As Long as the Rivers Flow (11 page)

“You’re lucky to be rid of that maniac,” Martha’s mother told her as she recovered at home from her injuries. “He could have killed you. But now you can get on with your life. You’re only
eighteen and whatever you decide to do, I’ll be there for you.”

“I’m going to go to Toronto,” Martha told her. “I’m going to Toronto to find Spider as soon as I’m back on my feet.”

But as time passed, Martha thought less and less about leaving for the big city, and when the government decided to give more authority to Native people across the country to manage their local affairs, she obtained one of the low-level administrative positions that became available at the band office and settled down into a comfortable life with her mother. Although the two headstrong women continued to clash, their relationship improved as the years went by, particularly after Martha learned to speak proper Anishinaabemowin and they began spending their summers together at the old trapping cabin, fishing, picking blueberries and experiencing some of the life they had enjoyed in the old days on the land.

Well aware that her mother preferred country to white man’s food, Martha ensured there was always game and fish in the house. She took up a position on the shore of Cat Lake, shooting migrating geese by the hundreds, smoking and curing them for later use in a small traditional birchbark wigwam beside the house. Throughout the winter, she set snares for rabbits that her mother made into stews and roasts, tanning the skins to transform into blankets, coats and mitt liners. Every fall she joined one of the hunting gangs who went after big game deep in the bush, gaining a reputation as a crack shot who brought down her share of moose and deer, and as an expert butcher who could more than hold her own in dressing and quartering animal carcasses.

Her mother could now barely suppress her pride in the hunting prowess of her daughter, and the two women were now able to joke about how green Martha had been when she returned from residential school. And each year, Martha would tell her mother that
she would be leaving for Toronto “as soon as I get myself organized,” but she never did.

Meanwhile, as the 1970s became the 1980s, the outside world came to the community. The bureaucrats with the money in Ottawa issued contracts to white entrepreneurs to push through a rough but serviceable winter road that would connect Cat Lake with the small, white town of Pickle Lake one hundred miles due east, and the all-weather highway to the south. After freeze-up, workers mounted bulldozers to cut a track through the bush and over the frozen muskeg, pushing aside trees and boulders, shoving sand and gravel into ravines and building causeways to gain access to the lakes and rivers. After the arrival of the first heavy snows, they used modified snow groomers of the type used to prepare hills for skiing farther south to pack the snow down into a drivable road. And from December to March, they kept the road open through the bush and across the lakes by regular snowploughing with graders.

The opening of a road, if only for a few short winter months each year, allowed other contractors to haul in building supplies, prefabricated buildings and everything else needed to erect a new school, a nursing station, jail, and an airport with a one-room terminal building and all-season runway. The band council began replacing the old log cabins with bungalows complete with electricity and indoor plumbing. A co-op came in to take over from the Hudson’s Bay store. Satellite dishes appeared on the sides of homes, and the residents were soon watching the same programs as the people in the south.

The people lost no time in using the winter roads to drive out to visit relatives in neighbouring reserves and to make expeditions to the south. Everyone looked forward to the excitement of the trip to Pickle Lake. Those who could cobble together the money would continue on to even more distant places like Sioux Lookout and
Thunder Bay where there were shopping centres and movie theatres. Wives wanted to stock up on detergent, toilet paper and pasta that cost a fraction of what was charged locally. Husbands were interested in cars and trucks, even if they could only admire rather than buy the latest models. Some visited used car lots and bought old clunkers that they nursed back home. When the wrecks fell apart, they put them up on blocks in front of their homes and cannibalized them for spare parts. The young men made for the topless dance bars to ogle the women, sometimes drinking too much and getting themselves into trouble. Children nagged their parents to take them to McDonald’s and Burger King and to the movies to see scary films and to let them hang out at the malls, just like the white kids. Everyone relished the chance to catch up on the latest news from friends and relatives who had moved to the city, and who were expected, by aboriginal custom, to invite them to stay in their homes, as their guests, for the duration of their visits.

And just as matters seemed to be going their way, the young people began to kill themselves, and not just at Cat Lake First Nation. In other remote fly-in Anishinabe, Oje-Cree and Cree communities throughout the north, at places no one in the south had ever heard of—Pikangikum, Poplar Hill, Slate Falls, Sandy Lake, Deer Lake, Kee-Way-Win, Sachigo Lake, Bearskin Lake, Big Trout Lake, Weagamow Lake, Muskrat Dam, Webeque, Wapekeka, Kasabonika Lake, Neskantaga, Kashechewan, Nibinamik, Fort Severn, Weenusk, Fort Albany, Attawapiskat, Marten Falls, and Eabametoong—the youth started to die.

Children as young as twelve were doing it. Girls as well as boys were involved. They joined together in suicide pacts, they copied the actions of friends who had killed themselves and they deliberately overdosed on drugs before doing themselves in. More often
than not, they hanged themselves, making a statement in the extreme manner of their deaths that they considered themselves to be fundamentally worthless and to merit suffering as they left this world. In the farewell messages, many said they had no other way to escape pain and almost all of them said life was not worth living.

Across the vast northern wilderness, families were shattered emotionally and communities were left deeply scarred and in a state of shock. Schools and band offices closed and there were wakes and funeral services. People, many of them strangers, alerted to the tragedy by the Native-language radio station, Wawatay, broadcasting from Sioux Lookout, came from reserves across northern Ontario to demonstrate solidarity with the bereaved in the face of the incomprehensible suicide of one of their children.

If the death was in the winter, the people would mount their old broken-down vehicles and travel great distances by winter road to the home of the grieving family. In summer, a few would come by boat, but most arrived by air, somehow finding the money for the fare. They would be met either at the shore or at the airport by volunteers in pickup trucks who would drive them to the home of the deceased. There they would take their place outside in the lineup of friends, neighbours and other visitors from far away, and wait patiently to go in to express their condolences.

When their turn came, they would mount the steps of the stoop, push the door open, enter the house, grasp the hands of the family members waiting solemnly inside, averting their eyes in accordance with their custom, and express their sorrow over and over again in the soft, measured tones of their language:
Nin kashkendam, nin kashkendam, nin kashkendam
.

After handing over simple gifts of food—a loaf of bread, a small bag of flour or sugar, a fish, a smoked goose, a piece of venison or moosemeat—they would stand silently and respectfully in front of
the simple wooden coffin holding the body of the young person in the living room. And later that evening, they would return to sit throughout the night, weeping and keening and singing the heartfelt, comforting old hymns in Anishinaabemowin with the families of the bereaved.

After the formal church funeral service, usually held in the school auditorium or hockey arena to accommodate the press of numbers, the people would go home and life on the reserve would slowly return to normal.

Another teenager would then be found dead, lying in the underbrush by the side of the road from a drug overdose, dangling from a cord attached to a hook in a closet, or hanging from a rope tied to a tree branch outside a school as the other children proceeded to class in the morning. The cycle of grief, mourning and incomprehension would begin again.

Why? Why? Parents, chiefs, religious leaders, teachers and the staff at the nursing stations all wanted to know why.

Having thought of suicide during her darkest nights, Martha believed she knew at least part of the answer. Despite the signs of material progress, many of the communities were sick in their collective souls. In many families, the parents, grandparents and great-grandparents had spent their childhoods and much of their teenage years in residential schools where no one ever hugged them, unless it was to molest them. No one ever said “I love you,” unless it was a prelude to sexual assault. Dysfunction had cascaded down through the generations with survivors neglecting their children as they had been neglected. Or worse, they sexually abused them as they had been abused.

But the main reason the young people were killing themselves, Martha suspected, was because they had lost their culture and had found nothing to replace it. When Martha was a child, families had
spent winters on the land and summers in their cabins around the trading post, and there had always been enough people around to help out the lost generations who returned home broken in spirit. There had always been a few younger people who had managed to avoid attending residential school and were able to befriend the ones who had suffered, and elders who knew the old ways and could help survivors reconnect with their language and culture. However, in far too many places, the experience of the residential schools had inflicted too much damage, destroying the restorative power of the healers.

To be sure, the Native leadership did what it could to cope. The sign at the airport had been changed from Cat Lake Indian Reserve to Cat Lake First Nation in accordance with a practice being adopted by Native communities elsewhere. The chief had said that it would inspire the people to have greater pride and confidence in themselves, but Martha doubted whether symbolic gestures would stop the rot. For the sense of purpose of the communities in her part of the Anishinabe homeland continued to die. The removal of so many children by the Children’s Aid Society had shaken them to the core. The people were angry, but they were also ashamed that so many of them had been poor parents. Few of them now had the heart to keep up the annual summer feasting, drumming and dancing celebrations. Even fewer sat around their campfires listening to the elders tell the old stories.

More and more people were now attending services at new churches and accepting what they were told on Sunday mornings as the literal truth. The old view that the land was sacred and that there was mystic power and current running through and uniting all things was being quietly abandoned. The objective of life, they came to believe, was to love God, to fear the devil, to suffer stoically through their earthly existence and to rejoice in death that led to heaven.

If anyone mentioned the shamans, the people would look at each other uneasily. At Cat Lake First Nation, only the elders and a few members of Martha’s generation who took an interest in the old ways knew what the reddish-brown pictograph of the ancestors paddling a canoe on the cliff face on the other side of the lake really represented.

Although they had embraced the ways of the white man, the people felt betrayed. The bureaucrats in Ottawa, who were supposed to protect their interests, had spent enormous sums of money to change their communities into modern towns. But less than a decade later, the houses, band offices and schools, often constructed by shady contractors with shoddy materials, were falling apart. The drinking water from the new pumping stations and treatment plants was more often than not unfit to drink, and the sewage lagoons were leaking effluent into the lakes and rivers, killing the fish and poisoning the water supply.

What future did the young people have, other than sitting around at home and collecting welfare cheques? They could not turn to their parents for advice since they had none to offer. So why not just give up and end it all?

When she was feeling down, Martha would wonder whether Native youth were more prone to suicide than white youth. That would lead her to think about Spider, since he was the same age as many of the young people in the north who were dying. Had he been able to resist the temptation? Perhaps he was already dead. If he was not dead, maybe he was alone on the streets of Toronto, hungry and sick after being abandoned by his adoptive parents who had treated him as badly as she had been by the nuns.

At these moments, she would feel bad and blame herself for not having had the will to tear herself away from the reserve to look for him in the big city when there was still time.

One morning shortly after Christmas in 1989, Russell, his face scarred and bloated, his eyes cold and hard, his beer-belly hanging down over his belt, and his pants clinging precariously to his hips, pushed open the front door of the family home and came in unannounced.

“Fifteen years,” Martha said, “fifteen years and you wander in as if it was just yesterday!”

“Was just in the neighbourhood,” Russell said cautiously. “Thought I’d drop in and see you. No hard feelings about our little misunderstanding so long ago?”

“I guess not,” said Martha. “A lot of water has gone under the bridge since those days. Have a seat and I’ll fix you something to eat.”

Martha and her mother busied themselves preparing fresh bannock and tea and Russell made himself at home, stretching out on the couch and talking non-stop about what he had been up to since he had left the community.

“You know, am I ever glad I got out of this dump when I did. To think I used to be satisfied living in that old shack. After I torched it, I headed off cross country to Mishkeegogamang where I know lots of people. I’d always been at home in the bush and it only took me a week to get there. A couple of Native guys came by selling drugs. They were from Thunder Bay and were peddling smokes, dope, coke and prescription drugs to Native high school students across the north. They had more business than they could handle, they said, and they asked me help out. In no time at all, I was rolling in cash. Had a nice car, nice apartment, the girls thought I was something. Then the cops got me,” he said, ignoring Martha’s mother’s look of disapproval.