Stolen Life (15 page)

As Yvonne and I struggle together with notebooks, letters, public records, and phone calls to find some order of chronology and fact in her past life, we need to begin again—she sees so much of her life, and consequently memory, as contained in the circle of repetition—we must begin again with her childhood place: Butte, Montana.

Perhaps, better, it should be thought of as Butte, America, the way the Irish workers named it, the hundreds who came there first attracted by the gold and silver along the rivers and then the thousands who arrived to dominate and develop the incredible mountain of copper on which they found themselves. Butte was “American West” only in its location and weather: in reality it was unique to Montana as a mining and industrial island surrounded by trees, a city of mines and smelters sprawling over the top of a 6,400-foot mountain and dominated by industrial tycoons and labour unions and strikes. Historian Joseph Kinsey Howard called it “the black heart of Montana, feared and distrusted”; novelist Ivan Doig found it both marvellous that “in all this wide Montana landscape [there was] a city where shifts of men tunneled like gophers,” and at the same time ominous: it made people “apprehensive, actually a little scared about Butte … something spooky about a place that lived by eating its own guts.”

And eating its own people, as Yvonne found growing up into her silent awareness of Butte in the sixties and seventies, through criminal police networks and largely corrupt government bureaucracies. The
copper glory of “the richest hill on earth” had by then been eviscerated, and even the steady drudgery of underground mining that first brought ex-Marine Clarence Johnson there in 1946 was no more. The mines destroyed his back: in 1969 almost two inches of his spine was removed and he was left permanently disabled, though he continued the independent work he had already begun earlier with his family, cutting poles in the mountain forests.

But for Yvonne, growing up in Butte was like living in a time warp: all the feelings of the forties, fifties, even the twenties, remained. Most travel was still done by train, for the highway remained a narrow, twisting track around the mountains; miners continued to answer the sirens that signalled shift changes in the few mines still operating. There were ranchers also, and farmers, a few loggers, the lingering stink of gangsters and snoopy, aggressive cops who were often thought of as—and were—one and the same. There were clusters of city for Irish, Italians, Germans, Chinese—but no place for Natives to claim, like skid row in Winnipeg—with bars for miners, saloons for cowboys, taverns for businessmen on every city block filled with regular drinkers, no bouncers anywhere but plenty of drunks, often old men disfigured and worn by drudgery—and sometimes in the company of battered women—as well as old cowboys still sitting at poker tables, gambling in the wide-open saloons.

Most of these people, she recalls, still thought of themselves as original frontiersmen; for them, Indians remained wagon-burners and wild banshees; for them, the only good Indian was a dead one. Oddly enough, her grandfather “Fightin’ Louie” Johnson was among the very oldest of these old-time cowboys. He was born in Minnesota on 15 April 1876, came to Montana when his parents homesteaded near Ulm, and insisted he had ridden for years in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show—which is possible since that touring “cowboy and Indian” circus continued almost until Bill Cody died in 1917. Grandpa Louie also claimed he had worked for the rancher whose land south of Havre was in 1916 turned over to the refugee Cree from Canada’s 1885 war and became the present Rocky Boy’s Indian Reservation. The leader of those Cree, who finally got that land for his people after thirty years of negotiations, was Little Bear, better known in history as
Imasees, the oldest living son of the Cree chief Big Bear, Yvonne’s great-great-grandfather.

When I tell her this history, Yvonne recalls, “We drove that narrow old highway through Ulm, Great Falls, Box Elder, Havre so often across the plains to Red Pheasant in Saskatchewan. Mom once mentioned having possible relations at Rocky Boy, but I don’t remember ever visiting anyone there.”

The time warp came from Butte itself and the old people who never left: lots of cheap houses for men, like her father, to live in on tiny war and mining pensions; and also from the town dying: eventually all the mines closed, though their rusting headframes still bristled between houses all over the mountain like the erect skeletons of an extinct form of life. By 1982 even the enormous Berkeley Pit stopped devouring the central business district of Butte and could do no more than slowly collect itself into an acidic lake.

But in a strange way “Fightin’ Louie” was proud of his mixed-blood grandchildren growing up in a Butte that never had any Blacks and only one Chinese café, that detested the faintest evidence of Native skin or long, braided hair; where children yelled “You’re savages! Your ancestors killed my grandparents and Custer!” across school yards. Yvonne thinks that sometimes Louie’s old age loosened his mind into the romantic Wild West notion that they were the Indians who could still, whooping and hollering, knock the shit out of any White cowboy—fists or guns—even though he always considered himself one of the cowboys. When one night a cross was burned in the Johnsons’ White House yard, with yells of “Prairie niggers!” his advice was, “You all stick together, you fight together, every kid covers the other kid’s back, you can lick ’em.”

Grandpa Louie was ninety-five years old when he attended the funeral of the grandson he most admired, his finest “warrior.” Earl, just twenty years old, laid out in a coffin with his hands folded over his chest, on Saturday, 8 May 1971, for the Mass of the Resurrection celebrated at nine o’clock in St. Patrick’s, the oldest Roman Catholic church in Butte. A warrior who had lost to the cowboys of the city’s police. In her despair and rage, Cecilia had Earl’s coffin driven from the city in a long procession of vehicles around the shoulder of Big Butte and miles away to the Sunset Memorial Gardens in the fields near the hamlet of Opportunity. Very near Warm Springs, Montana, where she
herself would be soon enough, when she committed herself into the psychiatric care of the Montana State Hospital.

When I visited Clarence Johnson in Butte he showed me a picture of Cecilia sitting on a bed beside him in 1971. Her body and slender legs seeming to hang, hooked onto the edge of the bed, both of them slack and staring down at the floor.

“She would just sit, never talked; she cried and cried. Yeah, your mind wants to forget the bad things.” Clarence remembers a fellow Marine saying that to him about the American landing on Tarawa in 1943, where the world ended for 2,700 of their 6,000 buddies and for the 4,500 Japanese soldiers they wiped out; only 17 Japanese survived. “But I can’t forget this—us sitting there. It’s the mental hospital at Warm Springs.”

Cecilia committed herself in the summer of 1971. “A lot of Mom died with Earl,” Yvonne says to me, and wonders aloud what the file of
the psychiatrist who counselled her would reveal. “Mom never talks about that, or her early school days. As a matter of fact, she hardly talks about any past at all. She always wanted to be perfect for her kids, and she just won’t talk about her past. She may get wild when she drinks and then she’ll face anyone down, and she’ll yell something rough at them, but she’s lived her life as if being tough and strong is the essence of all that’s needed. And despite everything that’s happened, she still has this childlike idea that if she tries to forget, if she hides something long enough, somehow everyone will forget it.”

Forget it. That’s the main lesson the Delmas Roman Catholic School taught Cecilia and other Native children during the Depression, when the
RCMP
came on the reserves with the legal right to seize them from their parents and force them into residential schools. And in fact, during the thirties, Cecilia said her parents were so desperately poor they felt they had to give up all their seven kids, from Josephine to Rita, because in school they’d at least get enough food to survive. So their bodies survived their poverty, sometimes abused but somehow alive, but what happened inside their hearts, their heads?

Clarence also shows me a black-and-white snapshot taken of Cecilia in Delmas School. There is a lattice-work wall behind her and she is perhaps eleven or twelve, a slender girl facing slightly away from the camera. A tall woman who may be a nun stands slightly behind and against her. The picture cuts away the left half of the woman’s body, and her face, but her arm is draped around Cecilia’s neck and over her right shoulder; her clenched hand holds a crucifix tight against Cecilia’s chest. It is clear: Roman Catholicism was too deeply fixed in Cecilia for her ever to reject it completely.

At Delmas the Cree children prayed several times a day and worked long hours for their food. They learned the basics of reading and writing—Cecilia said she was at a Grade Two level after seven years of school—and were drilled, often beaten, into good Catholic behaviour. You must be content with whatever happens; forget your pain, you have no pain only sins, pray, confess your dirtiness and sin of being pagan, when you’re dead heaven will be wonderful.

“No wonder Native women become barflies.” Yvonne speaks sadly, from her own experience. “Where else can you go for momentary relief? In this I see a strange pattern between Mom and myself, me finally
running from the United States to Canada—to the Indian streets of Winnipeg—and she, running from residential school in Canada, found an empty rez, went looking for her parents, and got stuck in Great Falls. She learned survival from the really tough Indians in Montana. I was my mother thirty years later.”

I try to bring her back to her original subject: Cecilia in psychiatric care after Earl’s death. And she shifts instantly, as sharp as all her memories are. In details they can be as precise as a photograph.

“We drove to see her every day. Dad always took a few of us along in the logging truck. She’d just sit there, head hanging, or propped up in her hand as if it might drop on the floor if she didn’t, not saying a word to any of us. Sometimes she would suddenly break down, like a dam of tears breaking, but mostly she looked as if she was somewhere far away: her eyes wouldn’t focus on us. Dad would say, ‘It’s hard, it’s so hard—but we’ve got the other kids, they need you,’ but even that didn’t seem to affect her.