Stolen Life (68 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
“W
E ARE THE ABUSED
,” Yvonne writes to me. “Which does not mean we are stupid. It means in our pain we are always thinking, and always alone.”
She is rereading Carl Jung’s
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
, and discusses with me the “natural mind” he describes: “the mind that springs from natural sources, and not from opinions taken from books; it … brings with it the peculiar wisdom of nature.”
Sentenced at age twenty-eight to a lifetime in prison, she has to understand what her mind may demand of her:
“My mind is alive, and there is pain. A small word,
’pain—
confusion, the unknown, aloneness—if pain could talk, could it identify any limits to what it is? If pain could say what it is, would it ask, ‘What do you think I look like? How do you think I smell, or feel?’ ”
She cannot answer that question directly; her writing, as she admits, is often “all over the place […] as I jump back and forth through time and space […]. [Because] I’m writing as if I’m reliving it as I am, and it tears me apart to do this.”
But reading Carl Jung has widened the language within which she can understand herself. “Jung has the White words,” she writes, “but to me he thinks like an Indian […]. He writes this which is me. I wish I could speak to him.”
He is certainly speaking to her in prison. On 19 December 1994 she concludes fifteen pages of her daily journal grappling with his
Memories:
“He writes back then [1961, the year she was born] what is me right now. I become aware of affinity, I could establish ties with something, some one. As most of my life has been to let myself be carried along
by currents without a notion of where it took me, or even consequence. My dear Jung as you are to me now. I now will sleep with this to ponder, though I feel I know it already. His new chapter begins, The Work’, on page 200 and the clock tells me it is 1:19 a.m. Time to try to lay it to rest.”
Yvonne:
This is what I believe, Sunday, 17 October 1993:
The Spirit truly goes on, it lives and never dies. I am certain my ancestor Big Bear and the Bear Spirit and the Creator guide me, strengthen me, protect me, now as they have in my past.
Mom took me to Grandma when I was little to help me forget. Grandma did help me, and when she did it she also saw something in my spirit my mother couldn’t see: what my mother thought was crazy, her mother saw in me as a gift. Grandma told Mom, “Vonnie has forgotten, but I want her to stay with me and I’ll give her teachings.”
A child doesn’t know how to protect itself, either its body or its spirit. Grandma Flora saved my spirit from being damaged beyond restoration by helping me forget, but now the Creator is again letting me remember. My question is, why?
I hear a woman crying. They just called lock-up, she’s crying to herself, my lullaby tonight are tarps on the scaffolding outside my window behind the stone walls blowing and snapping in the wind. As the snow falls and the wind blows, this woman’s tears are of a broken mother, a lost aunt, a sister, her anguish within these walls matching the howls of the storm. I heard say that the aboriginal nations of Turtle Island will not fall completely until the women’s hearts lie upon the ground. Where are your women, your girl children? What has happened to your life-givers?
Grandma was a good medicine woman; she intended good in making me forget. But I never really did; it was in my spirit, a spirit only the Creator can take. The Creator saw fit to take it
away through my grandmother, now he’s given it back. But I’m in prison for life, what can I possibly do with these memories?
I remember, and I pray as the storm kicks up. The woman is crying. Through the barred window I hold tobacco outside in my left hand, sweetgrass in my right. I pray for the woman to be safe, I pray for what she knows happened. I pray to the four winds to carry my prayers, I call her name into the wind to comfort her. I hold the tobacco in my open hand, offering it to the Thunder People, the Creator and his helpers. A universal prayer that reaches the world in every direction, over and around and up and down and under all Creation.
It thundered that night of my prayer. It almost threw down the scaffolding around the prison, ripped off the tarps. I prayed as I watched invisible hands take the tobacco on the winds, passing spirits of creation, the thunder beings. I watched the smoke of the sweetgrass swirl and disappear on the winds in respect of all things. I slept with the storm as my protection.
I awoke the next day. I heard, at the instant I awoke, a bird, unseen, fly away from outside my window with heavy wings. I heard geese fly overhead that day as well. I don’t know of what tomorrow holds, for me. Or where I go from today, and I fear, I am scared. I leave it to the Creator. He will take it from here.
Finally, the stone walls of the Prison for Women were gone for Yvonne. Within the Healing Lodge’s powerful Native atmosphere and natural setting, she found the support to grow stronger in understanding her spiritual longings and heritage; to recognize more fully that the most significant person in her life had been, and still was, her Grandmother Flora. As she writes to me in January 1998:
“Could it be that Grandma did ceremonies on me so I would forget, as a cleansing, and also as a sort of initiation, where I’d be reborn to fulfil my position as Medicine Bear Woman? I had the innocence of a child when those ritual initiations were done. But I left [and] I never actually returned to the rez to
stay […]. Grandma waited, I never returned for her to explain the special gifts I was initiated into as a child. Prior to her death [June 1986] she came many times to seek me, yet I was blind, asleep as they say in alcoholism and confusion. My gifts became my unknown burden. Grandma died long before I awoke, she died without advising me. But a few of her final words were
STOP YOUR DRINKING
. Now I understand that you cannot walk in balance with Medicine in one hand and booze and drugs in the other.”
It is at the Healing Lodge that Yvonne begins slowly to explicate her memories of her grandmother.
Yvonne:
When I was little, I sensed Grandma Flora was a powerful woman. I know now she had power to the extreme in what Whites would sneer and call witchcraft—if they ever thought about it—but Indians call it medicine power. Perhaps she saw gifts in me, but I felt that the mysterious things she did to me came from a deep compassion and love. So I went along in silence. And my heart felt it would burst with love. I had no need to try to understand, I just did anything she said.
Grandma woke me up in darkness, and she’d lead me out to watch the sun come up over the meadow and the far trees. I did not speak Cree, but she taught me by touch, by eye contact, by miming what I should do. So she showed me how to look at the sun rising, and what did I see? She would cry out, wail suddenly, and stop. And I saw things in the coming light. I knew I was doing what my ancestors have done since the time when the earth was first born.
Every day we got up to greet the sun, and every day we watched it sink away to sleep as well. I don’t recall what I saw except once, something, in the first rays of its light. An Elder has told me that, just as the sun rises, there may be a small slit in time when you can see spirits there, though I wasn’t told what kinds of spirits. I can’t speak about myself, then, but I know I
didn’t think it through. I just accepted whatever I was given as a child deep within myself: the spirits were there.
Grandpa and Grandma Bear lived in an old bus, while Mom and us kids lived on the reserve in their house. Leon was there, I remember walking with him in the trees, and once he led me to a baby deer lying curled almost invisible on the ground. It was so motionless I bent and touched its eye with my finger, but it would not open. On another walk he did something to me, and then gave me a baby duck to play with, splashing in a puddle. I don’t know what happened, and I told Grandma nothing about our walks but she showed me I should not walk with Leon any more.
Then everyone was gone. For a time I lived alone with her in the bus, and she had me sit watching the fire for what seemed for ever. One day I ran to her, screaming: there were women and children in the fire, she had to get them out!
Grandma laid me on the ground with my ear pressed against the earth. If I wriggled and tried to get up, she’d pat my hair, not say anything, just reassure me with her hand, turn my head sideways and lay me down again in the sunlight against the earth. I found it soft, comfortable, and it seemed there were voices talking, singing in the earth. I was a little scared because it was something I couldn’t understand, and yet under the sounds there was a deep silence that came over me, like peace. Like the lullaby I wanted to hear all my life—no one ever sang to me at bedtime—and I drifted to sleep where my grandmother laid me down. It was as if I could feel the earth’s heart beat. I was a baby cuddled on my mother’s breast, in her womb, my mother who absorbed every fear and every thought, and she was all around me, I was floating in warmth and dreamless sleep. Heart beat.
Behind the bus and house was a small hill, and over that a slough with the hole dug beside it where we got our drinking water. One day Grandma had some men pile a mound of grass on the hill, and when I went to play in it she chased me away, “Muskeke, muskeke!” I now know that means “medicine,” but then I thought, like children do, that she was just mean, never
wanting me to have fun. A few days later she set the grass on fire, and it must have been sweetgrass because the smoke didn’t rise. It hung low, thick and heavy along the ground.
Grandma told me to bring the water buckets and we went towards the smoke. She stopped there, and signed for me to go through it and get water. The smoke was really dense, I couldn’t breathe but I got through fast to the waterhole and into the fresh air. Grandma was waiting, so I filled the pails quickly and went back. I stumbled a bit in the smoke, and spilled a little, but I got through okay. Grandma poured some out on the ground, some into what I now know was a water drum, and immediately sent me back for more.
Again and again. Into the dark smoke, bending down, lifting and carrying that heavy water, I could hardly stay on my feet and finally I fell, trying not to spill any water and choking, because even close to the ground all there was to breathe was smoke. I heard Grandma calling for me but I could hardly gasp a cry, and when she found me she was almost overcome herself. She bent over me and drew out a hunting knife. I thought she was going to kill me, but she pulled me up and where I had fallen she drove the knife into the ground. Then she dragged me away. We barely made it to the edge of the smoke.
We lay together on the ground coughing for air. When I finally felt the burning smoke soften in my lungs I was crying. Grandma turned to me, touched me all over, and then she began to cry too. I don’t know why. She rubbed my hair and looked into my eyes—she never did that—I thought: obviously she didn’t want to hurt me, and yet she had made me do something so dangerous she was crying. I thought my heart would break, I loved her so much.
On the spot she had marked with a knife, where I fell, my grandmother made a frame with four poles driven into the ground, about a yard square. Other poles were tied across between them, and this frame was covered with blankets. I had animal skins wrapped around my middle, and huge leaves binding me. I was laid in the little structure, it was dark and I heard noises of work, I heard drums and singing.
The darkness was so black you could take it in your hand and feel it, like my dad sometimes said about working a mile inside Butte Mountain, “Now that’s darkness.” There was no beginning or end to it. And it wasn’t close to me, it just seemed part of what I was or could be. And I saw things moving, coming at me out of the darkness inside the little tent, and then lights like round stones of fluorescent swinging, moving quick as an eyeblink and gone, all was quiet and motionless. And I lay still.
Grandma seemed in a panic, she was ripping the binding off me, though one rope stayed on my feet, and I could not move because I felt so completely tired, and Grandma was yelling, but I didn’t answer her. After a while she rubbed me, wiping me down, I could see her do this, as if she was walking around inside me looking, it seemed her spirit was mine and she was looking for things I could not hide even if I knew what they were, and I was outside myself, like watching from a distance. She asked what I had seen, and I couldn’t say, though I knew in my spirit what had happened. She spoke and spoke as she unwrapped me, and I knew she was saying to me, “Now, look at yourself, see, you are all better.”
So I looked. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I seemed normal, quite all right, there were no marks or bruises or scratches or scabs or even scars on my body. As if I had been reborn, my skin perfect. And I felt this deep need to find something I now couldn’t see: something should be there on my body, but there was nothing.
And I looked at Grandma. With surprise and awe, and I felt her pride about an act well done. She peered at me as if she was walking inside me, looking around to see if all was well, and she saw my spirit was well. Though it seemed to me she did not quite trust my body, or my mind.