Stolen Life (69 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
Yvonne tells me this particular story of ceremony the day in August 1996, when we complete the second four-round sweat on the high glade near Okimaw Ochi. Unlike the cluttered, windowless box inside
P4W, we now talk in the Elder’s room on the back curve of the Spirit Lodge; through its large windows we look out between tall, dense aspen, down across the ravines and draws of the Cypress Hills to the prairie. She tells me the story again, in greater detail, in the pages she types for me afterwards, circling around and around with variant facts as if by sheer fore of will she
will
ultimately unwind a meaning my intellectualized mind can, against all odds, fathom. And all I can say is, as usual, is, “Yes … yes,” and listen.
Her struggle is for her own benefit as well as mine. She tells me, grinning slightly, “I know this makes no sense … but in a kind of a way it does.”
She says she has talked to Elders about what happened. Even the oldest can—or will—tell her little; one older man said, “It sounds as if she did ceremonies on you”—well, she knew that. He added that it might be better if she acted as if it never happened. Later he did add that it sounded like a shaking-tent ceremony; where bound medicine people are placed inside a tent and when the spirits come they untie them, and they appear free outside the tent again.
“But what was it? Why did she do it to me?” she asked him.
He would not explain. All he would say was, “Maybe she saw something in you, as she worked with you.”
So what else did she see in her? And why? The endlessly questioning mind. The Creator gave her a mind, so why?
And as Yvonne puzzles, she remembers that, long ago, her sister Kathy said to her, “Grandma helped you. She did not help me,” and that Grandma called Kathy a “White girl” because she did things like a White person. Yvonne is certain Kathy also suffered abuse as a child, but Grandma Flora only helped her. Why?
As I write this, I take out the two pictures of Flora Baptiste Bear which Clarence Johnson gave me. I remember looking for her grave in the cemetery beside the small Roman Catholic church on Red Pheasant Reserve; there was no marker with her name on it protruding from the deep February snow when I was there. Actually, I had driven over the hills from Saskatoon hoping to visit Cecilia, but I couldn’t find her either—she was travelling somewhere; as she once answered in a courtroom, “Oh, if I didn’t [travel], I’d go crazy”—and looking at Flora’s pictures, I remember that, before Yvonne was born, her grandmother
had already passed on to her through Cecilia her own manifest gift of a cleft palate.
Yvonne:
Sometimes I feel flooded with knowledge of the Creator, sometimes even in P4W I smelled flowers in winter, and once in spring, when the Woman who sits in the West visited me as I slept and I woke up afraid to look and I was almost asleep again, I felt someone tap my shoulder. I did not dare ask, was it a good spirit or a bad, but I knew the Woman who smells of all things beautiful, spring, medicine, sweetgrass, was with me and I felt calm. I partly saw this as vision, as I became Bear—and yet, Bear vision is different.
O Creator, I want to continue the battle of my ancestor, Big Bear, who lived on the prairie free as an eagle but who died in misery when he was caged. I have lived a captive from the day I was born, my children have been torn from me as Big Bear’s people were torn from him, his spirit was divided, there was nothing left but to die. I do not know my family, or where they are, they do not know me. O Creator, when will it end? We have survived five hundred years, when will the Native people again thrive in peace?
The sun was high at noon over the Red Pheasant Reserve. I may have been naked or only my chest bare, I was standing on a hide with my hair loose and tangled, hanging down. I was sweating—it may be I had just come out of a sweat—and I faced north, the sun rose on my right and set on my left, and my grandmother blew all over me with a long thin whistle. She was blowing and sucking, mostly circling around my stomach and around to my back while I stared ahead, blowing from the top of my head down my spine to my tailbone.
It was as if she were shaving my skin off. I felt myself opened, as if split down my back, she was reaching inside and I feared to look at what I would see there. I stared ahead while she sang, talked,
prayed, answered someone whatever was needful. Then she went away, and came back with a black bear’s paw and started to rub it over me. She was speaking Cree, and she went away again and returned with a yellowish paw. She rubbed me with that too, still mumbling to herself, and now she was trying to scratch me—but she still was not satisfied, so she went away again.
When she came back she carried a big bear’s paw with five huge curved claws. She began to sing, moving around me, scratching me, and I felt pressure building inside me and I wanted to be clawed, scratched raw by those big claws, I longed for relief to burst open. And it seemed the claws rubbing down my arms cut me to the bone, and it felt so good, like scraping an itch away, and I wasn’t scared, I rode with it into—as Jung writes—a “supreme euphoria.” A high beyond drugs, a calm and force beyond any force, a fearlessness, as becoming one with all mass and energy.
Grandma did that. Using the bear claw to scrape off the outer layer of my body, she split me open from the back of my skull to the bottom tip of my spine. It seemed she was scraping me clean inside the way she had scraped my arms, drawing the claw from my shoulders to the tips of my fingers as she sang and then shaking whatever she had scraped off with the claw onto a hide lying on the ground. I was opened, cleaned out, circled by love and ceremony.
Then she looked inside my belly, searching, and it sounded like she was following orders. She knelt in front of me and began to suck on my navel. I could feel her reach deeper into me, and she started to draw a cord out of my body. I could feel the cord coming out, she was pulling it and soon I was exhausted, empty, but she kept on doing it and I began to cry. She strained and pulled, groaning as she hauled this rope out of me, and I just wanted it to end, get it out of me! And finally she threw the last part on the ground, and then she blew on my stomach, and stuffed the hole in my skin shut. I cried out in amazement and looked down at the hide, there was something heaped on it but she forbade me to look. She pressed moss on my stomach and bandaged it tight.
And I remember most clearly: she brought a hide funnel and used it like a megaphone to shout all over my body. Against one ear, the other, my nose, mouth, every part of me, in some places she shouted twice, she had me face in the four directions and in every one she called the same Cree words as if she would drive them into my flesh and through to my spirit. And I began to call too, words I couldn’t understand coming from inside me, I couldn’t recognize the depth of my own voice repeating what she said, she made me shout it four times in each direction, each time louder: call to the ground, then straight ahead, then higher, then straight up into the sky, each time with more strength that seemed to well up from my gut and I still couldn’t roar it loud enough. It was my name, my spirit name!
Finally I collapsed on the ground. It was years before I knew again what my name was; after the long waiting and many sweats in P4W when the Elder told me in English, and gave it to me again in Cree. Medicine Bear Woman: Muskeke Muskwa Iskwewos. That was always my name, and I knew it.
I can only pray the Creator will reveal to me why I am what I am.
Both the pictures I have seen of Flora Baptiste Bear are black and white snapshots.
The first shows her standing with a hoe among young potato plants in a weedy garden. Her hoe is planted firmly between her feet; she grips it upright with both hands and is looking away to her left. The four posts of a barbed-wire fence enclose the garden, and directly behind her, against the fence, is an ancient hay rake designed to be pulled by horses; its thin steel wheel intersects with the distant shape of a late forties car parked between a white rectangular tent and a small log cabin with two tin stovepipes. The door of the cabin stands open, and beside its window on the longer cabin side, near the car, stands a man. He is barely discernible against the corner of the stacked logs of the cabin and the tall white poplars lifting their leafy tops all along the upper line of the picture. The man’s hands are behind his back; it seems he is
looking at the camera, but he is too small, too grainy in this old photo to be seen clearly. In the flatness of the picture his half-bent left leg—he may be in the act of walking forward—is precisely on the edge of Flora Bear’s black hair in the foreground, level with her ear. She is wearing what is probably a grey blouse buttoned around her neck, its long sleeves pushed up to her elbows, and what seems to be a dark blue skirt that hangs below her knees and is dotted with white strawberry shapes. Her feet are planted in the earth: she looks as if she has grown there with all the other young spring plants, trees, grass, potatoes.
The second picture is head and shoulders only: she is older and seated inside a car with a rounded windshield visor—perhaps it is the same car as in the first picture, the shades of colour seem to be the same—and the rectangle of the car’s right front window frames her exactly. Her heavy hair is parted at the centre, and around her forehead into two broad, doubled braids that lie on her shoulders and slant down her checked dress, down out of sight behind the car door.
Her braids frame her striking face. She stares directly into the camera, expressionless, monolithic. The cleft of her lip seems to begin at the top of her head, where the thin white line of the part in her black hair curves over the crown of her head, and continues in a straight line down between her heavy eyebrows and piercing, intense eyes, widens to the flare of her nose, and then gathers below it, broadly scarred, into the fold of her full upper lip. An indelible face.
Yvonne writes to me in January 1998:
A bear always has a fold in her upper lip. My grandma, I, my eldest child, have the gift and the legacy of the bear so strong, we have the Bear’s Lip
.