Growing Up Native American

by Bill Adler

  Lee Maracle (Metis) is a poet, writer, scholar, and activist for her people. She is the author of I Am Woman and numerous poems, articles, and essays.

  I WAS BORN IN VANCOUVER ON JULY 2ND 1950 AND RAISED ON THE North Shore mud flats about two miles east of Second Narrows Bridge. My first memory is of something that happened when I was about two years old. My brother Roger and I were playing down on the flats, catching wee little crabs and putting them in a quart-sized jar—which seemed huge to us because we were so small. Suddenly, I knocked over the jar and all the crabs went scurrying away. Roger yelled “Babe!”—they all called me “Babe” then—“Go and get them!” Well, I ran behind a log where they had headed and got stuck in some deep mud. Roger was scared. He thought I was in real trouble and bolted up the trail from the beach to get mom and dad. Dad came down, picked me up out of the mud and patted me; he was so strong it seemed he was spanking me and I wondered why.

  My mother, born in a large Métis community in Lac Labiche, Alberta, is the child of a Frenchman and an Indian woman. She grew up on a farm and at nineteen travelled to Edmonton, where she found work as a domestic for a rich Jewish family. Father was born on a small farm in Goodsoil, Saskatchewan, and grew up during the drought and depression of the ’30s. People had a hard time then just staying alive, especially those who depended solely on their crops. In addition to the bad times, my grandfather was old and had arthritis, so it was very difficult for him to tend the farm.

  As a young boy, my dad trapped animals to support the family. At fifteen he was out on his own, hopping boxcars, travelling around trying to find work. At twenty he joined the army and was sent to train in Edmonton, where he met my mother. Then he was transferred to Jericho, Vancouver. He wrote my mom many letters and finally he asked her to come to the coast and marry him. He was 22 and she was a year younger. They hadn’t really known each other very well, mainly through letters, and it wasn’t long before they started fighting and getting on badly.

  Three years after they were married they had a son, Nelson, but he died at eleven months. A second son, Ed, was born when mom was 27 and he’s still alive. In two-and-a-half years there was Roger, and I came along eleven months later. My two sisters, Joan and Joyce were twins; they were born on 12 June 1952. Gordon was born in May 1954, and George in November 1959.

  The house we lived in had originally been an RCMP boatshed; my dad nailed hardboard sections (rooms) into the top part where we lived and worked on building and repairing boats in the shed below it. There was no electricity—no heating, hot water or other luxuries like television. We didn’t get electricity till 1953, but even then the place was always cold and damp.

  Until I was three I spent most of my time with my dad’s father. Then later, when dad was around more, he would paddle us out in his rowboat to shoot ducks, which we learned to do quite young. I remember the first time clearly. I was standing in the skiff aiming intently at some ducks, but when I pulled the trigger it was too much for me—the jolt knocked me back right into the water. Dad grabbed at his gun and when I popped out of the water he was angry at me for almost getting it wet.

  Later, dad started fishing off the docks in Steveston, which was about twenty miles from home. I helped the other kids gut the fish he caught. Sometimes mom left the babies at home with granddad and came along with my two older brothers to help.

  When I was three years old I still didn’t talk. My parents were worried about it and took me to see a doctor—several, in fact. I found out later they were psychiatrists. My folks were always arguing about me. I was often left with a woman named Eileen Dunster—whom I called “Aunt Eileen”—because dad kept beating me up and mom didn’t like it.

  Though I didn’t talk, I remember watching things and thinking a lot. I don’t know why, but I was a very serious kid. Once mom came in and said “It’s raining cats ’n’ dogs outside!” I ran to the window to see, but was disappointed to find only the usual rain drops coming down. I wondered for a long time why she had lied like that.

  My silence lasted another year. Then one day mom caught me talking to Roger, with whom I was very close, and after that the jig was up. I started talking a little with my parents, but not very much; I didn’t like big people. I thought they were interesting, but not people I wanted to talk to.

  My parents fought a lot—nearly all the time. When they had parties—which was almost every week—dad got drunk and made us kids drink beer too. He would then make us dance and do other stupid things—which I really hated. I remember the first time I thought I hated my dad. My sister and I had this game: we would both run into the house and the first to touch the toilet seat got to use the bathroom first. Once my sister pushed me away from the toilet seat when I clearly had her beat. In retaliation I pulled her off the toilet and she peed on the floor. She was crying and told dad. He ran in and slapped me hard in the face. I didn’t cry; I just stared coldly at him. He then turned and left the house. I was four years old.

  Around that time things got really bad in the family. The old man was always beating up on Ed, my oldest brother. He’d throw him against the wall and sometimes end up hurting him pretty badly. Dad started being gone a lot of the time, but when he came home we would all run away. Ed started staying away for days. Once, when he was 13 and I was 9, he was gone for almost a week. Mom got real worried and kicked dad out of the house, knowing Ed wouldn’t return as long as he was there. We kids knew where Ed was but didn’t say anything. Dad and Ed came back together the next morning and I was surprised to see that dad wasn’t angry; in fact, he seemed to be proud of the spunk Ed had shown in running away.

  Our family was very poor at this time. Dad built boats and was apprenticing for carpenter papers. But when I was five, he just upped and left us, going north to fish. After that, he rarely came home and never sent mom any money. So things got even worse than before. With their marriage practically broken off, mom had to earn a living for all of us. Granddad helped mom with the crab shack business she ran with my dad. Ed and granddad caught the crabs at night and watched us kids while mom pounded them during the day. She would then go around selling them, and that’s how we managed to get a little money.

  It wasn’t long, however, before my younger brother Gordon was born. Mom couldn’t work for a time after that, and by the time she could, granddad was too old to trap. So mom did both jobs, working night and day, trapping and pounding. But after a while this got to be too much for her and she had to stop. We kids were getting older and started helping out. Ed got a paper route and made about eight dollars a month when he was only eight. When Roger reached that age they started caddying at Capilano Golf Course. Both boys went caddying on Saturdays and Sundays and usually brought in ten or twelve dollars a week. When I turned seven I started taking in washing and ironing for Whites in the neighbourhood.

  Sometimes we went to the nearby Indian Reserve and played with the kids there…but not often because we usually had so much work to do at home. Every summer mom planted a garden. We all worked in it and some of the vegetables lasted us into the fall.

  There was always a lot of talk in the neighbourhood about my mom—how she used to run around and all that. Only Ed and my youngest brother are dad’s kids. When dad was gone, people were always trying to break into the house. I remember one night when a guy broke in; mom had a wood chopping axe and was standing by the window telling him to get out or she would chop his head off. He finally left, but I dreamed that night that mom had killed him. I woke up in a sweat.

  The community we lived in was really very strange…weird things were always happening. An uncle of ours lived about a mile away. Time and again he came over and stole our skiff and sold it to a man named Sebastian. Whenever it happened, mom walked over to Sebastian’s place about two miles away and got it back. But they always argued fiercely. Once mom went over with an axe: she was bent on really fixing him for buying the skiff again, which he knew was ours. Actually, the skiff was over at his place a lot.

&nbs
p; When Sebastian saw her steaming down the trail with an axe he panicked and called the police. When mom got there he backed off yellin’ that the police were coming. She just took the skiff and went home. She locked up the house and we all hid in closets. Sure enough, the police came and banged loudly on the door. We didn’t answer. They then broke into the house and looked around, but didn’t find us. I remember being really scared that mom would be taken away to jail.

  Most of the people we knew lived on the Indian Reserve. The people outside the Reserve in our neighbourhood were mainly squatters, living on houseboats or shacks on the mud flats. There were a few large families like ours, but most were smaller. Some of the men worked as longshoremen and others collected welfare—about half and half. Then there was one man who worked as an electrician and another who repaired radios. Both families had two kids, but for a very long time they didn’t let them play with us. I guess it was because of mom’s reputation.

  Six families, most on welfare, lived in boathouses built up on stilts. The dredger’s house was on stilts too, but it was really nice. He was from South Africa and his wife was mulatto. She talked a lot about the racism back home—about how they’d had to leave because her husband, a white, had married a coloured woman. They moved into the neighbourhood when I was four and I played a lot with their son, Brian. I didn’t know what Blacks were then; I just knew they were different, much friendlier to us.

  Another family lived between our house and the Reserve. The father worked until they discovered he had a tumour in his head. Once it was removed he couldn’t balance himself well, so the family was forced to go on welfare.

  Then there were the Reids, who owned the local store. They were really mean to all the neighbourhood kids. Sometimes when we walked into the store Mrs Reid would throw us into a big barrel filled with lizards. Her life was miserable—always mean and fighting with her husband. They were always drinking and getting into car accidents. Once they even drove through our woodpile and smashed into the house.

  There was also a Canadian Indian-Mexican family nearby. Gracie Flores, the daughter, spent some time looking after us kids when mom went away for a few days. Then there was Jimmy Waddel. His family lived above the store and his father worked at McKenzie Barge and Derrick, a boat-building outfit. Jimmy and the older Korris boy down the street always picked on my brother and the younger kids from the Reserve. Whenever we played they tried to bully us around. So one day we decided we’d had enough. It was quite funny. Ten of us little kids were making faces at Jimmy from around the corner of a house, calling him “dirty old man,” “whitey,” “white boy,” and things like that. We had this huge chain from a logging boom with us and when he chased after us we all hid behind a tree. He could see us, of course, but when he ran up we wrestled him to the ground. Then we took a big padlock from dad’s boatshed and chained and locked him to the tree. The chain was real heavy, so he couldn’t get away. We just left him there crying.

  That night Mrs Waddel came over to tell my mother that Jimmy was lost. She was weeping. Jimmy was only eleven. I didn’t think much more about it until the police came. Suddenly I wondered if anyone had unlocked him. I was only five and didn’t have the key. All of us kids kept quiet. Ed didn’t know. He was older and we knew he would tell on us. Next morning they finally found Jimmy. He was still crying and told them the whole story—except who had done it. After that he never bothered us little kids again.

  When I turned seven I had my first birthday party. I got a skipping rope and remember really enjoying it. We didn’t skip with it much, though. We would have fun tying it around Roger, me and my little sister, Joan, who was very small for her age, five, about the size of a three-year old. Bound together, we would run down the hill as fast as we could. Joan couldn’t keep up and usually ended up being dragged along. Once she got caught in the bushes and got scratched. She was usually screaming about something, so we didn’t pay any attention; just kept yelling back, “Come on Joan! Keep running!” Finally we realized how hard it was becoming to pull. Looking back we saw we’d been pulling little Joan through the thick brambles. She was covered with cuts and bruises and crying loudly. We promised her all sorts of favours and she promised not to tell mom. At home she said she’d fallen into the bushes, but mom didn’t believe her. It was the first time I got a spanking from my mom.

  The next came when I lost a new pair of shoes that the Campbell family had given me. We were playing in the old sawdust pits, jumping into them from a high crumbling wall. Joan put my shoes down and they disappeared into this little hole. We dug for them, but the walls of the hole kept caving in. Then we got a shovel and held Joan upside down by the feet while she dug deeper and deeper. But we couldn’t find them and almost dropped Joan on her head. Finally we gave in and told mom. She spanked us good, mainly because she didn’t want us down at the sawdust mill. She got so angry, she sprained a finger. It swelled up so bad she couldn’t spank Joan, but Roger and I spanked her good because we figured she was the cause of our problem and deserved a good one.

  Soon after this incident, mom became very ill—or at least it seemed so to me. I was very worried. I thought it was my dad’s fault that she was dying because he wouldn’t take her to the hospital. I decided I would shoot him…he was just no good, I thought. All he could say was that he didn’t have enough money to take mom in, but we knew it wasn’t true because he was a pretty good fisherman. I knew about death because we had done a lot of duck hunting and fishing. I thought it wouldn’t be difficult to shoot dad. I told Roger my plan—he was eight then—and he talked me out of it, saying “If mom dies, shoot him. But let’s wait and see—otherwise it’s just stupid.” Well, I agreed—somewhat afraid to go ahead with my plan anyway—and mom got better in a couple of weeks. You have to understand that I really loved mom, and I hated my dad—especially when I was a young kid.

  For a long time, dad had only been coming home occasionally, then one day he moved back in and said to us kids that he was going to stay around awhile. Actually, he started being quite nice to us. My earlier hatred melted and I even began to like him a little. He got a job with Sterling Shipyards and continued to fish, taking Ed along with him. He wanted to take Roger too, but he was only eight and couldn’t pass for twelve, which was the minimum legal age for fishing.

  One day when Roger and I were down at the waterfront, he said: “Babe let’s take the skiff and go see dad; he’s fishing down at Rivers Inlet.” I said “Okay,” and he ran to the crab shack to get the oars. It was locked, but we were determined to go by now and “borrowed” a pike pole and paddle from Allen George’s canoe on the beach. We knew what we were doing was wrong. Mom and dad had both told us not to play around the water. We’d taken the boat out without asking several times—sometimes for hours—and mom and dad would worry, telling us how dangerous it was when we finally returned. Nevertheless, we pushed the heavy skiff over some barnacles down to the shore. We didn’t know it, but we’d scraped up a few small holes in the bottom. Paddling and poling, we headed up the coast and out toward the ocean, bailing water all the time. After travelling about five miles, we found ourselves at the mouth of the inlet near Lion’s Gate Bridge. We couldn’t paddle beyond the point no matter how hard we tried. Finally, the ocean current settled us onto the shore. Long hours of paddling and poling had convinced us it was time to go home. But how were we going to get the skiff back? We sat there a long time trying to figure it out: “Should we leave the skiff and walk back? Or try to make it back against the current, tired as we were?” As we talked it over, an RCMP patrol boat pulled up. The police asked us a few questions, then towed us home. Mom was worried finding us missing and the boat gone and had phoned the RCMP after a few hours. At home Roger just kept crying, saying he’d really wanted to visit dad up at Rivers Inlet. Mom told him we’d only gone five miles and it was another 300 to Rivers Inlet. But Roger was still too young to understand much about miles, so the tears kept falling. I was tired and didn’t care anymore about Rivers
Inlet, just wanting to lie down and rest.

  In 1959, when mom became pregnant again with my younger brother, dad left home for good. He yelled at mom, saying she was whoring around with other men, havin’ kids that weren’t his, and so on. Maybe he was right, but he fooled around plenty too. Since 1947 he would be leaving her for six months to a year at a time. Sometimes she talked to us about how bad it was being without a man in the house, and what it was like when they had no kids. She said Nelson died because dad refused to take him to the hospital—and she would never forgive him for that. Then when he was home they argued and fought a lot about Nelson, Ed and me. Dad just didn’t like Ed and kept complaining that I wasn’t even his kid. He accused mom of telling us stories when he was gone, trying to make us hate him. But in fact, mom remained loyal to him until long after he’d left her, always telling us he was a good man who just had too many troubles.

  Around this time a girl named Karen Thomas—we called her “Toni”—came to live with us. She’d been working in the canneries but was continually being laid off because of strikes or shortages of fish. So she decided to look after us kids while mom worked. She became like an older sister. We would often sit around in the evening and have long discussions—mainly mom and Toni. Sometimes they’d talk about politics. You see, when I was seven mom joined the Communist Party. Two years later there were lots of conflicts and she dropped out. I never found out why, except her saying the communists were real creepy, but since then she’s been anti-communist.

  With dad gone, we began working after school and didn’t have much chance to play. When I was nine I started taking care of my baby brother in the summer while mom worked at the Army & Navy Department Store. She’d always been at home before and now we felt lost without her. We just couldn’t understand why she had to go off to work every day and I remember our telling her in childish anguish that we would all work harder if she stayed at home. I was taking in ironing and doing a little baby-sitting outside, but we couldn’t make enough to live on. She had a deeply held ethic, handed down from both her family and dad’s father, that people ought to work. Government was always trying to put Indians on welfare, but they didn’t want it. Government said they were going to take away Indian trapping and fishing rights and put them on welfare—the Indians resisted. Our grandparents had been involved in many anti-welfare struggles.