by Rudy Wiebe
I found one good thing in P4W one day last summer: I sang in the winds of a rain. I was working on the yard crew—I love digging in the ground and making things grow in neat rows—and it began pouring rain. The rain cleaned the dirt of this place off of me, I wanted to ride the wind, I sang and wanted to fly with the storm.
I want to die, but not in here. Here there is pettiness, only pain is normal, love is one woman sucking another. God be merciful and let me die in my sleep. But not here.
My big brother Earl died in jail. He was in our home town, but every member of his family was far away too—Leon in jail and the rest of us in Saskatchewan. Earl told me when I was a child that I did not have to let people touch me.
Why did I once think, when a man has an erection, he’s in pain? That it’s my duty to help him relieve it? Any male looks at you, he wants sex? As I grew older I tried to get something out of sex for myself, I tried to tell myself I’m sexy—hey, look at these lo-ong legs!—but I knew I never was. I try to look back, and I can’t remember any sober sex. I was too busy having to perform and I knew I could never handle it without liquor. I became more confused, numb. And I found men never seem to care anyway, as long as their lust is relieved, all that bulging, prodding pain.
My lifetime of doing what others demanded of me—if I couldn’t stay out of their way. Except with my kids; and if only Dwa and I could have been together a little longer; a little while without booze. But I was hurting in ways I could not remember, then Leon came after me. Now I’m here, and Dwa is serving his ten years in Collins Bay Institution down the road. He got himself transferred from Alberta to Ontario so at least one person in my family would be closer to me. So we could try to stay together.
I don’t know if Dwa and I stand a chance. I’ll have a visit with him in the Little House in the prison yard, two or three days every two months, if we set it up right, but so far he’s said he doesn’t want to marry me, not in prison. I was trying to tell him of my first attack, and I was so emotionally drained I mostly wasted our few days together, I slept from three in the afternoon till three in the morning. I wonder if I’ll make it through this, if Dwa has any miracle to help me, if my life can include my kids or if I’ll have to teach myself to let them go. See them once a year on visits, as long as they can come, and let them grow up in the foster home where they are now. I won’t go back to the Parenting Skills class they give here; it’s mostly designed for short-term inmates and just frustrates me to hell. The first thing they take from you here is your motherhood, and by the time you’re brainwashed enough to suit them, you’re not even a woman. You’re washed out, empty clothes walking past.
I sleep too much. But it’s never enough anyway to make time move.
The “sugar shack” is what I call the Little House in the prison yard. Dwa and I have had a few three-day visits there now. I’m finally beginning to feel loved again, and comfortable with him. He’s the same man I’ve known over ten years, but different, strange. We talk about more things, each other’s needs. Even sexual, and we never really talked of sex before, just did it. When you’re locked in prison, he says, you learn to think of women not only in a sexual way. Given the way other guys behave in prison, I didn’t expect him to say that; he looks at me now as the one who bore him children, the greatness of women who are mothers, lovers, caregivers, giftgivers, sisters, aunties, grandmothers. In prison, he says, men can see life through a woman or learn to hate them forever, turned and twisted inside. The body reacts on its own, out of its nature, and a person’s sexuality gets very tested when you are forced to abstain.
How can anyone imagine the loneliness behind all the masturbation that goes on in prisons? I was raised between Roman Catholic and Cree, both very demanding, but the Catholic religion has no mercy. And me with all my abuse, there is nothing good about sex, not even something simple like masturbation—I found masturbation was a big, big thing for me. Because I know now that sex was being done to me all my life, and all my body knew was that any touching, of any kind, had to lead to sex. I was never innocent in body or mind; there were only secrets, pain, silence. And when Mom told me my crotch was a bad place, don’t ever touch yourself! I knew that already.
I can’t recall ever enjoying sex, and I never came. Eight years into marriage and it was still performing, I could never come—even when I finally found out what coming for a woman could be. In dealing with my abuse, what I am become, honesty with Dwa was the first step because he has lived with me into the process and so I told him about never coming while on a Little House visit. And he was so hurt, he cried. Well, what did it have to do with him? But he thinks it does, I guess he thinks it’s his manliness. So I have to deal with him while I deal with myself.
Love, not sex. I wished to give him sex because he wanted it, it joined us so well sometimes. But what I truly wanted was the closeness it gave us. All wrapped together in and around each other, together in the dark.
Today Mom blames Dad for everything that happened to us. “I should never have married him, never,” she said after twenty years and having seven kids with him. And Dad justified whatever he did to me by blaming all the rest of us for leaving him. “Families have to stick together,” he says. “Families work when it’s us together against the world.”
I pity them both. The other person is always the problem.
When I told Dad what I remember Grandpa Louie doing to me, he said there’s a difference between abusing and just touching or fondling. Maybe the old guy was just comforting and loving me to make me feel better. “And now,” he says, “all my dad gets for living 103 years is being called a dirty old man.”
Everyone in my family denies and denies the abuse I—all of us—suffered. “It’s all in your head,” they say, “you remember nothing straight.”
It’s in my head all right. And in my body, carved like stone. But Dwa and I are talking now in the Little House, we are telling each other the truth. And sometimes we both cry. There’s nothing else to do, but still it feels better, saying it aloud.
As Big Bear said, “Words are power.”
And it seems to me that the opposite is true as well. If no one ever speaks the words that should be spoken, the silence destroys you.
Would the guilt stop if I was dead?
If I die serving a life sentence the government has to send me home to Red Pheasant in Saskatchewan to be buried in the graveyard there with my family. I want a pine box, no air-tight shit, I want to rot and go back as I can to Mother Earth with my hugging pillow in my arms. No dress. Just pyjamas, the long-shirt-and-pants kind, with nothing on my feet. I want to be laid as if I were sleeping, and I sleep on my side with my hugging pillow in my arms, my head on another pillow in a curled, foetal position. On the little hill south of the church with my Grandma and Grandpa Bear.
My guilt feels endless. I can’t pin it down. And still I try to stay alive, to laugh when insanity would be a release, to not become what I see around me in P4W, women inmates who seem to exist for nothing but to eat or be eaten. And me with my conviction of guilt, both legal and personal, my shame.
Now after three years of being locked away this strange thing happens: I begin to recognize my body. I recognize it takes practice, you have to explore yourself to know your physical and spiritual self. The first time I attempted an orgasm I stopped myself and cried. There was the shame, the pity for myself, why does this come to me now? To feel my body after all the horrible stuff it’s been forced to do, all I’ve done, now this? But it did help me fall asleep.
O God, O Creator, help me.
And the Creator has. In the sweat lodge which the Ojibwa elder Art Solomon and others helped our Native Sisterhood to build in an angle of walls here in P4W, it was revealed to me what I have been given. Things beyond pain and suffering and grief. I have found the darkness and the light in that small circle, and I have blessed it, as it has blessed me, as my body poured sweat. I could not have remembered what I do about my life if the Creator had not come to me
in the circle of the sweat lodge.
I will say it the way it happened:
We Native women in P4W are a Sisterhood, we are family, and sometimes we kid around before we enter the sweat lodge with our Elders. It was Vern Harper that time, and somebody says, “Let’s go burn with Vern!” and we all laugh a little, it’s so solemn, but wonderful too, and full of anticipation. When the lodge helper lays all the covers tight and darkness surrounds us, the heat and steam rising, the sizzle of water on stones, of groans, of screams barely kept in, a pain like birthing that rocks, gasps—I cannot scream, it is not respectful, but the pain and heat are unfathomable: my robe is blue and white. I am burning up and I slap myself because I was told wherever I burn I’m sick and need healing, slapping it acknowledges my pain, slap it to let it go, give it to the Creator. And for an instant the pain is gone, but then it returns even more intense. I was warned: you’ve made yourself sick, so it’s up to you to heal yourself, do it, and in our circle all eyes are watching me invisible in the darkness but they watch, I know, and hear, the sound within my silence is a rumbling growl, it grows larger and larger until my body can’t hold it, it bursts into growl, roar after roar, a huge animal towering over me, roaring out of me.
The second round is hotter, and then the third round hotter still, the water hissing on stones soaked through with fire. The Elder at the head of the circle sings his sacred songs, makes his prayers as if talking with someone we cannot see. Then he addresses me. He is saying sacred words to me as he says them to himself.
“I think you know why you are receiving this name,” he says in English. “Your name is Medicine Bear Woman. And your colours are the Cree medicine colours, red and green.”
Everything is quiet in the sweating darkness of the lodge. The Elder says, “It’s your responsibility to learn how to say it in Cree.”
My body is curled and wet, this heat and darkness may have been called by his words to deliver me into my coming life. And then I hear the Cree words again. Not from him; it is the voice of my grandma Flora Bear who speaks my spirit name to me. As I remember she did so often when I was a child:
Muskeke Muskwa Iskwew.
Without knowing that name again I could never try to help myself, or help my family. My spirit name, given me by the Spirit World People, now I have a place. Where I can stand to speak.
Medicine Bear Woman.
I must explain how my life was kick-started. Speak it out, word for word. I know my spirit name, and that I am the great-great-granddaughter of Big Bear. The Elders tell me that Bear sits in the north of the circle. Bear is the Healer: if you ask and believe, it will happen.
In the summer of 1992, I found My Father’s House in the library and I started reading it. It’s a book written by Sylvia Fraser [about sexual abuse within a family], and it just made me sadder. And one day one of the guards spoke to me—actually I never speak to them, just “Hi!” and smile and disappear as fast as I can so they won’t ask me anything—but this one is a Native guard. She spoke to me first.
“Is something the matter?” she asked. “You walk around all day like a zombie.”
It was the name Leon always used on me. And suddenly I just blurted it out, “I’m having these terrible—not nightmares … sort of pictures … things about when I was little, that have always been there, somewhere, but more and more, I don’t know, I can’t stop them.”
Tears came into her eyes. “Are they about being abused?”
“Yes … yes. But if they do such things to a baby, I wasn’t crippled, I don’t know how I’d remember from so young?”
She looked at me for a minute, and then she nodded.
“You know,” she said, her face deep and sad, “I was raped and molested when I was a baby. My siblings, when they were older, they confirmed it. It happens, yes.”
Bear is the Healer: the Elders say if you ask and believe, it will happen. so I am asking. Please. Have mercy.
And every day I remember. I see as clearly as if I were staring at a picture I hold in my hand, hour after hour. The longer I look, the more I see in it.
This should not have to be spoken in public, or in a court of law. At best it should be talked through in my family only. If only that was possible.
I always knew I was abused, but I tried to forget to what extreme it had happened. At the time of my arrest in 1989, I knew of my brother’s recent attacks on me. His attacks rekindled lost or pushed-aside or covered memories: the best way to explain it is when you sit and watch water in a glass pot come to a boil. It doesn’t happen in one big rush and the whole pot is boiling. It’s slow and steady, just one bubble at a time rising up from the bottom, then a few more, and more, and before you know it the water’s pouring out all over the stove. My life is like that pot. I don’t know why water boils, or how the stove works, but I do know I was simmering as a child and started to boil as I got older until, with Leon and all that happened in Wetaskiwin, I came to a full raped boil. And then, the worst of it, I was arrested when I was twenty-seven, and the cops and the law just covered me, locked me down tight with a lid.
So I sat in Remand, the holding cages—and I kept boiling. I tried to wipe it up, yet it kept coming up; I was shackled and cuffed and unable to turn off the stove. I was sentenced, I was taken two thousand miles to the Prison for Women. I am boiling away, burning up, and I am smothered by the rules of the law while everyone sits on their job and watches me burn; till one day—perhaps they’re hoping for it—I’ll be boiled out and cooked out of existence.
Then, in October 1992, while I was at my appeal in Edmonton, my sister Karen told me on the phone that Leon had raped her. When my sister Minnie told Mom about Leon’s attack on Karen, Leon beat and beat Minnie, ripping her clothes off, all she had on when Karen finally got him to stop was her bra. And I said to Karen, as she wept for us all, that I will not let this violence in our family continue any more without a fight. I will speak out loud. I will write these words down.
[From a witness statement Yvonne wrote on 2 November 1992, in Edmonton. Her signature on the thirty-page handwritten statement is witnessed by Detective Linda Billings, Child Abuse Unit, Edmonton Police Service.]
My first attack happened when I was between two to three years old. We lived in a pink house, next door to a two-storey house and down from the railroad tracks. My eldest brother got on a bus and went one way and the other kids went to a school that sat on the hill […]. I slept in a bunk bed in a room off the kitchen. From where I slept I could see the kitchen table, and my plant that sat on the window. The boys slept in the living room.
The attack on me was by a grown man, by my brother Leon [eight and a half years old at that time], and later on by three other boys, one was tall with red hair. And one boy was our neighbour, and would be in later years as well.
What started my rape was our babysitter [the grown man] caught Leon messing around with me behind the fridge in the kitchen. The man told him, in other words, Leon was not doing it right. I was placed on the kitchen table and the bottom half of my body stripped. He was pointing things out to Leon, saying things like this is this, and this is this, And this is where you put your prick […].
I cry and try to crawl off the table. The man would yell at me and slap my ass. At first. And put me on my back. He hurt me I think by putting his finger up my cunt. I’d cry and try to get away as I was crawling off the table, then he started to poke my ass as well. He yelled at Leon for letting me get away.
One time I put my arms around Leon, to try and carry me away, and the man would throw me back on the table. He bent my legs up past my head as I lay on my back. I could not breathe […].
I was on the table, and Leon watching as this man tried to shut me up, he’d give me a sucker. First he gave me one and started to poke at me again, I’d cry out so he got some more suckers and shoved all of them in my mouth at once. I was suffocating and crying as this man kept poking at me. I’d pull the suckers out and cry and try to get away.
If
anyone tried to come in the kitchen, like other kids, he’d get Leon to give them a sucker and chase them away. The guy beat me to shut me up, he banged my head on the table. Then when someone came he’d put his cock in my mouth and almost kill me. But also, he’d bend my feet, to where I swear he broke them, to spread my legs and poke at me. I think he went to put lard or oil on his hands, and then Leon would bend my feet.
I got away from Leon’s hold and the man shook me, beat me, called Leon down, put me back on the table and bent my feet more. He took Leon’s hands, and helped him bend my feet the right way. I could not move. He told him to hold me, and if I moved, to bend my feet some more […].
At one point Leon lost his balance, he was off his own feet and his whole body was pressing down on my feet. At this point I could not move any more, or even cry out. I think I was close to death from all of it and them constantly choking me. I could feel everything, but feel nothing.
This is where I can’t recall all things in such an order. […] The last thing I recall was reaching out to Leon. I think I passed out.
The next thing I recall is Leon and the boys going outside, if not to keep the other kids out, they were running around and looking and blocking the windows. […] I think I kept passing out, but pain would wake me up. And choking, I wanted air.