Stolen Life (62 page)

Yvonne had managed life in the Prison for Women for four years, living as quietly and as withdrawn as possible—doing her daily work, her classes, her crafts, studying and writing, being active in the Native Sisterhood, and working with me on her book, which, she told me “all her family feared.” Now, just days before the old “dysfunctional labyrinth of claustrophobic and inadequate spaces”—as Judge Louise Arbour called
P4W
—was to be permanently closed, this “something low and dark” came there to raise chaos in Yvonne’s personal life. And it used the normal, ongoing inmate and guard interaction—“endless game-playing bullshit” as Yvonne calls it, the worst elements of which she had managed to avoid for four years—to do so.

Yvonne:
I’m scheduled to be taken to Collins Bay in fifteen minutes for my regular visit with Dwa. I have to be ready, have to get cleaned up. I have to get back unnoticed to my cell, quick, get myself cleaned up!

I walk out of the crowded bathroom into the open area of the Activity Building. Twenty inmate women stare at me, some deadpan, others crying, all speechless. And I do a fast scan to see if anyone else is coming for me, no, and I see my jacket on the floor where I placed it. I scoop it up—but my fingers barely move, my hands are swelling up so fast now I can’t get them through the sleeves: I have to unzip the jacket sleeves to the elbow with my teeth before I can get it on. My hair is in braids but sticks up where fistfuls of it were yanked out and I try to pat it down, and I can’t with my hands and I have no brush on me, I get out the door and head for my cell, my jacket covers the blood on my shirt and I have to get to my cell, quick, alone.

I hear a knock on the security glass: a woman on the upper range lifts her arm high in the Native salute, “Well done!”

She’s been in P4W longer than anyone. I nod to her, I’m walking on automatic in the right direction, walk normal, if the guards grab me it will most likely happen before I reach my cell. I know every wall and corner and staircase and iron bar in every P4W building, but now all I see is Jane’s back, going away along the top range towards her cell.

It all started because of Jane, a Native sister.

Just get back to your cell, your own small hole in the long range. Walk normal.

Everything grows bright and sharp. As I walk I begin to shake. I smell something odd—it’s on my own breath, like ether—and I can’t feel my heart pounding, though I know it must be. I try to touch myself and I feel nothing. Because my hands are destroyed?

It was the young White girl who got us to stop fighting. She hissed, “Six! Six!” meaning the guards were coming, and she gave me a shove because she’s new and doesn’t know any better.

I get into my cell. Its familiar—false of course—feel of protection. I’m alone for a minute, and do a fast body check: if
someone comes at me now, I’ll really have to take it to my limit, head, feet, teeth, whatever, because my hands are gone. Like they’re frozen, so I hold my brush between them and brush my hair down against my stinging scalp as best I can. The pressure in my hands builds, they’re stretching tight from the inside out, my hands seem like they’ll burst.

I have to look in a mirror, assess the damage. If the guards notice there’ll be endless questions that have to be answered and I don’t want to think that fast now—but there’s not a scratch. I don’t recognize myself. It’s the face of a stranger.

And I almost cry out in fear: according to the Elders, if your spirit leaves your body, you will not be able to recognize yourself.

My body is the house of my spirit. If my body does something my spirit does not agree with, it may leave my body. My body will be empty.

Or shift-change … into what? The Elders say when you shift-change you have called something from within yourself to the surface; it has taken you over to deal with whatever is necessary. Has my spirit been ripped from me? Has it hidden itself because it could not endure what I was doing?

By the rules of
P4W
, what I did was fair enough. But brutal. I can only bend my head and hate what I’ve just done. I lost it in there. Twenty inmates in the Activity Building watching, and I lost it completely. For the first time in prison. In six years.

My downfall was trying to help Jane, an abused woman who’s being abused some more in here. While I’m trying to get ready to go to North Battleford and face Leon in court, she comes day after day, crying, “I’m so scared, Yvonne. He’s after me all the time, what can I do?”

Yes, what? He’s Joe, a staff member who positions himself to watch us undress when we change to go to the sweat lodge. And takes pictures too, everybody knows it, using the
P4W
camera. Then here’s this short, stocky Ojibway woman who’s been beaten up all her life, crying to me, “Yvonne, you stick to yourself, you’re strong enough to go it alone here, you got the strength to haul your brother into court! What can I do?”

So, what can I do? She’s my sister in the ’Hood. Even the guards are so worried about her, one evening they ask me to stay with her in her cell all night. I do. And I know I have to make a stand.

I file a formal complaint against Joe, and shit starts to fly. In my complaint about his activities I make the mistake of dropping an inmate’s name as well, a White woman involved with Joe for a long time, who hates our Sisterhood so much—when she first came in I was chair of the ’Hood—that she tried to organize a “White” group to give them as much clout, she said, as the Native and Black Sisterhoods had. She never got anywhere with that, but she keeps pushing us and now she says she’s going to take me to court for libel. I tell her, “Fine, then I’ll be able to tell the whole world, and you’ll give me the legal means to do it.”

But then suddenly, in February 1995,
P4W
hits the national
TV
news with a leaked film-clip of the 22 April 1994 riot where six Native inmates are strip-searched naked by an all-male Institutional Emergency Response Team (
IERT
) and thrown into isolation shackled, crouching naked for days in bare steel-and-concrete boxes. The
IERT
guys took the video of themselves doing it, and it’s very rough. Correctional Services Canada (
CSC
) circles their wagons; they go nuts about inmate complaints, especially Natives. In April 1995 the government appoints a Commission of Inquiry into Certain Events at the Prison for Women, and Judge Louise Arbour comes right into
P4W
to see us. She’s sharp, tough; she goes around looking at everything and talks to inmates with no
CSC
people around, they can’t bullshit her. The warden of P4W was kicked into retirement, and
CSC
was spinning from all the publicity.

After seven tons of paper, I know my little complaint about one White guy screwing a Native inmate is impossible; there’s no way after this investigation I’ll ever come out ahead on this with
CSC
, and to get it out of the way I retract. I withdraw my statement as a lie.

Though every inmate knows what I reported was the truth. And Correctional Services Canada knows it too.

When I withdrew my complaint, it was open season on me as far as the White woman was concerned, the one I’d named. I had been moved from my house on the wing to a cell on the A Range when I tried to organize an abused women’s group, and after I returned from the disaster in North Battleford in late June, I was just messed up, barely surviving. I felt so vulnerable I packed a shank when I left my cell; I held it between my teeth when I took a shower. Though I tried to cover up, never show weakness, I started to shiver when I walked down the long corridors. But when the deal went down at the end of August I didn’t pack, because I was scared I’d use it—which would have been worse.

I was trying to stay low, I was trying to walk my spiritual path. I did not even know if I could fight sober—I never had. But if you feel forced to make a stand, you do.

I was completely exhausted by the Leon trial, my mind strung out with what happened there. The endless guard and inmate gossip about me got so bad, yet no one would directly confront me, that I couldn’t go on, I had to get the bullshit cleared up, so one day in August, just before I was due to go to Collins Bay to visit Dwa, I went to the Activity Building, to the area where the Blacks sit.

“Look,” I said, “does anyone have a problem with me? If so, let’s go to the laundry room and talk it over.”

No, they said, no way. And they’re friendly, like they usually are to me. “Hey Yvonne, don’t let no White bitches play with you.”

So I went to the next room, and the women there said “No” too. So I went to the kitchen area and asked. Same thing, no problem.

But one of the Blacks was running her mouth up and down the ranges, saying I was challenging everyone. And as I was in my cell, talking to a new arrival, a voice yelled out down the range: “Unit meeting, in the Activity Building!”

That means all the inmates on one range are to hold a meeting without direct guard supervision. I go, but I’m careful; I don’t pack a shank. We stand or sit in a circle and the inmate Unit Rep does all the talking: she says everybody’s getting too
tense, who gives a fuck about some staff asshole anyways. Then she comes to the point:

“Yvonne, stop getting in everyone’s face. We all know what you did, you told us yourself.”

She was talking about my dropping an inmate’s name when making a complaint on a staff member, and she pushed her face up to mine, so close I could look right down her throat. She was talking, though I don’t know what she said. I was watching her mouth move, her throat open.

Then she stopped. About twenty women sitting around or standing there, quiet. We’re supposed to have privacy for unit meetings. The guards can’t see us, but they’ve got two-way speakers and can hear it all, and sometimes they come around the corner and tell us whatever they please. But this time they didn’t move out of their bubble.

I said to the face up against mine, “Okay, I did that. Now do you have a personal problem with me?”

She walked across the room to her friends, hesitated, then turned from beside her friends and said, yes. Yes, she has a problem.

“You got my old lady involved too,” she said. “And I’ve got a big problem with that.”

Her old lady was sitting right there, and I could see she’s surprised to hear this. She works in the gym area, but I never mentioned her in my complaint, and all she had to say now was she knew nothing. But she didn’t explain.

“Okay,” I said. “I apologize if you got involved.”

I stood by myself in a corner of the room and the Unit Rep yelled, she thinks loud is authoritative, “Anybody else got anything to say to Yvonne?”

Another woman spoke up. I’d challenged her girlfriend the day before because she sided with staff on an issue, and she backed down at my challenge. But then, to save face, she lied to her woman; she told her she’d backed down only because I threatened to shank and gang-pile her.

“… if you get outa line again, Yvonne,” the old lady of the woman who backed down at my challenge was still yapping, “I’ll smash your face, I’ll knock.…”

I was so sick and tired of all this, finally I just said, “You want a piece of me?”

She’d talked herself up, everybody had heard her. “Yeah,” she said. “Fucken right I do.”

“Okay, I’m here. Let’s dance.”

I took off my jacket, the one with zippers at the wrists. She came at me running, and I went into my boxing stance the way Leon taught me, legs braced, knees slightly bent. She came on swinging wildly, but when I fight I shut off my pain. I hit her with three rights and a left jab and she hit the floor.

“Get up again,” I told her, “and I’ll knock you down again.”

She got up, and I came in with a right to the bottom of her jaw, followed by a left cross, and she went down again. She lurched to her feet, and the same thing happened, but she’d called me out and as long as I was up she was the one who had to call it quits. She was lying on the floor—and I never kick—so I dropped into a squat beside her and told her, “Say enough. Say it’s over.”

But she started to get up, and halfway there she grabbed my leg and I tried to push her down—I don’t pull hair—and I had to hop on one leg with my hands on her shoulders so she couldn’t flip me when she got up, both of us trying to keep our balance. I hate wrestling—box and get it over with.

Her old lady tried to break in on us, but the Rep yelled, “One on one, now fuck off!”