If I close my eyes and think “skin,” the first thing that comes to mind is the feel of sun on my arms and back. With that thought comes a flood of memories of sunburned days as a young U.S. Marine in tropical climes when I just couldn’t get enough of the smell of the sultry air and salty ocean mist, and the feel of the hot sun on my face and my back. If I stay with the thought, I’m taken back to the fading light of a Carolina summer’s day: I’m in the middle of a boisterous crowd of laughing teenage girls and shirtless Marines.  A girl reclines languidly in the sand, the late afternoon wind blowing soft curls across her face, which is set in a distant look that makes her seem uninterested in any of the boys or the games we are playing. I am fascinated by, of all things, the sun-speckled skin of her cheeks, shoulders, and breasts. I manoeuvre to sit next to her, but once in position I just sit there, not saying a word, trying to think of the perfect phrase that will make her want to stay with me and not go off with someone else when the sun goes down. I am taken by surprise when she looks over at me, smiles sweetly, and reaches out to gently touch my shoulder. She studies my own skin as she slowly draws her finger all the way down my arm, lingering for a minute when her fingertip connects with mine. She looks up at me with her green eyes, then drops her gaze and finger into the sand.  With an arch of her eyebrows, she writes her phone number in the sand, then throws her head back and laughs as she quickly sweeps away the words and the numbers she’s written.

*

Skin is the conduit of pleasurable sensations, but we all know it’s usually the point of first contact and one of the main receptors of pain as well. Thinking back to my youth, I also remember when the spell of that summer day was broken and I was reminded that not all obsessions with skin are so romantic.

A few weeks after I’d met that girl, I was invited to go meet her parents. When I showed up at their house and knocked on the front door, her mother opened it slowly and peered around to look at me standing there on her front porch. When she saw me, the hard stare she was wearing stare gave way to a look of shock.  “Oh my, thank God you’re not a nigger!”  she blurted.  I didn’t know what to say. “When my daughter told us she’d met someone and he wasn’t white, we naturally assumed . . . ”

 “No Ma’am, I am not black,”  I said cautiously. 

“But you are dark, though. What are you?” she asked.

“I’m Mohawk,” I replied, “a Native.”

 “You mean you’re an Indian? Really?”  After thinking about what I’d said for a couple of seconds, a smile came across her face.  She took me by the arm and said, “Come on in, Son.”

*

A dreamy setting for memories of one’s youth it surely is, but the American south in the 20th century was definitely not a time and place to escape from the implications of one’s melanin or suntan. I often wondered if there was any escape. Had there ever been  a society that was blind to skin colour? There had to have been times in history when the colour of one’s skin didn’t mean much to people. Hadn’t I read that the ancient Greeks didn’t bother themselves too much over skin tone? But that’s probably only because they made slaves of everyone they conquered, whether they were light, medium or dark-skinned. That’s not exactly an enlightened perspective.

People seem to think that modern-day Canada is a post-racist society. But I don’t believe it; that’s not my experience. Maybe, like the ancient Greeks, the people who are dominant now in this land, white people, no longer have to organize their ideas and institutions around skin colour because they don’t need to do that to maintain themselves in the privileged position they have inherited from their brutishly racist ancestors? After all, the original landlords of this continent are (thought to be) conquered; we’ve been relentlessly de-cultured, and our freedom to be ourselves has been deposited alongside all the masks, canoes and ladles in the museum. We are no longer a threat, and to most people it must seem like we crave nothing more than mercy and to be finally allowed to conform. To the now-dominant newcomers to our lands, the primitive racism of their forebears, which was so obsessed with assigning a person’s worth based on gradations of skin colour, must seem so obnoxious; it is certainly obsolete.

The ideas and attitudes of the past have served their purpose and are no longer needed to keep us in our place now that any idea we original landlords had about evicting the overbearing tenants and securing our homeland is out of the question. Now that the return of even a portion of our homeland or reparations for what we’ve lost is a laughable suggestion, the white descendents of the newcomers are able to tolerate us original people and see us as humans, to admire our resiliency, to laud our insights.  Many even admire brown skin and want to feel the non-white aesthetic by touching that which only a few short years ago was the mark of a scary and despicable savage.

When I was a boy, growing up on an Indian reserve outside of Montreal notions of savagism and civilisation were still present and acknowledged as facts in this country; it was  a time and place where the colour of your skin determined the quality of your existence. In the new multi-cultural Canada, a lot of people don’t realize that until very recently, if you were native, the identification card you were issued by the government reported not only such usual information as name, birth date, and the like, but also the complexion of your skin: light, medium or dark. I’ve never delved into the historical reasons for this, but I’m fairly certain it has something to do with the government’s notion that it was worth taking note of the lighter skinned mixed-race and presumably assimilated members of the band to distinguish them from the ones who were still medium in tone, marked as potentially civilizable, and especially from the tawny ones who were thought to be still mired in their dark savagism and generations away from being able to appreciate the glories of mayonnaise and smooth jazz. 

The ideas behind this imagined caste system were utter nonsense, of course, and a total failure, it turns out. I grew up with some fierce savages who were whiter in skin tone than the Minister of Indian Affairs himself.  Although my own status card flagged me as a dark complexioned, I’ve always been disappointed by my instinct for good behaviour. I ended up disease-free and graduated from high school.  I went to college instead of jail. I still have all of my teeth and can even speak English without an accent when I want to. So much for the tawny curse of the uncivilized.

This is selected text from an essay I have in the book, In the Flesh: Twenty Writers Explore the Body, forthcoming in April from Brindle and Glass publishers.

The link to the book on the publisher`s website is: http://www.brindleandglass.com/book_details.php?isbn_upc=9781926972374