Kwe: Standing With Our Sisters

by Joseph Boyden

  A few months ago, she sang the Women’s Warrior song at the foot of the bed of her dying auntie. The same song she has sung at the Valentine’s Day March for Missing Women on the Downtown East Side and at Idle No More rallies. It is a song sung for the living and the dead. She has songs I don’t know. Honour songs. The Strong Woman’s song. Songs to help the spirit on its way and songs to call it home. On the mountain, she sang them all.

  Along with two other native women, Sails arrived on the mountain around midnight and ducked under the yellow tape, into the area restricted by the injunction, to greet the elder and the fire keeper. Fire is a conduit. It is one of the ways we speak to the dead. It is heat and light, remembrance and destruction. The sacred fire on Burnaby Mountain just so happens to be burning on top of one of Kinder Morgan’s drilling spots.

  I recognize myself in her. We share an impatience with injustice; but, where I have stood back and watched, she has acted. When she was told to step back or be arrested, she talked to the cop and explained that she just wanted to sing. To the elder, to the fire, to the dead. He let her through. In my mind, I see the small group talking quietly. Someone holds a drum over the fire to tighten the skin and a song starts up. It is easy to believe that the sleeping city does not exist. To imagine only fire and song. At 3:00 am, one of the RCMP members approaches and asks “Can I do anything for you?” To which Sails replies, “If you wouldn’t mind stopping this pipeline that would be great!” Everyone laughs: the cop, the elder, the Kinder Morgan guys who were hanging around in the shadows. It was a moment, that’s all. The next day the arrests continued. Sometimes change happens with gale force intensity. Sometimes it is subtler. A moment on a mountain, a rustling through the trees.

  DOMINION

  ~ Lorna Crozier ~

  O, wind I am thy enemy, I trap you

  invisible in a spin, make you kill

  millions of larks, warblers, siskins, shrikes.

  O, swift fox I outswift you; O, steelhead

  I turn the water of your spawning beds into fire,

  O, mountain lion, O, milkweed; O, toxic toad.

  Raven, drop your runic stones upon me,

  Bees, waste me with your stings,

  make of my maggot mind

  a hive of blackened honey.

  Bison, rip through the wire that holds you in,

  wallow what’s left of me into mud.

  For I stake your heads on pine poles

  in the tindered forest, I fuse

  your bones, I nightmare your feathers,

  I plague, I famine,

  I foul.

  CATBIRD

  ~ Lorna Crozier ~

  Small bird of the thorn-bushes

  he can make two calls at once,

  though neither are entirely his own.

  He complains like a cat, tremolos

  like a tree-frog, squeaks like a moving part

  that needs some oil. Gray thief of another’s

  noise, why does he remind me

  of my mother who never donned

  his dark cap or long black stockings?

  Is it that he sings loudest when hidden

  in the undergrowth, unobserved?

  Now that she’s invisible, I hear her

  in the grief notes of the rain, in the sound

  the clouds make when they pass over,

  her shadow in the thicket graceful

  as a cat’s shadow or a bird’s, her two calls:

  one she brings from deep inside the earth,

  the other from the doorway where she stood

  and sent into the dark my only name

  to bring me home.

  1COUNTRYBOY

  ~ Sarah de Leeuw ~

  You were a young mother in Fort St. James before the road was paved through the Indian Reserve on the edge of town.

  Two communities touching, one all paved and moneyed-up with cattle, clear-cutting, and mining. Ranchers in good trucks, diesel engines, front-end-loaders, and 18-wheelers rattling to life at 4:00 am in tidy driveways leading up to double-wides. Septic ponds out back, tethered dogs that don’t bark too much, a corral off to the side with horses and that clean scent of hay-fed shit that warms the ground in winter, almost breathing, the steam rising through settling snow, moist circles of brown earth.

  When you first drove in, through the Nakazd’li Rez, your husband pulled over on the side of the road and said: like it? Our new town?

  When you tell the story you say you felt a jagged ripping at the front of your throat, tears welling up, holding your three-month-old daughter against your breasts, warm, you stare out from the passenger seat at the cracked-and- duct-taped-over living room windows with faded wolf-face-embroidered synthetic blankets and bath-towels hung up for curtains. At the strange bent wood frames in front of everyone’s houses that you don’t yet know are for tanning moose hides. At the small smoke-stained shacks with doors flung open that you don’t yet know are where thousands of salmon will be dried next year, muscly pink meat casting shadows towards Stuart Lake.

  You’ve never seen a town like this. You close your eyes.

  Your husband laughs, starts the car, tells you he is joking. You’re in the Indian Reserve. Federal Government land. They don’t even bother to pave the roads here.

  You head into Fort St. James. Less than 100 meters away. You cross an invisible divide. Reserve land to municipal land. A town. Pavement. A small bank. The RCMP Station. A Subway Sandwich Shop. A hotel.

  But here’s the thing. You meet a woman. You walk with her every day for 6 months. You leave and forget her, forget too the town on the edge of gravel road. Then, 20 years later, Fort St. James is all over the national news. You think of women in towns on an edge.

  Cody Alan Ledgebokoff, a 21-year-old born-and-raised Fort St. James boy, charged with the first-degree murders of four women. Three of them First Nations. The newspapers don’t give all the details. Isn’t it enough to say they were clubbed to death, dumped on the sides of the roads off the highway, in fleshy piles onto dirt-infused ice under the blackened branches of beetle-killed pines, in gravel pits. That the girls were raped and slayed, that the youngest was 15 years old, nearly blind?

  You look at the soft chunky good looking face of the young man, imagining the rapes. You can’t help it. You think of your now grown daughter. You think of how he had sex with those girls. Before slaughtering them. Clothes tugged off. Panting. You think of the shores of Stuart Lake. Smooth grey stones. How even they hurt your spine in the summer if you rested back on them in just the wrong way. You hear he dated the girls online, met them using the name 1CountryBoy. The bone-snapped bodies of girls younger than your daughter. You hurt in places you did not know pain could touch.

  AT THE PARTY

  ~ Bill Gaston ~

  A squat man in a ragged kilt, dusty,

  he’s pale and sunburned,

  gazing on his sunrise field.

  Boulders anchor shadows long as trees.

  He loves his wife, his children even more and

  has done no great wrong that he knows.

  He keeps his tongue, and his heart.

  Today, a year’s words of friends and betters

  and his own hard ideas

  has him off to war,

  impatient with the dented borrowed sword

  dangling in his hand.

  Hardest is leaving two girls who think

  he’s ripely brilliant and hilarious.

  They are years too young to scythe

  or seed, let alone know.

  So the man goes, and dies in a side battle

  under foreign leaders

  —often the way with gathered anger—

  and nine hundred years go by

  in hissing bad luck.

  Across an ocean, at a party, we’re rich,

  the house big as a castle, though

  there are others like it on either side.

  Downstairs, we shriek around a pool table

  balancing mounded
plates and sloshing cups.

  Our accents are from far off and also of this street,

  but nothing of the land’s oldest tongue.

  We party just under street level,

  and it’s soon dawn. To our surprise,

  on a shelf before the bright window well

  beside an antique sextant

  —as if one may have brought the other—

  squats a skull in a glass case,

  mummified, stained coffee-brown from bog,

  slight ginger wisps on one temple.

  We know the empty eyes have never not been on us,

  moaning long shadows,

  watching the dance.

  THE BLUE CLERK: VERSOS

  ~ Dionne Brand ~

  Verso 26

  The baby next door was in full voice last night. I didn’t want to put him in that last verso. It would have injured him. Before I fell asleep he woke up and gave a full throated account of the hours of dreaming he had, he didn’t hush for anything, and not until he was finished. I love his voice, it gives every raw emotion. He must be still alarmed at the stark dry air he entered when he was born. To be born, to be shoved out of water, although that water was diminishing and the body wanting some substance it did not yet know. He awakened again at 3 am with the same desire, or was it rage at not being able to stand and go get what he wanted himself. And then again at six. He never sounds sad. It is not pity that he is searching for. He sounds energetic and full of life while everyone is in that dark nine-month sleep he escaped. He is full of blood and living. He holds nothing back, his voice is all he has. It has not learned to round itself or square itself on a letter of the alphabet, he is before alphabets. In fact it is plain to the baby that Marshall McLuhan knew what he was talking about when he said the alphabet was the first technology. But why bring up McLuhan, the baby predates McLuhan. At the same time, right this minute, the baby post-dates McLuhan. McLuhan never existed and will not exist in this baby’s present. To throw a linguist in, if we think about it, the baby is on one side of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar theory and the people who take care of him are on the other. They are not yet his parents in these new weeks, they are not yet a noun, they do not yet predicate. For the briefest sliver of a second, if we understand time this way, they are a hypothesis. His voice rips out with all its intelligence. He seems aware that some others exist and they are there to make that part of him, which he has no control over yet, to make that part of him sensible to him. These others, they quiet him for their own peace. I love the baby’s voice. I will have to put my ear to the wall to hear him. He has such originality.

  GRIEF AT HEATHROW

  ~ Michael Crummey ~

  Flying home through London

  from a Mediterranean island

  lately split by Turks and Greeks,

  though half the civilized ancients

  made a claim to Cyprus

  at their respective peaks,

  signs of each occupation

  so prominently displayed

  the country seemed to belong

  to no one in particular

  and I carried that sorry sense

  of unease, like a low-grade

  fever, around the cobbled streets

  and tacky tourist haunts,

  slipped it into my suitcase

  like a cheap souvenir.

  Heathrow Departures dense

  with lost souls repeating aimless

  turns through the duty-free,

  the faux pubs and restaurants

  that somehow make the ennui

  of jet-lag more intense,

  and I leave the labyrinth

  to stand outside awhile,

  feeling naked without a cigarette

  to justify my presence

  among the smokers in exile.

  Five purgatorial hours to kill,

  dead time that seems infinite,

  and I stuff that gaping hole

  with visions of you fatally

  maimed beneath a mangled car

  or comatose after a simple fall

  or bleeding out in intensive care

  while I wait for my connecting flight.

  It’s a morbid habit of mine—

  idle in any airport I’ll light

  up some lame catastrophe

  and smoke it to the butt,

  it’s just the tar and nicotine

  of counterfeit emotion

  I can’t dismiss completely,

  lacking faith in the cosmos

  or in myself, which amounts

  to the same affliction—

  the fear I belong to no one

  in the end, the sorry sense

  that belonging won’t keep.

  Passengers wanting the entrance

  forced to look away as they pass

  the man undone by the urge to weep

  outside the doors to Terminal Three.

  BEGINNINGS

  ~ Alice Kuipers and Yann Martel ~

  from: Yann Martel

  to: Alice Kuipers

  date: Thu, Jun 5, 2003 at 11:17 AM

  subject: To my favourite Munchcusian

  Hello, beautiful.

  What a marvelous sleepless night I spent.

  You’re sweet, bright, and gorgeous.

  How was Norfolk?

  from: Alice Kuipers

  to: Yann Martel

  subject: Norfolk and exhaustion

  date: Mon, 9 Jun 2003 00:05:48 +0100 (BST)

  Nice to be reminded how beautiful England is: Norfolk is huge and flat and there were points I felt like the only person in the world. Nice to see the sea, walk for miles, and then lie around in a bikini. Nice is the best word sometimes.

  Hope you’re ok. Not lonely. Doing important things. Getting through jetlag.

  Ali

  P.S - am reading a great book...

  from: Yann Martel

  to: Alice Kuipers

  date: Mon, Jun 9, 2003 at 2:10 AM

  subject: To my favourite Munchcusian

  Dear Alice (or do you prefer Ali? I like both),

  Am I doing important things? God knows. What I am doing, in a few minutes, is a press conference. Imagine. I’m going to sit in front of a group of journalists from press agencies who will ask me questions. As if I were some kind of politician. But that’s what happens when people mix up the product, the book, for the producer. They figure because I wrote a good book that I have good, intelligent things to say about a thousand and one things. Oh yeah: and I have to say those things in Spanish.

  I’m a little nervous.

  Am I lonely? Yes and no. Madrid is nice, Norfolk-nice, though there’s no sea around (and you wouldn’t catch me dead in a bikini). I went to the Prado (the Spanish version of the Louvre), where I saw some great Goyas. I saw a so-so bullfight. (I like bullfights. I spent four summers in Spain and saw dozens of them, same when I lived in Mexico City for a year.) Today

  I face a solid day of media, followed by a full day of individual interviews. Tonight I leave for Barcelona. There I have two full days of interviews. So busy, busy, busy. But:

  I arrived in Manchester grim and tired. I left Manchester happy and exhausted. What happened, can you tell me? It all went by so quickly. I wish you were here, actually. Who needs sleep? And there’s so much to do in new cities.

  Oh, journalists are making noises. Must go.

  Write to me, will you?

  Yann

  from: Alice Kuipers

  to: Yann Martel

  subject: Bookshops and thinking about you

  date: Tue, 10 Jun 2003 12:17:37 +0100 (BST)

  Bookshop life! One of our customers licks the books! But life is good. I’ve been writing lots. And I’m looking forward to going on holiday to Gibraltar and I’ve seen a job organizing reading in schools that I think I’d like to do when I get back from Hong Kong.

  If I’m honest, I don’t really like emailing as a form of communication: I always worry that cyberspace is an emo
tional black hole. If I email you and say I miss you or I’d like to see you I have no way of knowing your response. I can’t see your face or hear what you’re saying.

  So, you ask what happened in Manchester and I have things I want to say, but the Internet is so open to misinterpretation that I’m left without words (unusual for me).

  Take care. Go to The Sagrada Familia (’spect you’ve been before, but if not...) Tell your publicist you want to stop over in Manchester on your wayback .

  Ali

  from: Yann Martel

  to: Alice Kuipers

  date: Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 2:18 PM

  subject: Re: Bookshops, training and thinking about you

  Dear Alice (I’ve decided I prefer the full, sibilant form),

  But if you look closer, just under e-mail’s dark complexion, you’ll notice the bright red blood of passion! I love e-mail. It’s been my lifeline to those I know and love, to those I’ve met and want to keep in my life, it’s my gypsy office.

  What’s your phone number then, if you don’t like electric letters?

  When are you leaving for Gibraltar? Crazy that I’m in Spain now, until Thursday, and then will be in Portugal until Sunday, while you slip in between the two to visit one of your colonies. And when are you leaving for Hong Kong (another, barely former colony—do you have some fetish about British colonies?)

  Barcelona is a spectacular city. Which you know, since you recommended I go to the Sagrada Familia. I haven’t been here in ages, since before the Olympics. I have two free hours tomorrow.

  The reading-organizer job sounds great, if you can live off it. I guess you’ll have to count your pennies and scrimp and save and make that tough choice between holding a fag in your hand or a pen. I know which you’ll choose.

  My stomach is growling. It’s past 10 p.m. and I still haven’t eaten. How quickly I’ve adapted to Spain’s lifestyle. Did you know I was born in Spain, in Salamanca?