Kwe
STANDING WITH OUR SISTERS
EDITED BY
Joseph Boyden
FEATURING CONTRIBUTIONS FROM
Sherman Alexie, Margaret Atwood,
Gord Downie, Tanya Tagaq Gillis,
Lee Maracle, Yann Martel,
and Michael Ondaatje
CONTENTS
Hey, Boys ~ Joseph Boyden
A Day in the Life ~ Tanya Tagaq Gillis
The Dogs Came to Lina ~ Madeleine Thien
River Woman ~ Katherena Vermette
The Missing Girl ~ Michael Winter ~
Untitled Poem ~ Michael Ondaatje
What Can Be Named in the Earth ~ Michael Ondaatje
Opera ~ Michael Ondaatje
Witness ~ Sherman Alexie
Epiphany ~ Andrew Davidson
From Pearl and the Storytellers’ Academy ~ Marilyn Bowering
Long Time No See ~ Lynnel Sinclair
Up the Shanghai River ~ Charles Foran
Seven Matches ~ Gord Downie
The Third One ~ Patricia Young
Water Bird ~ Patrick Lane
Because of What I Did ~ Richard Van Camp
Night Comes Sometimes ~ Lee Maracle
Night Skies ~ Lee Maracle
Leaves and Thickets ~ Lisa Moore
Rivered ~ Warren Cariou
A True Story ~ Kyo Maclear
Kindness Flowed Through the Generations ~ Taiaiake Alfred
Interference ~ Lola Tostevin
When I Was a Little Girl ~ Reneltta Arluk
How We Felt About It ~ David O’Meara
A sketch by Colin McAdam
From Beloved of the Sky ~ Eliza Robertson
Christ in the Jungle ~ John Vaillant
November 2014 ~ Diana Davidson
Dawn, After the Funeral ~ Patrick Friesen
Ghost, Returning ~ Patrick Friesen
This Sweet Old World, Sings Emmylou ~ Patrick Friesen
November 24, 2014 ~ David Chariandy
The Present, Missing ~ Garry Thomas Morse
Like a Flower ~ Stan Dragland
Gathering Voices ~ Joanne Arnott
Guilty ~ Garry Gottfriedson
All-Inclusive ~ Andrew Pyper
Gingham Dress – 1967 ~ Mary Swan
Mercy ~ Priscila Uppal
IF Mother Could Have Spoken… ~ Wanda John-Kehewin
God Loves a Drug Dealer ~ Susan Musgrave
Oscar of Between, Part 17D ~ Betsy Warland
22 Below ~ Melissa Auf der Maur
Chasing Painted Horses ~ Drew Hayden Taylor
Baffled in Ashdod, Blind in Gaza ~ Stephen Heighton
Fire and Song ~ Eve Joseph
Dominion ~ Lorna Crozier
Catbird ~ Lorna Crozier
1CountryBoy ~ Sarah de Leeuw
At the Party ~ Bill Gaston
The Blue Clerk: Versos ~ Dionne Brand
Grief at Heathrow ~ Michael Crummey
Beginnings ~ Alice Kuipers and Yann Martel
A photograph by Rawi Hage
Treaty Seven ~ Thomas King
Wounded Knee ~ Thomas King
Aflame ~ Margaret Atwood
Passports ~ Margaret Atwood
The Dear Ones ~ Margaret Atwood
Something Profound Is Wrong ~ John Ralston Saul
Contributors
Copyright Acknowledgments
HEY, BOYS
~ Joseph Boyden ~
My friend Tanya, she’s pretty special. She’s thirty-nine. She’s an Inuk from up north. She’s the mother of two amazing daughters, and she’s really smart and good-looking. She’s an artist and a musician and her talent has found a way to blossom into the lives of many, many people. Tanya travels the world sharing her brilliance, her spirit, her orenda. She’s taken an ancient and traditional custom of her people and used her throat and her whole body to make something so powerful on the stage that I’ve witnessed strangers weep uncontrollably or smile like madmen or simply stand and stare with their mouths open or even leave the concert. She’s that good.
Tina Fontaine was a special kid. She was fifteen, from Sagkeeng Reserve and living in Winnipeg. Her father was beaten to death by two drunken friends in 2011, and Tina’s family describes how she’d gone into a spiral since then, how she had drifted away from them and into child and family services care in Winnipeg. The family care system there is so over-stuffed that Tina was staying in a local hotel with little supervision. It was easy to run away, and so she did. The last time she was spotted was by two cops who’d pulled over a guy in his pickup truck. Fifteen-year-old Tina was his passenger. Despite her being flagged as a runaway, the cops let her go. Not too long after, while searching the Red River for another missing woman, Tina’s body was discovered in that river, stuffed into a garbage bag. Tina was a really good student and loved her family very much.
My wife, Amanda, I can claim that she’s special. She’s fifty, although when people hear this they don’t believe it. She’s a novelist and a screenwriter, and almost half a lifetime ago when she was twenty-seven she was brutally raped and left for dead in a Milwaukee neighbourhoood as she walked to her evening shift at a local bar. The assailant strangled her so hard that her contacts popped out of her eyes. He raped her and tried his best to kill her, and he came close. For a long time after, her skin continued to mottle and her eyes continued to bleed red. Almost half a lifetime later, that young woman at the wrong place at the wrong time is older and more beautiful and still wonders if that fucker still stalks the street, hunting.
My friend Tanya the artist and musician was sexually abused through much of her youth. She allows me to tell you this. She’s turned the pain into art. In October, the day after performing for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, a triumphant performance by all accounts, Tanya was followed, in broad daylight, down the street and verbally assaulted by a white man who made it clear to her that he wanted to fuck an Indian girl and she was the one. He went on, as she tried to walk quickly away, to describe all of the things he was going to do to her. Tanya says she can’t count how many times this has happened to her and to most of her friends. Tanya describes her daily experience of simply walking down the street as living in a horror movie, a movie you can’t escape from, one that doesn’t end. After her treatment by this man, Tanya got back onstage that night and performed triumphantly, once again, in front of a sold-out audience.
Amanda and I were in Winnipeg to watch Tanya perform with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. This was not so long after Tina Fontaine’s body was discovered wrapped in plastic at the bottom of the Red River. As I contemplate this confluence, I believe it might be possible that some small part of Tina is the child in these two women who lived, but I desperately mourn for the life of a young woman not given the chance. Not a chance to sing, not a chance to write, not a chance to breathe each day.
Hey, boys, what are we to do? Hey, men, why don’t we question this sickness that beats inside too many of us? Shall we healthier ones spend our lives staring, not knowing what to do, just stand and look at our shoes or touch our faces and ask forgiveness for horrors we feel no part of? What are we men to do about this? Do we simply stand by and watch?
How will we raise our own boys?
I’m sorry.
I’m so sorry, Amanda.
I’m so sorry, Tanya.
I’m so sorry, Tina.
A DAY IN THE LIFE
~ Tanya Tagaq Gillis ~
It’s 9 am, late for school
Grade 5 is hard
Rushing, stumbling to get my pants on
Forgetting to brush my teeth
Dreading recess
The boys chase us and hold us down
Touch our pussies
and non-existent boobs
I want to be liked
I guess I must like it
We head back to class
The teacher squirming his fingers under my panties
Under the desk
He looks around and pretends he’s not doing it
I pretend he’s not doing it
He goes to the next girl and I feel a flash of jealousy
The air gets thinner and tastes like rot
School is over
Maybe the northern lights
Will take me away
There is yelling at home
I leave to the arcade
Watch out for old Oak Oak
The old man likes to touch young pussy
We try to stay away
I wonder why nobody kicks him out
Things are better at home now
Three’s Company and a calm air
Archie comics and Lego
Goodnight
THE DOGS CAME TO LINA
~ Madeleine Thien ~
Of course it was a surprise to see them racing joyously towards her, galloping, twenty-eight years after they were believed drowned, and a stranger in a red parka signalled to her but Lina’s vision was filled with the animals who plunged in the sand as if they were running on foam, and she knew Mi Yung was approaching even though Mi Yung was no longer the teenaged girl in the red coat watching the ocean’s arrival, water and gravity bound up in a tight fist—that was love—that tight fist—that was them—because we arrive with too much and too little, every anthropologist knows we were once something else (helium, hydrogen) and one day will transform into another substance (carbon dioxide, hydrogen again) and Mi Yung’s belongings had been sent back to Korea and the red coat given away, and the dogs, too, tearing towards her, made Lina ask how much you could strip away of a person before there is no longer enough person left to exist, even as an idea, she had seen it in her lifetime, this dismantling of human beings, and if, say, she cut down all the branches of this arbutus here, how much would she have to cut before it was no longer a tree but merely wood, no longer a human being but merely human, the dogs leaped exultantly against the blue-black water which Mi Yung said must be heaven itself, black was the only colour rich enough to hold infinity, and when Mi Yung first came to Canada, she had been perplexed by the idea of a God in the white clouds because, for her, pure white was the ribbon worn at the death of a parent, emptiness, hospitals, and grief, boundless grief, yes, Lina had loved her with every molecule of her being and wanted to protect her, but Mi Yung knew that the dogs that circled her were not leaving, they were on their way, of their own accord, to the heavens, and every human being should be dignified with the responsibility of walking to their own end (“I never arrived in the universe, therefore how can I depart?”) and Lina had willed herself to laugh, then, at the riddles, she had vowed that if Mi Yung were taken she would never, never consent to belief, and the dogs, those dogs never came back, never came galloping, even something as relentless as the ocean could never arrive, as soon as it touched shore it slid back out again, maybe she was born at the unobserved, unlit centre and hour by hour, floated backwards, drifting or fighting, to the periphery. The dogs came to Lina (“One day in the future, no one will remember your arrival, and for them it will be as if you always existed”) and the ocean receded like the heavens, touched her feet, drew back, arrived, arrived, arrived.
RIVER WOMAN
~ Katherena Vermette ~
this river is a woman
she is bright
and she is beautiful
she once carried
every nation here
but she is
one of those women
too soon forgotten
broken like a body
that begs without words
only rough hands
that reach out
palms up
this river is a woman
she’s been dredged
and dragged
metal coils catch
her tangled hair
everyone wants to know
her secrets but
she keeps them
won’t let them go
unless she trusts you
unless you ask real nice
unless she just
feels like it
this river is a woman
she’s full of
good intentions
bad regrets
sometimes she just folds
into herself
can slow to a slush
then rush into race
currents indiscernible
patterns intangible
and below
she goes even
faster
this river is a woman
forever
returning
twisting north
a snake carved
into prairie grass
hiding everywhere
eroded with age
etched into her edges
and newly born
every day
this river is your lover
she curls around
you pulses
and fills you
like a heartbeat
if you are very quiet
all you hear is her
this river is your mother
she flows on and on
and unnoticed
slips in
slides out
as if she was never here
as if she was always here
this river is my sister
she is bright and beautiful
and brown
sings soft every summer
holds us up all winter
and every spring she swells
reminds us we are just
visitors here
this is her country
she is that woman
her deft voice
reaches out
broken by everything that has been
thrown into her
but
somehow her spirit
rages on
somehow a song
like her
never fades
THE MISSING GIRL
~ Michael Winter ~
One summer, when I was fifteen, I used to get up in the dark and go salmon fishing. Sometimes, while I ate breakfast, my brother would come home. He’d be noisy, kicking off his boots in the porch. Goodnight, brother.
Outside, under the moon, I got excited. I aimed the front wheel of my bicycle for the river six miles away. The pulp mill was glowing like something in a science lab. I felt cold and could hear my fly rod rocking where it was tied against the frame of the bike. I coasted along the ridge of my sleeping town that I did not care about, past houses where I delivered newspapers in the afternoon. All of it asleep. When I got to the highway I left the streetlights behind and felt I was cycling through a vast cathedral of darkness.
The heavy body of a powerful engine accelerated past me: a police car. It illuminated the highway ahead and I was shaken by its quiet urgency. The car pulled over and waited for me.
What are you doing out here, son?
I told them about the salmon.
Have you had luck?
I said I’d caught three fish.
All summer? That sounds like a lot of work.
Have you ever caught a salmon?
No they had never fished with a fly rod before.
I could tell, though, they had arrested plenty of men in the middle of the night up to their knees in the river with nets strung across.
Have you seen a girl out here?
It was the other officer, leaning over to take a look at me.
We’re looking for a girl about your age.
I got to the river and hid my bike behind the shape of Mr Gill’s camper truck. Mr Gill lived in this camper—he had a woodstove on board—and I met him on the river every morning. He was sitting there on his rock, waiting for
the sun to come up.
They’re looking for a girl, I said.
Mr Gill’s eyes lay upon the shining dark water running past his boots and he tried to figure out who this girl might be. He turned to me as though I must have seen her and, if he was patient, I would tell him everything.
No, I said in my head. No no no.
Her name and face the next day, in the newspaper that I delivered to all of the neighbours. A story of a person that I’d met. There was a shortage of information and nothing about her was in the life I was living. Had I seen this girl in the dark on a highway? Of course I had and I could not speak of it. I had not the means or the language. We have to discover these stories, or we will never go further than telling the truth about bicycles in the dark and salmon, and some parts of men.
~ Michael Ondaatje ~
In official histories,
the bought one wrote about the buyer
so the panorama of a life
told you nothing of damage
at every turn.
Just Caesar.
An authorized song, a sonnet
with metaphors dragged in
by their ears.
A whore’s poetica, maybe,
during his purposeful stride
onto routes
that will be on a famous map someday.
He marches not to conquer
the destination but to settle
something there he cannot
with those he knows.
Like conscience after victory.
WHAT CAN BE NAMED IN THE EARTH
~ Michael Ondaatje ~
Thorianite, zircon, arkosa,
terra rosa limestone. Peat
in the Muthurajawela swamp.
Green marble and rare graphite
in their silent darkness.
On sparser maps, hidden pure bodies of water.
On the three floors of the zoological museum
at Marcus Fernando Mawatha
are mammals evolving through time
stilled dioramas of wading birds
stalking the river basins
illustrations and recordings
of how tailorbirds, hill mynahs,
bill clatterers, and the drongo
alter their plumage and call
when migrating north.
Maps of Altitude and Dialect.
Also contour maps of drought,
the forests destroyed by leaf-cutter ants.
All data avoids the names of cities
Kwe: Standing With Our Sisters Page 1
