Looks Like Daylight

by Deborah Ellis

  Brad, 17

  According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Native Americans are put in prison at a rate that’s 38 percent higher than the national rate. In Canada Aboriginals make up 4 percent of the population but 23 percent of inmates, up from 17 percent ten years ago. Native prisoners are also more likely to be sent to maximum security or segregation, and prison guards are more likely to use force on them than on white inmates. A relationship has been established between dropping out of high school and being put behind bars. Racism also plays a big role. According to the Native Women’s Association of Canada, 40 percent of Aboriginal inmates in Canadian prisons are either residential school survivors or they are the children of survivors or they were affected by the Sixties Scoop. Many become reoffenders.

  In recent years, much work has been done to create opportunities for restorative justice — the sort of justice that brings healing to both the victim and the perpetrator, helping to ensure that the offender will not offend again. But too many young people are still caught up in the old system that focuses on punishment.

  I met with Brad inside a youth prison.

  I’m from Hamilton. I never met my grandparents. Just my mom and brothers and sisters. Dad left when I was two or three. Mom is a single mom. She doesn’t have a job.

  We’re Mohawk. My mom’s family is from the Six Nations reserve. My dad’s family is from the reserve too. I haven’t had any contact with them. When I was younger it didn’t matter. Now that I’m older I’d like to see my dad again and meet my other relatives. I don’t know if I’ll get to do that or not.

  I’ve been in this youth prison for a year. I get out in a couple of weeks.

  I’ve been in and out of custody since I was twelve. I’ve been in four closed prisons and lots of open-custody places. Open custody means no fence and you go on lots of outings. The YMCA will take you out to movies, things like that.

  I’ve been charged with different things over the years. Two frauds, four assaults with a deadly weapon, assault causing bodily harm, identity theft. Things like that.

  I only met my mom a couple of years ago. I knew her when I was a lot younger of course, but I don’t remember. Children’s Aid took me into foster care when I was four.

  I grew up in foster homes. A lot of foster homes. You’re always nervous at first because you don’t know the people and you want to say the right thing so they won’t hate you.

  I was in one foster home for a few years. They liked me and wanted to adopt me. But then one of their other foster kids hit their daughter. I pushed him down the stairs to get him away from her. The daughter didn’t speak up for me, so it looked like I was just a bad kid, and they threw me out.

  After that it was a lot of foster homes and a lot of group homes. None of the foster parents were Native. Some were white, some were Jamaican. Native parents raise their kids different. It’s a different rhythm. More patience and understanding, less giving out orders and punishments.

  I’ve been in six different group homes.

  Fence surrounding the youth prison

  The group homes were awful. I would never want to go back to one of those places again. They’re dirty. All my stuff got stolen. The kids who end up in group homes are the ones that are rejects from foster homes. They’re the kids everyone has given up on. They’re like waiting rooms for jails because no one expects anything worthwhile of us so they don’t put anything worthwhile into us.

  I finally found my mom again a few years ago. She’s been an addict for a long time, smoking crack and taking pills. She’s been clean for a year. I told her, “I’ll love you no matter what, but if you don’t stop doing drugs you’ll never be able to see us.” So she stopped, but it wasn’t easy. Addictions are hell. She goes now to a methadone clinic and has to give regular urine samples to prove she’s clean.

  She had a terrible life. She’s been stabbed, raped, beaten by a man using a bat with spikes on it. When she was a kid she was raped by her own dad. He was a prison guard. At another prison, not here, a prison for adults. All the other guards there knew he did it. None of them did anything to help my mother. She said he told her how he bragged about it to them. She got pregnant from him. He took her to get the abortion.

  I’m in here now because I stabbed another guy who also raped my mom.

  I never used the rape as my defense. I never told the court that’s why I did it. I figured that was my mother’s story to tell, not mine. I just kept silent and took my punishment. I’m really protective of my family. I’ve stabbed a lot of people — guys, that is, not women. It’s always guys who are hurting other people. I’ve never been hurt by a woman. I stabbed a guy who was kicking my sister, stabbed another guy who was beating another sister. I never use that as a defense.

  I do get nervous going to court, even though I’ve been there a lot. If you’re already in custody, they take you from jail to the central police station and they put you in a cell. To take you up to court they put shackles and handcuffs on you. You sit like that for a while in the courthouse cells. It’s boring and uncomfortable. If you get fed, it’s crap food, the cheapest thing they can find. And if it’s moldy, so what? You’re nothing. They make sure you know it. Then they bring you into the court, the adults talk for a while, then they take you back to the cell again.

  Sometimes they’ll let me talk. The judge might ask, “Are these the facts?” Sometimes they’ll ask you for an explanation, but if you say one thing slightly different from what the lawyer already said, that causes more trouble and more delays, so what’s the point of saying anything?

  Court is not a natural environment for a kid. A kid just wants to talk and have a conversation, but court is not a place where you feel comfortable to do that. I get that we’re there because we’re in trouble and it’s set up so that we feel intimidated. I just don’t think it really solves any problems.

  I’ve got fourteen high-school credits. There’s a school at this prison. It’s good to be able to study. I’ve got a job waiting for me when I get out of here, roofing and welding. And I’m going to learn drywalling. I hope I can finish school, but we’ll have to see.

  The longest I’ve ever been in custody is two and a half years. It really feels weird to get out of prison and see that everyone you know has gotten older. You’ve been locked away in a time capsule and the world has gone on without you.

  This is a prison, so there are hard things, but there are good things too. I think they think that because we’re young, there might still be a chance we can turn things around, that we’re not hard-core criminals yet. So we go to classes, there’s a weight room, there’s a yard where we can play basketball, there’s a library.

  We’re on a strict schedule. We wake up at 6:30, shower, go to breakfast, brush our teeth and do our chores. Everyone does their chore then goes back to their room until the chores are all done. We’re assigned chores like cleaning the washrooms and showers, mopping the floor, cleaning the lounge. We do them morning and evening.

  After chores we go to school for seventy-five minutes, back to the cells for a count, then another seventy-five minutes of school. After lunch we have a twenty-minute break. Then it’s school, break, school again. By that time it’s 3:30.

  Then we have activities. Sometimes it’s swimming or weights or in the gym or outside. You go with your range. You don’t have to go. You can stay in your cell, but if you go, you go with the range.

  There have been lots of scraps among the guys lately. Lots of fighting with the corrections officers. Sometimes it’s calm here for a long time. Then it changes and for weeks everyone is getting insulted and fighting back.

  Some COs treat you really good, like they actually care about how you’re doing. Others just look at it as a job.

  If you break the rules they send you to your cell. Sometimes they put you on twenty-four-hour lock-down where you have to stay in your cell on your
stool. You can’t move, you can’t read. You just sit there. They watch you through the window.

  Sometimes they put you in the hole, in solitary. I just got out of solitary, just before I came down here to talk to you. Solitary cells have a metal bed with a thin mat and a horse blanket. There’s a painted-over window in a cage, a metal toilet and a hatch in the door for the food tray.

  There are six cells in the solitary wing. If there are three or more kids in the cells, a guard stays in the wing. If there are less than three, a guard comes in to check on you every half hour. If you don’t talk to them, they won’t talk to you.

  You’re in there all the time. You can have a Bible and sometimes other books, but nothing else. The longest I’ve done in solitary is a month. I thought I was going crazy.

  I hit two guards. That’s why they threw me in there this last time.

  I think I’ll be institutionalized when I get out of here. I can cook, but only a little. I don’t know anything about how to conduct my life, like how to use a bank, things like that. I’m going to have to catch up.

  I don’t feel like I’m a part of any society. Not Native society, not Canadian society. Nothing. I’m a person on the outside.

  Kristin, 17

  The Pueblo Indians of the American Southwest possess a culture unique in the North American landscape. Some of the homes they carved out of the sandstone cliffs were five stories high and had hundreds of rooms. Taos Pueblo is a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site and also a National Historic Landmark.

  Today there are nineteen pueblos in New Mexico, each with its own history, cultural practices and artistic traditions. There used to be ninety-nine. Francisco Vásquez de Coronado of Spain, credited with “discovering” the Grand Canyon, came through the area on his search for the legendary Seven Cities of Gold. He massacred whole families in 1540, tying people to stakes and burning them alive. Eighty pueblos were destroyed, never to be rebuilt.

  The Southwest is also known as the place where the United States government tested the atomic bomb. Much of the uranium for those bombs came from a massive open-pit uranium mine on the Laguna Pueblo, causing long-term health problems for the people. While the pit is still there, the Laguna people are working to reclaim it.

  The Acoma Pueblo, where Kristin works, is also known as Sky City because of the ancient and still-inhabited city on top of the mountain. The three hundred homes there are owned by the women who, by tradition, pass them on to their youngest daughters. Visitors are welcome through the cultural center at the pueblo and the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque (www.indianpueblo.org).

  I’ve been involved with the Ancestral Lands project for three years. I was sort of forced into it to start with. I kept running away from home, having troubles with the law. I don’t like to talk about the details of that. It’s in the past, and I’ve fixed up all the things that I did wrong.

  But I will say that I was sent to a lot of places by the court system. Some of the places were not too bad, and the people who ran them tried to make them fun. After all, we were kids. We were in trouble, but we were still kids.

  Some of the places they put me in were really hard. They locked me up and I hated that. I was trapped.

  The court referred me to this project because I had to do some community service hours. I stayed for a while, kind of testing it out, seeing what the people were like. They seemed good, but I’m not used to things going well. I ran away again in the middle of it because I was sure it would not continue to be good. It was going to turn bad somehow and I didn’t want to be there when it did. Then I kind of kicked myself and thought, what if this time I was wrong? Then I decided to ask to come back and give it another try.

  I see the program as an opportunity to fix the mistakes I made in the past. I finished all the court-ordered stuff last summer and decided to stay with it.

  The director, Cornell, talks to us a lot about consequences. He says our actions should reflect our values, that sure we could spend our paychecks on booze and drugs, but there are consequences to doing that, and what does that tell the world about who we are if we make that choice?

  Desert around Acoma Pueblo

  He talks to us and we talk to each other. It helps us stay strong and on the right path.

  A kid will come back from the weekend and say, “I almost got into a car with my buddies even though I knew they were going drinking and were using drugs. But I didn’t. Three hours after I left them, they got busted by the cops. They’re sitting in jail this morning, and I’m back at work!”

  Cornell started this project because he and his wife came home from the casino at 2:30 one morning. He saw two thirteen-year-old girls running around, and in his mind he saw his own daughters. He didn’t want children leading lives like that. He wanted kids to have the opportunity to become something.

  Ancestral Lands is part of the Southwest Conservation Corps. It has lots of youth programs. They work with Pueblo youth, Navajo, Hopi. All Native youth. As Native Americans, we’re taught to respect the earth, but modern culture makes us forget that. The corps has a hiking club for younger kids ten to thirteen. The kids get backpacks, compasses and water bottles — things they need on a hike. They go on hiking trips out on the ancestral land. They meet with archeologists, elders, national park people. Gives them an idea that there’s a big world out there, bigger than watching TV or playing video games.

  The preservation crew, which is what I’m on, is for older youth. We look after the natural areas. Sometimes we cut down trees that are not indigenous to our area. Someone or something has brought them in from someplace else. They drink up a lot of water, which means the local plants don’t get what they need. I’ve spent a lot of time clearing cactus out of a canyon just south of Acoma. We clear away cactus and other invasive plants and in their place we plant natural local grasses which give the wildlife something to eat.

  There’s usually fourteen on a team, and we work hard! The work we do helps preserve and clean the water in the canyon. Our ancestors lived on this land. It belongs to us and we want to pass it on to the next generation in good shape.

  We all wear yellow hardhats and gray T-shirts, and we start every day with exercises like push-ups to get our muscles ready for the work ahead. Every time there’s a decision to be made or information to be shared, we form a circle so everyone can feel they can be seen and heard. It’s also so that it’s clear we’re all in this together.

  I love coming in to work in the morning. We laugh every day! Sometimes I don’t even want to leave work to go home. We’re all here to do a job, and we know that the job is important, and we take that seriously, but we can also have a lot of fun.

  Traditional pueblo oven

  Struggling with cactus is really hard. You have to be careful not to get hurt or hurt your teammates.

  Picking up trash means more plants will grow and the soil will be healthier. Clearing out moss and things from the water means the water will flow better. It might even get clean enough one day that people can just drink right from the river, the way we used to.

  We’ve learned how to work together to make a job go easier. And kids who have never made real friends in their lives have made good friends here. During lunch we put all the food we’ve brought from home in the middle of the circle. Some kids come with no food. Not because they’re lazy but because there’s no food in their house. If we pool what we have, then everybody eats, and there’s enough for everyone.

  I’m much healthier and stronger now than I was when I started, even though I thought I was tougher. There’s something really special about taking a place that’s ugly and making it beautiful. The first project I worked on, we fixed up a playground that was in bad shape. We painted it, repaired it, cut down weeds, picked up the trash. We made it safe for the little kids. I feel real proud even now when I see kids playing on it.

  And
the river I’m helping to clear — when I’m an elder I’ll take all the little kids in the community out to see it and tell them all about how I helped clean it up. You really feel it’s your land if you sweat a little to take care of it.

  We cannot give up our rights without destroying ourselves as a people. If our rights are meaningless … then we as a people are meaningless. We cannot and we will not accept this.

  — Harold Cardinal, Cree, from The Unjust Society: The Tragedy of Canada’s Indians

  Danielle, 18

  According to Columbia Journalism School’s Dart Center and Amnesty International, one in three Native American women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. In the general population, the rate is one in six. Most rape cases of Native women go unprosecuted. Eighty-five percent of the rapists of Native women are non-Native men, and tribal police forces have no legal ability to arrest white men.

  The Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center has looked at the barriers Native Americans face in receiving health care, including contraception, leading women who get pregnant because of rape to be forced to give birth to the child of their rapist.

  Programs to empower Indigenous women to keep themselves safe are growing popular. Women’s self-defense courses on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming and on the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana are just two examples.

  But many Native American and Aboriginal women who report that they have been raped are still simply not believed.

  That’s what Danielle came up against.

  I’ve lived here for about ten years. Before here, I lived in Timiskaming. But then Mom met someone she wanted to be with, and we moved here. My dad is German. I’m a non-status Native, an Algonquin from the Kipawa First Nation. I’ve lived in a few places, actually. I was even in foster care for a while.