Stolen Life (3 page)

The double set of entrance doors (this is, after all, a winter country) pull open into a lobby which faces the building’s round inner courtyard, open to sky. The four colours in the floor tiles—yellow, red, blue, white—orient me in the four directions.

The young woman seated at the reception desk knows I am coming, and for whom; I sign the register, name and time, and in a moment Yvonne is there. Smiling, as happy to see me as I am to see her, here, for the first time away from the oppressive stone-and-old-painted-steel monstrosity of the Prison for Women
(P4W)
in Kingston, where we last saw each other and from where she first wrote to me; tall and slender in sweater, jeans, moccasins. We hug, quick and loose because for her the arms of men have mostly been dangerous, often terrible.

We circle through the building, talking. She introduces me to everyone we meet, all women, almost all apparently Native, and since everyone wears casual working clothes I have no idea from either her
introductions or their insignia, if any, what their status is. Inmates here are called “residents,” guards “older sisters,” administrators “aunts,” the warden “Mother.” A circle of young women in the windowed bay of the dining room/lounge is assembling a 1,000-piece Italian landscape puzzle, and an older woman is introduced to me as one of the local Elders—there is one present all the time. She nods and smiles gently, warmly, at me, saying nothing.

“This place is a circle,” Yvonne tells me as we walk the curving corridors. “See, offices inside and outside, and then the extensions on either side are like the spread wings of an eagle. From above it looks just like a flying eagle. With four exit doors, opening to the four directions.”

I hadn’t recognized the eagle shape from above in the parking lot: I have to learn how to look. “It’s amazing,” I say. “So much light, and delicate, beautiful wood. I’ve never seen a building like this.”

“A lot of cedar,” she points out, “the wood of protection. We are all safe inside cedar. It’s an architectural marvel. The Elders said how it should be, and they chose this place. When the government decided to go ahead with the plan that the band here suggested for a new kind of prison, the Elders went looking on this land. No one had ever even hunted here; this hill and trees were sacred. And when they walked here, the tobacco they carried was pulled down, so they laid it on the ground and said, ‘This is the place, build it here, a house for healing our people. Where Elders shall lead.’ ”

If I close my eyes and stare into memory, I can see the massive grey façade of the Prison for Women, stones cut square and mortared together high and straight and thick as irrefutable sin. Yvonne was in there from April 1991 until September 1995; I visited her there four times. But now her quiet voice continues, telling me the new story of this place:

“Once the site for the Healing Lodge was chosen, the Elders tied four ceremonial flags to the trees on the limits of the land at the four directions, to let the Creator and the Spirit World acknowledge the place. So the spiritual boundaries were set, and now no bars or fencing is needed here because if you cross the boundaries of the four colours you defy the Creator and the Spirits, the ultimate disrespect, and who would do that?”

We are standing on the open balcony off the dining room in the bristling cold, leaning on the railing and against the huge wooden
posts that support the rafters. The living units where the residents share apartments are separate, built along a short road to the west. Before us, shingled in cedar, is the great teepee-like structure Yvonne calls the Spirit Lodge, and beyond it the frosted poplar forest folds down ravines into the prairie.

“There are beavers here.” Yvonne gestures with her cigarette into the trees below us. And through brush, between poplar trunks, I can see the flatness of white ice that curves sharply at a possible dam, the white hump of a lodge with dark logs sticking out. The only animal that architecturally alters its environment—except human beings, of course.

Yvonne’s first letter to me from Box 515, Kingston, concluded:

On 14 January 1996, wherever Yvonne and I look from the balcony of the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge on the eastern massif of the Cypress Hills, everything we see, and beyond, was her great-great-grandfather’s country. Mistahi Muskwa—Big Bear—and his Plains Cree people lived and hunted buffalo and antelope and deer and moose north to the Great Sand Hills and the Eagle Hills and Sounding Lake and the North Saskatchewan River and Fort Pitt and Jackfish Lake, where he was born about 1825, and all the way south to the Milk and Missouri rivers, country they walked and rode and hunted, old people, children, women, men, this immense land as familiar to them and the soles of their feet as the terrain of their own hands. Land which Big Bear refused to surrender to the Canadian government when Lieutenant-Governor Alexander Morris and all his officialdom dragged themselves painfully through the country during the long summer of 1876, carrying many little presents of food and ceremonial clothing, and the paper which would become the Cree’s eternal sentence, Treaty Number Six:

A land area a third larger than the entire United Kingdom.

The Canadian government first officially appeared on the prairie to Big Bear and his band in 1875, in the form of a Methodist minister, the Reverend George McDougall. It was McDougall’s official assignment to “tranquillize” the prairie Indians so they would “await in full confidence the coming of the Treaty Commissioners.” But Chief Big Bear refused a quick tranquillization; he told McDougall with absolute clarity:

“We want none of the Queen’s presents. When we set a fox-trap we scatter pieces of meat all around, but when the fox gets into the trap, we knock him on the head.”

As a result of that statement and McDougall’s report of it, Big Bear officially became known as “a troublesome fellow”; to his own people, he was a great leader with powerful medicine who received dreams and saw visions, but, for the churchmen advising the government, he was an evil conjuror. So he was not notified to attend any signing for Treaty Number Six the following summer. But he appeared in September 1876 at the Fort Pitt treaty ceremonies anyway and badly interrupted what until then had been mostly expansive, agreeable speeches. Facing Lieutenant-Governor Morris, Big Bear made the second of his profound, imagistic statements about Native-White relations:

“There is one thing that I dread: to feel the rope around my neck.”

At first Morris understood this on a simple, literal level: it must refer to the White legal practice of hanging criminals, and since Big Bear was now definitely confirmed as “troublesome,” no doubt he feared that fate if he signed. But Big Bear persisted, and at a certain point in the debate, which Morris himself recorded in his memoirs in 1880, the governor seemed to grasp the larger meaning of the statement: Big Bear was speaking for his people then alive and their children yet to be born in an all-inclusive image, and suddenly Morris made a radical concession in his interpretation of what the treaty meant:

“I wish the Bear … to understand fully, and tell the others [those people who are not here].… The Government will not interfere with the Indian’s daily life, they will not bind him.”

Clearly, Morris understood what Big Bear was saying, and he responded with a transparent, official lie. Taking the Cree’s immense land and forcing them to live in a reserve system was such an enormous
“interference” and “binding” of their daily life—many Native people now speak of their reserves as “prisons of grass”—that it seems the chiefs listening to this debate in 1876 could not even imagine how enormous a lie it truly was. They all “touched the pen,” and so signed. But Big Bear refused; he and his people followed the buffalo south into Montana.

Of course, Big Bear did eventually sign as well. He had to, when the death of the last buffalo between the Missouri and Milk rivers in Montana forced him and the 1,200 Cree then in his band into starvation. When they arrived at the Medicine Line between U.S. and Canadian territory, they found that the North-West Mounted Police had very clear orders: no food for non-treaty Indians. After holding out for a better treaty for over six years, after debating strategy with his family and council all fall, on a cold December day in 1882 Big Bear signed his adhesion to Treaty Number Six so that his starving people would have something to eat during the hard winter.

Big Bear signed at Fort Walsh in the Cypress Hills—as the raven flies, less than fifty kilometres from where Yvonne and I now stand, talking.

“I’m just happy to talk,” Yvonne says; “it’s really new for me. I spent my life listening and dreaming as other people spoke, to feel what they were saying.”

“You talk well enough now,” I tell her with a grin. “You’ve sent me fifteen notebooks already, most of them over three hundred pages!”