometown.

Works Cited

“Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society.” Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society RSS. Gulf of Georgia Cannery Society, n.d. Web. 04 Feb. 2014.

Tsawwassen First Nation. “Tsawwassen First Nation: Land Facing The Sea.” Tsawwassen First Nation, n.d. Web. 05 Feb. 2014.