OUT OF MUSKOKA by James Bartleman;
Penumbra Press, 2002, pp. 144, $29.95
Before leaving the Canadian Foreign Service to become Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, James Bartleman served as Ambassador to Cuba, Israel, NATO and the European Union; High Commissioner to South Africa and Australia, and Assistant Secretary to the Cabinet and foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Chrétien. He might have been expected to add to the long list of memoirs by former members of his department, reflecting on Canadian foreign policy and outlining his contribution to its formulation and implementation. But this is a very different and exceptionally interesting book.
In 1999 Mr. Bartleman was nearly killed by a mugger in South Africa. For some time he had been struggling with depression and having nightmares that he was still a poor half-breed kid in Muskoka, afraid to leave the village and face the outside world. He reports that the mugging shook him to the core. The dream now recurred with such intensity that soon he was afraid to go to bed. It was as though the mugging had destroyed his sense of identity and resurrected old struggles over issues that he had come to terms with as a child and youth. As therapy he wrote this memoir, focusing on his life in Port Carling. By reliving his past, he hoped to find peace in the present.
Mr. Bartleman was born in 1939 to a Chippewa mother, nee Maureen Benson Simcoe, and a Scottish Canadian father, Percy Scott Bartleman (who later reinvented himself as an Irishman). He reports that his mother was the real head of the family, utterly devoted to her children, who did her best to keep his father’s wild instincts under control. His father was an unskilled labourer and nomad at heart who moved from job to job before ending up in Port Carling, where with his wife’s help he eventually secured a job as the town’s lockmaster. He then mastered the art of doing what was expected of a public servant by spending most of the day drinking coffee and delegating the bulk of his work to his assistants. On the other hand he was a reader, and Mr. Bartleman believes his own voracious appetite for books and reading was probably influenced by his example.
As one of Canada’s leading tourist centres, Port Carling demonstrated a startling contrast between the rich and the poor, with Indians as an invisible brown minority at the bottom of the heap. The Bartlemans initially lived in a tent near the town dump, then moved up to a crumbling summer cottage and eventually settled into a deserted two story shack known locally as the haunted house. At first there were bad years: poverty, racial discrimination, bullying and gothic reality. He and his brother had to endure the taunts of older boys who called them “dirty half-breeds”. Despite the hardships, he found much to enjoy in Port Carling. He writes fondly of hunting and fishing, usually unsuccessfully. He is amusing on the advantages of living as a child near the dump, where unexpected treasures might be found, and of the adventures in repairing and improving the family’s crumbling house. He had a variety of part-time jobs, delivering newspapers, trapping porcupines for their quills, caddying at the local golf club, assisting the village foreman. He started a riot when, as a myopic goal judge at a hockey game, he made a bad call.
Until Canadian legislation changed in 1985, Indian women lost their Indian status when they married white men, and their children were similarly denied Indian status. Mr. Bartleman enjoyed visiting the neighbouring Indian reserve, and dreamed of someday being accepted as a member. He was proud of his Indian ancestry and would never have denied his roots. But contacts between Indians and villagers were few; indifference, suspicion, distrust and a tinge of fear predominated. Port Carling was a model Anglo-Canadian community; the Indian Camp was an unwanted intrusion of the Third World into this paradise. He assumed that his classmates shared their parents’ prejudices, but was nonetheless elected school president for several years in a row. Despite good relations with his classmates he never telt that he fully belonged.
Mr. Bartleman received his big break from an American, Robert Clause, who owned a nearby estate. Obviously impressed by his ability and intelligence, Mr. Clause offered to pay for his education through grade thirteen and university on the same basis as his own grandchildren. He left Port Carling for high school. At first Mr. Bartleman suffered from acute homesickness and longed to return to his family and the familiar surroundings of his village. Gradually he established a group of acquaintances and found bout de papier Vol. he could keep up academically with the others. He had overcome what he considers one of the greatest obstacles facing young people, white and Aboriginal, who come from small northern communities, adjusting to alienation in urban environments.
The University of Western Ontario was liberating. Psychological defence mechanisms that had been developed over the years to cope with life as a half-breed in a small white community fell away. From there, after a gap year tour of Europe and a brief spell teaching, he succeeded in joining the Canadian foreign service, to become one of its stars.
In this memoir, Mr. Bartleman naturally draws on his subsequent experience in the foreign service when looking back at his early life. When commenting on the beliefs of the Indians and the Christianity of the villagers he grew up with, for instance, he also compares the faith of Muslims, Jews and Catholics he met subsequently and of the Bushmen of South Africa and the Aborigines of Australia. When he was back in Muskoka from university, he met Louis Armstrong, whom he found a man of great personal dignity and humanity. He became the benchmark for judging charismatic political leaders met subsequently, including Nelson Mandela, Sheik Mujibur Rahman of Bangladesh, Fidel Castro and Yitzak Rabin. However Mr. Bartleman’s true heroes would be “ordinary” people: a nun in Bogota, a Canadian doing aid work in Bangladesh, Cuban dissidents, individual Palestinians and Israelis trying to forge bonds to move the peace process, an Aborigine leader promoting healing and reconciliation. He concludes that suffering is caused as often by decisions taken casually and indifferently as it is by hatred, jealousy, rivalry and fear. He illustrates the point with examples taken from Commonwealth and NATO meetings he attended and from his experiences in Israel and Columbia.
In an epilogue, Mr. Bartleman brings the story of his family down to the present. He also notes the improvement in the lives of the First Nations of Wahta and Mnjikaning, of which he, his brother and two sisters are now full members. He had long since identified himself with the Indian rather than the white part of his being. He records that writing the memoir has allowed him to reconcile these two parts and to come to terms with existential issues such as death, spiritual quest and justice.
Perhaps some day we may be given a full account of Mr. Bartleman’s professional life — but we must be grateful for this unique memoir of his childhood and youth.
View the original scanned pages →
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 19, No. 3 (2002-2003) — Fall/Winter 2002/2003 // Automne/Hiver 2002/2003, pp. 17–18. Read the rest of this issue →
