Up Ghost River (20 page)

“I think you should go to university.”

“No thanks.”

“I know what you're worried about—that you'll be too far behind. But I've found this course that's different, in Indian-Eskimo studies. It's the first of its kind in North America. It's at Trent University in
Peterborough, near my hometown. You can learn about all the things that matter to you. Gitchi Manitou, the Sacred Teachings.”

“It's not for me,” I said.

“Why?”

“I already know about that stuff.”

“Exactly.”

“So why spend three years learning about it?”

“Because we live with ten other people, Ed. In a two-bedroom house.”

“Only on Sundays.”

“What's going to happen when they all come home for summer?”

“I … maybe …” I hung my head, ashamed. “Maybe I could ask at the band office again.”

“You know that's not going to help.”

She was right, as usual. I stared at the potatoes I had been peeling. I felt trapped and wondered how I'd gotten myself into this mess. I had tried so hard to do all the right things: finish St. Anne's, graduate from high school, get a good job, and yet I was still stuck. Worse, I had dragged Joan into the chaos.

“And we are short on money, Ed. Albalina needs diapers. Baby food. A stroller.”

“Yes, I know!” I said a little too loudly.

“And you can't keep picking up garbage.”

“Why not?”

“You said it yourself. The band only has money to pay you for eight weeks.”

“We'll get by.”

We moved to Peterborough the same way that all Indians move down south: empty-handed, like we were fleeing. Of course we weren't entirely free from luggage, but we couldn't take much on the plane, especially with Albalina. I didn't mind so much—every object is a memory, of when it is bought and how it is used, and it's better not to be weighed down by all that stuff.

In Peterborough there were newspapers and TVs everywhere. I mean, you could walk into practically any store, and there were papers. We didn't have that up north.

When we arrived, the story headlining most newspapers was about an Indian, Joseph Drybones, who had been found to be drunk in a Yellowknife bar. It was against the law for an Indian to drink off reserve, and he was arrested and charged with contravening section 94(b) of the Indian Act. He represented himself and pled guilty, and was sentenced to either a ten-dollar fine or three days in jail. Then he got himself a lawyer who appealed, arguing that because Drybones only spoke Dene, he hadn't understood what was going on, didn't realize he was pleading guilty, and therefore his
plea was invalid. The judge gave him a new trial. This one went better—his lawyer claimed that, all appearances to the contrary, Drybones wasn't a real Indian.

For us, being Indian was a matter of language, culture, race and history, but legally, it was a different matter. It was defined by an official list of names held by the Department of Indian Affairs. Since Drybones had mistakenly been left off the official list, he didn't have legal status. Therefore, his lawyer argued, the law shouldn't apply to him. And even if he was legally an Indian, the law was unfair from the start, as it discriminated against Indians because of their race. The case bounced around the legal system, to ever higher courts, until finally the Supreme Court weighed in. They decided that Indians should have the same drinking rights as everyone else, at least when they were off reserve.

I had mixed feelings about the case. I had been drinking more since Joan and I had married, living in that tiny house, all thirteen of us, with Albalina screaming with teething pains. The only thing that held me back was that it was more difficult to get drunk in Fort Albany. If you went to the bootlegger, you had to pay through the nose and homebrew was always limited because of the time it took to make it. I was priced out of the market, especially with a kid. Now I was down south, where you could walk into a liquor store and, thanks to Joseph Drybones, buy anything you wanted for just a few dollars. It was progress, I guess, as we were finally getting some of the same rights as the wemistikoshiw, but it meant that temptation was always in reach.

Like all native students, I'd come a month early with Joan for catch-up courses. We bought a secondhand car with a small loan, and the money that I'd saved picking up garbage, and moved into a one-bed apartment on Bolivar Street, on Peterborough's west side. Most of the houses on the street were detached two-storeys, but with
the money for tuition and a $1,000 monthly student allowance given to us by the band, we found one subdivided into apartments, a stone's throw away from where the rest of the native students were living. I was twenty-two years old, and it was the first time that we had our own place. It felt like I'd made it.

Joan went out and reconnected with a couple of her high school friends, like Svetlana, who'd relocated to Peterborough. She and her parents had made it out of the Soviet Union by sneaking from Russia through Romania and paying some criminal a lot of money for fake passports. By the time they arrived in Canada in the early 1950s, they were stick thin and had nothing but a handful of rubles stuffed into their pockets.

I soon realized that Svetlana didn't think much of natives. She had been nice to me and translated the phrase that the Tekaucs used to repeat,
Zatknis!
It meant
Shut up!
She, Joan and I laughed about it for a while. But after that we butted heads.

“I don't know why they are still complaining,” she said. She was sitting in our living room, having some after-dinner wine. A native guy who she worked with (she didn't know anything about his nation other than he was “Indian”) at General Electric had been complaining about the storm we'd had the night before, and made an offhand remark about how it compared to the government flooding thousands of acres of Anishinaabe land, displacing his people without any compensation, that had happened with the building of the Trent-Severn Waterway.
⁶

“Always history, history, history,” she said. “That stuff is in the past. They need to get over it.”

“They
?”

“You know what I mean,” Svetlana said. Joan and I exchanged glances.

“
They
haven't been compensated yet,” I replied.

“Stuff happens. Look at the Purges,” she said. “My grandparents had friends who were taken away. They say something wrong and,
pft
, that's it. Seven years for you. Nine years for you. The KGB have ears everywhere.”

“That doesn't make it right, does it?” I said.

“What is right? History? No. Everywhere is history. That's why I like Canada. Come here. Start again.” I thought about my past. About my great-granddad being taken away under the Potlatch laws. About going to St. Anne's. About going to Montreal with Mike. Maybe she was right. Maybe that stuff was better dead and buried.

We were sitting in a lecture hall on the first day, myself and the other native students. A guy named Harvey McCue, from Georgina Island First Nation, Ontario, a professor in the Indian-Eskimo Studies Program, was explaining what was required to make it through a university degree.

“University is different from high school. How so?” Harvey asked. Simone, nineteen, put up her hand. I didn't know too much about her—just that her parents were from Skwah First Nation out in Chilliwack, B.C., but she had grown up in Vancouver. “There's more work,” she said.

“Some people say that,” Harvey said. “You definitely have to spend a lot of time hunched over your books. More than in high school. But at university, everyone has a choice. To work or not is up to you. There's no one telling you what to do. To get your work done, you have to be self-motivated. What else?”

“More parties!” This was shouted out by Clayton, a twenty-year-old who'd spent his childhood in North Spirit Lake First Nation before being shipped off to St. Margaret's Indian Residential School. Everyone laughed.

“Yes, there are more parties at university. If you wanted, you could party every night. But we expect more of you. Going to university is a great honour. If you don't take it seriously, you won't graduate. You won't be able to get your work done if you are partying every night.” Clayton was sitting a few seats away and started scribbling a note. He handed it to me.

This guy is so serious
.

I know!
I wrote back.

He should lighten up
, he wrote.
And try my hangover cure
. I smiled.

“If you have a problem,” Harvey said, “come and see me any time. That's what I'm here for. To help you stay out of trouble.”

Joan was driving me home from school. She had been teaching me to drive, but I hadn't yet passed my test. Albalina was asleep in the backseat.

“So, how did it go?”

“Harvey said we should come and see him if we get into trouble.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“Oh you know. Partying. That sort of thing.”

“I can't imagine Harvey partying.” She had met him at the meet-and-greet on the first day of orientation. I agreed—he seemed like a straight shooter.

“Yeah, well. He's supposed to help us navigate between the two worlds. White and native.”

“You'd be good at that.”

“Me?”

“Sure. You navigated me, didn't you?”

“Still am.”

I was at our apartment. Albalina was asleep and Joan was watching TV. I had a difficult assignment. As part of Native Studies 100, we
were looking at the reserve system. Joan popped her head into the living room where I was working.

“Do you really think you should be drinking while you're studying?”

“I've almost finished. And it helps me relax.” I was top of my class by Grade 13 at KLCVI. Here, I was behind. It was stressful, especially as I was already married with a kid.

“Ed. I'm worried about you.”

“Look. I know my limits.”

“Do you? I heard you, you know, last night. Going through the drinks cabinet.”

“I had insomnia. Booze helps me get to sleep.”

“At four in the morning.”

“Yes. It was still dark outside.”

“That's not the point, is it?”

“What is the point, Joan?”

“The point is that you drink almost every night.”

“I told you. It helps me relax and puts me to sleep. And I'm not drunk by the next morning. But if it's upsetting you, I'll cut down.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.”

A few months later I was sitting in the university library reading a newspaper editorial by the Cree writer Harold Cardinal, which was part of our politics course. Everyone talked about Cardinal on campus. He had written a book the year before called
The Unjust Society
,
⁷
which argued that Canada had a long history of trying to wipe out Indians through assimilation and the residential schools. After that book came out, Cardinal was everywhere, writing newspaper columns on the treaties, the reserve unemployment rates, native sovereignty, and it was all biting, deep and smart.

I read his words about assimilation over again and thought about what they meant to me. Did they mean Ma carrying Rita to a Christian cemetery rather than burying her out in the bush? Or Pa taking me to St. Anne's? Or me going to Montreal with Mike Pasko? The concept made me feel trapped. It was like our future had already been written, that we were following a script that was out of our hands.

I looked down at the newspaper. God, I needed a drink. I always did when I thought about this stuff. Reminded me of St. Anne's and Mike Pasko. Fuck, I shouldn't. I'd already promised Joan that I'd cut down. Simone popped her head through the library door.

“A bunch of us are going to the Commoner.” It was the local student bar. “Wanna come?”

“No, I better not.” I had promised Joan.

“Come on. It'll do you some good.” She was right about that one. I certainly needed a drink. “Don't be a stickler.”

I looked at the article again and felt the hot anger spreading across my chest. It would be good to burn it off. Booze would do that.

“Meet you there in fifteen.”

“Where were you?” Joan asked that night, opening our apartment door.

“We were celebrating.”

“Celebrating what?”

“Our assimilation off the reserves!”

“What are you talking about?”

“We are now part of the White Man's World!”

“Ed. Are you drunk?”

“Nah. It was just a couple.”

“It doesn't look like it!”

“Why are you always on my case?”

“Because you promised you would cut down and you haven't. You still drink almost every night.”

“I'm shorry,” I slurred.

“Sorry?! I don't care about sorry. I care about you being sober.”

“Relax, Joan.”

“Don't tell me to relax. It's you that's making me anxious.”

“Come on. Don't be like that.”

“I'm going out,” she said.

“Where?”

“Just out.”

When she returned, I had sobered up. I told her that she was right and that I needed to lay off the booze.

“How can I believe you?”

“I promise.”

“You said that last time.”

“I know. But this time, I mean it.”

“How can I trust you?”

“I've been better, haven't I?”

“You stopped for a little while. But now it's the same again. You drink almost every night. I can smell it on you in the mornings.”

“Joan. I'm sober by morning. Besides, I had a rough day. There was this article in the newspaper about the treaties. I told people about it at the bar. Everyone was so mad. They all said, ‘that happened to me too.' There were all these broken promises. And then we started to play this drinking game: whose reserve had it worse. If you couldn't think of anything that the wemistikoshiw had done to make your life miserable, you had to drink.”