Stolen Life (34 page)

My grandma turned away from anything Whites considered riches, but the religious jail my mother grew up in—residential school—taught Mom to want things. She could not deny that, while her mother wouldn’t acknowledge that property even existed and lived as best she knew how, coping physically and living spiritually. Whatever spiritual gifts Grandma saw in me—and she did—she knew they had to be brought out from under, she had to undo all that my White life had forced onto me.

I saw Grandpa John’s tears one other time, long after Earl’s funeral. The summer of 1985—centennial year of the Canadian Indian and Métis rebellion—when Mom brought him and Grandma to Wetaskiwin and I took Chantal and we drove southeast over the prairie to Sounding Lake, Alberta. A large shallow lake, the edge of its water had dried back so far from its original stony banks that only a dot of blue was left glittering in
the distance, and the cattle grazing on the fenced flats were tiny blotches in an immense spread of green.

“Ni-pi-kap-hit-i-kwek” Grandpa named it in Cree when we drove over the rolling brush hills and saw it far away below us. Sounding Water. The aboriginal people of the prairie say that this is the place where the buffalo were born; here they came out of the depths of the water, and the underground sound of their birth rumbled through the earth as they emerged. They say it still does sometimes, though I did not hear it when we camped there. Grandma Flora made our campfire beside the Cree burial ground on what was once the edge of the lake.

In 1883 our ancestor Big Bear wanted to claim the land for his reserve at this sacred place.

I knew nothing then about Big Bear except that he was my great-great-grandfather, but I know now that, after the buffalo were all killed in Canada and starvation had forced him to sign Treaty Six, he and his people travelled here past Sounding Lake, coming north from the Cypress Hills as the Canadian government demanded, in June 1883. Maybe it came to Big Bear and his people then that, if they could live at this sacred place, the Great Spirit would give them the living gift of the buffalo back again; if they could settle here, the buffalo would be born again, they would be able to hunt them properly once more, and so live again. But the government imprisoned and killed Big Bear with sickness before he ever got his land negotiated; over a hundred years and we, Big Bear’s direct descendants, still had no land. They say there are over six hundred of us now in Canada and more in the United States.

Where we camped that night, we were looking at what had once been a lake. A three-strand barbed-wire fence, a straight line across it and out of sight, white cattle grazing. Dried up. No sounding water, no buffalo.

A few steps from the burial ground stood a stone cairn erected by the government. The writing on it remembered a North-West Mounted Policeman who died while on duty, but it said nothing about the Cree graves, nor the Treaty Six payment that took place here in 1878, and the long debate between Big
Bear and the governor. It was on this spot he tried to negotiate better terms for the huge land all the Cree chiefs had given away by “touching the pen.” Land fed you, Big Bear told that White moneyman; it was not like bits of government paper the wind could blow away, or water rot. But the governor would change nothing, and so Big Bear and his people left Sounding Lake and followed the buffalo south into Montana. Living there only four years while the lake here started drying up; no more buffalo were being born.

When the sun sank behind the hills along the far shore, I heard coyotes howl; Chantal shivered as I held her, listening. Their long, scattered calls answering each other from everywhere around us sounded so strange, such sad laughter. The sky was dark and clear, the stars like icicles, and Grandma Flora in the brush of the hills sang her ceremonies. Grandpa John sat looking into the wolf-willow fire.

The next morning, Mom said she was going to find out once and for all who had this land. It should belong to Big Bear’s children, no one else. So she and Grandpa drove to the nearest town, Consort, and nobody there could, or would, tell them anything, so she drove on to Coronation, and they had land records but were even worse to them, so by the time they got back to us on the shore above the dry lake, Mom was so angry she could barely speak. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police was right behind her, two uniforms in a cruiser called by the rancher who said the land was his, the cattle were his, I guess everything as far as he wanted to see in all directions was his, and the uniforms told us so. This was leased Crown land, whatever that means to crowned Queen Elizabeth II, and if we weren’t off it in twenty-four hours—Cree Indians and relatives of Big Bear or whatever we were, it didn’t matter—they’d come back to remove us forcibly.

I watched this happen. My “little big man” James was growing inside me, and I held Chantal tight against my stomach as he moved there so we all together would see this, and remember.

Grandpa John stood without a word. Grandma Flora had started to pack up as soon as she saw the cars coming over the hills.

Mom shouted at the cops as they got into their car, “We don’t need no twenty-four hours, we can leave in fifteen minutes! But when we get the land back, we won’t give you one minute to clear out!”

They were turning their car around, gesturing for her to calm herself. But she kept on: “And you’ve got the gall to bury this bastard in our burial ground, build him a stone statue—when we get it back he’s coming out. I’ll grab his boney ankle and throw his bones over the hills!”

The thick rancher was glaring out of his pick-up. “Oh yeah?” he growled. “And I’m gonna dig up your goddam burial ground and crush every bone I find into bonemeal to feed my cattle!”

The cops waved him away, and he spun around and both drove off as Mom cursed them. Grandpa John was leaning against our truck, hunched against its rear-view mirror, crying.

The two vehicles crawled away up the trail over the hills between wolf-willow in a long drift of dust. And, suddenly, rain began to fall on us. The sky was clear blue, the sun was shining, and rain fell like light falling. I went to comfort Grandpa, and it was so quiet we all listened—Grandma, Grandpa, Mom, Chantal, me—and we felt the Great Spirit blessing of rain run down our faces, and listened to it drop on the sandy ground that had once been hidden by the sacred water of Sounding Lake.

“It’ll be all right,” I said to Grandpa John. “The spirits see us, and they’re crying too.”

A
LWAYS IN MY LIFE
there was Leon.

Mom and Dad’s first child, Earl, had such a strong, healthy personality it seemed he would be everything to everyone; both the Bears and the Johnsons loved him. And when he was killed by Butte police, he became our martyr. Leon, the second son, could not shoulder such a burden, and all Dad knew was to try to beat what he thought was good character into him. But by 1971 Leon learned to protect himself from every family expectation by being for ever in trouble with the police, whose external rules he always knew exactly how to violate if he wanted to, get arrested, and be beyond any possible responsibility. Sometimes he behaved as if he had no brain whatever: he’d be barely out of jail and he’d steal a car and drive it home, leave it standing in front of the house, make no attempt to hide what he had done, and next day he’d be arrested and fight the police and be in jail again. Inside, he was a model inmate.

And I, the last of the girls. The family story now is that, beginning with having to be held upright to sleep and fed by eyedropper, I was always protected and spoiled. Since I could only cry, everyone tried to please me. That’s the family story; and maybe there’s some truth in it, but I do not remember it that way. I remember clearly the many times I felt family love as a child, yes, but if my mother now stands in a public courtroom and calls that love “spoiling Vonnie”—as she has done—then she is betraying even the love she gave me as a child into a testimony to protect Leon.

For I remember also, very clearly, being used by everyone for whatever purpose they pleased, and all the more easily because I could not explain what was being done to me.

Used most by Leon. Though he was my protector too, especially when I was little. In school he saved me from some brutality, and when I had to run from Dad I lived with him in Butte and that worked because at the time he had plenty of women to keep him happy. He protected me from others almost as if I were his property—but he never protected me from himself.

Living with Chantal in Wetaskiwin and starting to date Dwa, I somehow felt strong enough to suggest he should come to Canada. I had not really known him for over five years and I thought perhaps a change of country, a job, could break him out of his hopeless crime cycles. But prison had done to him what it does, and as soon as he arrived I knew he was more aggressively Leon than ever. He seemed to have no conscience, no concept of right or wrong or decency, leave alone kindness: he knew no women in Wetaskiwin, so he simply asked me to sleep with him. A sister was less to him than a whore because he wouldn’t have to pay her. He told me all the years he was in prison he thought about me, and in his mind compared all his sisters. At the time he did leave me alone when I said no, but I moved in with Dwa; I could see disaster looming over me like his huge body.

And when the rent I’d paid on the apartment ran out, he followed me, made himself a space to sleep in the garage outside our back door, where Dwa stored his painting stuff. And then he wouldn’t work any more; he claimed at one point Dwa ripped him off in pay and so he did nothing; he lived off us.

Leon had to have a light on in order to sleep. He’d spent most of his life in reformatories, with chain gangs, in prisons where lights burned all the time. I didn’t dare leave him with the children and help Dwa paint. I didn’t dare stay alone with him while Dwa worked, sometimes away for days or late hours, coming home when the kids were already sleeping and he was tired and happily alcoholic and would eat and get into bed with me and fall asleep so he could get up and drive off in his van and do it all over again.

Dwa did what he did best: escape into steady drinking and work, and I couldn’t explain my fears. Fears both for myself and for my children, dreading that my nightmares would resurface in them, even if I loved and protected them more than anyone else on earth could. Leon put the blocks to me simply by walking in from the garage: huge, growing a beard, glowering, enough aggressive personality to burn down Wetaskiwin crammed into my small house. His way of staring. Though I didn’t dare show it, I was terrified.

How could I get rid of him? I’ve never known.

Oddly, a few times he seemed as weak and helpless as I. He told me that whenever he was in prison he could think because that world was real to him; outside he couldn’t really think, the world seemed too strange. And when Earl died he went completely crazy; he had shared a room with him and how could he sleep alone in it then? He’d wanted to fight and kill every cop for what they did. But the cops didn’t kill Earl. No.

“Earl killed Earl,” Leon told me. “He wimped out, left me holding the bag. I’ve got to live and deal with it alone.”

Deal with what? He would never say, exactly. Only a bright light burning kept him going, he said, only when he was dead for sleep.