A Geography of Blood (16 page)

Boy, am I ever lost!

“You mean you don't know where you are?” the young woman at the band office asks, when I get through to her by phone. The tone of her voice speaks volumes: how could anybody be so completely clueless? And she's right in more ways than she probably suspects. Though only a few miles off the highway, I'm a thousand miles out of my comfort zone. Should I have brought tobacco for the chief? Or should it have been cloth? I've lived on the prairies all my life. Surely, it shouldn't be this nerve-wracking to visit the neighbors.

The voice on the phone has me sorted out in an instant—turns out I'm almost there—and soon I'm parked in front of the band office (a worn-looking brown shed), under the fluttering blue and white of the Treaty 4 flag. The chief leads me into a spartan room, listens to my proposal, nods, and then proceeds to pour out her heart. She talks about emotional trauma and its links to disease, about alcoholism and wasted lives, about poverty and a father who taught her how to survive. How to grow a garden; how to look after cattle; how to snare and hunt different animals. “There is more to life than money,” she says several times. What truly matters, she insists, is survival and health. “I know my community isn't healthy.” Instead of the suspicion and principled misgivings that I had expected, the chief is apparently prepared to take me at my word. An hour into our conversation, she stands up, leads me to another room, interrupts a meeting in progress, introduces me to the band council, and says that I will be visiting the reserve to speak to some of the elders. Simple as that, I'm in, and it will be up to me to make sure that something good comes of this.

Jean Oakes and I meet in prison, though thankfully neither of us is confined behind bars. A cheerful, round-faced woman in her late sixties, with metal-rimmed glasses, a calm, reassuring manner, and a ready laugh, she perfectly fills the role of grandmother. So it is fitting that she is employed in that capacity, as elder, or
kokhum,
at the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge, a minimum-security correctional institution for federally sentenced Aboriginal women. Opened in 1995, the lodge occupies a cluster of comfortable, low-rise buildings in a stand of poplars on the highest height of the Nekaneet reserve, fifteen minutes up the road from the band office. In case you're wondering, as I was, the lodge's website defines “healing for Aboriginal women” as “the opportunity through Aboriginal teachings, programs, spirituality and culture, to recover from histories of abuse, regain a sense of self-worth, gain skills and rebuild families.” Although Aboriginal women make up three percent of the Canadian population, they constitute thirty-two percent of federally sentenced female prisoners, a statistic that speaks to a history of suffering.

Following a chain of acquaintances that had begun with the band council, I had ended up being invited, first, to attend a Horse Dance ceremony on a grassy meadow just above the lodge—a bright swirl of sunlight, drumming hooves, and prayers—and, now, to look in on a program that has been designed to assist selected “residents” with their “healing journeys.” As each woman introduces herself in turn, she takes a moment either to reflect on a ceremony the group had held the day before or, even more poignantly, to grieve over the pain of being separated from her children. Just as the last of the tears is being dried away, the door edges open, and a short, grandmotherly figure slips in and sits down beside me.

“I was lucky I came from poor,” she says, by way of introducing herself. “It was good that time, no alcohol, no drugs. Everybody used to be helping one another.” Lucky to have been poor? That's not something you often hear. And when the class is adjourned for lunch, look at the way the “girls” crowd around her, teasing and asking for hugs. Might there be room for me inside that circle of affection?

A few weeks later, over an offering of tobacco—I'm learning!—I visit Kokhum Jean in her home (a neat white bungalow on a small knoll across from the band office) and do my best to explain why I've come. I tell her about arriving in Eastend and our old van and all the breakdowns and how, as we dangled from the umpteenth tow truck, we got the impression that something was telling us to stop and pay attention to where we were. I watch her out of the corner of my eye, in case she thinks I'm unhinged, but instead she looks pleased and nods in agreement.

“That is how we—.” She breaks off, as if she too is uncertain how much it is safe to divulge. “That means you are supposed to be here,” she continues. “This is your home.
Something
there is that is always watching us.”

I tell her that I've been learning about the history of First Nations people in the Cypress Hills, and her response is matter of fact. “How does that make you feel? Angry?” she asks. If she is angry herself, it doesn't show in her voice. Still, my heart blenches with the realization that though it has come as news to me, she and other indigenous people have known the truth from the beginning.

Here I am, a
moonias
from the city who has turned up out of the blue to ask for teaching and help. Yet like the chief and council before her, Jean has literally and figuratively opened her door to my request. Yes, she will tell me what she knows about Chief Nekaneet and about what happened back then. Better yet, she will also accept my help in making her own book of teachings and recollections for her children and grandchildren. (
Stories From My Life,
by Jean Francis Oakes, was published in 2008.) Instead of the bitterness and resentment I had feared and half-believed I deserved, my presence seems to have been accepted as one of nature's little whims, like the wild lupines along the road that cuts through the reserve or a bird that has landed on a windowsill.

And so the storytelling begins. We sit at her kitchen table, amid moccasins-in-progress and piles of brightly colored beads. Way back, she tells me, there were four large reserves in the Cypress Hills, or so her parents and grandparents had said. “Lucky I used to be nosy,” she interjects merrily. “That's why I know all these stories. I was the oldest, I had to watch the baby. Sometimes I'd just pretend to be watching the babies so I could hear what was going on.” Her kitchen rings with laughter.

“My chief, Nekaneet, he was stubborn. Even with them telling him like that, ‘You're going to be starving here if you don't move,' he still didn't give in. ‘Even if they kill me, you guys don't move,' he was telling his band members. They moved the other people all away. That's why we are all alone.

“And after that our reserve was small, small, shaped like an
L
.”

Jean breaks off, puts on the kettle, and I think of what I've read about what happened next. In 1913, with the Dewdney-era bureaucrats finally out of the picture and with pressure now coming not only from the “stragglers” (as the government described the Nekaneet people) but from concerned settlers as well, Indian Affairs finally relented and created a token reserve. Instead of the quality cropland and pastures the chiefs had selected and that they thought had been given to them, the new Maple Creek reserve consisted of 1,440 acres (nine quarter-sections) of rough wooded land, miles from the nearest town, to support a community of eighty-one men, women, and children. “We are absolutely destitute,” a spokesman for the group informed Ottawa the following autumn, “and without some assistance from your department it will be impossible for us to live.”
6
But except for an admonition to try harder and the promise of a miserly ration for those in deadly distress, Indian Affairs remained unresponsive to appeals for help. The band (under the leadership of Jean's late husband, Gordon) would have to wait until 1992 to receive compensation for the additional 16,160 acres to which they were entitled by the terms of Treaty 4. A claim for other treaty benefits, also long withheld, was finally settled in November 2009.

It was during the difficult early years on the reserve that groups of Nekaneet people sometimes drove their horse-drawn wagons over to Eastend and camped in the river brush, where they were surreptitiously observed by a boy named Wallace. “Probably they were Cree,” he later noted; “undoubtedly they came from some reservation, though it never occurred to us to inquire where it was; probably they were off the reservation without permission. We responded to them as to an invasion or a gypsy visitation...

“We told ourselves we could smell one of those camps a mile away with a clothespin on our noses,” he remembered. “When they talked the butcher out of the entrails of a slaughtered beef we knew we could, for they hung their shanties with the red and white guts to dry them in the sun.”
7
He believed that he was witnessing the last days of a vanishing race. But red and white are good colors, the colors of north and south. Sometimes, just to survive is a magnificent achievement.

Like their chief before them, the Nekaneet people were stubborn, and they knew how to get by. “I was lucky I came from a poor way,” Jean says again, as she returns to the table and hands me a mug of tea. “We used to be the workers, my two brothers and me. We used to go to sleep early, get up at five in the morning already. Go feed the horses. You make a fire. My mom already will be cooking. And we'd go in the bush, not even light yet, make fence posts, chopping wood. That's how we used to do it, how we used to survive.”

I think of my dying mother speaking of her mother before her: all those babies, hell on earth. But Jean is not downhearted. “That was good that time,” she says, a contented purr in her voice. “Me, I never got tired of working.”

If there is one blot on Jean's childhood memories, it is not poverty or constant labor or the burdens of history. It is her lack of formal schooling. “Lots of times it hurt me, I don't have no education,” she laments. “Sometimes you feel this short.” She squeezes a narrow slit between thumb and forefinger.

It wasn't that her elders were opposed to learning; the problem was that they knew too much. Many of them had been victims of the residential-school system. (The first Indian industrial school opened on the prairies in 1883, with the unabashed intent of “killing the Indian” in its students.) “They used to pull their ears and hit them with wooden sticks if they spoke a word of Cree,” Jean says, her voice rising with disbelief. Another time, she whispers, “These nuns and preachers, they used to treat girls bad. The nuns would be holding the girls, and the priests there. That's what Josephine [her husband's aunt] told us later. ‘The nuns, they hold me and the priests would force themselves.' Josephine told us what happened.”

That's when Jean looks up, glimpses the pain in my eyes, and offers what comfort she can. “It's not you that got treated bad that time.” Her elders were so determined to protect their children that they managed to enlist the help of the local mounted police officer. “When the wagon came from Lebret [a residential school in the Qu'Appelle Valley], someone would call that policeman—Fleming his name was, Sergeant David Fleming Senior—and he would come in his black pants and red coat. He used to tell them, ‘Leave those Nekaneet alone. They don't want their kids to go to school.' Two generations, we didn't go to school, my mom and me.”

Although Jean was deprived of schooling, she was certainly not untaught. Her “good teachers” were her parents and grandparents—“real traditional people,” she calls them—and the knowledge that they imparted to her sometimes makes me catch my breath. Despite all the trouble they knew in their lives, they remembered who they were and the teachings they had received from their own elders. For instance, Jean and I might be having a completely ordinary conversation about her ancestry (a great-grandmother from Montana; a beloved
mosom,
or grandpa, who was born on Red Pheasant reserve and joined the community through marriage) when she'd calmly add that one of her great-grandfathers was a healer who had “come from the Thunders.”

“That Sawepiton, he came from Thunder,” she'd say. “That's what he used to tell us. And one time, the Thunders, his dad, told him you are going to go to the Middle of the earth. That's why he used to know everything. All what they do here now, all these songs, these ceremonies, they got from him. We got a lot of good history from my mosom.”

She remembers how she and the other kids would beg him for stories—“He was a storyteller, just like a radio”—but if it was summertime, he would always say no. “‘No, I'm not going to tell you. It would make it cold.'”

“I used to always be happy when it was cold so my mosom could tell us stories and talk about Wesa'kaca.” Those were still her favorites, the trickster stories of Wesa'kaca, filled with mischief, mayhem, and good humor.

One day, several months into our acquaintance, Jean decides to tell me about the Healing Lodge and why it is located on the Nekaneet reserve. “My old man, Gordon, he knows for a long time ago there's going to be something there for women,” she begins. “He used to dream he had a sweat up there on that hill and there's lots of ladies—they are all laughing, they are happy—but he didn't know why. He used to dream about that for four years before. I guess that's meant to be there.”

Okimaw Ohci, that's “a good word,” she continues, “but nobody says it right. They say okima oki. That's like your bum.” She frowns. “Oh-keema-wo-chee,” she says firmly. “That's like Kink Hill.”

Kink Hill?

“Wesa'kaca, that's okimaw, that's our king.”

Oh, King Hill!

“Just like the white people had Jesus over there. In the old country, they had a hill like that. Jesus and Wesa'kaca are the same kind.

“That one, Wesa'kaca he used to heal people; he used to tell us in the future what's going to happen. He made this world. You remember that story? Everything was flooded—there was just a little place to stand on, and all the people were there. And they send down one animal and another one, to try to go get dirt from under the water. Muskrat, he was the one who went and got that dirt, under his fingernail, and Wesa'kaca took that dirt and blew on it. That's how he made the land get bigger. Pretty soon it was growing. And that time now, he sent Coyote to measure the land.