by Rudy Wiebe
By 9:15 a.m. the area is tight with people. It is Monday, and the relatives and friends of all those arrested over the weekend are trying to get into the larger courtroom for the first session. We crowd in and wait as, with great deliberation, the unflappable judge and policemen and occasional lawyer sort out names and birthdates and addresses (if any), and misdemeanours relating to cars, drunkenness, fights, drugs. The arrested are arraigned in a glass cubicle in lots of ten or twelve at a time, and efficiency is aided by the large number of accused men (there are no women) who seem to have irregular but continuing appointments at the court, whose vital statistics of all kinds are on permanent record. Every accused pleads guilty.
Courtroom A is all business and order. Outside its double doors is talk and worry, laughter, tears of spectators passing in and out. To judge from this crowd, at least seventy per cent of Saskatchewan is Cree. To judge from the men the police bring in from the city cells—men with mostly battered faces and wearing worn clothes, but with their long hair slicked back as if they’ve all been hosed down—it’s closer to ninety percent. As Yvonne says, aboriginal crime is very big business in Canada and, according to statistics, it’s worst of all in Saskatchewan.
This isn’t a good place to meet anyone; especially not me her Bear family. For she’s warned me: “They all know I’m writing a book with you. You’re the enemy, so be careful.”
Leon’s trial is scheduled for Courtroom B at 9:30. I look in, it’s small and empty; a place to get away from the crowd, but I want to see all the prisoners arrive. Perhaps I can recognize Leon. But Yvonne has given me no clear picture of him, and there are too many large men with black hair being paraded by, too fast.
It’s easier to identify Cecilia when she comes up the stairs with a group of younger women. She is short, broad, black hair parted and pulled back from her round, classic handsome Cree woman’s face: a visible descendant of Chief Big Bear, solid and formidable as a rock. She glances past me, I’m just another person standing around; I hear her talk to her small circle but cannot decipher what she is saying. She and her companions seem nervous, but familiar with all the courthouse facilities.
After 10:30 the crowd is considerably thinned; Cecilia and a slim woman barely bigger than a child—that must be Laura, Leon’s wife—sit in the tiny visitors’ alcove off the lobby between the courtrooms. I still haven’t introduced myself when three men come down the corridor: a younger and an older RCMP officer, both almost as burly as the handcuffed man they lead between them: this is Leon. Tall, pale skin, good-looking with swept-back, wavy black hair, clean shaven, in a new white-striped shirt, new Lee jeans, and white socks and Brooks shoes. Yvonne has told me it’s tradition: Cecilia always buys Leon new clothes for every court appearance. Despite his shackles he advances with easy confidence, nods to the women waiting for him, a slight grin twitching his lips; Laura gets up and follows close behind. Leon is very big, and even handsomer in profile, despite a double chin. He wears no belt, and his jeans are a bit loose—he may have lost his paunch in jail—to shift them up he must use both cuffed hands.
The trial cannot begin with Karen Sinclair’s testimony: Crown Prosecutor James Taylor spoke to her yesterday, after she arrived from Winnipeg, and there was no sign then that she was under the influence of alcohol, but this morning she was tested at 100 milligrams. Several hours will help, and the judge decides to begin with the testimony of witness Phyllis Stevenson.
While the court takes a short break to locate Ms. Stevenson, Laura returns to the lobby and reports to Cecilia, who has remained outside. The younger police officer talks to Cecilia as well, and after a moment she looks up at me, steadily. So I go to her in the crowd.
“Hello, are you Mrs. Cecilia Knight?”
“Yes.”
“I’m very glad to meet you. I’m Rudy Wiebe, I’m a friend of your daughter Vonnie. I’ve visited her in Kingston.”
She has already deduced who I am. And it is obvious that mentioning Yvonne’s familiar family name and my friendly visits to P4W doesn’t help; she suspects I know she has never gone to visit Yvonne in prison, though under the Correctional Services Canada visitation program she has been offered an airline ticket every year.
She confronts me quickly: “You the guy that’s helping her write a book?”
“We’ve talked about that, yes.”
Everyone, including the RCMP constables, is watching us, listening. Her heavy eyebrows clench over her intense black eyes.
“You write anything about our family”—she gestures at the closed courtroom door—“you’ll answer to me.”
Later this afternoon, after I have met Karen and listened to her testify, I will tell Cecilia: “Yvonne’s life story is her own. No one, not even you, can forbid her to tell it the way she remembers and knows it to be.”
But now, at her direct challenge, I can’t find a single word—what did I expect? But in front of all these witnesses?—and she turns, walks back into the visitors’ cubicle.
“The Provincial Court of Saskatchewan at North Battleford; October 18, 1993: In the matter of Her Majesty the Queen versus Leon Ray Johnson, who stands charged that between the 1st day of May, 1992, and the 1st day July, 1992, at Red Pheasant Indian Reserve in Saskatchewan, he did commit a sexual assault on Karen Sue Sinclair. That she is his sister is admitted.”
Witness Phyllis Stevenson
[from her court testimony and cross-examination]:
Karen Sinclair is married to my brother. We started getting close because we confided in each other, my husband was abusing me and my brother tries to control Karen by scaring her—she gets scared easily. Last year we were living in Winnipeg, I was separated from my husband then, and Karen wanted me to meet her relatives in Saskatchewan. [Phyllis tells the familiar story about an all-night party at Leon’s house with lots of twelve-packs available. At one point] I went upstairs to the washroom, when I came back Leon pushed me and I was scared. He sort of shoved me aside, on my arm, he didn’t say anything but I was scared, I went outside and sat in the bushes behind the house. It was somewhere after midnight and I was wondering how I’d get home. Then Laura, Leon’s wife called me, so I went back in the house […]. Laura said Leon and Karen were in the basement and I was going to go down there but she said I shouldn’t go, eh, I shouldn’t bother. So I went out […] and sat in the car. I locked all the doors and fell asleep. Then Karen came out, she was in a really big hurry […]. We drove to North Battleford. Her eyes were all red, and she picked up some Visine for her eyes and we stopped at McDonalds, [her daughter] wanted to eat, and when she was out of earshot Karen started to cry. She wouldn’t tell me immediately what was wrong, but finally she just said that Leon was on top of her and she pushed him off and she didn’t elaborate. She started to get hysterical, so I just comforted her. I held her in my arms and she cried on my shoulder.
Crown Prosecutor James Taylor: Did Karen want to report it to the police or not?
Answer: She did, and I told her not to because—because her mother had recently had a heart attack and I didn’t think it would—I told her they should discuss it amongst themselves in the family before they went—before she went ahead and did this, like.
Karen enters the courtroom at 2:30 and walks, without looking to either side, directly into the witness box. When she looks up, she sees me sitting at the elbow of the policeman guarding Leon, and she smiles at me—a first from a Johnson other than Yvonne. Her dark brown hair is tied back from her pale, rather drawn face; a small, trim woman in black jeans and shirt. And handsome like all her siblings I have seen: physically, the Creator has truly been kind to this family.
Karen tells another familiar story, of years of enduring violent physical attacks by Leon, and of sexual advances—which, unlike Yvonne, she says she could rebuff. And then, the night of the party,
we were drinking, smoking, talking. To be honest with you, I got loaded […]. I drank till I blacked out, the last thing I remember is sleeping downstairs, next thing was be
ing woke up on the living room couch, upstairs. Leon on top of me. He had ahold of my hips and was bringing my hips to him and his body was on top of me. He was very very heavy, I could hardly breathe.
Crown Prosecutor Taylor: And what was Leon doing?
Answer: He was having intercourse with me.
Crown Prosecutor: What did you do?
Answer: My exact words were, “Get the fuck off me,” and I was pushing, with both hands against his chest. He got off of me, pulled up his pants, sat down on the couch that was next to the couch I was on. And I looked for my pants and pantie, I was holding my shirt like this and my bra was still on but I couldn’t find the rest […].
Counsel for the Defence Mignealt: You don’t know whether you were the aggressor in having him have intercourse with you?
Answer: I know myself, no, I was not. I never said anything, I didn’t want anybody to find out and then my husband went and got drunk and blabbed it all over the place. It was something I just wanted to keep to myself and not nobody know, but everybody knows now.
Counsel for the Defence: I understand the Winnipeg police came to you because of a statement your sister Yvonne made against Leon. Did you see the statement?
Answer: I saw it. There was a very thick one sitting on the police table. I did not read it. The officer asked me if I wanted to charge Leon and without hesitation I told him, “Yes.”
Counsel for the Defence: You say you didn’t read Yvonne’s statement, but were you aware of its contents?
Answer: Yes. I didn’t have to read it, because Yvonne told me.
Crown Prosecutor: Karen, as you were growing up, living with all your brothers and sisters, during those times did you have any suspicions about anything happening between Leon and Yvonne of a sexual nature?
Answer: Yes.
Crown Prosecutor: Did you ever see anything?
Answer: No, not actually seen it. [But] I was pretty sure, yeah, the suspicions were very strong, yes, yes.
Cecilia never enters the courtroom. During a brief recess in the afternoon I see her alone in the visitors’ alcove and quickly, gathering my nerve, I go to the door and ask her if I can come in, sit down. Her greeting is non-committal, she’s obviously thinking of something else, so I sit down.
Over noon I have had lunch with Jim Taylor. He is a stocky, oddly gentle man for what I still think of as the necessarily aggressive profession of Crown Prosecutor; he’s been doing it for many years, and not much that happens in or out of a courtroom surprises him. He told me that it was Cecilia and Minnie who had been drinking with Karen in her hotel room till four in the morning; it was he who put her in a cell for four hours to make sure she would be sober enough by the afternoon to testify.
But now, Cecilia is explaining to me how persecuted Leon is. She is full of defences for him: it all happened when he was a kid, everyone does stupid things when they’re young, the police have got it in for him, they just want to throw away the key on him for life. She says nothing about Karen, or why she would lay such a personally painful charge against her own brother, though it seems to me she must know every detail of it—it happened only sixteen months ago. Rather, she tells me without prompting that she was in Winnipeg babysitting as usual at the time the alleged offence took place; that when she was young her brothers tried to do things to her too but they sure as hell never got anywhere.
Young? I think: at the time of the rape, Karen was thirty-three, Leon thirty-six.
Yvonne has explained a great deal to me of how her family works, its enormous capacity for evasion, and listening to Cecilia I see her account corroborated. Behind Cecilia’s defiant words to me I recognize her attempts to save her beloved Leon from the charges of sexual abuse that two of his sisters and a cousin have, after as long as twenty years, finally dared lay against him. Getting Karen drunk before her courtroom appearance did not prevent Leon’s case from going ahead, but I know Cecilia is trying stronger tactics on Yvonne. She told Yvonne a few months earlier that if she dropped her charges against Leon and he got out of jail, Leon would run for a seat on the Red Pheasant Band Council and when he got elected he’d get the band to support Yvonne with money and lawyers in her appeals of her life sentence. The band, she said, would help get her out of prison.
This seemed to me no believable plan of action. It sounded more like blackmail: if you lay off Leon, I’ll help you with your appeals. But help how? Keep Leon out of prison and he’ll be elected to band council? That sounds ludicrous to anyone who knows anything about reserve politics. Yvonne refused to play along with Cecilia’s suggestions, and on 6 April 1993 she went so far as to send a three-page personal letter to the Red Pheasant Council giving them a detailed history of Leon’s unretributed violence against his family members. She concluded: “My silence kept him safe in the past, but I will not be silenced ever again.”
Do I tell Cecilia I know any of this, in the few moments we see each other in the tiny waiting room of the North Battleford Courthouse? No. She is polite to me, speaking loudly about generalities I already know, but I sense she could as easily explode as she is, for the moment, civil. I ask her the most neutral question I can think of: how is she related to Big Bear? But she will explain nothing; by siding with Yvonne I have become, as Yvonne has told me, “the family enemy.”
I ask her about Yvonne. Cecilia’s very worried about Vonnie, from prison she is saying such things, writing such crazy letters—she does not mention the band letter directly—so many crazy things, some of it is hate mail. She tells me Vonnie’s White grandfather abused her, yes, and her White father too, but nothing else that girl says now ever happened, it’s just not true, and maybe all the drinking she’s done all her life, and drugs, and now that life sentence in jail, maybe she is crazy. Gone just plain crazy.
I could ask Cecilia: if her daughter Yvonne is “crazy,” why has she never once visited her in prison? Gone to talk face to face, offer her some comfort and help? Why this destructive, emotional blackmail for Leon’s sake?
I could ask, and maybe I should. But I simply don’t have the nerve, sitting there, her implacable face so close. Perhaps I’m too intimidated by all I know of this afflicted family where both social and personal violence perpetuate themselves like cancers, from one generation to the next until, in despair, they can only accuse each other of brutality and lies in a public court where any Canadian who cares to can come and listen and know of it.
And at least part of the reason for my silence is Big Bear. I am as White as the Treaty Six negotiators whom he confronted in 1876, and today, in these North Battleford courtrooms, I have seen the prophecy in Big Bear’s declaration to those government men:
“When I see you there is one thing that I dread: to feel the rope around my neck.”
A prophecy being fulfilled in Canadian courtrooms day after day, in dreadful ways not even he could have foreseen 120 years ago.
What I do tell Cecilia is that I’ve talked to Yvonne for days at a time, I have read thousands of pages of her letters and personal journals, and she not only reads but she also writes out analyses of large, difficult books of fiction, history, and psychology. I have worked with highly intelligent people at universities all my life and to me she appears to be not at all “crazy.” Her memories are bizarre, yes, and sometimes horrible and grotesque, but they are invariably consistent. She impresses me as a very intelligent woman who is daring for the first time to think through and understand what her life has truly been, and what has been done to her.
I see the expression on Cecilia’s face and I stop talking; we look at each other for a moment silently. I think: she has long ago chosen which child she will support absolutely—it seems she cannot support them all—and now she is as immovable as a mountain, a strength commensurate with everything I have grasped in almost four decades of thinking and researching and writing about Big Bear.
She is little more than a year older than I. We both know the sometimes overwhelming, inexpressible pain that can happen in families,
pain from which our memories will never find an escape. But to simply deny it? Face to face in the small room, I am weak in the knowledge of all she has already endured, and must continue to endure.
And I feel relieved—even as I feel shame at my relief—when she gets up abruptly, walks past me, disappears into the crowded lobby.
Accused Leon Johnson
[condensed from his court testimony and cross-examination]:
I’m the leader there, the man of the house, I’ve got to watch my house and my kids so I slacked off on the drinking. Karen kept pushing the beer and the pot. So this time when Phyllis went upstairs, you know, it’s one of the deals, you always watch where everybody’s at in the house, especially on Reservations. I was listening downstairs for Phyllis, where she was at, and when she come out of the bathroom she went into our children’s room, so I went upstairs to see what was going on. She was all the way into the bedroom so I got Phyllis and took her out of the room and I say, “You can’t go in there.” And I went downstairs and told Karen I’d threw Phyllis out of the house and why, because she wouldn’t, you know, leave the kids’ room alone. So Karen just partied on, she says, “Drink brother, here, drink brother,” bringing me beers. I’ve seen my sister drink to excess before, but not like that night […].
Counsel for the Defence Mignealt: Okay. Now, was there any act of intercourse that evening?
Answer: No, none at all.
Crown Prosecutor Taylor: You say Karen’s the one who’s standing naked in the basement. Is it your view that this is all Karen’s fault?”
Answer: Exactly.
Crown Prosecutor: How much of the past twenty years, since you were sixteen, have you spent in jail?
Answer: About eight to ten years flat time inside, locked up.
