“I’ll ask at the band office again,” I said.
“You asked a few weeks ago. Do you think it will make any difference?” Normally, the waitlist for housing was seven years. Sometimes they made exceptions for people who were particularly cramped, but our living situation wasn’t any worse than anyone else’s.
“I’m sorry, Joan. I’ll ask again, but you’re right. I doubt it will make much difference.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Maybe … uh … maybe we could spend more time outside?”
“We already do that!”
“I don’t know!” This came out louder than I expected. Her shoulders slumped. She looked like she was about to tear up.
“Please, Joan.” I hugged her. “Please don’t cry. I’ll make it better. I promise.”
I tried to think of all the things that made Joan happy. Like photography. Her first camera, a Brownie, had been given to her by her grandmother, and it had become a passion. I found the number of a photography store in Timmins from the teacher friend of mine, John, who had first mentioned me to Joan, and went to Father Daneau’s house to call the store. I asked whether they had a camera within my price range. As usual, I could only afford the cheapest option. A few weeks later, I surprised her with the gift.
“Thanks, Ed,” she said, smiling briefly.
I couldn’t tell if it made her happy or not. Did it matter that it didn’t have an FD lens? Or a faster shutter speed? It seemed like the wemistikoshiw had this game where only the most expensive object was worth having, which meant almost no one could afford it.
Things were changing on the reserve. Every year you noticed something different—someone had bought themselves a new television or a cassette deck, and then everyone heard about it through the moccasin telegraph and went over to take a look. Maybe I was paranoid, but all this stuff made me uneasy. Especially the houses that the government was building. Most people lived in one-room places in the summer and spent the rest of the year on the land. We were free that way, maybe too independent. But it was hard to say no to a free house, especially one with lino floors and insulation. The free houses were the next step in changing our way of life: we put down our guns and paddles and came indoors.
My dad warned me about following the ways of the wemistikoshiw too closely. He used to tell me that a lot during the summers I came home from high school. He said it was dangerous to get stuck craving their electric things and plastic objects. He said the Cree chief Big Bear had given a similar warning to his own people. Each time my dad said it, I nodded. Okay, Pa. I get it. But things were different now. I mean, you could talk about the days when the Cree used moss as diapers until you were blue in the face, but if you showed up somewhere with moss between your daughter’s legs, you might as well have put poison ivy down there for some of the looks you’d get.
Our baby sucked up money faster than an ATV with a gas leak, especially now that Joan was no longer working. I began to rack my brain for other ways that we could make some extra money. I asked my old friend, Fred, what he thought when he came by to help me fix my canoe. He currently worked at the Hudson’s Bay store, but was soon moving to Timmins to take a job in mining.
“How about you come with me?” Fred said. “It’s not so bad. Three weeks on, one week off. It’s where the money is at.”
I thought about the photos of mines that I had seen in magazines at the Ryans’ house. Dark and cramped. Like the basement at St. Anne’s. I’d once been sent there to collect a forgotten toilet pail. There was no light other than my torch and it smelled of piss and poo. I couldn’t see the rats, but I could hear rustling. I shone my light in the corners and saw a flash of movement. Something grey and furry from the corner of my eye. I stepped forward and my foot slipped on something wet. I dropped the flashlight, stunned. It hit the floor and went out. Crawling on the floor, searching for the light, my hands in dust and stickiness. That stuff never leaves you. Tony had gone in there for two days after we had tried to run away, and afterwards, he wasn’t the same.
“That would be a step backwards,” I told Fred. “I’m already teaching ESL.”
“Suit yourself. But I bet Joan would be happier down south.”
I looked at him hard, then relented. “I guess. She’s going a bit stir crazy on the reserve.”
“So what about it? We could hang out together. Just like old times.”
“I was thinking more … well, I already teach in Kash. I want to do that down south.”
“Down south, I think you need university for that.”
“I know, I know. Or working for a school. Something like that.”
“I tried to get an office job. Almost got it.”
“What happened?”
“Well, I didn’t realize. You know how things are. I saw this cool photo of my hero, Russell Means.”
Russell Means was one of the leaders of the Occupation of Alcatraz which, in 1969, as part of the Red Power movement, had taken over the island in San Francisco Bay. Ever since the sit-in had begun, long hair and braids had become more popular on the reserves.
“And?”
“So I showed up in my braids. I told her I got the idea from Mr. Means. The boss looked like she was interviewing the devil.”
We both laughed. “What happened?”
“Oh, you know. She sat there and nodded a lot. Didn’t say nothing, but I knew.”
“Did you try again?”
“Nah. What would have been the point?”
—
Joan had heard about a special on oranges and had me go to the Hudson’s Bay store to check. I returned empty-handed—the oranges were sold out—but it didn’t seem to matter; Joan was happier than I had seen in a while.
“Dad is wiring us some money,” she said.
“When did this happen?”
“Father Daneau just dropped by with the message. Don’t worry. We don’t have to pay it back right away.”
“Right,” I said and sat down. I had heard that before. Don’t worry, you don’t have to pay it back until later. Mike had said those words on the way to Montreal.
“Tell him we don’t want the money.”
“No, I’m not doing that.”
“I said tell him,” I growled.
“Why should I? He offered. We certainly need it.”
“I am not accepting money from a white man.”
“I hate it when you say those sorts of things.”
“What sorts of things?”
“He’s not a white man! He’s my dad!”
I didn’t feel comfortable accepting a white man’s money, so we didn’t get a loan from her pa. Instead, I managed to earn a few extra dollars by getting a job with the band council, picking up garbage. It wasn’t so bad. The work was pretty easy, but it meant I came home stinky, which Joan didn’t like. A few weeks later, while we were making dinner together, she presented another solution.
“I think you should go to university.”
“No thanks.”
“I know what you’re worried about—that you’ll be too far behind. But I’ve found this course that’s different, in Indian-Eskimo studies. It’s the first of its kind in North America. It’s at Trent University in Peterborough, near my hometown. You can learn about all the things that matter to you. Gitchi Manitou, the Sacred Teachings.”
“It’s not for me,” I said.
“Why?”
“I already know about that stuff.”
“Exactly.”
“So why spend three years learning about it?”
“Because we live with ten other people, Ed. In a two-bedroom house.”
“Only on Sundays.”
“What’s going to happen when they all come home for summer?”
“I … maybe …” I hung my head, ashamed. “Maybe I could ask at the band office again.”
“You know that’s not going to help.”
She was right, as usual. I stared at the potatoes I had been peeling. I felt tra
pped and wondered how I’d gotten myself into this mess. I had tried so hard to do all the right things: finish St. Anne’s, graduate from high school, get a good job, and yet I was still stuck. Worse, I had dragged Joan into the chaos.
“And we are short on money, Ed. Albalina needs diapers. Baby food. A stroller.”
“Yes, I know!” I said a little too loudly.
“And you can’t keep picking up garbage.”
“Why not?”
“You said it yourself. The band only has money to pay you for eight weeks.”
“We’ll get by.”
FOURTEEN
PETERBOROUGH, ONTARIO, 1970
We moved to Peterborough the same way that all Indians move down south: empty-handed, like we were fleeing. Of course we weren’t entirely free from luggage, but we couldn’t take much on the plane, especially with Albalina. I didn’t mind so much—every object is a memory, of when it is bought and how it is used, and it’s better not to be weighed down by all that stuff.
In Peterborough there were newspapers and TVs everywhere. I mean, you could walk into practically any store, and there were papers. We didn’t have that up north.
When we arrived, the story headlining most newspapers was about an Indian, Joseph Drybones, who had been found to be drunk in a Yellowknife bar. It was against the law for an Indian to drink off reserve, and he was arrested and charged with contravening section 94(b) of the Indian Act. He represented himself and pled guilty, and was sentenced to either a ten-dollar fine or three days in jail. Then he got himself a lawyer who appealed, arguing that because Drybones only spoke Dene, he hadn’t understood what was going on, didn’t realize he was pleading guilty, and therefore his plea was invalid. The judge gave him a new trial. This one went better—his lawyer claimed that, all appearances to the contrary, Drybones wasn’t a real Indian.
For us, being Indian was a matter of language, culture, race and history, but legally, it was a different matter. It was defined by an official list of names held by the Department of Indian Affairs. Since Drybones had mistakenly been left off the official list, he didn’t have legal status. Therefore, his lawyer argued, the law shouldn’t apply to him. And even if he was legally an Indian, the law was unfair from the start, as it discriminated against Indians because of their race. The case bounced around the legal system, to ever higher courts, until finally the Supreme Court weighed in. They decided that Indians should have the same drinking rights as everyone else, at least when they were off reserve.
I had mixed feelings about the case. I had been drinking more since Joan and I had married, living in that tiny house, all thirteen of us, with Albalina screaming with teething pains. The only thing that held me back was that it was more difficult to get drunk in Fort Albany. If you went to the bootlegger, you had to pay through the nose and homebrew was always limited because of the time it took to make it. I was priced out of the market, especially with a kid. Now I was down south, where you could walk into a liquor store and, thanks to Joseph Drybones, buy anything you wanted for just a few dollars. It was progress, I guess, as we were finally getting some of the same rights as the wemistikoshiw, but it meant that temptation was always in reach.
Like all native students, I’d come a month early with Joan for catch-up courses. We bought a secondhand car with a small loan, and the money that I’d saved picking up garbage, and moved into a one-bed apartment on Bolivar Street, on Peterborough’s west side. Most of the houses on the street were detached two-storeys, but with the money for tuition and a $1,000 monthly student allowance given to us by the band, we found one subdivided into apartments, a stone’s throw away from where the rest of the native students were living. I was twenty-two years old, and it was the first time that we had our own place. It felt like I’d made it.
Joan went out and reconnected with a couple of her high school friends, like Svetlana, who’d relocated to Peterborough. She and her parents had made it out of the Soviet Union by sneaking from Russia through Romania and paying some criminal a lot of money for fake passports. By the time they arrived in Canada in the early 1950s, they were stick thin and had nothing but a handful of rubles stuffed into their pockets.
I soon realized that Svetlana didn’t think much of natives. She had been nice to me and translated the phrase that the Tekaucs used to repeat, Zatknis! It meant Shut up! She, Joan and I laughed about it for a while. But after that we butted heads.
“I don’t know why they are still complaining,” she said. She was sitting in our living room, having some after-dinner wine. A native guy who she worked with (she didn’t know anything about his nation other than he was “Indian”) at General Electric had been complaining about the storm we’d had the night before, and made an offhand remark about how it compared to the government flooding thousands of acres of Anishinaabe land, displacing his people without any compensation, that had happened with the building of the Trent-Severn Waterway.6
“Always history, history, history,” she said. “That stuff is in the past. They need to get over it.”
“They?”
“You know what I mean,” Svetlana said. Joan and I exchanged glances.
“They haven’t been compensated yet,” I replied.
“Stuff happens. Look at the Purges,” she said. “My grandparents had friends who were taken away. They say something wrong and, pft, that’s it. Seven years for you. Nine years for you. The KGB have ears everywhere.”
“That doesn’t make it right, does it?” I said.
“What is right? History? No. Everywhere is history. That’s why I like Canada. Come here. Start again.” I thought about my past. About my great-granddad being taken away under the Potlatch laws. About going to St. Anne’s. About going to Montreal with Mike. Maybe she was right. Maybe that stuff was better dead and buried.
We were sitting in a lecture hall on the first day, myself and the other native students. A guy named Harvey McCue, from Georgina Island First Nation, Ontario, a professor in the Indian-Eskimo Studies Program, was explaining what was required to make it through a university degree.
“University is different from high school. How so?” Harvey asked. Simone, nineteen, put up her hand. I didn’t know too much about her—just that her parents were from Skwah First Nation out in Chilliwack, B.C., but she had grown up in Vancouver. “There’s more work,” she said.
“Some people say that,” Harvey said. “You definitely have to spend a lot of time hunched over your books. More than in high school. But at university, everyone has a choice. To work or not is up to you. There’s no one telling you what to do. To get your work done, you have to be self-motivated. What else?”
“More parties!” This was shouted out by Clayton, a twenty-year-old who’d spent his childhood in North Spirit Lake First Nation before being shipped off to St. Margaret’s Indian Residential School. Everyone laughed.
“Yes, there are more parties at university. If you wanted, you could party every night. But we expect more of you. Going to university is a great honour. If you don’t take it seriously, you won’t graduate. You won’t be able to get your work done if you are partying every night.” Clayton was sitting a few seats away and started scribbling a note. He handed it to me.
This guy is so serious.
I know! I wrote back.
He should lighten up, he wrote. And try my hangover cure. I smiled.
“If you have a problem,” Harvey said, “come and see me any time. That’s what I’m here for. To help you stay out of trouble.”
Joan was driving me home from school. She had been teaching me to drive, but I hadn’t yet passed my test. Albalina was asleep in the backseat.
“So, how did it go?”
“Harvey said we should come and see him if we get into trouble.”
“What sort of trouble?”
“Oh you know. Partying. That sort of thing.”
“I can’t imagine Harvey partying.” She had met him at the meet-and-greet on the first day of orientation. I agreed—h
e seemed like a straight shooter.
“Yeah, well. He’s supposed to help us navigate between the two worlds. White and native.”
“You’d be good at that.”
“Me?”
“Sure. You navigated me, didn’t you?”
“Still am.”
I was at our apartment. Albalina was asleep and Joan was watching TV. I had a difficult assignment. As part of Native Studies 100, we were looking at the reserve system. Joan popped her head into the living room where I was working.
“Do you really think you should be drinking while you’re studying?”
“I’ve almost finished. And it helps me relax.” I was top of my class by Grade 13 at KLCVI. Here, I was behind. It was stressful, especially as I was already married with a kid.
“Ed. I’m worried about you.”
“Look. I know my limits.”
“Do you? I heard you, you know, last night. Going through the drinks cabinet.”
“I had insomnia. Booze helps me get to sleep.”
“At four in the morning.”
“Yes. It was still dark outside.”
“That’s not the point, is it?”
“What is the point, Joan?”
“The point is that you drink almost every night.”
“I told you. It helps me relax and puts me to sleep. And I’m not drunk by the next morning. But if it’s upsetting you, I’ll cut down.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
A few months later I was sitting in the university library reading a newspaper editorial by the Cree writer Harold Cardinal, which was part of our politics course. Everyone talked about Cardinal on campus. He had written a book the year before called The Unjust Society,7 which argued that Canada had a long history of trying to wipe out Indians through assimilation and the residential schools. After that book came out, Cardinal was everywhere, writing newspaper columns on the treaties, the reserve unemployment rates, native sovereignty, and it was all biting, deep and smart.
I read his words about assimilation over again and thought about what they meant to me. Did they mean Ma carrying Rita to a Christian cemetery rather than burying her out in the bush? Or Pa taking me to St. Anne’s? Or me going to Montreal with Mike Pasko? The concept made me feel trapped. It was like our future had already been written, that we were following a script that was out of our hands.
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