Blue Bear Woman

by Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau

  I excuse myself and leave the group for a minute. I must have brushed against the couple’s table because the man aims another timid smile at me. I smile in turn. He waves me over. “Are you Victoria?” he asks in English.

  He met me several years ago in the village I’m from. He was living with my brother Demsy and his wife Loussie. His name doesn’t ring a bell. So many people took advantage of my brother and his then wife’s generous hospitality.

  “Allow me to introduce you to your cousin—Victoria!” As though he has just cracked a good joke, he starts to laugh, showing a missing eyetooth. This new cousin with my name radiates warmth toward me. What a funny coincidence. Slim and rather good-looking, she wears her hair short. She used to work for Hydro-Québec but, after a bout of depression, now manages the restaurant at the Waskaganish Inn. “At least I’m home,” she says. “I knew Anne in Val-d’Or well, how is she? You look a lot alike, she often mentioned you.…”

  Anne was Sibi’s given name. I sit down next to my cousin, born a Kapassisit, to tell her and her friend the sad truth. They reel with the news, exclaiming, “Oh, no, how can that be? Not Anne! She was so nice, so pretty!”

  “That’s what killed her,” I say, “Too pretty, too naive. Candy for predators.”

  My rage throws me off-balance. I excuse myself again, my bladder calls.

  On my return from the washroom, Brad swoops down on me by the takeout counter. “Hey, Victoria! You’re back!” he says in English, then switches to French, “I have something to show you. Come to my studio after lunch, okay? Right now, I’m in a big hurry.…”

  He pats his shirt and pants’ pockets, grabs the waitress’s notepad, rips out a page, scribbles down an address with his pen, then holds the piece of paper out to me. “It’s at the top of the hill, fourth house on the left!” He grabs a large greasy brown paper bag the woman at the counter hands him and disappears in the direction of the door. No time for me to get a word in edgewise.

  Victoria and Norman stop me again. They ask how the other family members are doing. George? Andrew? Edward?

  I no longer hear Humbert Mistenapeo’s thundering laugh and glance over at the table. Leaning into each other, my friends look like conspirators. Intrigued, I can’t wait to join them.

  16

  DESCENT INTO THE DEPTHS

  AUGUST 2004

  I GAZE IN AWE at Brad’s work of art. The density, lines, and luminosity of his stained glass leave me speechless. Such virtuosity in its design! The scene is one of Canada geese migrating. In the foreground, squatting and surrounded by grasses, are a couple of the web-footed birds so alive it’s as though I can feel the wind ruffling their feathers. But no, it was the school janitor opening the side door on one of his rounds.

  Standing next to me, Brad waits for my comments. He’s somewhat uncomfortable, embarrassed by my obvious interest, unsure how to behave. I smile to put his mind at ease. “It’s magnificent, a major work in your career, Brad.…”

  Unassuming as this tall young man is, he’s not expecting my compliment. His talent comes as naturally to him as his joie de vivre. Originally a graphic designer, his work suffered for a long time from the influence of the painstaking approach imposed by his professional training. This monumental work of art is proof that his inner artist has been liberated and that he has the ability to use what he has learned to follow his own path. Does he realize that? Happy with my assessment, Brad invites me to visit his studio in the basement of his father’s home. We leave the lobby of the neighbourhood school where my friend’s art holds a place of honour.

  His father is busy braiding thin larch branches, shaping them into geese with wings outstretched. He invites me to sit at his worktable and asks about my trip to James Bay. Like Mistenapeo, Mr. Wheschee speaks to me in a Cree free of the English terms the new generation tends to resort to while weakening the language. Their habit is one that saddens me as the loss of a millenia-old heritage. I don’t often have a chance to speak Cree and am touched by the respect these grandfathers have for their culture.

  An impatient Brad almost has to drag me away by the sleeve. “Come see my pieces downstairs! I’ve started working in a new style—abstract!”

  After the traditional cup of tea, I leave the Wheschee family and set out for the museum where Daniel and Stanley will be waiting. The beginnings of a headache tell me my body needs a rest. I need alone time before my second cousin and I begin preparing the next stages of our search for Great-Uncle George’s bones. The river lures me with its long, grey sandbank. The air is humid, a sign of rain to come? I walk, I breathe, and the strangeness of this voyage north to my roots overwhelms me with a jumble of emotions I’d thought put to rest. The pain I believed to be under lock and key has been revived. My impatience and aggressive outburst over lunch were simply a sign of my unwillingness in the face of an inevitable journey. Shaman Mistenapeo’s power has delivered me to the dreaded depths.

  The past, alcohol, neglect, and lost loved ones resurface, the drowned rising from a lake bed. How can I come to a spirit’s rescue when I’ve been incapable of helping the living? When I have no hold over those still with us even now sliding into the abyss? A wave of anguish provokes a howl that’s cut off by sobs wracking my body. I sit with my back against a rock, my head and arms resting on my raised knees. The coils around my solar plexus assert their stranglehold, tightening around me like some wild, enraged animal’s fangs. Waves of sorrow reach into the marrow of my bones, into my cells, my atoms. A pack of repressed images hurls itself at me. The first time my father hit my mother, staggering, me hearing her cry, “You slept with Jenny! You slept with Jenny!” Both of them drunk. My father’s refusal to go after Maikanish who my mother dragged to the hotel with her. It’s a late winter’s night. I’m afraid my little brother will catch cold. He’s only six. I beg my father, but he refuses to budge. Makwashish stumbling home from our neighbour’s. Blind drunk! At the age of four. My parents and the neighbours fast asleep, mouths gaping, sprawled on the grass, bottles of homemade wine scattered around them. Sibi, abandoned by our mother the minute we left for school. On our return late one afternoon, we find her clinging to the bars of her crib, milk curdling in her morning bottle, her diaper full of poo and pee. She’s sixteen months old. Her crib under a curtainless window on a sweltering September day, her arms reaching for me. The accusations of incest hurled by our mother at my father. To protect her eldest son. How could she not have interpreted the clues, the traces of sperm on our underwear that appeared early each summer only to disappear when Jimmy returned to school? Sibi’s rape by Jimmy when she was three, confided to me thirty years later. My blindness, thinking I was the only victim. If I had known, would I have denounced or threatened him to save her? I weep for the loss of my brother who, after his first year in residential school, came home a predator. “I’ve got a new game,” he’d said. But I wasn’t to tell our parents on pain of I-can’t-remember-what-consequence.… For years now, his fellow students have testified to the horror they lived through between walls managed by the Oblates of Immaculate Mary. Managed my ass! Children scorned, abused, destroyed. My brothers and sisters placed in foster homes where the abuse continued. One starved, the other beaten, manhandled, sexually abused. Our little ones living under the shadow of alcoholism. Our concern as relatives, our helplessness and ignorance. Why? How can we stop the downward spiral, is such a thing even possible?

  17

  THE TOTEM ANIMALS

  AUGUST 2004

  A CROW FLYING overhead caws. Curious, it does an about-turn and lands on a log abandoned on the bank of the Rupert River to stare at me. Its arrival brings me back to myself, wrests me from the grip of despair. The bird hops along the sand, prancing, its beak jutting forward and back in a goofy motion. What does it want? Food perhaps? The crow parades in front of me, barely two metres away, like a large tin soldier. It does an abrupt about-face to start all over again, off-balance on one leg. It looks
drunk. I’m overcome with laughter, as uncontrollable as the tears that preceded it. I hear an echo of the joyous laughter of the people of my clan out at Pointe-Aux-Vents. My mother’s laughter. This laughter from a source I’d forgotten erases my fatigue, my migraine, my sorrow. Koukoum Ka Wapka Oot’s words come back to me, “There are good and bad shamans. Some take on animal shapes or enter an animal’s spirit.”

  Cherished grandmother and cherished memory, alive and generous!

  Humbert’s smile comes to mind in the cascade of my laughter.

  “Tchi a, noumoushoum? Nile virus? Or bird flu?” I speak to the bird.

  It brings its pantomime to an abrupt end, unfurls its wings and, in the velvet whir of take-off, heads for the village.

  The crow is right; the hour has come to return to Daniel and Stanley. I have no idea what time it is or how long I’ve been down by the river. Back at the museum, my husband walks up to me with an angry, or is it worried, look? He thinks Brad is the cause of my red, swollen eyes. Stanley takes pains to show no interest. Daniel and I need to sort a few things out, we’ve been drifting apart since our arrival this morning in Waskaganish. I invite him to follow me outside so we can be alone for a moment. My explanation turns him around. Yet I still feel a shadow hovering. So I insist until he blurts out what he has to say, “How does it make me look, waiting for you with no idea where you are. Stanley called Brad, who told us you’d left his studio at least an hour before. And that was three-quarters of an hour ago!”

  How can I tell him what I was meant to experience on the riverbank? A stranger in a culture whose rules he knows nothing of, Daniel fears ridicule more than anything. Plunged into a milieu whose attitudes are familiar to me and into my maternal language and culture, I hadn’t noticed. I didn’t pay attention. I let myself be caught up, re-entering my child’s skin, free, solitary and grown-up before my time, finding in nature solutions to internal upheaval.… I apologize.

  Reconciled and holding hands, we walk back inside to reassure my cousin. I know that it will be enough for him to see us together to put his mind at ease. Seated at the computer, he has his back turned to us. His long black braid floats along the sky blue of his T-shirt, a colour that highlights his copper tone. I clear my throat to attract his attention. He turns and seeing our linked fingers, flashes a broad smile.

  “I’ve got a surprise for you,” he says, pushing back his roller chair. He holds out a sheaf of white paper with the title “Domind’s Ancestors” on the first page. He’s offering me the genealogy for my grandparents George and Louisa. My obvious glee pleases him. “I thought you’d like a copy.…”

  Late that afternoon, we say good-bye to Stanley. Where we go next with our project is up to me; he’ll wait for my call. We have to drive back south to return our rental van the next day. Since we don’t want to be crunched for time, we’ll sleep en route. We stop at the craft store to buy my long-sought-for caribou hide moccasins. Mistenapeo is back in his spot with other Elders in front of the store. After lunch, he’d left us with a cursory good-bye, saying he needed a nap, “We’ll see each other later.”

  Beaded in bright colours, the moccasins are a perfect fit, slipping easily onto my feet. Such meticulous work. I thank Shirley for her choice. She sends me a questioning look, “Tshagun?” I urge her to speak.

  In some confusion, she says, “Is this whole expedition to Stanley’s grandfather’s old hunting grounds for real? They mentioned it at noon while you were away.”

  I nod and ask if there’s something bothering her.

  “No, it just seems so strange. Do you think you’ll find anything? My husband’s so excited by the project.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “For now, I’m letting events lead me where they will. The only thing I do know is that I want to see this adventure through to the end. I trust Mistenapeo.”

  Now that I think of it, I still have to bid farewell to the grandfather. Not an easy thing to do. Over lunch, I understood he has diabetes when he refused to eat any refined sugar and his granddaughter Sandra came to remind him it was time for his insulin. This hunch of mine that he’ll no longer be here when I next come through, is it real or a reflection of my own fear? All the knowledge that would disappear with him.… Daniel is losing patience, we have to hit the road. On our way out, he walks over to Humbert to announce our departure. The old man shakes his hand warmly and wishes him a safe journey’s end. I take a seat in an empty chair next to Noumoushoum. I hold my hand up, fingers apart, signalling that I need five minutes alone with Mistenapeo. He heads for the car. I decide to adopt a humourous tone with the old man. Around us, the other Elders suggest it’s time for tea and cookies. They stand and make their way inside Chez Johnny’s snack bar.

  “Tell me, Noumoushoum, do you like to travel in the form of a crow?”

  His guttural laugh rings out. “Ha, ha, ha! Maybe,” he says. “When I nod off, I lose all control over my totem animals! They do as they please!”

  He seems to be mulling something over. I pick up on his calmness and grow calm in turn. In this shared stillness, his voice goes straight to my heart.

  “My daughter, the path to your truth—the one you glimpsed this morning—will not be easy. You’ve already suffered a great deal; learn to embrace suffering. Free yourself of it and, in doing so, you will become even stronger. In you there is your family, but also two peoples—the red and white. Whatever you think, the white part of you is as devastated as the red. You need to heal both parts of yourself and reunite them. Opposed, they weaken you. United, you’ll stand like a rock whatever the storm.”

  I hold back my tears. His words feel like a battering ram, like the ones used in the past to break down the door to an impregnable castle. They bring to the surface images buried deep in my memory: a bayonet planted in a German soldier’s neck, mortar shells and their deafening explosions, the horrendous fear of not making it out alive. God deliver me, these are my father’s memories buried deep inside! My five minutes are more than up. I must leave. I take the old shaman’s hand in mine. “Mist’Migwech, noumoushoum … nashtabou’eh tchad’tchiden.…” Thank you, grandfather, I love you very much.

  Mistenapeo pats my hand with his free hand. “I know, my daughter, I know.… Go, your husband is waiting!”

  18

  BEAR STORIES

  AUGUST 2004

  WHILE DANIEL FILLS THE CAR up with gas at the village station, I head for the snack bar hoping to find some sandwiches. The cook adds lettuce and slices of tomato to the ham between two slices of white bread. I order fries to please my husband, who comes up as I pay. He gets behind the wheel, no doubt aware of my current inability to take us to our destination.

  We drive down the gravel road with the sun at our back. It will follow us for a few hours still. I doze off. An abrupt movement on Daniel’s part jerks me from the beginnings of slumber. He’s braked. I look at him, surprised, questioning. He points at structures among the spruce trees, perhaps tipis. At the entrance made of fine sand, we leave the car and walk down a mossy path. The structures are various representations of First Nations housing: a longhouse, a tipi, a roundhouse, and even a sweatlodge. The shelters’ walls are made of moss-insulated jackpine. Plywood nailed across stumps serves as beds. Pop cans spill out of a garbage bin at the entrance. I step into every shelter. Strong energy emanates from each of them, a kind of tangible magnetism. I wouldn’t be surprised if the site had been chosen, with Mistenapeo’s help, as a cultural training centre for young community members or for tourists.

  I feel a weight on my forehead between my eyebrows as though an invisible hand was trying to gain entrance. Not painful, just strange. Immediately, my breathing deepens and intense heat spreads through my chest and hands. There’s no longer any doubt, this place is meant for prayer. I go back to the van for my medicine bag and ceremonial objects. Daniel ventures away down a trail leading to a body of water whose lapping waves can be heard.
He has never been comfortable with my spiritual practice, nor was my father in the past with my mother’s. Is it just a question of different traditions?

  I sit down at the foot of the biggest tree, my back to the north, and lay down a moose hide on which I spread out my sacred objects. Then, responding to a call from Spirit itself, one that almost takes my breath away, I empty my mind, offer myself up, and wait for instructions. I take deep breaths, my mind alert. Touch the centre of my being. Immediately, a chant rises through my oesophagus and is taken up by my throat like some bodily instrument that begins to sing. My hands seize the drum and drumstick, and follow the rising notes, initially confused, then increasingly assured and harmonious. No image comes to me, for whom should I pray then? The answer isn’t long in coming. The voice takes on Humbert’s familiar rumble, “The prayer is for you, my daughter. The Great Spirit has given you your own power song to heal you.”

  Luminous joy explodes, a balm to the past’s open wounds and my familiar sadness. If I have been blessed, may it extend to my family here and now, but also to my ancestors and to future generations. I see a multitude dancing in a shining golden space. Borne away by this unexpected gift of joy, I lose all sense of time. So Grandfather Mistenapeo will not leave me! A conviction nestles deep in my being—whatever the source of the force disguised as Humbert, it will provide support and guide me along this unknown path that beckons. I can still hear my grandfather’s cavernous timbre from this morning. Centuries ago. “Support will be there for you.…”