by Rudy Wiebe
Yvonne: This is what I believe, Sunday, 17 October 1993:
The Spirit truly goes on, it lives and never dies. I am certain my ancestor Big Bear and the Bear Spirit and the Creator guide me, strengthen me, protect me, now as they have in my past.
Mom took me to Grandma when I was little to help me forget. Grandma did help me, and when she did it she also saw something in my spirit my mother couldn’t see: what my mother thought was crazy, her mother saw in me as a gift. Grandma told Mom, “Vonnie has forgotten, but I want her to stay with me and I’ll give her teachings.”
A child doesn’t know how to protect itself, either its body or its spirit. Grandma Flora saved my spirit from being damaged beyond restoration by helping me forget, but now the Creator is again letting me remember. My question is, why?
I hear a woman crying. They just called lock-up, she’s crying to herself, my lullaby tonight are tarps on the scaffolding outside my window behind the stone walls blowing and snapping in the wind. As the snow falls and the wind blows, this woman’s tears are of a broken mother, a lost aunt, a sister, her anguish within these walls matching the howls of the storm. I heard say that the aboriginal nations of Turtle Island will not fall completely until the women’s hearts lie upon the ground. Where are your women, your girl children? What has happened to your life-givers?
Grandma was a good medicine woman; she intended good in making me forget. But I never really did; it was in my spirit, a spirit only the Creator can take. The Creator saw fit to take it away through my grandmother, now he’s given it back. But I’m in prison for life, what can I possibly do with these memories?
I remember, and I pray as the storm kicks up. The woman is crying. Through the barred window I hold tobacco outside in my left hand, sweetgrass in my right. I pray for the woman to be safe, I pray for what she knows happened. I pray to the four winds to carry my prayers, I call her name into the wind to comfort her. I hold the tobacco in my open hand, offering it to the Thunder People, the Creator and his helpers. A universal prayer that reaches the world in every direction, over and around and up and down and under all Creation.
It thundered that night of my prayer. It almost threw down the scaffolding around the prison, ripped off the tarps. I prayed as I watched invisible hands take the tobacco on the winds, passing spirits of creation, the thunder beings. I watched the smoke of the sweetgrass swirl and disappear on the winds in respect of all things. I slept with the storm as my protection.
I awoke the next day. I heard, at the instant I awoke, a bird, unseen, fly away from outside my window with heavy wings. I heard geese fly overhead that day as well. I don’t know of what tomorrow holds, for me. Or where I go from today, and I fear, I am scared. I leave it to the Creator. He will take it from here.
Finally, the stone walls of the Prison for Women were gone for Yvonne. Within the Healing Lodge’s powerful Native atmosphere and natural setting, she found the support to grow stronger in understanding her spiritual longings and heritage; to recognize more fully that the most significant person in her life had been, and still was, her Grandmother Flora. As she writes to me in January 1998:
“Could it be that Grandma did ceremonies on me so I would forget, as a cleansing, and also as a sort of initiation, where I’d be reborn to fulfil my position as Medicine Bear Woman? I had the innocence of a child when those ritual initiations were done. But I left [and] I never actually returned to the rez to stay […]. Grandma waited, I never returned for her to explain the special gifts I was initiated into as a child. Prior to her death [June 1986] she came many times to seek me, yet I was blind, asleep as they say in alcoholism and confusion. My gifts became my unknown burden. Grandma died long before I awoke, she died without advising me. But a few of her final words were STOP YOUR DRINKING. Now I understand that you cannot walk in balance with Medicine in one hand and booze and drugs in the other.”
It is at the Healing Lodge that Yvonne begins slowly to explicate her memories of her grandmother.
Yvonne: When I was little, I sensed Grandma Flora was a powerful woman. I know now she had power to the extreme in what Whites would sneer and call witchcraft—if they ever thought about it—but Indians call it medicine power. Perhaps she saw gifts in me, but I felt that the mysterious things she did to me came from a deep compassion and love. So I went along in silence. And my heart felt it would burst with love. I had no need to try to understand, I just did anything she said.
Grandma woke me up in darkness, and she’d lead me out to watch the sun come up over the meadow and the far trees. I did not speak Cree, but she taught me by touch, by eye contact, by miming what I should do. So she showed me how to look at the sun rising, and what did I see? She would cry out, wail suddenly, and stop. And I saw things in the coming light. I knew I was doing what my ancestors have done since the time when the earth was first born.
Every day we got up to greet the sun, and every day we watched it sink away to sleep as well. I don’t recall what I saw except once, something, in the first rays of its light. An Elder has told me that, just as the sun rises, there may be a small slit in time when you can see spirits there, though I wasn’t told what kinds of spirits. I can’t speak about myself, then, but I know I didn’t think it through. I just accepted whatever I was given as a child deep within myself: the spirits were there.
Grandpa and Grandma Bear lived in an old bus, while Mom and us kids lived on the reserve in their house. Leon was there, I remember walking with him in the trees, and once he led me to a baby deer lying curled almost invisible on the ground. It was so motionless I bent and touched its eye with my finger, but it would not open. On another walk he did something to me, and then gave me a baby duck to play with, splashing in a puddle. I don’t know what happened, and I told Grandma nothing about our walks but she showed me I should not walk with Leon any more.
Then everyone was gone. For a time I lived alone with her in the bus, and she had me sit watching the fire for what seemed for ever. One day I ran to her, screaming: there were women and children in the fire, she had to get them out!
Grandma laid me on the ground with my ear pressed against the earth. If I wriggled and tried to get up, she’d pat my hair, not say anything, just reassure me with her hand, turn my head sideways and lay me down again in the sunlight against the earth. I found it soft, comfortable, and it seemed there were voices talking, singing in the earth. I was a little scared because it was something I couldn’t understand, and yet under the sounds there was a deep silence that came over me, like peace. Like the lullaby I wanted to hear all my life—no one ever sang to me at bedtime—and I drifted to sleep where my grandmother laid me down. It was as if I could feel the earth’s heart beat. I was a baby cuddled on my mother’s breast, in her womb, my mother who absorbed every fear and every thought, and she was all around me, I was floating in warmth and dreamless sleep. Heart beat.
Behind the bus and house was a small hill, and over that a slough with the hole dug beside it where we got our drinking water. One day Grandma had some men pile a mound of grass on the hill, and when I went to play in it she chased me away, “Muskeke, muskeke!” I now know that means “medicine,” but then I thought, like children do, that she was just mean, never wanting me to have fun. A few days later she set the grass on fire, and it must have been sweetgrass because the smoke didn’t rise. It hung low, thick and heavy along the ground.
Grandma told me to bring the water buckets and we went towards the smoke. She stopped there, and signed for me to go through it and get water. The smoke was really dense, I couldn’t breathe but I got through fast to the waterhole and into the fresh air. Grandma was waiting, so I filled the pails quickly and went back. I stumbled a bit in the smoke, and spilled a little, but I got through okay. Grandma poured some out on the ground, some into what I now know was a water drum, and immediately sent me back for more.
Again and again. Into the dark smoke, bending down, lifting and carrying that heavy water, I could hardly stay on my feet and finally
I fell, trying not to spill any water and choking, because even close to the ground all there was to breathe was smoke. I heard Grandma calling for me but I could hardly gasp a cry, and when she found me she was almost overcome herself. She bent over me and drew out a hunting knife. I thought she was going to kill me, but she pulled me up and where I had fallen she drove the knife into the ground. Then she dragged me away. We barely made it to the edge of the smoke.
We lay together on the ground coughing for air. When I finally felt the burning smoke soften in my lungs I was crying. Grandma turned to me, touched me all over, and then she began to cry too. I don’t know why. She rubbed my hair and looked into my eyes—she never did that—I thought: obviously she didn’t want to hurt me, and yet she had made me do something so dangerous she was crying. I thought my heart would break, I loved her so much.
On the spot she had marked with a knife, where I fell, my grandmother made a frame with four poles driven into the ground, about a yard square. Other poles were tied across between them, and this frame was covered with blankets. I had animal skins wrapped around my middle, and huge leaves binding me. I was laid in the little structure, it was dark and I heard noises of work, I heard drums and singing.
The darkness was so black you could take it in your hand and feel it, like my dad sometimes said about working a mile inside Butte Mountain, “Now that’s darkness.” There was no beginning or end to it. And it wasn’t close to me, it just seemed part of what I was or could be. And I saw things moving, coming at me out of the darkness inside the little tent, and then lights like round stones of fluorescent swinging, moving quick as an eyeblink and gone, all was quiet and motionless. And I lay still.
Grandma seemed in a panic, she was ripping the binding off me, though one rope stayed on my feet, and I could not move because I felt so completely tired, and Grandma was yelling, but I didn’t answer her. After a while she rubbed me, wiping me down, I could see her do this, as if she was walking around inside me looking, it seemed her spirit was mine and she was looking for things I could not hide even if I knew what they were, and I was outside myself, like watching from a distance. She asked what I had seen, and I couldn’t say, though I knew in my spirit what had happened. She spoke and spoke as she unwrapped me, and I knew she was saying to me, “Now, look at yourself, see, you are all better.”
So I looked. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I seemed normal, quite all right, there were no marks or bruises or scratches or scabs or even scars on my body. As if I had been reborn, my skin perfect. And I felt this deep need to find something I now couldn’t see: something should be there on my body, but there was nothing.
And I looked at Grandma. With surprise and awe, and I felt her pride about an act well done. She peered at me as if she was walking inside me, looking around to see if all was well, and she saw my spirit was well. Though it seemed to me she did not quite trust my body, or my mind.
Yvonne tells me this particular story of ceremony the day in August 1996, when we complete the second four-round sweat on the high glade near Okimaw Ochi. Unlike the cluttered, windowless box inside P4W, we now talk in the Elder’s room on the back curve of the Spirit Lodge; through its large windows we look out between tall, dense aspen, down across the ravines and draws of the Cypress Hills to the prairie. She tells me the story again, in greater detail, in the pages she types for me afterwards, circling around and around with variant facts as if by sheer fore of will she will ultimately unwind a meaning my intellectualized mind can, against all odds, fathom. And all I can say is, as usual, is, “Yes … yes,” and listen.
Her struggle is for her own benefit as well as mine. She tells me, grinning slightly, “I know this makes no sense … but in a kind of a way it does.”
She says she has talked to Elders about what happened. Even the oldest can—or will—tell her little; one older man said, “It sounds as if she did ceremonies on you”—well, she knew that. He added that it might be better if she acted as if it never happened. Later he did add that it sounded like a shaking-tent ceremony; where bound medicine people are placed inside a tent and when the spirits come they untie them, and they appear free outside the tent again.
“But what was it? Why did she do it to me?” she asked him.
He would not explain. All he would say was, “Maybe she saw something in you, as she worked with you.”
So what else did she see in her? And why? The endlessly questioning mind. The Creator gave her a mind, so why?
And as Yvonne puzzles, she remembers that, long ago, her sister Kathy said to her, “Grandma helped you. She did not help me,” and that Grandma called Kathy a “White girl” because she did things like a White person. Yvonne is certain Kathy also suffered abuse as a child, but Grandma Flora only helped her. Why?
As I write this, I take out the two pictures of Flora Baptiste Bear which Clarence Johnson gave me. I remember looking for her grave in the cemetery beside the small Roman Catholic church on Red Pheasant Reserve; there was no marker with her name on it protruding from the deep February snow when I was there. Actually, I had driven over the hills from Saskatoon hoping to visit Cecilia, but I couldn’t find her either—she was travelling somewhere; as she once answered in a courtroom, “Oh, if I didn’t [travel], I’d go crazy”—and looking at Flora’s pictures, I remember that, before Yvonne was born, her grandmother had already passed on to her through Cecilia her own manifest gift of a cleft palate.
Yvonne: Sometimes I feel flooded with knowledge of the Creator, sometimes even in P4W I smelled flowers in winter, and once in spring, when the Woman who sits in the West visited me as I slept and I woke up afraid to look and I was almost asleep again, I felt someone tap my shoulder. I did not dare ask, was it a good spirit or a bad, but I knew the Woman who smells of all things beautiful, spring, medicine, sweetgrass, was with me and I felt calm. I partly saw this as vision, as I became Bear—and yet, Bear vision is different.
O Creator, I want to continue the battle of my ancestor, Big Bear, who lived on the prairie free as an eagle but who died in misery when he was caged. I have lived a captive from the day I was born, my children have been torn from me as Big Bear’s people were torn from him, his spirit was divided, there was nothing left but to die. I do not know my family, or where they are, they do not know me. O Creator, when will it end? We have survived five hundred years, when will the Native people again thrive in peace?
The sun was high at noon over the Red Pheasant Reserve. I may have been naked or only my chest bare, I was standing on a hide with my hair loose and tangled, hanging down. I was sweating—it may be I had just come out of a sweat—and I faced north, the sun rose on my right and set on my left, and my grandmother blew all over me with a long thin whistle. She was blowing and sucking, mostly circling around my stomach and around to my back while I stared ahead, blowing from the top of my head down my spine to my tailbone.
It was as if she were shaving my skin off. I felt myself opened, as if split down my back, she was reaching inside and I feared to look at what I would see there. I stared ahead while she sang, talked, prayed, answered someone whatever was needful. Then she went away, and came back with a black bear’s paw and started to rub it over me. She was speaking Cree, and she went away again and returned with a yellowish paw. She rubbed me with that too, still mumbling to herself, and now she was trying to scratch me—but she still was not satisfied, so she went away again.
When she came back she carried a big bear’s paw with five huge curved claws. She began to sing, moving around me, scratching me, and I felt pressure building inside me and I wanted to be clawed, scratched raw by those big claws, I longed for relief to burst open. And it seemed the claws rubbing down my arms cut me to the bone, and it felt so good, like scraping an itch away, and I wasn’t scared, I rode with it into—as Jung writes—a “supreme euphoria.” A high beyond drugs, a calm and force beyond any force, a fearlessness, as becoming one with all mass and energy.
Grandma did that. Using the bear claw
to scrape off the outer layer of my body, she split me open from the back of my skull to the bottom tip of my spine. It seemed she was scraping me clean inside the way she had scraped my arms, drawing the claw from my shoulders to the tips of my fingers as she sang and then shaking whatever she had scraped off with the claw onto a hide lying on the ground. I was opened, cleaned out, circled by love and ceremony.
Then she looked inside my belly, searching, and it sounded like she was following orders. She knelt in front of me and began to suck on my navel. I could feel her reach deeper into me, and she started to draw a cord out of my body. I could feel the cord coming out, she was pulling it and soon I was exhausted, empty, but she kept on doing it and I began to cry. She strained and pulled, groaning as she hauled this rope out of me, and I just wanted it to end, get it out of me! And finally she threw the last part on the ground, and then she blew on my stomach, and stuffed the hole in my skin shut. I cried out in amazement and looked down at the hide, there was something heaped on it but she forbade me to look. She pressed moss on my stomach and bandaged it tight.
And I remember most clearly: she brought a hide funnel and used it like a megaphone to shout all over my body. Against one ear, the other, my nose, mouth, every part of me, in some places she shouted twice, she had me face in the four directions and in every one she called the same Cree words as if she would drive them into my flesh and through to my spirit. And I began to call too, words I couldn’t understand coming from inside me, I couldn’t recognize the depth of my own voice repeating what she said, she made me shout it four times in each direction, each time louder: call to the ground, then straight ahead, then higher, then straight up into the sky, each time with more strength that seemed to well up from my gut and I still couldn’t roar it loud enough. It was my name, my spirit name!