Epistemology of the Woodpile

university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 4, fall 2002 WARREN CARIOU Epistemology of the Woodpile It was most visible at large family gatherings: weddings, funerals, reunions, cribbage tournaments. A few of my relatives had slightly darker skin, had not-quite-definable but noticeably different features from the others. There was no logical pattern to this phenomenon: it was a cousin here, an uncle there. It skipped generations, it skipped siblings, it skipped entire nuclear families. But still it was discernible to us B or so we thought B whenever the whole huge panoply of the extended family was available for comparison. Amid the constellations of red hair and freckles, there were a few slightly browner faces, darker eyes, some shocks of black black hair like Grandma=s had once been. Such physical variance could be expected in most families, I imagine, and many people might never have remarked upon it. But to us it was considered worthy of notice. Sometimes we envied these darker members of the family. More than once I heard someone say to them, >You=re lucky: you tan.= But there were also times when their relative darkness signified something other than an imperviousness to sunburn. Once at a family reunion, when a darker cousin was talking with a darker aunt, one of my uncles stepped up to me and gestured toward them with a twitch of his eyebrows. >Ya see?= he said. >That=s from the Indian in the woodpile.= I was only eleven or twelve, but this was not the first time I had heard about this proverbial Indian lurking in my family=s woodpile. There had been murmurings over some of the family photos, and jokes told in the >notfor -children= tone of voice that made me listen all the more closely. I had imagined this woodpile as the remains of our family tree, cut and stacked and ready for the fireplace. And in my imaginings, the Indian was somehow haunting this fragmentary tree, hiding there B maybe waiting to cause trouble, maybe just waiting to play a joke. It seemed that to my relatives he was simultaneously funny and dangerous, commonplace and taboo. I didn=t quite understand why. But this time, when my uncle showed me, I knew immediately what was involved. There it was, written on the bodies of my relatives: a past transgression that had inevitably come out in the flesh of later generations, a kind of belated scarlet letter, a red flag of miscegenation. It could only 910 warren cariou university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 4, fall 2002 mean one thing: one of my ancestors had had sex with a Native person! I imagined it as a racialized cuckoldry scene: a Native man ( I assumed it was a man), huddling in the woodpile, while my sturdy French ancestor strode through his front door to greet his wife. The husband would never discover that she was carrying the Native man=s child, because the evidence wouldn=t show up for generations. This suggestion of ancestral impropriety was surprising enough, but when I thought out the implications of the situation a little more, I came up with a bigger surprise: if what my uncle said was true, then not only did one of my ancestors have sex with a Native person. One of my ancestors was a Native person. I remember that moment as a brief tremor in my identity. Not a primary trauma; not a stunning revelation; just a slight destabilization of my idea of myself. I wondered: Maybe I=m not quite who I thought I was. Or rather, Maybe we=re not so white as I thought we were. The woodpile narrative was, for me, the means by which I came to recognize at least the potential of my own racial hybridity. Of course I didn=t know whether my uncle was right or wrong in his speculations about our family woodpile. He presented no evidence, other than the appearance of our relatives. The possibility remained only a possibility: unverifiable, ghostly. I think this is a defining characteristic of the woodpile narrative and its relationship to personal identity. The woodpile is a cipher for that...