Read Online Hole in One by Walter Stewart - Free Book Online

been in England,” I said, “working on his Ph.D. on ‘Minor Poets of the Nineteenth Century.’”
    The first Indian inhabitants hereabouts were Hurons, but they were nearly all chased away, even before the European settlers came onto the scene, and the land pretty well belonged to the Ojibway, or, as they are now spelled, Ojibwa, one of the Algonkian-speaking tribes. This was Joe’s tribe. I once did a piece on the Ojibwa, and discovered that the name comes from two native words,
ajib,
“to pucker up,” and
ubway
, “to roast.” Taken together, they signify “people whose moccasins are roasted until they pucker up.” I had once asked Joe if he thought this meant his ancestors had invented the hotfoot, but he said he had no information on the subject. The tribe was once almost as powerful as the nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, and was known as Chippewa in the United States and as Mississauga in southern Ontario. The French called the tribe members Saulteaux. Like nearly all our aboriginal peoples, under the careful stewardship of their European overlords they went from being proud warriors and accomplished agriculturalists to impoverished hangers-on.
    Joe had only recently become interested in his native background; during most of the time he was growing up, he was taught to be ashamed of it. His father, a white contractor, had been captivated by a schoolteacher from the Circle Lake Band whom he had met while building a new school on reserve land. Joe was brought up in Silver Falls as a white. His parents didn’t try to conceal his background from him, and he knew his grandparents were still reserve Indians, but nothing much was said on the subject.
    â€œIt was like having an alcoholic in the family,” he told me once. “You knew about it, but you didn’t talk about it.”
    A brilliant student and athlete, he won a series of scholarships that took him, eventually, to Oxford, and it was over there that he finally got interested in his own culture. A delegation of Canadian Indians landed in England in 1981 to protest the patriation of Canada’s Constitution, with no provision for aboriginal rights, and Joe read about them in the English press. He decided, then and there, that he had been shortchanged, so he began to study Canadian Indian history and culture, and even got a pretty fair command of the Ojibwa tongue. He couldn’t join the Circle Lake Band, since he wasn’t a status Indian, but he attended their meetings, and did a lot of work for the Assembly of First Nations—mostly, as he said, “writing pamphlets in lucid prose telling the whites to get the hell off our land.” He had also taken an Indian name, for use on ceremonial occasions, but most of us still called him Joe.
    Joe doesn’t actually have to work as a golf pro, since his father died a few years back and left him quite a lot of money. He just happens to be a wonderful golfer, so he divides his time between academic studies and lecturing at Trent University, thirty miles away, and teaching golf for very low fees at the Bosky Dell course during the summer, and after work in spring and fall. He says he doesn’t mind the poor pay, because he gets reward enough out of whipping the ass off businessmen who have to bite their tongues to keep from calling him a dirty Indian. He believes that, if his ancestors had invented golf instead of lacrosse, they’d still own the continent.
    He gave Hanna another of his incandescent smiles.
    â€œShall we?” he said.
    â€œShall we what?” asked Hanna, then blushed again. “Oh, golf,” she said. “Sure.” She gathered her dropped clubs, and they moved off towards the first tee.
    â€œNo straying into the rough, haha,” I said. I got a frozen look from Hanna.
    â€œWhat’s it to you?” she wanted to know.
    â€œI was thinking more of Joe’s wife, Darlene,” I replied.