Florence Woolner works passionately on Aboriginal communications. She is so sought after because of her experience and her commitment to learning.

FLORENCE’S HOME IN SIOUX LOOKOUT . . . 6:30 p.m.

Nachos and crackers with salsa, asiago cheese dip and humus. Pumpkin Soup. Cheese and Red Pepper Enchiladas. Grapes and cheese.

THE DISCUSSION

People expect more of Florence than seems humanly possible, but she sees herself as deeply human. She does not start by listing her many accomplishments in the area of Aboriginal communications. And even if she were willing, it would be impossible to list the many, many, many things she does for others.

Florence is well aware that people can be many things to many people. She gives the example of a colleague who one of her friends knew to be cruel to his family. She says,” I didn’t see that he was really [terrible] in his private life. He wasn’t in his professional life. I don’t have the answer to how the same person can be so many things.” She does know that she can see people at their best.

She describes herself as an extroverted seeming introvert saying, “I do have a lot of social ease, but often I am depleted by social exchange.” Florence talks about the demands of the holiday season and admits that she can become exhausted by all of the gatherings. She says, “Even though I have this amazing persona that is out there and seems to be fulfilled with people, I just need to get rested.”

Florence explains quite bluntly that she thinks her shyness comes from having been overweight. She realizes now that everyone has their own shortcoming that they do not want others to see; so there is no irony when she says, “The challenge in life is being aware there may be things you aren’t seeing. Self-awareness is a cornerstone of personal sustainability.”

Florence’s self- awareness can seem very critical. She cautions, “You don’t want to waste your time or my time or any one else’s time on my self worth. There’s not an hour that goes by that I’m not aware of my limitations. As women we seem to have that record going on in our thoughts. I would also like to think I have a proper sense of my own worth in terms of expanding it.”

The communities Florence works with definitely value her. She began working in the north for the Children’s Aid Society. She admits that ‘baby grabbers’ were not the most popular, so she was happy to take a job teaching in a Northern community. At that time a university degree in English and five years of work experience made it easy to find work.

Florence says, “I remember going to the North feeling like I was in another country. It was exotic to me. We’d never used the language of poverty. It was not a poor place, to us it was amazing.  The development was pretty much me getting developed. I was doing a lot of my young development about how to live.”

“The hard part was the cross-cultural stuff. You never knew if you were right or wrong. I remember being uncomfortable but just being so stimulated that I could hardly stand it.”

While “over the years there has been a concerted effort by both cultures to speak better to each other, coming together doesn’t always make communication easy.” Florence credits Aboriginal people with making themselves “au courant. They have made it their business to learn our language, read our newspapers, our magazines.”

Florence is not as concerned with Aboriginal people speaking to non-Aboriginal people as she is with Aboriginal people speaking to each other. She has worked with Aboriginal people to get means of public media that they own, control and can use to inform themselves. Living up north, she saw how isolated people were and how important information is.

Florence explains, “I’m not much of a philosopher or conceptualizer, I just sort of felt it.” She can also still feel the excitement of waiting for a plane to come in carrying the two week old Wawatay newspapers that provided information in both syllabics and English.  Florence has been a part of the work that ensured that not only newspapers were available, but radio and television as well.

She says, “It really helps if it makes sense to the people you’re doing it for. They’ll just give you so much positive reinforcement. Everyday there would be some evidence that the work I was doing made some sense to the people I was involved in doing it with.”

Training is one of Florence’s areas of expertise, but she knows that many people just wanted her to fix their transmitters. She remembers being excited when an Elder beckoned her over to show her what was wrong with the trail radio he was sending out to be repaired. Trail radios, though their signals might bounce all over the place, were the only means of communication people had while out on their traplines. She says, “what astounded me is when we started to unwrap it, it was like Christ’s chalice. It was multilayer, the wrapping. It really caught me in the throat.”

This is just one of many experiences that motivated her. She explains, “I often work for Aboriginal people. Thankfully they were gracious teachers and I made some glaring mistakes. They had to put up with me and I had to understand them.  I had to be interested in race relations. That was the price I had to pay for all this fun I was having. I am describing this as so pleasurable but it was incredibly uncomfortable.”

“I’m branded as an Indian lover in Sioux Lookout. There are things you give up if you are not someone who is just an employee of an Indian organization, but who enjoys it.”

When Florence went to Ottawa to work on developing Aboriginal communications across Canada, she realized that what she had come to learn about Aboriginal people in Northern Ontario could not be generalized to other groups across the country. She says, “Proving my unending ignorance, I thought I was pretty hot on Aboriginal culture. My first meeting was in Iqaluit with the Inuit. I wasn’t in the room 30 minutes when I thought, ‘oh shit. I don’t know anything.’”

She admits that “There still isn’t a day I don’t learn from an Aboriginal colleague about how they see the world.” On the other hand, “The experience in the North is still the same. I still love being there. My sense of value has increased. Because of my age and experience I have so much more to offer. If you want to do community work, you can’t not be there. ”

Of her commitment to be in the communities she works in she says, “I’m privileged to be a part of a community. I didn’t want to be an outsider. Most of us should probably stick to a place and refuse to give up on it. Your role as an elder is to stick around and help the young people. It is not enough for me to be a citizen of Canada or the world because I’m not that big a thinker.”

She is a self-professed planner, saying, “Maybe that’s also cross-cultural. You make sure you teach yourself to be thinking ahead, when you might be working with two cultures in any sort of setting.”

Florence tries to pay attention to her own setting saying, “I’d rather do good than make my bed. I have to be willing to sit with myself and say cleaning the house is part of my own self help. You have to do that first and always and then you can go out. The good that I do is really selfish because I have fun. If I want to do that, I need to make the bed first.”

Florence has learned to say ‘no’ as often as she says yes.  She explains, “The ‘nos’ are important so that you can do a reasonable job with the things you say yes to. I have a love of time because it can flow. But I know it will kill me if I don’t’ take time to sustain myself as a physical and spiritual person.”

She adds, “Learning why and when you’re saying no is probably a sign that you have gotten to a sustainable place in your life. It’s never easy to say no but it’s a sign that you’ve figured out what you need to do.”

Every morning begins with a list of things she wants to do and is whittled down to what she can do. She says, “I do that every morning. You put in your exercise because you want to do that every day. You put in your eating because you want to do it properly with cooking and having it with friends and a glass of wine. And you want to put in walking the dog.”

She laughs, “Even though planning doesn’t have a very sexy connotation, I think it’s a key to having a good life.  Her responsibility she says “is not to plan more than I can do with a good heart. We always want to do a lot more than we can. I want to do everything. I have a real zest; I hope I have that all my life.”

Life so far is meeting Florence’s expectations. She describes herself as lucky in so many ways: lucky to love her work, lucky to stay somewhere long enough to get to love it, lucky never to have been so wronged that she has had to forgive, lucky that time just flies by and lucky to have a full belly.

STILL DIGESTING

Florence reminds me that the headlines do not tell the full story of the north. I marvel at the scope of a novel that might tell hers. She mentions Bleak House and the  character Mrs.Jellybey’s missionary obsession that prevents her from seeing what is in front of her. This is a cautionary tale.

The fact is I had stayed in Florence’s home before I had seen the woman herself. Years ago she moved out of her house so that my family could stay there to attend a wedding. We had not met her. As a little girl, I puzzled over a woman who would loan her house to strangers. As a grown woman, I can see why, whenever she leaves home, she receives more invitations to host her than she could possibly accept.

It makes sense that people accept Florence because she does not put the onus of understanding on them; she puts it on herself.  She looked at my website before we met and really wants to provide me with answers that will help me not only as I try to collate all of the conversations I am collecting, but as I try to live my life.

She reminds me that it really is about the living. While talk is not bad, dialogue and strategizing are not ends in themselves, even for word lovers like the two of us. Though she worries that eating out and writing every day are too much for me, she has managed to listen to the entirety of War and Peace, while washing her dishes. She takes great pride in the fact that she could keep so many names straight.

Florence seems to be leading a life with a cast of characters just as vast as those she encountered listening to War and Peace. Her story and its intersection with so many others is Dickensonian, but she does not expect his happy endings.

She cautions me that while she has enjoyed her experiences in northern communities, it is not easy to be close to people who are suffering, and it is important to acknowledge that the suffering is not your own, but theirs.  She is well aware of the two solitudes of the North.

She loves the people, but says she loves the landscape even more. She already expects to use the next chapter of her life to explore what she can do for the environment. You can expect she will do lots, whether she plans to or not.