From 1943 to 1946 I lived with my grandmother and an aunt in Brantford, Ontario. I can still hear them, "Don't talk baby talk to him. He understands." Somehow, in the middle of WWII they owned a good as new Dodge and humoured my requests to visit railway stations, drive down country roads to get closer to the rising full moon and so forth. I remember the electric trains of the Lake Erie & Northern, the gas-electric car of the T.H.&B.
On May 30th, 2001 I took a day trip around the Brantford area. The steam engines are gone. The electric trains are gone. Downtown Brantford is apparently recovering from an accidental strategic bombing but the residential areas are still intact.
Suddenly as we drove between Eagle Place and Echo Place I spied a piece of railway track in apparently usable condition. Why it was the former T.H.&B. and there not far away was a canal showing signs of locks and tow paths. Or, was that the abandoned B.&H. (Brantford & Hamilton Electric RR scrapped about 1931).
Canals predated the railways and I tried to imagine who, what, where and when.
Suddenly I passed a beautiful old white church. We backed up, walked around it and as the sign on the door said "open", I walked in. The friendly cleaning lady, who was sweeping the floor, said hello. I looked at the stained glass windows and saw memorial plaques in a language that was unknown to me. The cleaning lady told me that at the time Her Majesty's Chapel of the Mohawks was built, the natives had no written language so that there was little option but to record what was said phonetically. I asked her, for she obviously knew whereof she spoke, whether the natives had their own religion before the arrival of the Europeans. Oh, yes.
Does anyone honour these traditions still today? Oh, yes. What is this religion called? The long house.
I mentioned that I had heard terms such as First Nations, Six Nations, Indians and so forth and she knew all six of the tribes by name pointing to a list of them on or near a stained glass window.
I allowed that I thought her people had made a considerable contribution to this world and in the future would yet again.

This item by George Noviss was included in Montage January-February 2005, The Mensa Newsletter for Toronto, Hamilton, Kitchener/Waterloo, London, Windsor/Sarnia

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