As Long as the Rivers Flow (29 page)

“I was then in a coffin with its lid open, dressed in my best clothes, my head and my body resting on soft red velvet cushions. Weeping members of the community passed by to kiss me and to say goodbye, just like they did at the funerals of the others. There was a guard of honour of kids from the school and my mother was standing at the head of the coffin wringing her hands and Spider had his arm around her shoulders. Someone read a poem I had written back when I was happy with my life, and the families of the other kids who had taken their lives were so upset they left the room. The preacher delivered a sermon telling everyone to be joyful, for I had gone to heaven, a choir of elders led the crowd in heartbreaking songs and someone started to play
Amazing Grace
on an electric guitar, just like they always do at all the funerals.

“I looked up at the faces of my friends from school as they crowded around, and I knew that it wouldn’t be long before some of them followed me.

“Then the coffin lid slammed shut and everything was black. I felt the coffin being picked up and carried away and I was ever so scared.

“I called out saying that I had changed my mind, that it had all been a mistake and I didn’t want to die. But no one heard me.

“A few minutes later, I heard the sound of the coffin being pushed onto the back of the pickup truck we use as a hearse. I felt the vibrations of the engine as the driver turned the key in the ignition and every bump as he shifted gears and moved off over the trail to the cemetery. There, I knew, an open grave awaited. Soon
I heard the preacher say ‘Earth to earth, ashes to ashes,’ as clods of dirt rained down on the wood over my head.

“No, no! I cried. I didn’t mean it! I don’t care if the Church treated my mother and the others bad at that residential school. I don’t care if my mother drinks and beats me. I don’t care if the people can’t get their lives together. I don’t care if they spend their welfare money on booze and drugs.

“I want to take my chances with life! Thirteen is too young to die! I want to smell the air after a rain. I want to see the waves battering the rocks on the shore. I want to hear the call of the loon. I want to fall in love and get married. I want to touch the soft warm skin of my own baby. I want to sing and dance. I want to experience bad as well as good things. I want to travel, to live in Toronto, to see the world and come home and help my people. I want to grow old. I don’t want to become a spirit!

“But no one paid any attention for I was dead and buried.

“The image faded, leaving me with a feeling of absolute dread and hopelessness.

“Nanabush then spoke.

“ ‘It is now for you to decide whether the joy of living, even in pain, outweighs the finality of death.’

“I chose life and woke up feeling happier than I had since my mother came back.”

The members of the community sat in silence. They now understood that the land they lived on was sacred, and by forgiving their enemies and connecting with their ancient culture, they could find the strength to heal their wounds. And that night, before the people went to bed, they told their children that they loved them.

W
HEN
M
ARTHA WENT TO BED
that night, she closed her eyes and Father Antoine came to her, just as he had so often over the years. This time, however, he was not the corpulent priest with bad breath who haunted her nights with flashbacks of abuse. Instead she saw him as he had become—a pitiful, ageing pedophile, unwilling to acknowledge, let alone apologize for, the harm he had caused her and the mothers of the children who had killed themselves.

Earlier in the evening, Martha had told him that she forgave him. Now, several hours later, the rapture induced by the dynamics of the healing circle was fading. But that did not matter, for she did not regret making her gesture of mercy, and more importantly, she no longer feared him. The pardon she had extended to Father Antoine had banished the monster of hate within her, freeing her to deal with her depression and alcoholism and make a new start with her children.

She was ever so proud of her children. The strongest member of the family, Martha recognized, was Raven, but she would still require much nurturing to reach her potential. Martha just hoped
that she would find the mothering skills within herself to meet the challenge.

As for Spider, she had been ecstatic when Joshua had brought him back. Even better, he told her he had not had a drink since the night he left the reserve and felt at peace with himself for the first time in his life. He knew himself, however, and would soon resume drinking if he returned to the city or remained on the reserve. He planned to return as soon as possible and live a traditional lifestyle away from alcohol in the trapping cabin of his grandparents and he hoped that his mother and sister could come to see him often. He wanted their company, and would need their help in mastering life in the bush and learning the traditional teachings.

Father Antoine went to bed a deeply troubled man, for despite his words of denial, his encounter with the mothers of Rebecca, Jonathan and Sara had thoroughly upset him. Who could have guessed that his actions of so long ago would shatter their families and lead their children to kill themselves? As a priest, he knew there were few if any greater sins than murder, and taking your own life was self-murder. How many people had he destroyed over the years?

The enormity of his sins made Father Antoine tremble. It was not as if he had not known that he was doing bad things. He had, however, convinced himself long ago that he was different from other men, and had been compelled by some blind force within himself to act as he did. Other priests were doing similar things without being punished by the Church, and this to him had been a sign that the hierarchy, if not approving his actions, at least understood his predicament.

Now for the first time, he was ashamed of himself and realized that he had used his faith as a tool, an instrument, a means of rationalizing his unacceptable conduct. For during his years at the
residential school, after the passion of his encounter with each little victim had dissipated, he would descend to the chapel late at night overcome with shame and remorse, get down on his knees, clasp his hands together, turn his face to the statue of Christ and pray fervently for forgiveness and vow that he would never again touch another little girl. In the course of the night, a feeling of great peace would come over him, and he would know he had been granted absolution.

The nuns, when they entered at dawn for the first mass of the day, he was well aware, would see him there still on his knees, praying earnestly. How fortunate they were, they must have thought, to have a priest of such exceptional piety and goodness as their spiritual advisor. But often that same afternoon, after a long nap, he would wake up refreshed, the urge would return, and he would summon another little girl to his office.

Years later, when he returned to Quebec and resumed his exploitation of little girls, he had sought solace in prayer and had confessed his sin after each encounter. And each time, he had been absolved of his sin—or so he had thought. But now he saw that he had gained a peace of mind that was at best self-delusion, and at worst a divine joke. For he had never felt pity for the little girls and he had deceived himself when he assumed they had loved him, mistaking their compliance with his demands for genuine affection. He now had to find a way to make amends to his victims before he died. But in his heart, he knew he had pity enough only for himself.

Bishop de Salaberry went to bed in a thoughtful mood. Something had happened that evening, he knew, that would change his life forever. When he heard the stories of the suffering mothers who had lost their children to suicide, he had been overwhelmed by the deepest sorrow and sadness, and a feeling of compassion such as
he had never before experienced. His ambition to rise in the hierarchy of the Church was no longer of any importance. He had felt the presence of the divine, and this, he knew in his innermost being, was because of the spirit of forgiveness shown by the families of the children to the representatives of the white society who had done so much harm to Indian people over the centuries.

Perhaps, he thought, before he fell asleep, the archbishop knew this would happen to him when he had asked him to accompany Father Antoine to Cat Lake First Nation.

And that night, the spirits did not come to ask Raven to join them on the other side.

I
N THE NORTH
of the province of Ontario, there is a land so vast that it could swallow up France and still have room left over for Belgium. It is a region of stark, harsh beauty, green and lush in summer, and white and cold in winter, with deep blue skies by day and with countless stars turning dark to light by night. It is the source of several of the greatest rivers in Canada, the Severn, the Winisk, the Attawapiskat, the Albany and the Moose, that rise in the uplands of the Laurentian Shield and flow northwards to the sea through the immense, swampy Hudson Bay Lowlands.

It is also the only part of the province occupied to this day largely by Native people—in the boreal forest by the Anishinabe (Ojibway) and their close cultural cousins the Anishininimouwin (Oji-Cree), and along the Hudson Bay and the James Bay Lowlands by their good friends, the Omushkegowak (Swampy Cree). The Nishnawbe Aski Nation, where this novel is set, is a grouping of forty-nine First Nations whose traditional lands make up more than sixty percent of the area of Ontario running from the height
of land to the James and Hudson Bay coast and from the Manitoba to the Quebec borders.

A drama of death and sorrow has been playing out for generations in this region. From the late nineteenth to the latter part of the twentieth century, the people of Ontario’s remote boreal forest, like their Native counterparts across Canada, watched helplessly as the federal government removed their children, often by force, and sent them to Indian residential schools to be turned into brown-skinned white Canadians. All too often the children were abused by predatory caregivers and returned home broken in spirit and devoid of parenting skills. In the infamous “ ’60s Scoop,” the Ontario Children’s Aid Society and its counterparts across Canada entered the reserves and seized children by the thousands and adopted them out to white families across Canada and the United States. In the 1980s, the traditional life of the people was further undermined by exposure to the culture and anti-Native sentiment of the outside world when winter roads were pushed into their communities.

With their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents before them traumatized by their residential school experiences, the youth had no one to turn to in their families for love and support as they confronted these monumental shocks, and they began to kill themselves in staggering numbers. From 1986 to 2010, almost five hundred people, including sixty children under the age of fourteen and one hundred and eighty youth aged fifteen to twenty, took their lives in the territory of the Nishinabe Aski Nation out of a total population of fewer than 30,000 men, women and children. And this despite the frantic efforts of chiefs and councils to stem the epidemic of death that continues to this day, out of sight and mind of the outside world.

In some communities, survivors speak of the ghosts of suicide victims who come calling in nighttime dreams seeking to persuade young people who had joined in suicide pacts to fulfil their part of
the bargain and kill themselves. Too often, the appeals are answered and more deaths take place.

For many people, Native and non-Native, dreams, especially about people who have passed away, are not imaginary phenomena but powerful depictions of reality. In the land of the Anishinabe, of the Anishininimouwin and of the Omushkegowak, young people who participate in suicide pacts have spoken to friends and relatives about visits from the spirits of the dead, just before they too killed themselves.

This is a work of fiction and any resemblance the characters may have to people living or dead is entirely coincidental. The Cat Lake First Nation is actually a proud Native community of some five hundred people located on the shore of Cat Lake one hundred and fifty miles upstream from the Albany River and one hundred miles by winter road to the west of Pickle Lake. The airport, band office, school, cemetery, rapids and shoreline depicted in the book are, however, composite creations drawn from more than a dozen fly-in Anishinabe reserves in northern Ontario.

The residential school in this novel is also composite based on many residential schools across Canada, including the St. Anne’s Indian Residential School at the mouth of the Albany River on the James Bay, which was in operation from 1904 until its closing in 1973. On May 29, 2002, arsonists, believed to be former students at the school, destroyed the long-abandoned structure.

M
EEGWETCH TO MY WIFE
, Marie-Jeanne, and our children, Anne-Pascale, Laurent and Alain. Meegwetch to my mother, Maureen Benson Bartleman, and Hilda Snake for the translations of key phrases into the Anishinaabemowin dialect of Chippewas of Rama First Nation, my home community. I also thank my mother for telling me tales of Wendigos, bearwalkers and witches that she heard the elders relate on winter evenings around the old box stove in her grandfather Benson’s kitchen when she was a little girl on the Rama Reserve in the 1920s.

Meegwetch to Shirley Hay of the Wahta First Nation for her comments on the aboriginal cultural context and to Grand Chief Stan Beardy of the Nishinabe Aski Nation who introduced me to his people. Meegwetch to the residential school survivors who courageously provided me with the details of the sexual and physical abuse they suffered while attending Indian residential schools in the 1950s and 1960s. Meegwetch to Goyce Kakegamic of the Sandy Lake First Nation, a residential school survivor, former deputy grand chief of the Nishnabe Aski Nation and leader in the
fight to combat suicide among Native youth. Meegwetch to Nokomis (Grandmother) and elder Lillian McGregor, Crane Clan, Anishinabe of the Whitefish River First Nation, for her help in preparing the prayer to Gitche Manitou. Meegwetch to Raven Redbird for her insights into the problems faced by Native women new to Toronto and to the staff of the Anishinabe Street Patrol and the Salvation Army Breakfast Mission for allowing me to accompany them over the years to witness first-hand the help they provide to the homeless, Native and non-Native alike. Thank you to Nanda Casucci-Byrne who travelled with me to the fly-in communities in northern Ontario and who made many helpful suggestions throughout the drafting process.