Up Ghost River

by Edmund Metatawabin

  “Well, times have changed,” I said.

  “People say that but—”

  Ma interrupted him. “We’re proud of you, aren’t we, Keshayno?” He and Ma exchanged glances.

  “Yeah,” he said gruffly.

  There’s a story about Chief Big Bear at the end of his life. It was the 1880s, and the buffalo were already dead and his people were starving. He decided to ride from the Cypress Hills in Saskatchewan to Ottawa to meet the head of Indian Affairs. Chief Big Bear was said to be tired of explaining his issues to various officers only to be told that it was out of their hands and he would have to ask someone higher up. But as he rode east, he began talking to various wemistikoshiw officials, Indian Agents, police officers, newspaper-men. Each told him that it would be near impossible. Eventually, he gave up.

  The first year I was chief I didn’t ride or fly to Ottawa. I wrote to the politicians, explaining my grand plans and taking control of our destiny. Sometimes I got a polite reply.

  Dear Mr. Metatawabin,

  Thank you for your suggestions. We have taken them on board and are investigating accordant to Sections 53–60 of the Indian Act. We will be in touch following due processing with the correct jurisdiction.

  Usually I got nothing.

  So after a year, I had made good on a few of my election promises. I had given a couple of speeches to our local school, now called St. Anne’s Catholic School, about how the Red Road could be adapted to provide important life lessons that apply today. I had organized a youth muskeg run, where we ran 10 kilometres through the muskeg, to champion youth fitness, as more kids were turning away from the traditions, to spend their days watching TV and eating junk food. I had done some youth training sessions, teaching them how to write cover letters, and how to prepare for a job interview.

  I was reintroducing ancient and sacred aspects of our culture, but I had nothing to show for my ideas on native empowerment. I realized I was about to be shifted around in the revolving door of elected chiefs who are ejected faster than puking kids on a merry-go-round. I decided to take my band councillors to Sudbury.

  Compared to other great native resistances, whether led by Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse or Louis Riel, ours might seem tame. The band council and I set up a meeting with the Department of Indian Affairs in the morning and told them what we wanted: to become manager of our own affairs, that is, prime contractor on all development work undertaken in our community. Normally, the bulk of taxpayers’ money spent on our community went to hiring wemistikoshiw consultants who had to be flown in and put up in Fort Albany’s grotty hotel and fed overpriced food. Or on renting machines—all construction machinery had to be brought in on the winter road, which meant that we usually had to rent it for a year and return it when the winter road next opened, regardless of how long it was needed. Construction equipment usually couldn’t be rented without hiring the company’s people to operate it, so we lost valuable jobs too. We wanted to take control of DIAND grants so that we could buy our own secondhand equipment, rent it out to other communities and use the savings to train our people.

  The Indian Affairs representatives—two middle-aged men and a woman, all of them in suits—met with us on the morning of February 15, 1989. They took notes and coughed a lot. They thanked us for our idea and said they’d give it the appropriate thought and consideration. They got up to leave, and we stayed sitting. The representatives cleared their throats. They shuffled from side to side. Finally, the man in the middle spoke up.

  “Can you wait outside?”

  “No thanks,” I replied.

  That was it. Very Canadian. We sat there until four p.m., and then they gave us our paperwork. We’d made history by becoming the first native community in Ontario to gain control over its own affairs, a small victory in the fight for First Nations sovereignty. It wasn’t as drawn out as other occupations, such as the Blue Quills school sit-in in 1970, or as high profile as the Occupation of Alcatraz. But for my people whose family members had been taken away under the Potlatch laws, and who had tried and failed to resist the Indian Agents on many issues of personal autonomy, such as the size and area of their trapline, or whether they could expand their businesses, or whether they could practise their religion or culture, or if their kids were allowed to grow up with their parents or had to go to St. Anne’s, it felt like more than the outcome of a day’s peaceful resistance—it felt like a long, hard-won victory.

  We returned to our Sudbury hotel and I called Joan.

  TWENTY-SIX

  You might think that with everything going so well, I would have already started proceedings against Mike Pasko and the nuns and priests, but it would take me another three years. At the time, I told myself that I was too busy. I wanted to help my community snap out of its stupor—the daze left behind from the residential schools, the Indian Act, cultural loss and welfare dependency—and there was always so much to do.

  As prime contractors, we’d started a construction company, Neegan-o’chee. We were building a stone dike, using the abundant aggregate on the dry riverbed, to stop Fort Albany from flooding, a sewage treatment plant (previously people dumped their sewage in the woods, buried it in their backyards, or threw it into the river), and a filtration plant to supply houses with running water. We had halved unemployment to 40 percent, and were making profits on our DIAND grants: we had bought some used construction equipment to build our dike and houses, and were renting it out to other First Nations communities, rather than renting machines on a daily rate from the wemistikoshiw, and paying exorbitant shipping costs. We reinvested the profits into cultural projects for the community. I was re-elected in 1990 on the basis of these successes, and still I dragged my heels for another two years on the court case. Partly it was the power of the church in town: they ran everything from the yearly Christmas concert and Thanksgiving feasts, to the hockey fundraisers to buy equipment for the kids.

  But if I’m honest, there was much more to it. I had dinner with Tony in the fall after I was first elected, and our conversation stayed with me. He had left mining and started his own consulting business, helping First Nations communities get grants from DIAND. He had dinner with the family, and afterwards I said I had something to talk to him about and we went for a drive.

  “So,” he said. “What’s on your mind? I don’t see you for five years and then suddenly a call out of the blue.”

  “Yeah man. I’ve been busy. It ain’t easy being chief.”

  “Easier than not being chief,” he said.

  “Probably,” I laughed. “Listen. Remember when Sister Wesley used to beat us up and all?”

  “Yep. Eat like a dog!” He shook his head. She had made Tony eat vomit from the floor, too.

  “I’ve been thinking of taking her to court.”

  “You should.”

  “Her and the others.”

  “Which others? The staff or students?”

  “What do you mean, the students?”

  “It was a pretty rough place, Ed.”

  “I know. I was there.”

  “Right. So you remember how the boys used to copy the staff. Beat each other up. Hit them with sticks. Force themselves on each other.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. I told my parents about it and said I wasn’t going back. That’s why they pulled me from the school.”

  “I don’t remember that … I mean, I remember the kids beating each other up, but not them forcing themselves on each other.” God, did kids rape others like Mike had done to me? I couldn’t even imagine it.

  “Well, I do remember it,” Tony said. “It shouldn’t stop you though. I mean, everything is always passed from one generation to the next, right? That’s why we have to stop it here. Punish those responsible …” He continued talking, but I couldn’t hear. My mind was spinning. I couldn’t focus.

  A few weeks later, after I had gone out on the Albany to canoe and fish, I felt calm enough to discuss Tony’s conversation with Joan.

  �
��After all that has happened,” I said, “we can’t let the students take the blame. It will mean Mike and Sister Wesley and the others won.” “Ed,” Joan said. “I don’t think that’s going to happen. I mean, you said it yourself. There have been other court cases and the only ones prosecuted were the staff and the government.”

  “Maybe they didn’t have any student abusers at those schools.”

  “That seems hard to believe. Kids learn through imitation.”

  “All kids?”

  “Well, not all. But enough to generate some hardcore bullies and maybe a few abusers, especially if everyone is turning a blind eye.”

  “So what do you suggest?”

  “I think you should do what you feel is right.”

  “What if we go through with this and it’s just the natives who are punished? I mean, if there’s a native guy and a white guy charged with the same thing, then the native guy will be convicted.”

  “Ed, I just don’t think that’s true. You can say what you like about the wemistikoshiw, but our courts are fair.”

  “Joan, I think you’re being naive. Remember my great-granddad, John Metatawabin?”

  “Well, that was eighty years ago.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not so different today.”

  “Ed, you’re exaggerating.

  “No, I’m not. A native guy shows up in court, and he looks down to avoid confrontation, and then he’s called shifty. Or he doesn’t speak English well enough to paint a compelling picture, and people assume he is lying. Or he damns himself by assuming that he must have done something wrong, because why else would they have arrested him, and he admits his guilt. Or he assumes that he’s broken an Indian Act law that he didn’t even realize existed, since the Indian Act bans most things considered essential to a good Cree life. There’s a reason why the jails down south are full of Indians.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’m still figuring that out.”

  After that conversation with my wife, I watched anxiously as other people came forward. In 1990, eight Secwepemc men, former students of St. Joseph’s Mission in Williams Lake, B.C., launched a case alleging sexual abuse against the Catholic Church. As the case unfolded, I waited to see if there was any mention of student-on-student abuse or if any charges were laid. None were—just a settlement against the Catholic Church and the federal government. Asking around when I was next in Sudbury, I found the same was true of the first residential school case two years earlier, Mowatt v. Clarke, where eight Nlakapamuk boys from out in Lytton, B.C., came forward and said they’d been abused at St. George’s Residential School. No charges were laid against the boys, and the federal government and the Anglican Church admitted fault before the case went to trial.

  Did that mean that these schools weren’t as bad as St. Anne’s? That the boys there did not repeat the behaviour of their abusers? Or were the lawyers just focusing on prosecuting those in charge?

  Then Phil Fontaine, leader of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, spoke out against his own sexual abuse and called for an inquiry. I decided to act.

  To expose the abuse at St. Anne’s, I started small. Working with my band council, I arranged for everyone who had ever been at the school to come together in the summertime. We called it the St. Anne’s Reunion and Keykaywin Conference—part school reunion, part safe space to talk about some of the issues that had affected us, as keykaywin is Cree for “healing.”

  Despite the innocuous title, many people tried to stop it from happening over the next few weeks. They likely figured there would be serious consequences from discussing what had really happened at the school. They came to my door to talk about how their relatives had gotten jobs at the school, and would now be punished for all their hard work. They gossiped about me and stared at Joan at the Hudson’s Bay store. I ignored them all. It’s hard to embarrass an alcoholic. To heal, they’ve already buried all their shame.

  “Thanks for coming, man,” I greeted Tony at the airport, one of three hundred students coming to the St. Anne’s Reunion and Keykaywin Conference. They came from all over—Peawanuck, Attawapiskat, Moosonee, Kashechewan, Timmins, Toronto, Ottawa, Sudbury, Cochrane, North Bay, Thunder Bay—and we put them up in people’s houses and at the nurse’s station, which was the only place in town with any spare beds.

  “Good to see you,” he said, hugging me. “Sorry I didn’t get back to you about Amocheesh. I was asking around.” I had been trying to learn Amocheesh’s whereabouts. I needed to know whether he had been abused, too, when he had gone to stay with Mike in Montreal.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I actually wanted to ask you about something else. Do you know anything about Mike Pasko?”

  “The Hudson’s Bay manager?”

  “Yeah, that’s him.”

  “He was a good man. Real nice.”

  I blushed. “You never heard …”

  “What?”

  “You never heard that he took boys to his place in Montreal.”

  “Yeah, I heard that.”

  “Who?”

  “Amocheesh. And some others, I think.”

  “He took me,” I said quietly. I looked down, and my shoulders tensed.

  Tony stared at me. I could feel his eyes on the top of my head. I met his gaze, and a flash of understanding passed through his eyes. “Are you getting at what I think you’re getting at?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I am.”

  “Did he, you know, touch you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When?”

  “When I was sixteen. I went with him to Montreal.”

  “Have you told the police?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to tell the conference?”

  “I haven’t decided.”

  “You should.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Sorry man. Wow. Fuck. I don’t know what to say.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I am now.”

  He put his arm around my shoulder and squeezed me, and looked at me with sad eyes. I met his gaze at first, then I could tell that we both wanted to be alone with our thoughts so I drove him to Nicholas’s, where he was staying.

  At the St. Anne’s Reunion and Keykaywin Conference, we had worked hard to create a safe space for people to open up about abuse, inviting social workers, mental health workers, a justice of the peace, elders, First Nation chiefs, and a professor of native history to speak about the effects of residential schools and child abuse. In the mornings, there were presentations by experts about how residential schools can affect someone’s life, and then we asked anyone to open up about their experiences. We knew they’d be in a raw and vulnerable state after talking, so we searched for a Cree healer who could come to Fort Albany to help out. No one whom I’d worked with in Edmonton was available, so my colleague, Mary Anne Nakogee-Davis, arranged for a Navajo healer whom she had met and said was renowned among his people, Albert Damon from Window Rock, Arizona.

  Where to put all these people? That was a constant challenge. We rented an outdoor tent for some of the presentations, but we also had to hold some of the sessions inside St. Anne’s school for lack of any extra space. The only place we could find with any privacy was an old classroom where a committee involving myself and two others—Andrew Wesley, director of aboriginal child family services in Timmins, a distant relative of Sister Wesley, and Alex Spence, director of the Timmins Ojibway and Cree Cultural Centre—would listen to the testimonies in private. Many came to us to begin to tell stories. It was difficult for them. You could tell by the way they spoke with their eyes lowered. Soft voices. Weight shifting between dusty running shoes. Most people didn’t mention names. They said, “a man came upstairs, and he made me kneel down”; “they came into the bedroom, and I couldn’t see their faces.”

  Over the next seven days, we heard accounts of homosexual and heterosexual rapes, forced masturbation, fondling, and the cover-up of a murder.r />
  A boy several years younger than me, Simon John Thomas, took me aside and told me three support staff at St. Anne’s took him and his friend down to the basement. They raped them among the sacks of potatoes, then took them back upstairs to the dorm.

  Joel Wesley, who was a few years below me, and Andrew Wesley’s brother, said he and his friend, Abraham Nakogee, both sixteen, were running around the school’s track. Nakogee complained of chest pains to Brother Lauzon. He was told to stop whining and to keep going because he was fat. He had a heart attack and died. Joel was told that if he ever talked about it, he would be punished.

  A woman in her forties, Lucy, stood up in an open session and told the crowd of about two hundred people that when she was fourteen, a nun came into her bedroom and led her to one of the storage rooms. Two brothers were waiting and they raped her. After it was over, they told her that she would be whipped forty times if she said anything. A few months later, she was taken to the infirmary and made to have an abortion.

  “I miss him. I miss my baby,” she said. She stared off into space, like she was lost in another world, the world where her baby still lived.

  She sat back down and her story seemed to hang there, silencing the room.

  Later Andrew Wesley, Alex Spence and I escorted Lucy outside. She said she wanted to go to the place where she was made to have the abortion. We walked across the school grounds, over the bridge to the site of the old infirmary, which had since closed down. Andrew said a prayer for the baby. Then we all took it in turns to hug Lucy. Afterwards, she said she wanted to be alone.

  We left her and I walked across the grass to the Albany. The sun had started to set, and the spruces across the river had sunk into shadow, the rocks’ reflections rimmed by darkness. I started to cry.

  After the healing conference, I gave the Ontario Provincial Police a booklet of testimonies from the conference and they flew in from South Porcupine, near Timmins, 500 kilometres away, to lay charges. Four investigators and one detective sergeant took statements from approximately 750 people. Eighty of them alleged sexual abuse. Almost all of them alleged physical abuse, but most of it was not severe enough to be considered a crime. The 1950s Criminal Code allowed corporal punishment for parents on their children, and as the school was our official legal guardian, the kicks, punches and whippings were acceptable. So too were some of the punishments that terrified us: standing with our soiled underpants on our head and being locked in a dark basement without food and water. These punishments were not considered serious enough for criminal charges since the harm done was mainly psychological.