Stolen Life (4 page)

“But I can never write fast enough, I can’t keep up, feelings aren’t words, if I could speak things all the time you’d have even more!”

She’s smiling at me; she has sent me tapes and videos as well, but they are so difficult to organize, her memories are so interwoven and intersnarled, that I’ve begged her to write only, however it comes and she remembers, but write it down; write, please.

She continues, “I guess when I talk I express myself like I listened, story form. It’s actually an easy way to understand if you yourself can listen. But not many people are good listeners and that doesn’t matter to me. I tell little stories so you can see, live, feel what I am trying to explain to you. Like I’m figuring it out, out loud. I’m always all over the place. People say I can’t stay on one topic; sometimes when I just say
things head-on, point blank, it drives them crazy to have to listen to me. Some of the girls in P4W used to tease me; they said they were going to paint a T-shirt with words on the front, ‘Ask me a question …,’ and on the back ‘… and I’ll tell you a story!’ ”

She laughs white clouds into the cold air; her cigarette is finished and we’re freezing.

“But the Elders say that storytelling is a gift too. If a person with a story can go deep, where people are angry, sad, where they’re hiding thoughts and emotions, raise the past they’ve maybe forgotten and can’t really recognize any more, push them to spirit-walk into themselves—to do that with a story is a gift.”

We go back into the open dining/social area and find a private space.

I nudge Yvonne back to her ancestry. “You’ve never told me exactly how you’re related to Big Bear.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Maybe some of my aunts or uncles know, but my mother will not tell me now. Perhaps for some reason she’s afraid to break the silence about my family, but I need to know my heritage. My grandma Flora wouldn’t speak about Grandpa John’s family, and he never did either. Maybe because they were both related to Big Bear, somehow, and in the Cree way that isn’t right, they shouldn’t marry, but they never would say. Big Bear had several wives who had many children, so it’s possible. I don’t know, and no one tells me now. In Natives, blood runs thick and long and for ever.”

“So what was your grandma Flora’s mother’s name, the great-grandma you knew, your dad showed me a picture of her in her coffin, she died in the seventies and over a hundred?”

“They said she was a hundred and sixteen, and I don’t know her name. Mom just called her ‘Kohkom,’ ‘Grandma’ in Cree. Mom just always said, ‘You’re Native, you be proud of it.’ And I did have such pride being Native that I never thought to justify it by finding out my bloodline.”

“And you never asked her the Cree names of ancestors?”

“No, not really. You’re careful with Cree names—brother, daughter, okay, but not names. When I was little I heard that Grandpa John’s father was Big Bear’s son, and the story was that people came to call him a bad medicine man because they feared Big Bear. It had something to do with submitting to the Whites, with turning against Big Bear’s advice during the rebellion in 1885, because in doing that they
had also turned against his Bear Spirit. So they feared Big Bear, and that was made worse by their shame at having given in rather than stand up for their rights and spiritual beliefs, as he wanted them to. So they called his son ‘a bad medicine man,’ and they said he made some sort of pact with bad spirits because he was mad at the government, and forfeited all his boys to the evil—all except John, who was the youngest. The story was that John and his father stood on the shore of a lake and watched all the other sons walk into the lake and drown. They say that as the last bubble of their breath broke on the surface, John’s father screamed and jerked a handful of hair out of John’s head, threw it on the ground and spit on it, and swore that never again would there be anything like this in our family, never. I don’t remember—know—what the deal was my great-grandfather had made; it had something to do with government, but he renounced it then, and I think Grandpa John knew this from when he was a small boy.”

Yvonne looks up past the wide, laminated rafters of the room, away into distance; her long, black hair falls in a thick braid to her waist and her long slant of body sits still as a shadow, but I have watched her talk for hours and I know she is deeply troubled. She searches her way into sound, slowly. “I don’t know … maybe, when Grandpa died, the curse had run its course … I just don’t know. Sometimes I pray for direct guidance, from Big Bear’s spirit. I’ve written many, many letters to archives, but they won’t look up anything for me. I wish I could go to those places, and poke around, to get any information hiding in papers, in pictures. Even if I don’t know what I’m looking for, I know I would know if I saw it.”

But she won’t be able to go “there,” to Ottawa or Washington or Montana or Regina or wherever the archives are that might help inform her. She is sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder, and not until she has served twenty-five years—15 September 2014—will she be eligible for parole. If that is granted, she will be released, but nevertheless remain on parole until she dies. The “faint hope” clause of a parole hearing at fifteen years is truly that: so faint as to be, for her, almost indiscernible.

“If I even live that long.”

Who is Yvonne Johnson, and what was she accused of doing to become the only Native woman in Canada with such an immovable sentence of first-degree murder?

Why is she serving the heaviest possible sentence in the Canadian Criminal Code, but nevertheless was the fifth woman to be accepted in this minimum-security prison, this new Healing Lodge in
mi-nati-kak
, “the beautiful high lands” as the Cree call them, of southern Saskatchewan?

Early on Friday morning, 15 September 1989, the body of Charles Skwarok was found in the Wetaskiwin, Alberta, city dump. Within hours Yvonne, her common-law husband, Dwayne Wenger, and her acquaintance Ernest Jensen were arrested, charged with murdering Skwarok in the basement of Yvonne and Dwayne’s Wetaskiwin house. Three days later Yvonne’s maternal first cousin, Shirley Anne Salmon, was arrested for the same crime. In the various trials that followed, Shirley Anne pleaded guilty to aggravated assault and was sentenced to one year in jail; Dwayne pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life, ten years; Ernie was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life, ten years; Yvonne was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life, twenty-five years.

Did Yvonne, of all the four acknowledged participants, deserve the heaviest sentence? Did she get justice, or simply a full, overwhelming measure of law?

And the larger question: why was she involved in murder at all? When I answered Yvonne’s first letter, I had no idea of what crime she was convicted; I was powerfully intrigued by this self-aware, storytelling descendant of the historical Big Bear who had been living, growing, in my imagination for over three decades and who himself died in 1888 from the effects of what was surely an unjust imprisonment. But as Yvonne’s and my letters, phone calls, and finally our personal visits grew, her life became as vital and irrefutable to me as that of her magnificent ancestor.

Seven months after my first meeting with Yvonne at the Healing Lodge, on 22 August 1996, I will be lying on my back in a high-hill glade
nearby, staring up into a blue sky running with mare’s tails. Yvonne’s cousin Rose has organized a cycle of four sweats to help Yvonne on her spiritual walk, and she has invited me to join.

Like the other men visitors lying around me, breathing hard, I wear only shorts and my body pours sweat: the body cleansing itself of wastes and pollutants—the mirror of the spirit cleansing itself in prayer to find balance, wholeness, self-awareness. We have completed the third round of the forty-stone sweat, and soon we will crawl back into the sweat lodge beside us for the fourth and final round. The Elder’s helper will have carried the last grandfather stones from the fire into the centre pit and he will close us in, cover us over with complete, absolute darkness—sight and taste gone, but hearing and smell and touch and spirit intensified. Then the ancient, spiritual songs, the Cree prayers, will begin to rise with the steam rising from the white-hot rocks as the Elder sprinkles water on them by shaking his spray of leafy wet poplar branches. And again I will try to pray.

Resting on the ground, I look across the clearing. In the shade of nearby trees sit the women who are praying this sweat also. They wear long, belted robes; we will all soon re-enter the round sweat lodge together, and the women will sit in the darkness on their side across the fire pit from the men. Rose and Yvonne are there; even without my glasses I can see Yvonne’s blue robe among the women resting silent on the grass, blurry as bright flowers that have burst out of the green earth suddenly.

Then Yvonne gets up, walks away into the open glade. Against the trees and the grassy shoulders of the hills she moves down the slope; disappears.

Later she writes to me: “I lay down in the field and cried, staring into the sky with such anger mingled with pain, all I could do was shed tears at my lostness. I was so angry I wanted to walk away, go, I’m beyond help, just a lost cause, hopeless.… But my cousin knows how I am, all the pain, and she had put up four sweats for me. I had to return. Go back into the sweat, pray for help in my pitiful state, all my misplaced pride and honour; asking again how to become a true, proud, Native woman.”

For almost four years she has sent me the journals that I urged her to write—get everything, anything, into words, on paper, write it down, every memory, emotion, rage, laugh, pain—all of it, as it comes. And we
have talked, face to face in the Prison for Women and for hours by telephone; we have exchanged letters; she has sent me boxes of notes and comments on legal documents, on trial transcripts. At the moment I cannot see her, but I know she will not have broken the spiritual boundary of the Healing Lodge; I know she is looking at the sky, the grass, the trees and hills and distant prairie, as I am; looking at Creation’s brightness through the darkness of the sweat lodge; looking inward. She has asked me to help her; I have promised her, “Yes”—though, foolishly, I had no idea what a difficult thing I was promising—and, for these years, we have struggled to tell her story so that she, so that I, so that some possible reader will understand. Something.

Why has she lived such a dreadful life, and why has she been so destructive to herself and those she loves? Why have they been so devastatingly destructive to her? How is it she became entangled in murder? What I already know of her life makes it almost too horrifically representative of what has happened to the Native people of North America; of what her ancestor Big Bear most feared about the ruinous White invasion that in his time overwhelmed him, that jailed him in Stony Mountain Prison in 1885 for treason-felony, that is, for “intending to levy war against the Queen, Her crown and dignity.” Sadly enough, that stone-and-steel fortress on top of its limestone extrusion in flat Manitoba had been completed in plenty of time to receive him.

That being said, at the same time Yvonne is as much White as Native. In fact, she and her family tried to live “White” throughout her childhood in the United States—she remains a born citizen of the United States, although through the Red Pheasant Reserve she has Indian status in Canada—but in Butte, Montana, she was “called down” as “Indian,” as “a dirty breed,” protected by few discernible laws. The White so-called law-enforcers destroyed her brother and became her worst abusers, until finally she had to flee to Canada for her life.

“My Native side sometimes hurt me,” she writes to me, “but it never came close to doing to me what the White side did. I became comfortable with my Native self, so that is where I chose to exist out of. And yes, I am happy being a ‘dirty Indian.’ ”

Yvonne finds growing strength in nothing the White half of her heritage gave her in the first fifteen years of her life, but rather in the spiritual and personal heritage of her Cree ancestors, particularly in
her grandmother Flora Baptiste Bear, and most particularly in her extraordinary progenitor the Plains Cree chief Mistahi Muskwa. Her voice speaking to me echoes his: a sense of heritage, of self-awareness and knowledge, of suffering, of self-deprecating humour, a longing for vision and understanding.