Up Ghost River (2 page)

If I remember correctly, it was mid-November when I first flew into Fort Albany, a few hundred kilometres north of my new home. The weather had been bad in Moosonee when we left, heavy snow flurries building intensely. Less than an hour later, as I stared out the window of my small plane, my hands gripping the armrests, the plane being jostled by strong gusts as we approached the runway, the snow
fell so thick I couldn't see a foot out my window, and that's when I deeply questioned my young man's folly of a new career choice.

The plane did land safely despite a few terrifying skids on the snowy runway, and after shakily climbing off it and walking into the tiny room that served as the terminal, I stood and watched as different dark-skinned and white-haired
gookums
and young pretty mothers with newborns were eventually picked up by smiling family members. Eventually I was left standing alone and staring out the window when even the lone baggage handler/ticket counter attendant departed the building for what I could only assume was his lunch break.

Just when I thought I'd been forgotten completely, up roared a pickup truck and out climbed an imposingly well-built man who trudged to the door and swung it open. I'd been practising how to say my contact's name: Edmund Metatawabin. I'd repeated it over and over, even asked Cree friends down in Moosonee how to pronounce the surname. “Do I put the emphasis on the vowels?” I'd asked one of my students the day before. “Do I pronounce it Meat-at-a-Way-Bean? Do I pronounce it Me-Ta-Ta-Way-Bun?”

“Just call him Ed,” one student answered dryly.

“You must be Ed,” I said as the large man walked into the terminal and nodded to me.

“No, I'm his brother Mike. Edmund had to help his wife out at the restaurant.”

And with that, he ushered me into his pickup truck and took me on a tour of Fort Albany, the place that now holds a monumental grasp on my being. I learned that Mike, Ed's younger brother, was the current chief of Fort Albany. I'd been picked up at the airport by the chief! I learned that Ed had been a past chief, and that their father, and his father before him had also served as chief to their reserve. I was riding through the reserve of Fort Albany with royalty!
But was Mike not the most down-to-earth guy I'd ever met? On our snowy drive, dodging rez dogs and kids playing hockey with frozen tennis balls, Mike gave me a brief history of his community, a history, both personal and historical, that you are about to embark on, dear reader, one that I understand in that deepest part of me is both central and integral to who we are as Canadians. But I digress. Let me tell you at least a little bit about Ed.

After our tour, Mike brought me to the community centre with its warm and cozy little restaurant where I was greeted by a smiling woman named Joan, who I soon learned was Ed's wife. “You must be the new teacher from Northern College,” she said, handing me a cup of coffee. Children ran around the tables, Ed and Joan's youngest, adorable daughter, Cedar, laughing at me before running away. We sat and talked for a bit, and I learned that Joan had met Ed in the community when she came to teach years before. The two fell in love, and the fair-haired and light-skinned Joan stayed in Ed's northern home with him. Clearly, she flourished here.

Not long after, in from the kitchen walked the man I'd already heard so much about. He was slighter than his brother, with the build of a long distance runner, but the first thing I noticed about Ed was his open and handsome face, the easy and large smile, the long black ponytail reaching far down his back. When he walked up to me with a warm Cree greeting of
Watchi-yeh
, reaching his hand out to me, I noticed the glint in his eyes. He seemed interested in who he was meeting, almost searching for something in my own eyes. I hadn't quite experienced it before. It's a look I've grown accustomed to over the years, a look that is also mischievous, the eyes ready to crinkle in laughter at a second's notice.

I spent a week up in Fort Albany that first trip, and got to know Ed, Joan and their family a little. They even had me over for dinner to the octagonal log house Ed had built himself with logs cut from the
surrounding bush, a large wood stove keeping the place warm during even the coldest nights. I learned a number of things that first visit, foremost of which was that this family was a truly special one. Before I headed south to Moosonee, they made it clear that I was welcome back anytime. And so this is how I was introduced to Ed, who explained to me just as I was leaving that the English translation of his family's name is “Ten Sunrises.” It's as if he whispered a secret to me because he trusted me, a secret that I've pondered ever since.

And I did return often. In fact my trips up to Fort Albany through that first year, through that long winter and into spring, became the fondest memories of my time living on James Bay. There are so many tales I wish to tell that I've experienced with Ed and his family. I could speak on and on about my experiences with them. But I realize that this is their story, isn't it?

Allow me to say this, though: I've remained friends with this amazing man and his family for coming on twenty years now even though we live many thousands of kilometres and different worlds apart. I've watched from a distance as he and Joan's brilliant children have grown up into exceptional human beings. Ed not only brought me into his house the first year I knew him, but ushered me into his community with open arms. He allowed me into his parents' home, where I interviewed for many hours his powerful father, Abraham, and his dear, sweet mom, Mary-Theresa. Ed brought me to St. Anne's Residential School and shared deep stories of his pain in that cruel institution so that I might better be able to write my novels. Ed welcomed me into his spiritual world, too, introducing me to certain elders and shamans who have forever changed my life for the better.

Years after I moved away from James Bay, Ed asked me to help celebrate the opening of Peetabeck Academy, the combined elementary and high school that finally allowed youth to stay at home in their teenage years and not have to move far away down south to
complete that part of their education. I'll always remember the community gathering outside the brand new and beautiful school, the smoking ruins of that nightmare called St. Anne's behind us, as Blue Rodeo performed a celebratory concert for us all.

More recently, Ed asked me to return to Fort Albany in order to be the keynote speaker at the Great Moon Gathering, where communities from all across James Bay meet yearly to discuss education for Cree youth. And so I returned, along with my dear friends the Tragically Hip, who played their first high school gym in twenty-five years to the sheer joy of the people who were lucky enough to be there.

Ed is a special man indeed, as you will soon learn through his story. Singlehandedly, he breaks all of the ridiculous and scathing stereotypes levelled at the people of James Bay. Resilience. Self-reliance. Courage. Family. Spirituality. Happiness and deep humour and love. These are what define Edmund Metatawabin and the Cree people of James Bay. Please, now lose yourself in his story. It's at times painful. It's at other times a wonderful lesson in the importance of laughter. It's certainly deeply connected to the land. It is, in part, a tale of a world changing too quickly. But most of all, it is a heart song, a love song to a very special people and place, to a geography and a culture that are a foundation of who we are as a nation.

Joseph Boyden

New Orleans

April 2014

On October 18, 2012, the Canadian government tabled a sprawling 457-page bill that generated such opposition among indigenous people that it sparked a worldwide political movement. First Nations viewed Bill C-45, the Jobs and Growth Act, as an attack on our rights and our voices. It made it easier for corporations to build on our traditional land without our consultation or approval, which we viewed as an attack on native sovereignty. And it reduced the legal protections against environmental degradation of our sacred waters, by reducing the number of rivers and other waterways protected under one of Canada's oldest pieces of legislation, the Navigable Waters Protection Act. In response, Idle No More was born.

How you viewed this story depended on where you watched it unfold. I am used to travelling between my isolated northern community and down south, as we like to say, and I am married to a white woman, with four children, so I am accustomed to walking in both worlds. The issue split along well-worn lines: Idle No More's protestors represented the environmentalists vs. big business, the minority vs. the majority, aboriginal rights vs. assimilation, angry
natives vs. mainstream Canada. It's a familiar story, but it's only partly true.

For my people in the north, C-45 and the other government bills that were protested under the Idle No More banner were an attack on native sovereignty and environmentalism, but also part of a larger story that continues beyond recent memory. We have been silenced ever since we first met the white man. The Potlatch laws silenced us by preventing us from practising our spirituality, culture and religion. We were put under the extreme stress of shifting from a nomadic to a sedentary lifestyle, and denied spiritual and cultural rituals that had helped us cope, understand who we were and find meaning in the world for thousands of years. We were denied the right to travel or move between reserves without permission from the Indian Agent. We were refused the right to plant crops, banned from cutting down trees or building houses, unless we could get permission from the government minister. When we tried to protest these decisions, the Indian Act prohibited us from hiring lawyers. We were forbidden to appeal any decisions of District Stipendiaries (Indian Agent supervisors), Police Magistrates or Justices of the Peace. The Indian Act silenced us politically by denying us the right to vote, which was only repealed in 1960.
¹
We were banned from holding any political meetings.

My own silence began in 1955. It may be a familiar story to you. My childhood was spent in St. Anne's Residential School, which has garnered its own tragic reputation in the national media. There, we were whipped for talking out of turn. Terrible things happened at the residential school—it has a reputation as one of Canada's worst—and the children who tried to voice their concerns were punished. When children were whipped until they bled, they were told not to tell their parents. When kids died at the school, the school authorities ignored the parents' grief and their pleas for answers.

I stayed silent about these experiences until they began to bubble up and could no longer be contained. By then I was married with three children. With an addict's rage, I began to destroy all that I had built: home, family, marriage and career. It would take me several years and many hard lessons to find my feet again. To walk the right road, I had to find the wisdom in indigenous teachings and learn how I could make them relevant to a modern context. I had to start making amends and work toward repairing the harms done to myself and my people.

Once I became chief of Fort Albany, I was able to use these lessons more broadly to help my community. Fort Albany is an isolated, impoverished northern community, near the reserves of Kashechewan and Attawapiskat. Many of the issues that plague those communities—addiction, suicide, family breakdown—have been our fate too. My work has focused on empowering the people who are suffering, especially those who survived St. Anne's Residential School, and their children, as the harms done to one generation become the fate of the next. The media has taken note, and I have represented my people at news conferences in Fort Albany, Ottawa and Toronto. I have won national awards, and some filmmakers have even made a documentary about my work with youth, called
Paquataskamik Is Home
.

When Prime Minister Stephen Harper tabled Bill C-45, these decades of work were threatened. I had already lost my voice once. So too had my people: our silence had become an ever-present companion. I could not let that happen again.

PART ONE

First

there was some other order of things

never spoken

but in dreams of darkest creation.

—Linda Hogan, “The History of Red”

In this dark room,

in this place of fences, strange smells,

and men with yellow eyes

where finally I am caught

and cannot get free,

I close my eyes and am home again.

—Ann Turner,
Sitting Bull Remembers

I knew something was wrong before I got back to camp. I could hear my family's voices, but I felt it before that. It was like walking into cold mist—you were breathing it in before you'd seen it coming. The feeling hung there, chilling me inside, and I hurried to our mud house, hoping I could make it go away.