The Cast Stone

by Harold Johnson

  “What about the Fenians?” Leroy wanted to know.

  Roderick held up an old hand. “Before you go there, I thought the American Revolution was about taxes and conscription. You’re saying it wasn’t?”

  “I’m not saying anything. I just said that some Canadian historians have written that the American Revolutionary war against Britain was started by the Americans as an excuse to invade Canada.”

  Roderick thought about it. Let it settle in. “Makes sense.” He concluded.

  “The Fenians.” Leroy still wanted to know.

  “1866 to about 1871.” Ben exercised his memory. “The Fenians were Irish revolutionaries who wanted to cut Britain off from its colony. There were about a half dozen raids into Canada over that time period. The Americans looked the other way. President Andrew Jackson was supposed to have said, “We’ll recognize the established facts,” meaning of course that if the Fenians were successful, America would recognize the annexation.”

  “That’s right.” Leroy rested his hands on the table.

  Ben continued his history lesson. “There was also a lot of talk after the American Civil War about another invasion of Canada. After the North beat the South they were looking at us. Some people say they would have invaded if the American people had any stomach left for war.” He paused for a taste of his tea, something to wet his dry throat. “Of course the famous 1870 Wolseley expedition sent out to Manitoba was not only about Riel and the Metis. John A. MacDonald was reacting to American newspapers in the West calling for an invasion of Canada.”

  “If we’re counting attacks we can’t forget the Cyprus Hills massacre,” Roderick added.

  Leroy asked. “What was that one again?”

  “Remember, the American wolf hunters who attacked the Nakoda at Cyprus Hills, accused them of stealing horses?”

  “Oh, yeah, that was an American whiskey fort, wasn’t it?” Leroy remembered.

  Ben put his cup down. “If we’re talking about American commercial activity in Canada, I’d say we have to consider all the big corporations that have taken over.”

  “Now that was an invasion.” Roderick leaned forward. “One thing I really learned when I was chief was that if an American company wanted something, the Canadian and Saskatchewan governments went out of their way to make sure they got it. If a First Nation wanted something we had to wait. Weyerhaeuser, the American pulp and paper giant, wanted all the trees in this territory. We were trying to save some — know who the governments sided with?”

  Leroy nodded, “It was always like that. But it got worse under Hopper. It was him who made an agreement with them to use each other’s armed forces in case of civil disasters. He invited the American army in. We almost lost Canada in ’08 without a fight. Hopper was ready to give it away.”

  “You know they always planned on an invasion.” Ben spoke softly. “In about 1928, maybe ’30, they had plans to invade. They were going to take Halifax first to block British support, then attack Winnipeg to cut the rail system. Most of the attack was aimed at Ontario and Quebec. Even when the plans were declassified in 1974, nobody in Canada made much of a fuss about it. A few people went to the American archives in Washington to look at the plans, a few articles appeared, but it was mostly written off as a hoax or something. Nobody really cared.”

  “Yeah, and look what happened. All the warnings were there and nobody did anything.” Roderick leaned back.

  Leroy defended: “Well, Thoreau was going to do something.”

  A silence followed as the three Elders remembered how it had been. Ben looked back at the table where Rosie, Elsie, and Benji continued to sit. Benji seemed to be in conversation with Elsie; Rosie still held her granddaughter, wasn’t going to let her go.

  Ben wondered if Benji felt deserted. Well, he came to find out about me — Rosie is a part of me that he needs to know.

  The gymnasium buzzed with conversation, occasionally a laugh rattled across it. People ate, visited, remembered, relished the memories, the good times and those memories washed away the sorrow, the loss of a respected Elder.

  Ben had never really considered himself an Elder before tonight, but here he was, sitting at the Elder’s table with the very old Leroy, and Roderick who had always been older, but now was clearly old.

  “It don’t do Thoreau much good now.” Roderick interrupted Ben’s thoughts. “Governor Johnson sure as hell isn’t going to legislate against the oil companies.”

  “Governor, my ass.” The old fist hit the table. “Canada is led by a prime minister, and Thoreau is our prime minister until he’s defeated in a fair election. Just because Johnson was appointed don’t give him any authority. You can bet Canada will resist until there isn’t a breath left to fight with.”

  Ben came back to the conversation. “That’s the problem. The Americans aren’t going to go away. We’re stuck with them. Like the Borg used to say in the old Star Trek movies: ‘Resistance is futile.’ We can resist, like we resisted Canada when they were stomping on us. Didn’t do a lot of good. They still stomped on us. Now the Americans are stomping on Canada. We have a new supreme master to live with. We’d better learn how. Did you hear the other day about those kids that crucified themselves at the border? A dozen of them nailed to crosses. It didn’t change anything. Hungry for three days, sore hands, a little media attention, but they’ll be forgotten soon enough.”

  “They weren’t hurting so bad,” Roderick paid attention to news. “Morphine; they were all higher than kites on morphine, didn’t feel a thing. And the nails they used, weren’t even real nails. Did you see them, they showed them on CBC, ground down to the size of needles.”

  “It wasn’t so much how they did it,” Leroy liked what the kids had done. “It was that they did it. It wasn’t against the government so much as it was a shot at the Christians; a shot at the new Zion. Those are the crazies we have to watch out for, the ones going around preaching the end of times and that America was prophesied in the Bible as the Promised Land. That’s what’s behind all this you know. Got nothing whatsoever to do with security or oil or water or nothing. It’s them crazies and their millions showing up for revivals and screaming their salvation. They’re the ones that are war crazy. Those kids did something. They might have been on morphine, maybe they ground down the nails. So what that they didn’t nail their feet. They did something about the real enemy. They embarrassed the Christians, reminded them about Christ for a minute and got them out of the Old Testament.”

  “I have to agree with you, Leroy,” Ben nodded toward the older man, a man in his nineties with vigour and strength. “It’s that ‘One People, One Country, One God’ stuff that’s worrying. Now that’s supremacy, pure and simple supremacy.”

  Roderick entered with a little more excitement now: “That’s where it comes from, from the Supreme Being stuff. All those Christians believe in a supreme single God. That’s their culture. It’s all about hierarchy, every bit of it.”

  “It’s certainly cultural. But it’s not limited to Christians. Muslims and Hebrews believe in a supreme God too.” Ben needed to be balanced. An argument that was too one sided, could not persuade. “It goes back to Plato and his theory of Gold, Silver, and Bronze people. Organized society has tried to follow his formula ever since, and spread the idea to the rest of the world during the era of expansion. Not only to the Americas — this idea of supremacy was used in Africa and Asia. It never diminished. When the academics started to speak of a postcolonial period in the last century as though colonialism had ended, we had the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank forcefully spreading the economic dogma of the Super Powers, America, and the European Union, on the third world. Colonialism never ended. It just changed forms. If we want to understand this symptom we have to examine the cause, and I’ve been saying for decades that the cause is supremacist ideology”

  Roderick liked what Ben was saying. “It’s like Indian Affairs. Oh, they were polite and dedicated, but couldn’t get it through the
ir skulls that we wanted to do something different. They genuinely could not understand anything but top down.”

  “How many terms were you chief?” Leroy couldn’t remember.

  “Three.” Roderick held up three fingers. “Two terms in the nineties and again from ’06 to ’09. That’s when I hung it up. We couldn’t do anything. You can’t change people’s minds who only have one way of thinking.”

  “And how do you change people’s thinking?” Ben asked rhetorically.

  “You don’t,” Roderick answered. “All we can do is live our lives the best we can. Walk in a good way and maybe people will see us walking in a good way and want to walk with us. Can’t force anyone to change, never could. It never works.”

  Ben responded with a hint of sarcasm: “I think assimilation worked pretty well for Canada.”

  “No it didn’t. All those policies did was wreck our people, we never did become them. When they stripped our culture we didn’t adopt theirs. That’s still what all the grief is about, people trying to find where they belong. So from about the nineties onward there was that movement back to our spirituality. So much for assimilation.”

  Leroy stayed out of the discussion. It wasn’t pure politics and he wasn’t really interested.

  “But you got to admit that supremacy was what was behind the policy. They believed they were superior and were doing it for our own good.”

  “And we learned it from them. We started to become, as you say, supremacists ourselves. Indians got to be just as good as white people at believing they were better than others. We had our hierarchies too. AFN, FSIN, Chief and Council. I even got sucked into it. They elected me chief, thought I really was a chief for a while, forgot that I was only okimakan and not okimaw.”

  Ben nodded to Roderick, “Ahie” he agreed.

  “You too, Ben. You got yourself a good education, stayed in that big university. You must have felt pretty important.”

  Ben’s first response was to deny the allegation, deny that he ever put himself above the people, but he knew that to verbalize the denial wouldn’t be completely true. He kept silent.

  “It’s okay, we all got caught up in it. Now we’re old, had our ups and downs. Some of us took real shit-kickings before we figured it out. When we started to act like we were better than someone else, something always came along and put us in our place. When you’re an Indian, you learn it fast.”

  “Ahie.” Ben understood. Maybe for the first time, understood why things went the way that they did. Why he really wasn’t teaching anymore. It might not have had anything to do with his age or his desire to come home. Maybe those powerful forces that keep balance in the universe decided Ben needed to get balanced again. “Ahie,” he nodded again to his Elder Roderick.

  Rosie watched Benji, saw his discomfort, saw him sit too straight, saw the mechanics of his movements. This young man was completely out his element and it showed — it showed in his voice, in his questions, or lack of questions; it was there in his silence, in his perfect politeness.

  She had watched, stood aside, not part of the reunion, only an observer. She couldn’t help herself. She needed to be there when Benji met his father. She needed to see what Ben would do, how he would react — it was important to her, beyond curiosity, way beyond tidbits of possible gossip. How Ben reacted when he came face to face with his child, with his offspring, with his little alter-self, would inform Rosie of the true Ben, the real man inside the image she had created.

  She had stood there under the trees, watching from a distance, smiling, maybe even smirking a little as Benji explained, tried to explain, faltered — started again. She couldn’t hear the words. She imagined he said who his mother was, gave his birthday, said his name again, “Benji” or “Benjamin”, or something.

  She’d watched Ben’s stance, watched as realization filtered through broken speech, until realization broke the stoic and the body sagged, drained of will and then Ben hugged his son and she knew, even at a distance, that Ben was crying.

  She left then — quietly, soft steps away. Now she knew the true Ben and knew that he was the same Ben she had always known, only now he had another dimension. He was a father.

  “This is what I wanted to show you.” Elsie felt around on the dash of her car for a tiny note pad, found it through the open window, flipped pages at the edge of the white schoolyard floodlight, not nearly enough to read by, but she didn’t need to read, she only needed enough to assist her memory. Benji stood awkwardly in the gravel parking area while Elsie read out the poem she had composed on her way north, driving with one hand and scribbling with the other.

  “Who needs an army?” She read with a deeper voice than she used for conversation.

  “Beaten with a Bottle

  Broken Spirits Spilled

  Bashed

  Robbed

  Rolled

  Stole the Little Bit of Dirt

  The Earth

  Broken Spirit Lost

  Stole the Ragged Bit of Shirt

  Ghost Danced

  Bashed

  Beaten by a Bottle

  Spirit Spilled

  Spewed

  Broken Lips Speak

  the English

  Beaten

  Bottled

  Robbed

  Rolled

  In Drunken Stupor

  Stoned.”

  She looked up to try to read Benji’s face. She needed him to like it, wanted him to like her for writing it, wanted him to see her as an Indian, a good Indian woman. Her mother would frown on this, trying to be noticed by a man while at a wake, disrespectful. But, she might never see him again, never see those anxious eyes, those eyes that looked through her and saw the dreams, dreams of great things, great doings.

  His expression didn’t tell her anything. His words did. “Read it again.”

  She did. Slower, punctuated, put her heart into it. Three-quarters of the way through she realized. “He doesn’t get it. He was raised white.”

  “I like the sound of it. The rhythm.” He confirmed her thoughts when she finished. “I have to think about the content for awhile, but I like it.”

  But did he like her, Indian woman, traditional Indian woman?

  “My adopted parents weren’t drinkers. I never saw a drunk person until I was in my late teens. Just never saw anybody act that way. I guess if you grow up around alcohol you might hate it. Or love it,” he corrected himself. “Alcohol is a big issue these days, but I just don’t see it. Always thought it was just the right-wing Christians imposing their beliefs on the world. I guess from your perspective it would be different.”

  “I didn’t grow up in an alcoholic home either.” She corrected his assumption. “Mom never allowed it in the house. She’s the inspiration for the poem. It echoes her words. She always said that the whiteman used alcohol to defeat us and to keep us down. To her this neo-temperance movement is a good thing for us.”

  “Hey, look, a falling star.” Benji pointed toward the southern sky. “Wow. I’ve never seen one so bright, or that colour, almost blue.”

  “Incredible. Did you make a wish?”

  “No, you?”

  “For good things.” she answered, “good things to come.” Good things for her and Benji.

  “Are those northern lights?” Benji continued to stare at the enamel black sky and the tinge of white, almost cloud like across the eastern horizon.

  “Yeah, they are. Let’s go down to the lake away from these lights and maybe we can see them better. It’s just down here a ways, not far.” She led the way to where water lay perfectly flat and reflected stars, northern lights, and the track of speeding satellites.

  “I’ve never seen them before. You don’t get them in Toronto.”

  “Probably do, just can’t see them.” Elsie could not imagine anywhere on Earth where the spirits did not dance. She stood close to him, close enough to feel his presence, and as Benji’s gaze wove back and forth across the black star-studded sky, where the ligh
ts were beginning to dance in sharp waves of green tinged with red, he began to feel her presence too.

  The hood smelled of vomit, not Abe’s. That’s all right, he thought, I’ve smelled vomit before.

  “Abraham Isaac Friesen.” The voice was not strong, did not have natural strength to it, though the speaker tried to sound authoritative. Like a substitute teacher, Abe thought.

  “Charged with conspiracy against peace, order, and good government.” The voice continued. “What is the evidence?”

  “He was captured at his residence. A reliable source reported suspicious activity there and when a squad led by Captain Ross approached the residence, warning signals were activated by co-conspirators.” The voice sounded as though it was reading, flat, empty. “Several vehicles were reported fleeing the residence as the squad approached. Abraham was the lone occupant when it arrived. He was taken into custody, read his right to voluntary statement, due military process was explained. Abraham declined a voluntary statement. Upon investigation, evidence of a terrorist cell was discovered. They had occupied the loft of a barn on the premises; however, a complete search did not uncover any weapons. It is assumed that the fleeing co-conspirators removed that evidence with them.”

  “Heart rate eighty-four,” Abe felt cold metal against his chest, he assumed it was a stethoscope. “Breathing normal.” The doctor’s voice held a slight southern accent, an educated Virginian, Abe guessed. He slowed down his breathing, willed his body to relax. A heart rate that high showed his anxiety, and Abe needed not to be anxious.

  “I’m not convinced there is evidence of imminent danger.” The substitute teacher sounded nearer.

  “Upon approach to the residence, a unit was dispatched to investigate the signal fire. That unit was attacked, two officers were killed by the insurgents and two were taken captive. Their whereabouts remains unknown.”