Stolen Life (56 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
Though sometimes he did strange things, especially when he and I were alone. Sometimes I was frightened of him because he was so ugly and hairy down there, but he had a handkerchief with a hole in it and he would stick his cock through the hole to hide his scariness and then I’d have to take off my panties and he would show me how to sit on the floor, or lie down flat with my skirt high and legs spread exactly the way he’d tell me. Then he’d put my panties over his face or on his head, or peek through the legs, and he looked so funny we’d both laugh, him playing with them. He’d give me candies while he held the panties and the handkerchief in place, till finally he’d stop and place his shaking foot between my legs and pull at himself while I lay there on my back with candy melting in my mouth.
Even so, sometimes I would become very frightened, or suddenly scared, and I would get up to run out.
But I know the lock on the door was too high for me to reach, I could never get out. And he would laugh and soothe me in his lap with his big hands, and give me more candy.
Strange but true, my abusers have often been my protectors. Grandpa could sometimes talk Mom out of hitting or punishing me. I know he was protecting me for himself, the way Leon did when he fought the boys in the school yard or on the street in Butte so they’d stay away from me. And so, in a strange way, I
loved them both, then: what else did I have? I thought they gave me more attention and care and love than either of my parents.
Now no one of my family can get at me; but there is also no escape for me from the silence of prison. Is it that that’s forced these memories out? Where is it all coming from?
I must continue to exist. To find out why I remember.
On 19 December 1992, Detective Linda Billings in Edmonton sent Yvonne’s witness statement against Leon to the
RCMP
in North Battleford “for follow-up.” During the same time, Karen in Winnipeg filed a charge of sexual assault against Leon as well. So did their sister Minnie, then in North Battleford, but before the police could include her accusations in a formal charge, Yvonne wrote me, “Minnie pulled hers back, scared I guess.” She would not sign it. In Thunder Bay their cousin, Shirley Anne Salmon’s half-sister Darlene Jacques
(née
Bear), also filed formal charges about a series of rapes Leon committed on her when she was fourteen.
Eight months later, on 30 August 1993, two
RCMP
officers “attended”—as they put it—Yvonne in Kingston to investigate further the matter of the “Leon Ray Johnson Sexual Assault.” In a three-hour interview Yvonne repeated, with more detail, what she had written originally, both about the first attack on her “by Leon and other parties” when she was a baby in Montana, and Leon’s rape of her cousin Darlene at Red Pheasant “around the years ’74 or ’75 in the house where my mom lives now,” and also Leon’s various sexual attacks on Yvonne while she was living in Wetaskiwin in the eighties. The five-page signed statement, witnessed by constables Pender and Viens, concludes “… to the best of my knowledge … these are the only attacks I recall on myself [by Leon] in Canada.”
The Canadian legal system now took its ordered course, with Crown Prosecutor James Taylor in North Battleford building Yvonne’s and Karen’s and Darlene’s cases against Leon for all the acts he had perpetrated in Saskatchewan. Yvonne felt his violence within the family had to be forced into the open, and if the family refused to discuss it, then it would have to be exposed in a public court of law, but she felt
no satisfaction about what was happening. She was torn by her feelings about her brother, whom she loved, and still loves. Whom she hated and cannot help but hate. She wrote to me:
Brian Beresh, when I talked to him about this at my appeal, told me a court of law was no place to heal. He says if this case ever goes to court, Leon’s lawyer will eat me alive. And I know, my whole family will blame me for taking a stand. But I have started it and I will say what has to be said, and if it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, then so be it. At the least, it has been spoken
.
And I’ve given it all over to the Creator. That’s what the Elder told me when we went into the sweat lodge: “Let Leon go. Give him over to the Creator.”
If I Don’t Beat You up, You’ll Sleep With Me?I told one cop I wish I was a split personality, I’d send one of them to court in my place.
–Yvonne, letter from North Battleford cells,
20–25 June 1995
O
N SUNDAY
, 17 October 1993, I drive from Edmonton to Saskatchewan to meet for the first time members of Yvonne’s family. Karen’s courage to face her brother has held: Leon will go on trial in North Battleford the next day. I have talked on the phone to her at her home in Winnipeg, and she has agreed that I attend.
Seven months later, on 11 May 1994, I’ll be driving the same highway to the preliminary inquiry into Yvonne’s charges against Leon for similar offences: several counts of sexual assault and incest, plus assault causing bodily harm. And Yvonne’s cousin Darlene (Bear) Jacques will be in court then too, charging Leon with a series of rapes committed twenty years before.
Leon has been arrested on Karen’s charges and is being held for trial in prison at Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. The year 1993 is the first time a member of his family has taken him to court for sexual assault, as the former “rape” is now called in the Canadian Criminal Code. And it is Yvonne, his youngest sister, who has begun all this.
Four hundred and seven kilometres of cruise-control highway for me to think. The long rolling land of the North Saskatchewan River plain is superbly different, fall and spring, but I know the two courtrooms in North Battleford will look and smell exactly the same. On my first trip, just east of Edmonton scattered buffalo graze along the highway in Elk Island National Park, they bulk black as moving mounds among the bare poplars or willow brush; as obliviously concentrated within themselves here in the bush and swamps and meadows of the Beaver Hills as they must have been for Big Bear and his hunters 120 years ago. But now they are enclosed in a steel-mesh
fence. Brilliant fall weather, and a few yellow combines still gobbling up the endless swaths of grain that diagram the fields on either side.
I hear the spaceship
Columbia
is about to launch itself into space; I am told that in less than a minute after lift-off it will be travelling 3,300 miles per hour over the Atlantic Ocean and into the void of the solar system.
From Kingston, Yvonne has sent me pictures of her family—individuals and groups of Johnsons at various times and places. They all seem to be tall, broad, impressively handsome people, or, Vonnie laughs, an unbeatable—that’s a good one!—combination of Cree warrior and Norse Viking. But what does a woman look like who must, finally, accuse her brother of violent incest? What does the brother look like? What do they say? If the machinery of law pushes them into the same room, where do they look?
On a long field sloping south towards the Cree reserves across the Battle River and Cutknife Hill, I see a coyote loping through the grain stubble. Coyote, apparently ignoring me but travelling steadily in the direction I am going. If I saw two of them, I would turn around and drive back home, fast, but with only one I think I should have a fifty-fifty chance that the trick Coyote plays on me will be a lucky one. The blunt steeple of the Delmas Roman Catholic Church appears over distant bends of the highway—will that counterbalance Coyote or, more likely, egg him on to something more tricksterish?
Beside the church, behind a straggly caragana hedge, I see the low, crumpled concrete foundation of a large building: the Thunderchild Residential School stood here, so powerful it sucked every Indian child from the reserves assigned by the government to the Roman Catholic Church (the “Anglican reserve” children had to go to Anglican schools) behind its iron fence. I have seen pictures of it; it burned down—cause unknown and never discovered—in 1948 and prairie wind still plays over the empty space. Cecilia Bear remembers that school only too well. At the inquiry in May she will tell the court, “I was born in a tent in Red Pheasant and my parents split up—I was raised in Delmas Convent. I left there when I was thirteen [1945–46]. Went to my folks in Alberta, they were together again, my father worked there.”
I try to imagine Cecilia—whose picture as a grandmother I have seen—Cecilia a child running in this school yard that is now shorn, unmarked grass. More likely she’d be working in the garden, or in the kitchen, less likely standing at a window and looking south to her home, mother and father miles away. The boys were let out of school to go home for spring and fall work sometimes, but the girls stayed there year-round; how often did their parents come to see them? Were they permitted to? The worst years of the Depression and the war: those parents found some comfort in the thought that, whatever else it did, at least the Church wouldn’t let their children starve to death.
I first see Cecilia Bear Knight (the last name comes from a brief marriage that didn’t work out), age sixty-one, in the small lobby between Courtroom A and B in the North Battleford Courthouse.
By 9:15 a.m. the area is tight with people. It is Monday, and the relatives and friends of all those arrested over the weekend are trying to get into the larger courtroom for the first session. We crowd in and wait as, with great deliberation, the unflappable judge and policemen and occasional lawyer sort out names and birthdates and addresses (if any), and misdemeanours relating to cars, drunkenness, fights, drugs. The arrested are arraigned in a glass cubicle in lots of ten or twelve at a time, and efficiency is aided by the large number of accused men (there are no women) who seem to have irregular but continuing appointments at the court, whose vital statistics of all kinds are on permanent record. Every accused pleads guilty.
Courtroom A is all business and order. Outside its double doors is talk and worry, laughter, tears of spectators passing in and out. To judge from this crowd, at least seventy per cent of Saskatchewan is Cree. To judge from the men the police bring in from the city cells—men with mostly battered faces and wearing worn clothes, but with their long hair slicked back as if they’ve all been hosed down—it’s closer to ninety percent. As Yvonne says, aboriginal crime is very big business in Canada and, according to statistics, it’s worst of all in Saskatchewan.