by Rudy Wiebe
If I close my eyes and stare into memory, I can see the massive grey façade of the Prison for Women, stones cut square and mortared together high and straight and thick as irrefutable sin. Yvonne was in there from April 1991 until September 1995; I visited her there four times. But now her quiet voice continues, telling me the new story of this place:
“Once the site for the Healing Lodge was chosen, the Elders tied four ceremonial flags to the trees on the limits of the land at the four directions, to let the Creator and the Spirit World acknowledge the place. So the spiritual boundaries were set, and now no bars or fencing is needed here because if you cross the boundaries of the four colours you defy the Creator and the Spirits, the ultimate disrespect, and who would do that?”
We are standing on the open balcony off the dining room in the bristling cold, leaning on the railing and against the huge wooden posts that support the rafters. The living units where the residents share apartments are separate, built along a short road to the west. Before us, shingled in cedar, is the great teepee-like structure Yvonne calls the Spirit Lodge, and beyond it the frosted poplar forest folds down ravines into the prairie.
“There are beavers here.” Yvonne gestures with her cigarette into the trees below us. And through brush, between poplar trunks, I can see the flatness of white ice that curves sharply at a possible dam, the white hump of a lodge with dark logs sticking out. The only animal that architecturally alters its environment—except human beings, of course.
Yvonne’s first letter to me from Box 515, Kingston, concluded:
But I have read your book The Temptations of Big Bear. And I must admit I have seen it many times before but did not wish to even pick it up, as I figured, yeah, what do any of those White people or history really know of my family […]. But now I am glad I read your book. I was slapped in the face by how much you really knew or could understand. And I wondered if you had talked to my relatives. Or how you did your research. Where did you get it all? […] Lately more and more Natives are interested in Big Bear, for reasons too numerous to mention. Land claims would be my guess. My grandpa John was a self-proclaimed chief by blood to Big Bear, and he went to Hobbema and other places to get them to fight for his birthright, and now many people are looking into him. And in my own research I find everyone shutting up on me […]. I run into special difficulties because of where I am, and I don’t have great contact with my family, so I cannot get at all the info I need to get a better understanding which is in the minds of the old folks that are left alive on the rez. And I fear I lose one every day I am in here. The old people tried to tell me before, but I was not ready for it. I’ve lost too many already. I feel as if I’m the last in my family who can get it back, as the others just don’t care. I fear it will all be lost. I’m scared of the great loss that will be; I can’t let it die.
Please help me share what it is you know, and how you got it. How is it you came to know as much as you do? Were you led? What was the force behind you? Who are you? Why did you choose Big Bear to write about? What sparked your interest in this powerful man of long ago? I wish to clear his name and to recover his medicine bundle as I try to find my lost family, and only under our Bear Spirit will it ever be true. We have not guarded it as we should have, and now we have suffered long enough; now is the time to heal and to return to the land and reclaim our rightful place and to meet my family that has been sent all over the four winds. We need to come together as Big Bear wished.
[signed] Yvonne Johnson
On 14 January 1996, wherever Yvonne and I look from the balcony of the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge on the eastern massif of the Cypress Hills, everything we see, and beyond, was her great-great-grandfather’s country. Mistahi Muskwa—Big Bear—and his Plains Cree people lived and hunted buffalo and antelope and deer and moose north to the Great Sand Hills and the Eagle Hills and Sounding Lake and the North Saskatchewan River and Fort Pitt and Jackfish Lake, where he was born about 1825, and all the way south to the Milk and Missouri rivers, country they walked and rode and hunted, old people, children, women, men, this immense land as familiar to them and the soles of their feet as the terrain of their own hands. Land which Big Bear refused to surrender to the Canadian government when Lieutenant-Governor Alexander Morris and all his officialdom dragged themselves painfully through the country during the long summer of 1876, carrying many little presents of food and ceremonial clothing, and the paper which would become the Cree’s eternal sentence, Treaty Number Six:
The tract [of land] embracing an area of one hundred and twenty thousand square miles, be the same more or less; to have and to hold the same to Her Majesty the Queen and her successors forever.
A land area a third larger than the entire United Kingdom.
The Canadian government first officially appeared on the prairie to Big Bear and his band in 1875, in the form of a Methodist minister, the Reverend George McDougall. It was McDougall’s official assignment to “tranquillize” the prairie Indians so they would “await in full confidence the coming of the Treaty Commissioners.” But Chief Big Bear refused a quick tranquillization; he told McDougall with absolute clarity:
“We want none of the Queen’s presents. When we set a fox-trap we scatter pieces of meat all around, but when the fox gets into the trap, we knock him on the head.”
As a result of that statement and McDougall’s report of it, Big Bear officially became known as “a troublesome fellow”; to his own people, he was a great leader with powerful medicine who received dreams and saw visions, but, for the churchmen advising the government, he was an evil conjuror. So he was not notified to attend any signing for Treaty Number Six the following summer. But he appeared in September 1876 at the Fort Pitt treaty ceremonies anyway and badly interrupted what until then had been mostly expansive, agreeable speeches. Facing Lieutenant-Governor Morris, Big Bear made the second of his profound, imagistic statements about Native-White relations:
“There is one thing that I dread: to feel the rope around my neck.”
At first Morris understood this on a simple, literal level: it must refer to the White legal practice of hanging criminals, and since Big Bear was now definitely confirmed as “troublesome,” no doubt he feared that fate if he signed. But Big Bear persisted, and at a certain point in the debate, which Morris himself recorded in his memoirs in 1880, the governor seemed to grasp the larger meaning of the statement: Big Bear was speaking for his people then alive and their children yet to be born in an all-inclusive image, and suddenly Morris made a radical concession in his interpretation of what the treaty meant:
“I wish the Bear … to understand fully, and tell the others [those people who are not here].… The Government will not interfere with the Indian’s daily life, they will not bind him.”
Clearly, Morris understood what Big Bear was saying, and he responded with a transparent, official lie. Taking the Cree’s immense land and forcing them to live in a reserve system was such an enormous “interference” and “binding” of their daily life—many Native people now speak of their reserves as “prisons of grass”—that it seems the chiefs listening to this debate in 1876 could not even imagine how enormous a lie it truly was. They all “touched the pen,” and so signed. But Big Bear refused; he and his people followed the buffalo south into Montana.
Of course, Big Bear did eventually sign as well. He had to, when the death of the last buffalo between the Missouri and Milk rivers in Montana forced him and the 1,200 Cree then in his band into starvation. When they arrived at the Medicine Line between U.S. and Canadian territory, they found that the North-West Mounted Police had very clear orders: no food for non-treaty Indians. After holding out for a better treaty for over six years, after debating strategy with his family and council all fall, on a cold December day in 1882 Big Bear signed his adhesion to Treaty Number Six so that his starving people would have something to eat during the hard winter.
Big Bear signed at Fort Walsh in the Cypress Hills—as the raven flies, less than f
ifty kilometres from where Yvonne and I now stand, talking.
“I’m just happy to talk,” Yvonne says; “it’s really new for me. I spent my life listening and dreaming as other people spoke, to feel what they were saying.”
“You talk well enough now,” I tell her with a grin. “You’ve sent me fifteen notebooks already, most of them over three hundred pages!”
“But I can never write fast enough, I can’t keep up, feelings aren’t words, if I could speak things all the time you’d have even more!”
She’s smiling at me; she has sent me tapes and videos as well, but they are so difficult to organize, her memories are so interwoven and intersnarled, that I’ve begged her to write only, however it comes and she remembers, but write it down; write, please.
She continues, “I guess when I talk I express myself like I listened, story form. It’s actually an easy way to understand if you yourself can listen. But not many people are good listeners and that doesn’t matter to me. I tell little stories so you can see, live, feel what I am trying to explain to you. Like I’m figuring it out, out loud. I’m always all over the place. People say I can’t stay on one topic; sometimes when I just say things head-on, point blank, it drives them crazy to have to listen to me. Some of the girls in P4W used to tease me; they said they were going to paint a T-shirt with words on the front, ‘Ask me a question …,’ and on the back ‘… and I’ll tell you a story!’ ”
She laughs white clouds into the cold air; her cigarette is finished and we’re freezing.
“But the Elders say that storytelling is a gift too. If a person with a story can go deep, where people are angry, sad, where they’re hiding thoughts and emotions, raise the past they’ve maybe forgotten and can’t really recognize any more, push them to spirit-walk into themselves—to do that with a story is a gift.”
We go back into the open dining/social area and find a private space.
I nudge Yvonne back to her ancestry. “You’ve never told me exactly how you’re related to Big Bear.”
“Yeah,” she says. “Maybe some of my aunts or uncles know, but my mother will not tell me now. Perhaps for some reason she’s afraid to break the silence about my family, but I need to know my heritage. My grandma Flora wouldn’t speak about Grandpa John’s family, and he never did either. Maybe because they were both related to Big Bear, somehow, and in the Cree way that isn’t right, they shouldn’t marry, but they never would say. Big Bear had several wives who had many children, so it’s possible. I don’t know, and no one tells me now. In Natives, blood runs thick and long and for ever.”
“So what was your grandma Flora’s mother’s name, the great-grandma you knew, your dad showed me a picture of her in her coffin, she died in the seventies and over a hundred?”
“They said she was a hundred and sixteen, and I don’t know her name. Mom just called her ‘Kohkom,’ ‘Grandma’ in Cree. Mom just always said, ‘You’re Native, you be proud of it.’ And I did have such pride being Native that I never thought to justify it by finding out my bloodline.”
“And you never asked her the Cree names of ancestors?”
“No, not really. You’re careful with Cree names—brother, daughter, okay, but not names. When I was little I heard that Grandpa John’s father was Big Bear’s son, and the story was that people came to call him a bad medicine man because they feared Big Bear. It had something to do with submitting to the Whites, with turning against Big Bear’s advice during the rebellion in 1885, because in doing that they had also turned against his Bear Spirit. So they feared Big Bear, and that was made worse by their shame at having given in rather than stand up for their rights and spiritual beliefs, as he wanted them to. So they called his son ‘a bad medicine man,’ and they said he made some sort of pact with bad spirits because he was mad at the government, and forfeited all his boys to the evil—all except John, who was the youngest. The story was that John and his father stood on the shore of a lake and watched all the other sons walk into the lake and drown. They say that as the last bubble of their breath broke on the surface, John’s father screamed and jerked a handful of hair out of John’s head, threw it on the ground and spit on it, and swore that never again would there be anything like this in our family, never. I don’t remember—know—what the deal was my great-grandfather had made; it had something to do with government, but he renounced it then, and I think Grandpa John knew this from when he was a small boy.”
Yvonne looks up past the wide, laminated rafters of the room, away into distance; her long, black hair falls in a thick braid to her waist and her long slant of body sits still as a shadow, but I have watched her talk for hours and I know she is deeply troubled. She searches her way into sound, slowly. “I don’t know … maybe, when Grandpa died, the curse had run its course … I just don’t know. Sometimes I pray for direct guidance, from Big Bear’s spirit. I’ve written many, many letters to archives, but they won’t look up anything for me. I wish I could go to those places, and poke around, to get any information hiding in papers, in pictures. Even if I don’t know what I’m looking for, I know I would know if I saw it.”
But she won’t be able to go “there,” to Ottawa or Washington or Montana or Regina or wherever the archives are that might help inform her. She is sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder, and not until she has served twenty-five years—15 September 2014—will she be eligible for parole. If that is granted, she will be released, but nevertheless remain on parole until she dies. The “faint hope” clause of a parole hearing at fifteen years is truly that: so faint as to be, for her, almost indiscernible.
“If I even live that long.”
Who is Yvonne Johnson, and what was she accused of doing to become the only Native woman in Canada with such an immovable sentence of first-degree murder?
Why is she serving the heaviest possible sentence in the Canadian Criminal Code, but nevertheless was the fifth woman to be accepted in this minimum-security prison, this new Healing Lodge in mi-nati-kak, “the beautiful high lands” as the Cree call them, of southern Saskatchewan?
Early on Friday morning, 15 September 1989, the body of Charles Skwarok was found in the Wetaskiwin, Alberta, city dump. Within hours Yvonne, her common-law husband, Dwayne Wenger, and her acquaintance Ernest Jensen were arrested, charged with murdering Skwarok in the basement of Yvonne and Dwayne’s Wetaskiwin house. Three days later Yvonne’s maternal first cousin, Shirley Anne Salmon, was arrested for the same crime. In the various trials that followed, Shirley Anne pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and was sentenced to one year in jail; Dwayne pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life, ten years; Ernie was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life, ten years; Yvonne was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life, twenty-five years.
Did Yvonne, of all the four acknowledged participants, deserve the heaviest sentence? Did she get justice, or simply a full, overwhelming measure of law?
And the larger question: why was she involved in murder at all? When I answered Yvonne’s first letter, I had no idea of what crime she was convicted; I was powerfully intrigued by this self-aware, storytelling descendant of the historical Big Bear who had been living, growing, in my imagination for over three decades and who himself died in 1888 from the effects of what was surely an unjust imprisonment. But as Yvonne’s and my letters, phone calls, and finally our personal visits grew, her life became as vital and irrefutable to me as that of her magnificent ancestor.
Seven months after my first meeting with Yvonne at the Healing Lodge, on 22 August 1996, I will be lying on my back in a high-hill glade nearby, staring up into a blue sky running with mare’s tails. Yvonne’s cousin Rose has organized a cycle of four sweats to help Yvonne on her spiritual walk, and she has invited me to join.
Like the other men visitors lying around me, breathing hard, I wear only shorts and my body pours sweat: the body cleansing itself of wastes and pollutants—the mirror of the spirit cleansing itself in prayer t
o find balance, wholeness, self-awareness. We have completed the third round of the forty-stone sweat, and soon we will crawl back into the sweat lodge beside us for the fourth and final round. The Elder’s helper will have carried the last grandfather stones from the fire into the centre pit and he will close us in, cover us over with complete, absolute darkness—sight and taste gone, but hearing and smell and touch and spirit intensified. Then the ancient, spiritual songs, the Cree prayers, will begin to rise with the steam rising from the white-hot rocks as the Elder sprinkles water on them by shaking his spray of leafy wet poplar branches. And again I will try to pray.
Resting on the ground, I look across the clearing. In the shade of nearby trees sit the women who are praying this sweat also. They wear long, belted robes; we will all soon re-enter the round sweat lodge together, and the women will sit in the darkness on their side across the fire pit from the men. Rose and Yvonne are there; even without my glasses I can see Yvonne’s blue robe among the women resting silent on the grass, blurry as bright flowers that have burst out of the green earth suddenly.
Then Yvonne gets up, walks away into the open glade. Against the trees and the grassy shoulders of the hills she moves down the slope; disappears.
Later she writes to me: “I lay down in the field and cried, staring into the sky with such anger mingled with pain, all I could do was shed tears at my lostness. I was so angry I wanted to walk away, go, I’m beyond help, just a lost cause, hopeless.… But my cousin knows how I am, all the pain, and she had put up four sweats for me. I had to return. Go back into the sweat, pray for help in my pitiful state, all my misplaced pride and honour; asking again how to become a true, proud, Native woman.”