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It has been some time -- but not a long time -- since James Bartleman felt the dark tentacles of depression enclose him.

"I've had a whole month" of keeping the illness at bay, said Mr. Bartleman, a Chippewa on his mother's side who rose above childhood taunts of "dirty half-breed" to break bread with the likes of Fidel Castro and Yitzhak Rabin.

The words, imbued with an audible measure of relief, were uttered last week while he sipped cranberry juice in the stately office at the Ontario Legislature that is reserved for the province's Lieutenant-Governor.

It's not easy to reconcile the genial, unconventionally open man who has been the Queen's representative in Ontario for more than two years with someone who periodically sinks into deep depths of emotional despair. Mr. Bartleman spends his days chatting with diplomats, hosting elegant soirees for charity and praising the work of school children. He moves through hundreds of appointments annually with an energy and enthusiasm that could not be feigned.Yet he has chosen to write and speak openly about his continuing internal battle and considers the fight against the stigma of mental illness to be a major objective of his current appointment -- along with tackling racism and the barriers to aboriginal people.

"It's like the whiff of death," Mr. Bartleman, 64, said of the days depression takes hold. "You just feel it invading your body and pulling you down into a pit."

The illness, which started in 1995 during his years as foreign-policy adviser to former prime minister Jean Chrétien and was exacerbated during a brutal attack by a thief in South Africa, has not been fully vanquished by medication. But mood-modulating drugs allow the Lieutenant-Governor to maintain his frequently hectic schedule.

One day last week, his official rounds began on a crystal-clear morning at a history fair in the whitewashed barracks of Fort York. More than 1,000 middle-school students had arrived with metre-square models constructed to depict famous battles, the paths of explorers and the exploits of war heroes. Three boys from St. Denis Catholic School in Toronto proudly showed the Lieutenant-Governor their award-winning multimedia project called "Who Wants to be a Fur Trader?" Mr. Bartleman, looking every bit the dignitary in a dark blue suit, smiled and considered their work. Then he delivered his punch line.

"We would eat beaver, and also muskrat," he said, explaining that, as an aboriginal boy growing up in Central Ontario, his family often dined on the generosity of trappers. Three sets of eyes widened in amazement.

At the end of another long row of displays, Mr. Bartleman was cornered by 12-year-old Sandra Amaoko, who drew him to her project about the Underground Railroad. "Do you represent the Queen?" asked Sandra's partner, Latiesha Stephenson. "Can you say 'hi' to her for me?" Sandra asked.

"Sure," the Lieutenant-Governor replied. "Any particular message?" Sandra suddenly turned shy in the company of the dignitary. "Just hi."

A short time later, Mr. Bartleman talked to the children about the importance of history. It's a subject that has been his passion since he was a child -- and was his major at the University of Western Ontario.

The child of an aboriginal mother and a white father, he has told the tale of his early years in Port Carling, Ont., in his book Out Of Muskoka, the proceeds of which support scholarships awarded by the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation.

The Bartleman family started life in that small town in a tent next to the garbage dump and later moved to the only house in town with no electricity or indoor privy. It was not unusual, in the overtly racist postwar years, for Mr. Bartleman and his older brother to be chased home from school by boys shouting anti-Indian epithets. His mother heard jeers of "dirty squaw."

In the worst moments of his depression, the Lieutenant-Governor endures a recurrent nightmare that he never left those days behind. His escape from poverty was made possible by an American benefactor who hired the teenaged Jim Bartleman to work at his cottage near Parry Sound and paid to send him to university.

But despite the hardship of his early years, he is staunchly proud of his aboriginal roots.

Standing amid the relics of the War of 1812 in the building at the fort, Mr. Bartleman explained that a great-uncle on his mother's side was John Bigwin, an honorary chief of the Mnjikaning Indians who went to London as a Diamond Jubilee guest of Queen Victoria. His father's people supported William Lyon Mackenzie in the rebellion of 1837.

"The more we know of our history, the more we know of ourselves," he later told the students.

Mr. Bartleman's next appointment was at the Royal York Hotel, where he and Premier Dalton McGuinty had been invited to attend a private audience with the 14th Dalai Lama. Mr. Bartleman is well-practised in such meetings. His diplomatic career, which started in 1966, took him to such diverse postings as Colombia and Bangladesh, where he opened Canada's first mission in that country. He was Canadian ambassador in Cuba and Israel, and high commissioner in Australia and South Africa before being appointed by Mr. Chrétien as ambassador to the European Union.

The proceeds of his second book, On Six Continents, published this year, are being used to support a lecture series on international diplomacy and mental health. It tells the stories of those years and of life with his wife, Marie-Jeanne, a Belgian woman he met when he was posted to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's headquarters during the Cold War. Their three children were schooled largely overseas.

His next book, not yet published and tentatively titled Roller Coaster, will recount the years in the mid-nineties that he spent as diplomatic adviser to the former prime minister. In one chapter, he tells about his secret mission to Cuba to convince Mr. Castro that it was time to give up his hard-line brand of communism and adopt a more capitalist economy. That adventure culminated in a second trip, this time with Mr. Chrétien, in which Mr. Castro ended up grabbing and throttling Mr. Bartleman for his impudence.

The book will transgress some traditional secrecy bounds that normally govern former diplomats. But "too often, public servants keep information to themselves until their graves," he said. "I wanted to get something out there that will describe what really happened."

After leaving the Dalai Lama, the Lieutenant-Governor's entourage drove to the Downsview military base in north Toronto where thousands of books collected in his name are being stored for shipment to aboriginal communities across Ontario. Many others have already reached their destinations.

In January, Mr. Bartleman visited the Neskantaga First Nation, a fly-in community about 450 kilometres north of Thunder Bay, and realized the school library was empty. He put out a call to Ontarians to donate their used books, hoping to collect 60,000 to fill schools in 33 remote aboriginal communities across the northern part of the province. He received 1.2 million donations.

Boxes of the books, stacked four and five high, now fill a cavernous hangar at the base. By the end of last week, they had been sorted by a team of volunteers and members of the Canadian Forces; nearly 40 per cent were discarded as inappropriate or in bad shape.

Within a couple of months -- and with the help of the Ontario Provincial Police, the army and an association called the East Indian Professional Residents of Canada -- they will have been distributed to any of the 134 aboriginal communities in the province where there is a need. The remainder will go to communities across Canada.

The involvement of the East Indian Professionals in the venture appeals to Mr. Bartleman. "As Lieutenant-Governor, I am really happy to see the communities working together," he said. It was left to his office director to quietly mention that he has put up $12,000 of his own money to pay for supplies and food for the volunteers -- and that the program will receive the proceeds of his third book.

Lunch at Downsview was taken with the book sorters in the cafeteria of the military base. Mr. Bartleman's aides had suggested that it would be appropriate for them to collect his food and bring it to him, even if he was eating at a folding table and sitting on a plastic chair. He is the Queen's representative, after all. But he insisted on taking his tray through the kitchen to select his own Wiener schnitzel and cabbage.

Then it was back to Queen's Park for an official meeting with South Korean Ambassador Yim Sung-Joon, a reception to honour the 25th anniversary of the Canadian Hearing Society, the signing of cabinet documents and another reception to celebrate the inclusion of 10 new states in the European Union.

As the day neared its end, the Lieutenant-Governor seemed tired. But he was eager to talk about the issues that preoccupy him.

The book program, Mr. Bartleman said, means that "I'll be able to put something in place that may be a legacy." As for the depression, he said it hasn't been easy to be the face of a disease, but he feels a social responsibility to come forward because so many people suffer without getting treated.

"Maybe the treatment will only bring partial relief, but people's lives can be improved immensely," he said. His has. And on those days when the darkness takes over, he simply goes on.

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