Remembering Uncle Sonny

It was a warm summer day at a family picnic table near the shore of the Bay of Quinte. Uncle Earl “Sonny” Green sat with three enthusiastic children, their eager faces turned toward him as he recalled moments from a life which had known both extraordinary sorrow and exuberant joy.

At eighty-seven, his face was etched with time, but his eyes still carried a remarkable spark. His memories reached back to his early years at the Brantford Mohawk Residential School and forward to the years when his family, regathered on their homelands, where they grew strong and came to know themselves again. Every person had walked a different path, but none had been untouched by the sorrow and disillusionment along the way.

Uncle Sonny was an Indigenous veteran of the Second World War and other conflicts. He had returned with scars, losses, and something which had always struck me as unusual: an uncanny gratefulness for the life he still had. He had learned not to allow the past to master him, but instead to grow through it. That strength made him an example, not only of an Indigenous man, but of what any person might become when they choose life over bitterness.

To Uncle Sonny, family was a hodgepodge of those who were blood and loyal friends, all held deeply within his enormous heart.

“Did you have many friends growing up?” my cousin Martin asked.

“Well, sure, son,” Sonny replied. “There were boys near my age at the school, and some girls, but we were kept from interacting with most of them. I guess they thought boys and girls would get into trouble. But we were only kids; we just wanted to know one another and stay connected.”

He told us his sisters were also at the school: our grandmother Ethel, Muriel, and Georgina. Like others, he naturally wanted to make sure his sisters were being treated well and share a hug or a word of encouragement.

“That’s when we often got in trouble,” he explained. “Some of the people in charge didn’t understand how innocent it was. They tried to keep us apart, and sometimes things got pretty heavy-handed.”

He was careful, though, not to paint everyone with the same brush.

“Don’t get me wrong. There were some very kind people working at the schools too. But louder voices seem to get the most support, while quieter ones have to work in the background to do what’s right.”

Then Sonny connected that experience to something deeper about his people.

“That’s our way too, as Native peoples. When someone in the community has done a great wrong and won’t turn from it, sometimes the only thing for it is, we turn from them.”

“Why do we do that?” Carol asked. “What good does that do?”

“It gives them their way,” he said, “but they are by themselves in it. Just because someone has a loud, persistent attitude doesn’t mean everyone else has to follow them. Many battles have been caused because of these kinds of voices.”

He explained that, traditionally, being separated from the community could eventually bring a person to reconsider their choices. Cold, hunger and shelter are things best conquered by groups.

“We need each other,” he said. “That’s the way the Creator made us. Family. Some people call that society. A word used to distance themselves from the fact we are all family.”

He paused.

“We were just the first family members here. That doesn’t mean we all aren’t part of the great tribe of humanity.”

We listened closely.

“Couldn’t you just force someone to do the right thing?” Martin asked. “Wouldn’t that work better?”

Sonny smiled thoughtfully.

“That’s interesting. That’s exactly what many people in charge of the residential schools thought. They believed forcing people was the best way to teach what they thought was true. But force never seems to drive truth inside, so it will stay there. Sometimes it only shows; the truth they were sharing was very different from the way they were living.”

Then he told us, despite all the confusion and cruelty, he had encountered something genuine among it.

“I found the heart of a person bigger than all of us; it was Jesus in those who were actually living what they meant to share. It was a very different experience. When something good is coming clean through a person, you can sense that difference. It answered certain questions I had had about the Creator God which I had never found among our people.”

Those conversations stayed with me. So did the question of Uncle Sonny’s hand. He had no index finger and only half of a middle finger, along with his thumb. To children, it was impossible not to wonder about it.

One day I finally asked, “Uncle Sonny, I hope this doesn't bother you, but how did you lose your fingers?”

His humour surfaced instantly.

“Lose them? What do you mean? I've always had seven and a half fingers, just like everybody. Hey, wait a minute. How come you have ten? That’s strange!”

We laughed, and that was the end of the question—for that day.

Another time, we gathered around his favourite picnic table, for another of his stories. Martin, the oldest in our group, asked, “What DID happen to your fingers?”

Sonny said, grinning, “Oh, I used to have a real bad nail-biting problem; I got a little carried away one day. Didn’t know when to stop!”

We burst into laughter and ran off to play.

As we left, I glanced back. Sonny was leaning against the tree behind the picnic table, laughing with us, but then he sighed. At six years old, I somehow sensed that the sigh carried something deeper—a release from an old sadness.

He noticed me noticing.

Neither of us said anything.

Years later, when I was about eight or nine, another boy asked Sonny about his hand. This time he gave us a story about fighting a squirrel in the hollow of a tree over a nut—and losing.

Again, everyone laughed.

But when the others ran off, Sonny looked at me.

“I’ll tell you sometime, son,” he said. “It just has to be right.”

I understood.

The right time eventually came at a family reunion on the Johnson homestead.

Seasons come and go in life, as God presents moments to grow in. Stay tuned for the second part of this real life story in next weeks edition of The Standard Newspaper, to find out what happened.

Happy Seasoning