A Discussion with Mary Balfe, Member of the Christian Life Community of Canada, Manitoulin Island, Ontario

With: Mary Balfe Berkley Center Profile

June 2, 2015

Background: As part of the Education and Social Justice Fellowship, in June 2015 student Caitlin Snell interviewed Mary Balfe, a member of the Christian Life Community (CLC) of Canada. CLC of Canada strives to empower young adults and community action through education, social justice work, and communication. In this interview, Balfe expands upon her involvement in the CLC, the complexities and difficulties found in Native and non-Native relationships, and how to reconcile the mistreatment of Native populations.
Would you like to begin by introducing yourself?

My name is Mary Balfe; I’m a retired elementary school teacher. I’ve also done chaplaincy work in high school, and I’m presently volunteering. My volunteer work has been with Christian Life Community Canada as a member of a small Christian community based here on Manitoulin, and there are several across Canada and across the world, in fact. I’m finding myself involved with the Anishinabe Spiritual Centre in terms of Ignatian processes, decision-making, and evaluations and appropriations of any particular processes and discernment, particularly communal discernment—how to make decisions as a community.

Because I’m non-Native, it means that one walks a balance within the culture on Manitoulin and the north shore, where there are five reserves here on the island, and the separation with, of course, non-Native people. My own experience having lived here since 1991 is that I’m really sad to say that there are racist experiences, and some would say it’s from both sides, and it’s not easy, it’s not easy, and so it’s treading a balance. I recently found out from my mother who’s 94 this summer that her grandmother was from a Native tribe called the Migma, so my own heartfelt experiences are really in her honor to consider what she lived as a woman in Canada, actually the Quebec area, and what she survived likely.

How long has your family lived here on the island or North Shore?

It was not an easy decision, but it was one that my husband actually had an injury at work, and it was recommended that he return to school, and we decided as a family that he would do that from here. So he was actually going to be travelling north from [Manitoulin Island] from the Sudbury area a couple times a week and then coming back, but this was going to be home base. So our experience at that point was my husband had been bringing our boys up here to fish and he had been coming to hunt, so when we arrived there were two of them in high school, and the high school was built in 1969 to integrate Native and non-Native students. It’s called Manitoulin Secondary School. That began their introduction to Native youth, and at the same time I was hired to teach on two of the Native reserves within the next ten years, and I was actually working with behavioral students. My experience was learning the story of kids who were at risk, and so I did that in the M’Chigeeng area at Lakeview School and at Wikwemikong where the Pontiac School is, both in elementary situations.  

How did you get involved in Christian Life Community Council of Canada?

That occurred simply because there was a Jesuit—this is Jesuit territory in terms of their mission—and there was a Jesuit that came from southern Ontario who knew some people who were in leadership in the community, so they gathered together in a group and brought a number of different people from different parts of the island. We began a group, and we were together for about seven years, and then some began to feel called in other directions, which left, actually left, three of us, and we expanded to a few more and some moved away, so it’s kind of a community that is always changing. Our purpose is to come together to learn how to pray, to make the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, and out of that find our call for mission, how are we called to serve.

What are some initiatives Christian Life Community Council is currently working on?

One of the hopes from that assembly coming up is to have a toolkit written following the assembly of the ideas of making Christian family, rebuilding Christian family…kind of like the how-tos. What’s been missing? What’s disappearing from what we knew? That basically will be what we’re doing while we’re there.

How does the Christian Life Community Council bridge cultural or religious gaps?

Christian life community is ecumenical, so although it comes out of a Catholic church, it welcomes anybody who wants to participate. We have had people who are of various denominations, although the majority is of a Roman Catholic background. We’re a worldwide organization, so our executive at the world level is chosen from five world regions that we have across the world, so they’re centered in Rome. So we’re all over the place, and the key to our operating is that we discern every five years how we’re being called as a world body. I was in Lebanon in 2013, so the priorities that we’re working on are ecology, family poverty and globalization, and youth.

Can you please describe a memory that you share with your family?

As soon as you said that, I think the one thing besides birthdays and the high festival times of the year is a nativity, so setting up and when my children were younger, they’d build it. Every year we’d have a new barn for Jesus, so they’d go out and get the sticks and get the glue gun and be quite creative about how many staircases there were to get to the loft, and all those things. That would be a significant memory that now my ten grandchildren would be experiencing, at least when they come to this house.

What are some of the areas of improvement of your community, whether that’s your CLC community, family, or some other community you identify with?

From my own viewpoint, I would say that this exercise, the blanket exercise, is a wonderful means of education. It opens people, not only their eyes, but their hearts to recognize what Native people lived and what they suffered. I think it’s well written now that those issues were denied of the people, they were ignored, and that can only last so long before it will break open, and so I think it’s the breaking open that is an area of improvement. Somebody said to me not too long ago that when things go wrong in a person’s life, and I thought this was a really good quote, they said, “Sometimes you feel like you’re broken, but really you’re being broken open,” and I wonder if that’s not what’s happening for Native and non-Native people.

So at the [Anishinabe Spiritual Centre] when I came in ‘91, ‘92, ‘93 I was looking for a place to be able to retreat, to be able to go, to be spiritually fed, and what I was told was that the Anishinabe Spiritual Centre was largely for Native people, and so that’s kind of a severing of the non-Native people, and I must say I left really disappointed, because I had moved away from everything that I thought was ordinary, practical, and made sense to me, to come to a place that was really wilderness. We live on an isolated island at a distance to any community, the deer are in my backyard, but where would I go to be supported spiritually. But that is changing, and I say that it’s changing with a delicate balance. It’s nothing that anybody can dictate. It has to happen with mutual openness and respect and reconciliation.

How should we approach reconciliation between Native and non-Native people? What’s the first step to developing mutual respect and reconciliation?

Well, that blanket exercise is quite interesting: they take a large room and they lay blankets down, and that becomes the land, and they begin to tell the story. And so the people are nomadic, walking all over because they had inhabited the entire land of Canada at one time, and so it begins the story, and then it talks about how this happened and that happened, and the European settlers and all the rules and the regulations and the assignment to the reserves and the disease and so on, and so you’re walking this with the people themselves, so I found that particularly profound, because it’s not in our history books. Why would you want to put something in the history books that you’re ashamed of? So it’s not only for adults, it’s written also for young kids in grade five-six age, so when we can begin the process of younger children coming to know the story and how to change things. I mean, it is very complex, very complex, so beginning with simply acknowledging that these things did indeed occur and how together will we make our way in the future. We all know that healing takes a long time.  

What is your view on work that other organizations or institutions are implementing to reconcile historical tragedies and mistreatment of the Native population?

Just this last weekend, the truth and reconciliation commission completed itself after six years. Let’s see what comes from that. There’s really some good work done. Philip Shano sent me something he was a part of, and it was a group of ecumenical membership who were really looking at what kind of theology were we following when we got caught as a faith-based people in this government project to take children. And I think, quite honestly, that’s one of the things that struck me horribly, was that as a grandmother of 10 you have children being taken away so not only that parents are suffering, but the extended family is suffering, and I think you’ve probably encountered the stories of what that kind of meant for the people, not having the sense of being parented or to be a parent for children, and how that has been a deteriorating factor among the Native communities within their families and so on.

But certainly that closer to home it’s having friendships. Two of the people in our community are Native; one has lived in non-Native community all her life, and the other has lived in the Native community all her life. What we recognize that we have in common is our faith. I do believe that it is just in living, just in establishing friendships, one with another.

How did you decide to become a teacher?

My interests and curiosity were in religious studies and special education, so I did a fair bit of study in terms of children’s disabilities as well.

What is the purpose of education in society?

Well, hopefully, our own awareness is going to help us broaden our perspectives on any given experience. Whether we’re talking about…I mean, I have one kid who’s a chemical engineer who would love to know his brother’s work with mechanics, so I think it’s to learn and appreciate the gifts of others and to know that we come from such history, a rich history, and so I want to just take that back to where I'm living. There’s such a rich history here. There’s an archeological site in Shagwinda, which you came down, that has artifacts going back 10,000 years, so the gift of history and time. Does education lead us to be peaceful people? I would hope that education would.

What is the role of culture in education?

So, when I was teaching, the Native teachers were in the schools—this would have been women who had learned the language at home; they had perfected their grammatical skills or whatever they needed to in order to be in the classroom and teaching. They did that, and as well, I’ll tell you, I was working with some young women who were 12 to 13 years of age, and I guess that is the age for a woman, and I guess guys, too, to be invited to make a sweat, to go into a sweat lodge and to receive a name as you are coming into the next phase of your life. I was invited to do that, so that was a cultural experience that I would have never come upon except that particular time that I was teaching and that was the group that I was working with.

You know, I think it’s pretty common that, say, for instance, the eagle feather has a great significance among the Native people and the elders, the idea of elders, and so bringing into education their seven grandfather teachings and using the alabaster shell to smudge and what the teachings are of the various medicines. It’s like there’s this great flurry of people going on their computers and finding their ancestry. What is it about that that they are inquiring? It’s because they want to have a deeper sense of where they come from. And the richness of what their history was, and so I see that in terms of the Native people it’s being true to who they are. I think that’s really what it is: it’s to be true to who they are.

Did you ever encounter an educational experience that conflicted with your culture or values?

If we’re talking about my experience here with Native people, I would say no. I’ll tell you one experience I had that really opened my eyes, and that was how reverent they are with their sacred spaces, so that when a circle is struck for a ceremony in this area, and I don’t know if it’s just with Ojibwe people, you walk in a clockwise direction. If you walk into a circle and you walk the wrong way, you’re escorted out of the circle. So that really opened my eyes, because then when I was doing chaplaincy in the high school and young people coming into the little chapel really didn’t have a sense of sacred space, I was able to talk to them that everybody has their sacred space, and did you know that this is what Native people do, and how do we want to enter here and why, and how do we want it to be. And that really did open my eyes that we helped them, too, to recognize that this isn’t just a regular church thing. This is something about space that we can make sacred, and we choose to make it sacred, and how do we want it to look, and how do we want it to be. So that was an experience that I recall with great respect.
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