Stolen Life
Page 1
STOLEN LIFE
The National Bestseller
Winner of the 1998 Viacom Canada
Writer’s Development Trust Non-Fiction Prize
Shortlisted for the 1998 Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction
Winner of the 1998 Saskatchewan Book Award for Non-Fiction
Winner of the 1999 Alberta Book Award for Non-Fiction
Winner of the 1999 Edmonton City Book Prize
“Rudy Wiebe works here like a great jazz guitarist.… Wiebe supports, clarifies, and encourages Yvonne Johnson and at crucial moments solos through trial transcripts with consummate skill that unerringly calls into question the police practices and courtroom proceedings that have miscarried justice in this case.… Brilliant.”
The Toronto Star
“An incredible story … [Yvonne Johnson’s] life reads like a novel.… Stolen Life is truly the story of a journey from hell to redemption.… A powerful [account] of justice and injustice, of tragedy and triumph, of redemption and healing.”
Regina Community Free Press
“Stolen Life brings the story of one woman seeking to reclaim her history, to understand her pain, and to honour her responsibilities. In so doing, it honours the central principle of oral tradition: that only those who have memory will understand.… A moving account.”
Quill & Quire (starred review)
“Powerful … Stolen Life is not light summer reading. The catalogue of abuses that comprise Johnson’s life is not easy to take.… But the unblinking honesty of her writing keeps us with her. Definitely recommended, but steel yourself beforehand.”
The Vancouver Sun
“Deeply affecting … Stolen Life is a rare book, one that resonates for months after you read it and challenges and changes your perspective on the world.”
Vue Weekly
FIRST VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 1999
Copyright © 1998 by Jackpine House Ltd.
All rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions. First published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, Toronto, in 1998. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Wiebe, Rudy, 1934-
Stolen life: the journey of a Cree woman
eISBN: 978-0-307-36713-6
1. Johnson, Yvonne, 1961 –.
2. Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge (Maple Creek, Sask.)
3. Women prisoners – Saskatchewan – Maple Creek – Biography.
I. Johnson, Yvonne, 1961 –. II. Title.
HV 9505.J64W53 1999 365’.43’092 C98-932388-9
this page constitutes a continuation of the copyright page
Cover design: CS Richardson
v3.1
To my children, whom I love endlessly;
to all survivors and those who help them;
and, with the greatest respect, to Rudy
YVONNE JOHNSON
To the memory of Mistahi Muskwa (Big Bear),
1825–1888
RUDY WIEBE
The sentence has changed.
Once I could not remember.
Now I cannot forget.
ELLY DANICA
Don’t: A Woman’s Word
But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged.
ALBERT CAMUS
The Myth of Sisyphus
We pray at best for the open wound to grow a scar.
PETER FALLON
“A Part of Ourselves”
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prefatory Note
ONE: Blood Runs Thick and Long and For Ever
TWO: My Eyes Became My Voice
THREE: A Killing in the Family
FOUR: The Only Good Indian
FIVE: That’s Right, Drive Me to Winter
SIX: Growing Up in a Beer Bottle
SEVEN: Wetaskiwin: The Place Where Peace Is Made
EIGHT: Down into Disaster
NINE: Three Days in September 1989
TEN: If I Gave You a Gun, Would You Shoot Me?
ELEVEN: You Have Nothing to Hope, and Nothing to Fear
TWELVE: The Power of My Name: Why I Must Remember This
THIRTEEN: If I Don’t Beat You Up, You’ll Sleep with Me?
FOURTEEN: Spirit Keepers
FIFTEEN: What You Did, and Where You Did It
SIXTEEN: Since the Time When the Earth Was First Born
Epilogue: Where People Are
About the Authors
PREFATORY NOTE
This book is based on what Yvonne Johnson holds to be her own truths about the life she has lived. However, since there is never only one way to tell a story, other persons involved in this one may well have experienced and remember differently the events and actions here portrayed. The book is also based on my research into the circumstances of Yvonne’s life. Besides over five years of dialogue with her, this research involved travel to various places crucial to the story; interviews wherever possible; attendance at trials; and the gathering of data from court, police, government, school, and newspaper records in both Canada and the United States.
I have gathered together Yvonne’s words, as given in the present text, as she and I agreed, from various sources: largely her seventeen black prison notebooks, her letters to me, her comments on official records and documents, her statements to police, my notes of our conversations in person or on the telephone, numerous audiotapes. She has a natural gift of language, which at any moment will follow a detail and widen into incident, story, often humour. This was at first sometimes confusing, even disorienting, until I recognized that her thinking was often circular, revolving around a given subject, and her writing almost oral in the sense that I had to catch the tone of her inflection to understand exactly how the incidents she was remembering connected; where the expanding images or even parables with which she tried to explain herself were leading. These qualities can only be fully appreciated when talking with Yvonne face to face, but I hope this book will give its readers a good flavour of such a conversation.
What is remarkable and enlightening is how Yvonne’s powers of writing have expanded during her time in prison. Her first letter to me (November, 1992, quoted at length in the first chapter) was as chatty as her talk still is; her formal education could, at best, barely be called erratic and ended in Grade Eight, but even in the earliest of her writing that I have seen she had a profound ability to capture an astute perception with words. For example, during her trial in March, 1991, she handed to her lawyer a long analysis of a relative, which included this comment:
“She is a woman of many faces.… You know, the only feelings you get from her is one of her faces. One of her strong feelings is fear, anger. And she has a tongue like a knife in your heart.”
Reading has helped her think and write. By 1998, after years of reading widely and deeply—including the works of Carl Jung, some of whose books she read and re-read while making copious notes—and thousands of pages of writing—by pen, typewriter, computer—Yvonne’s imagistic insights have widened into longer, much more coherent explorations and descriptions. The written language of her perceptions and her natural oral story-telling ability have grown immensely, to become acute, distinctive, and often beautiful.
The selection, compiling, and arrangement of events and details in this book were done in a manner the two authors believe to be honest and accurate. Public documents are quoted selectively, but with every attempt at fairness and accuracy.
The actual names of people are used when their identities are a matter of public record; for others, and in the case of all persons at present minors, the names are pseudonyms. Also, the spelling, punctuation, and grammar i
n Yvonne’s letters and notebooks have been standardized.
–Rudy Wiebe,
Edmonton, April 1998
O Creator of all, I pray you, look at me, for I am weak and pitiful.
I pray,
help me to make amends to all those I have harmed; grant them love and peace, so that they may understand I am sorry;
help me to share my shame and pain, so that others will do the same, and so awaken to themselves and to all the peoples of the world.
Hai hai
Yvonne Johnson,
Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge, April 1998
1
Blood Runs Thick and Long and For Ever
Nothing just happens, my friend, unless it was meant to be.… If we are guided under the Bear, then even our futures can be changed.… You and I may have been chosen long ago to meet, and our past has given us each a gift of understanding.
–Yvonne Johnson to Rudy Wiebe, 24 December 1992
TO BEGIN A STORY, someone in some way must break a particular silence. On Wednesday, 18 November 1992, in Edmonton, Alberta, I received an envelope from Box 515, Kingston, Ontario. Inside, folded into quarters, was a long sheet of paper typed from top to bottom, edge to edge, solid with words on both sides. It began:
Howdy Howdy Stranger
My name is Yvonne Johnson. I am currently an inmate at the Prison for Women in Kingston, Ontario. I am thirty-one years old. I am a Cree from Saskatchewan, that is where my ancestors come from. We were accepted back into my grandmother’s rez after my mother was kicked out for marrying my father, who is a White from Great Falls, Montana. My grandmother Flora was a Baptiste, my grandfather was called John Bear, I lost him a few years back now; and my grandfather’s grandfather was the Cree chief Big Bear.
On either side of the straight Saskatchewan road, the lines of barbed-wire fence try to square the land into right angles on the curving earth. The land is white here in January 1996, prairie-snow flat, and on this morning frigid fog hides the world; I can see nothing of sun beyond the fence. At the road crossing, where I feel the pavement end, I stop, turn right, and drive south—the Cree direction of the Law of Order, which is the natural order of Creation, the order of how things will happen. I need that today: order.
The road disappears ahead into limitless mist, slopes down a little and east, then straight south again, with all the land now rising about me. Gravel clatters, swerves. White-tailed deer feed above brush on the bare shoulders of a ravine; they will look up only if I stop, probably scatter if I get out, so I continue moving, very slowly. The temperature is twenty-two below, but the deer are spaced delicately at ease, heads bowed to their feeding scrawls in the snowy earth, and when the ravine hides them again I continue my watch into the grey mist, into its brightening; waiting. And then, imperceptibly, the high hills begin to emerge.
They are very nearly upon me, their folded shapes covered with hoar-frosted trees, the mass of the Cypress Hills like immense, furry animals kneeling down tight together, brilliant as spun glass against the sudden blue sky.
The road ahead vanishes again down into mist, then reappears once more, higher, like a question mark up into the hills.
The Stoney people called them pa-ha-toonga, the Thunder-Breeding Hills.
The “Howdy Stranger” letter continued:
I was accepted by the Red Pheasant Reserve south of Battleford, but I do not know where I truly belong. As you may be aware, in 1885 my family and band were spread all over this continent after the imprisonment of Big Bear. I don’t know where to start, or where to go from here, but I have a will and hopefully you can help to guide me somehow. I have been through a lot in the last few years. I don’t have that much education, just what I’ve learned or I think I’ve learned over the years. I try to fake it a lot; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t […].
Well, once again, I am thirty-one and mother of three children and a stepson. I was born in a place called Kalispell, Montana, and raised in Butte, Montana. My brother was killed by the cops there when I was nine and my family, or what of it we had, went all to hell. My mom went on the AIM [American Indian Movement] march from Wounded Knee to Washington in 1972 to see if she could get anything done about my brother’s death, but came back empty and soon filed for divorce and said she was going back to her people. I stayed with my father, as no one else would and I could not leave him alone like that. All the other kids, minus the one brother who was in prison, went with my mom to Canada. Me, I was pulled back and forth a lot, as I am born with a cleft palate and lip and only in the United States would the Crippled Children’s Fund pay for the repair I needed. I had a hard life and it keeps getting harder. I think it’s a deep sense of true justice and understanding and of true knowledge I search for that keeps me going.
And believe me, death seems a lot easier and a lot less painful at times, but I guess I truly am a sucker for punishment. What can I say? I still hang in. Well, I just wish my life would change for the better at some point. I don’t want to die this way, with nothing settled or overcome. I need to fight, I need to know where I come from and why our race suffers so from the hands of my White brothers. Just because I went through my first thirty years in silence does not mean I went through it blind and deaf as well. If anything, my silence enhanced my keen sense of observation—had to get the dictionary out for that one. All my luck, I probably copied it wrong! …
My mom’s a Cree from a residential school in Sask.; my father is a ex–U.S. Marine of the Norwegian race. My dad was out of the war for a short time when he met my mom, who had also just got out of a hell of her own, the Indian school. Quite a combo, hey? There were seven kids in my family. Anyways, I don’t hold it against them; they tried as best as they knew how. And I love them. I just hate reality, it’s so cruel and unkind. But I hold history responsible for that as well. You see, I’ve spent the last thirty years running from it, but due to imprisonment I was forced to stop running, and that’s so hard.
The car shudders over a cattle guard and I have entered the land of the Nekaneet Cree Nation. The road splits, one branch skirting right around an open slope towards the band office, but the one I want continues up into a fold of hills between the thick-rimed poplars. An occasional, isolated family house is visible behind trees or in a clearing, and then a large driveway breaks away at right angles, left. This must be it. Around a bend a standard wire double gate appears, its two halves swung back wide open, its two posts set into the shoulders of the road and connecting to nothing; no fence, no barbed wire, no warning sign, no suggestion of barrier or clearing, simply the snow and brush and white poplar forest which covers the Cypress Hills, vanishing into itself.
On these slopes that forest has never been touched by either axe or saw, and the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge for Federally Sentenced Aboriginal Women, Correctional Services Canada, Prairie Region, has been built in a narrow space cleared and levelled especially for it. When I get out of the car on the upper level of the parking lot, it seems I am above the entire world. I look north over the flat centre and wings of a low building, past the swallowtail crossings of what must be the poles of a huge wooden teepee rising behind it, and beyond, over the frosted trees and bare white slopes and shoulders of hills, down to prairie. The level land disappears everywhere into horizonless silver under the blue, brightening sun, disappears everywhere north, which is the direction of the Bear and Honesty and the Law of Harmony that subsumes within itself all four of the sacred laws—the control, order, balance, and harmony within Creation.
The double set of entrance doors (this is, after all, a winter country) pull open into a lobby which faces the building’s round inner courtyard, open to sky. The four colours in the floor tiles—yellow, red, blue, white—orient me in the four directions.
The young woman seated at the reception desk knows I am coming, and for whom; I sign the register, name and time, and in a moment Yvonne is there. Smiling, as happy to see me as I am to see her, here, for the first time away from the oppressi
ve stone-and-old-painted-steel monstrosity of the Prison for Women (P4W) in Kingston, where we last saw each other and from where she first wrote to me; tall and slender in sweater, jeans, moccasins. We hug, quick and loose because for her the arms of men have mostly been dangerous, often terrible.
We circle through the building, talking. She introduces me to everyone we meet, all women, almost all apparently Native, and since everyone wears casual working clothes I have no idea from either her introductions or their insignia, if any, what their status is. Inmates here are called “residents,” guards “older sisters,” administrators “aunts,” the warden “Mother.” A circle of young women in the windowed bay of the dining room/lounge is assembling a 1,000-piece Italian landscape puzzle, and an older woman is introduced to me as one of the local Elders—there is one present all the time. She nods and smiles gently, warmly, at me, saying nothing.
“This place is a circle,” Yvonne tells me as we walk the curving corridors. “See, offices inside and outside, and then the extensions on either side are like the spread wings of an eagle. From above it looks just like a flying eagle. With four exit doors, opening to the four directions.”
I hadn’t recognized the eagle shape from above in the parking lot: I have to learn how to look. “It’s amazing,” I say. “So much light, and delicate, beautiful wood. I’ve never seen a building like this.”
“A lot of cedar,” she points out, “the wood of protection. We are all safe inside cedar. It’s an architectural marvel. The Elders said how it should be, and they chose this place. When the government decided to go ahead with the plan that the band here suggested for a new kind of prison, the Elders went looking on this land. No one had ever even hunted here; this hill and trees were sacred. And when they walked here, the tobacco they carried was pulled down, so they laid it on the ground and said, ‘This is the place, build it here, a house for healing our people. Where Elders shall lead.’ ”