by Rudy Wiebe
“No one from my family?” she asked.
“You better talk to your family, about what they said in court.”
Yvonne phoned Karen later from P4W, but Karen told her little except that the police had “yanked them around,” they would not allow them to visit her; security, Karen said. Yeah, Yvonne comments to me, “if they really wanted to come, they’d find a connection, Mom was in good with my escorting officers. I’m not stupid, I’ve been in the system seven years now.” She knew that the RCMP had searched for Cecilia in town and personally told her to visit Yvonne. After Karen’s case against Leon, both the prosecution and the defence had evaluated Cecilia as a “good woman” caught in a bad situation, having a court search through her children’s violence against each other. She personally told Leon’s defence lawyer after Karen’s trial,
“I support both my kids, but you get caught in the middle, and you really don’t know what’s going on all the time. All my life my kids never told me things, that I’m starting to learn about now.”
And the defence lawyer added at Leon’s sentencing, “To some extent, I think if there’s a victim, it’s her. Because she’s a … she’s a good woman.
Yvonne says that she believes in her heart that her mother is a good woman. But she also thinks that at some point Cecilia made her decision: she would back her son, even if it meant going against her daughters. She refused to be drawn into Karen’s trial, but in Yvonne’s she chose to take the stand; once there, there was a lot she could not remember, or that she had never seen. But as Yvonne pointed out, “If Mom says she can’t remember, or saw nothing, then how can she say nothing happened?”
For Yvonne, the situation ultimately turned again on her mother’s life of deny, deny. By continuing to say, “It never happened, Vonnie, nothing was going on, if you say it did you’re crazy,” her mother—despite her good intentions—simply perpetuated the silence that allows abuse in the family to go on, and on.
Yvonne found the holding cell worse after the verdict, four yellow cement walls. She was there for two more days—“I smoke like mad, a smoke was all I knew I had […]. my stay in the cells was spent crying”—before they flew her back to Kingston. Alone except for an Elizabeth Fry Society woman: “She came and stayed with me, she gave me real support. She let me ramble and pace and smoke, she was short and dark, from Asia I think, and I taught her old Johnny Cash songs to give her a flavour of jail. She told me she saw me as a very strong, spiritual person.”
And one fifteen-minute visit from her mother.
Cecilia came for a security visit under supervision in the visiting room: Yvonne writes me she must have deliberately asked for that, in order to keep it short and controlled. There were police officers—at times as many as six—listening all the time, and Yvonne recognized in her mother that cockiness she gets when she has won something. Yvonne had taken Leon to court to confront and expose him for what he had done, but also to reach the family, to achieve some understanding and—best of all—change. But her mother had seen it as a challenge, and now that the jury had declared Leon “not guilty” it seemed to Yvonne her mother was in effect telling her, “You gave it your best shot, and you lost. You tried, but not even a jury of Whites believes you, three members of the family have gone up against him now and it’s over, he’s clean, now let the past lie.” So the court had vindicated her for backing Leon all along: she had won.
Would her mother have come to see her even for fifteen minutes if the verdict had gone the other way? She wouldn’t come earlier when Yvonne needed support, so why was she bothering now? Yvonne writes with some bitterness, “I feel she [visited me] for the sake of show. The whole thing was exciting to her.” To show the cops here’s this poor, afflicted mother with her violent, crazy kids, and she still tries, she still cares for them all, even the worst. It’s not her fault, she’s the one to feel sorry for.
The police banged on the door, “Two minutes!”
Cecilia said to Yvonne, “I love you.”
Eight months later Yvonne writes me, still with the pain remembered from that moment:
“I told her I feared for all of them from Leon. That’s when I saw fright, and what seemed almost a breaking of some sort in her, yet her comeback was quick. She said, ‘I’m tougher than that, he can’t get this old bag down.’
“Her big boy would walk free again, despite all she knows he’s done. In her happiness, her words, ‘Now don’t cry, forget it,’ hit me very hard.
“But I was obedient. I told her as I hugged her, ‘And I too love you, I really do, Mom.’ I looked in her eyes and I saw a little give, they seemed to fog a bit and she grabbed me for a hug.
“ ‘Yvonne,’ she said, ‘I’ll help you get out. But be careful what you write, we still have to live here, you know.’
“Then she parted my company, walking out of my life as always.”
When Cecilia left, she cracked a joke Yvonne couldn’t hear; the RCMP officers gathered in the corridor laughed, and then the door closed.
14
Spirit Keepers
Reason sets the boundaries [of life] far too narrowly for us […]. Day after day we live far beyond the bounds of our consciousness; without our knowledge, the life of the unconscious is also going on within us. The more critical reason dominates, the more impoverished life becomes; but the more of the unconscious […] we are capable of making conscious, the more of life we integrate.
–Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
In August 1995, Yvonne writes to me from Kingston:
Something low and dark came to visit me in the North Battleford cells, and I feared it when I should not have, as to fear is to give it a way in. I smudged and cleansed the area, praying to send it back where it came from. I’ve had nothing but bad luck [in P4W] since court, which, I believe, was caused by whatever came, to kill me or take my spirit. It could not, so it follows me to raise hell in my life instead here. I know now not to acknowledge it in spirit, I will let it die out by not giving it any energy from my sorrows and worries. Then it must go away, as it has no control. I must believe in the protection that’s over me.
Yvonne had managed life in the Prison for Women for four years, living as quietly and as withdrawn as possible—doing her daily work, her classes, her crafts, studying and writing, being active in the Native Sisterhood, and working with me on her book, which, she told me “all her family feared.” Now, just days before the old “dysfunctional labyrinth of claustrophobic and inadequate spaces”—as Judge Louise Arbour called P4W—was to be permanently closed, this “something low and dark” came there to raise chaos in Yvonne’s personal life. And it used the normal, ongoing inmate and guard interaction—“endless game-playing bullshit” as Yvonne calls it, the worst elements of which she had managed to avoid for four years—to do so.
Yvonne: I’m scheduled to be taken to Collins Bay in fifteen minutes for my regular visit with Dwa. I have to be ready, have to get cleaned up. I have to get back unnoticed to my cell, quick, get myself cleaned up!
I walk out of the crowded bathroom into the open area of the Activity Building. Twenty inmate women stare at me, some deadpan, others crying, all speechless. And I do a fast scan to see if anyone else is coming for me, no, and I see my jacket on the floor where I placed it. I scoop it up—but my fingers barely move, my hands are swelling up so fast now I can’t get them through the sleeves: I have to unzip the jacket sleeves to the elbow with my teeth before I can get it on. My hair is in braids but sticks up where fistfuls of it were yanked out and I try to pat it down, and I can’t with my hands and I have no brush on me, I get out the door and head for my cell, my jacket covers the blood on my shirt and I have to get to my cell, quick, alone.
I hear a knock on the security glass: a woman on the upper range lifts her arm high in the Native salute, “Well done!”
She’s been in P4W longer than anyone. I nod to her, I’m walking on automatic in the right direction, walk normal, if the guards grab me it will mo
st likely happen before I reach my cell. I know every wall and corner and staircase and iron bar in every P4W building, but now all I see is Jane’s back, going away along the top range towards her cell.
It all started because of Jane, a Native sister.
Just get back to your cell, your own small hole in the long range. Walk normal.
Everything grows bright and sharp. As I walk I begin to shake. I smell something odd—it’s on my own breath, like ether—and I can’t feel my heart pounding, though I know it must be. I try to touch myself and I feel nothing. Because my hands are destroyed?
It was the young White girl who got us to stop fighting. She hissed, “Six! Six!” meaning the guards were coming, and she gave me a shove because she’s new and doesn’t know any better.
I get into my cell. Its familiar—false of course—feel of protection. I’m alone for a minute, and do a fast body check: if someone comes at me now, I’ll really have to take it to my limit, head, feet, teeth, whatever, because my hands are gone. Like they’re frozen, so I hold my brush between them and brush my hair down against my stinging scalp as best I can. The pressure in my hands builds, they’re stretching tight from the inside out, my hands seem like they’ll burst.
I have to look in a mirror, assess the damage. If the guards notice there’ll be endless questions that have to be answered and I don’t want to think that fast now—but there’s not a scratch. I don’t recognize myself. It’s the face of a stranger.
And I almost cry out in fear: according to the Elders, if your spirit leaves your body, you will not be able to recognize yourself.
My body is the house of my spirit. If my body does something my spirit does not agree with, it may leave my body. My body will be empty.
Or shift-change … into what? The Elders say when you shift-change you have called something from within yourself to the surface; it has taken you over to deal with whatever is necessary. Has my spirit been ripped from me? Has it hidden itself because it could not endure what I was doing?
By the rules of P4W, what I did was fair enough. But brutal. I can only bend my head and hate what I’ve just done. I lost it in there. Twenty inmates in the Activity Building watching, and I lost it completely. For the first time in prison. In six years.
My downfall was trying to help Jane, an abused woman who’s being abused some more in here. While I’m trying to get ready to go to North Battleford and face Leon in court, she comes day after day, crying, “I’m so scared, Yvonne. He’s after me all the time, what can I do?”
Yes, what? He’s Joe, a staff member who positions himself to watch us undress when we change to go to the sweat lodge. And takes pictures too, everybody knows it, using the P4W camera. Then here’s this short, stocky Ojibway woman who’s been beaten up all her life, crying to me, “Yvonne, you stick to yourself, you’re strong enough to go it alone here, you got the strength to haul your brother into court! What can I do?”
So, what can I do? She’s my sister in the ’Hood. Even the guards are so worried about her, one evening they ask me to stay with her in her cell all night. I do. And I know I have to make a stand.
I file a formal complaint against Joe, and shit starts to fly. In my complaint about his activities I make the mistake of dropping an inmate’s name as well, a White woman involved with Joe for a long time, who hates our Sisterhood so much—when she first came in I was chair of the ’Hood—that she tried to organize a “White” group to give them as much clout, she said, as the Native and Black Sisterhoods had. She never got anywhere with that, but she keeps pushing us and now she says she’s going to take me to court for libel. I tell her, “Fine, then I’ll be able to tell the whole world, and you’ll give me the legal means to do it.”
But then suddenly, in February 1995, P4W hits the national TV news with a leaked film-clip of the 22 April 1994 riot where six Native inmates are strip-searched naked by an all-male Institutional Emergency Response Team (IERT) and thrown into isolation shackled, crouching naked for days in bare steel-and-concrete boxes. The IERT guys took the video of themselves doing it, and it’s very rough. Correctional Services Canada (CSC) circles their wagons; they go nuts about inmate complaints, especially Natives. In April 1995 the government appoints a Commission of Inquiry into Certain Events at the Prison for Women, and Judge Louise Arbour comes right into P4W to see us. She’s sharp, tough; she goes around looking at everything and talks to inmates with no CSC people around, they can’t bullshit her. The warden of P4W was kicked into retirement, and CSC was spinning from all the publicity.
After seven tons of paper, I know my little complaint about one White guy screwing a Native inmate is impossible; there’s no way after this investigation I’ll ever come out ahead on this with CSC, and to get it out of the way I retract. I withdraw my statement as a lie.
Though every inmate knows what I reported was the truth. And Correctional Services Canada knows it too.
When I withdrew my complaint, it was open season on me as far as the White woman was concerned, the one I’d named. I had been moved from my house on the wing to a cell on the A Range when I tried to organize an abused women’s group, and after I returned from the disaster in North Battleford in late June, I was just messed up, barely surviving. I felt so vulnerable I packed a shank when I left my cell; I held it between my teeth when I took a shower. Though I tried to cover up, never show weakness, I started to shiver when I walked down the long corridors. But when the deal went down at the end of August I didn’t pack, because I was scared I’d use it—which would have been worse.
I was trying to stay low, I was trying to walk my spiritual path. I did not even know if I could fight sober—I never had. But if you feel forced to make a stand, you do.
I was completely exhausted by the Leon trial, my mind strung out with what happened there. The endless guard and inmate gossip about me got so bad, yet no one would directly confront me, that I couldn’t go on, I had to get the bullshit cleared up, so one day in August, just before I was due to go to Collins Bay to visit Dwa, I went to the Activity Building, to the area where the Blacks sit.
“Look,” I said, “does anyone have a problem with me? If so, let’s go to the laundry room and talk it over.”
No, they said, no way. And they’re friendly, like they usually are to me. “Hey Yvonne, don’t let no White bitches play with you.”
So I went to the next room, and the women there said “No” too. So I went to the kitchen area and asked. Same thing, no problem.
But one of the Blacks was running her mouth up and down the ranges, saying I was challenging everyone. And as I was in my cell, talking to a new arrival, a voice yelled out down the range: “Unit meeting, in the Activity Building!”
That means all the inmates on one range are to hold a meeting without direct guard supervision. I go, but I’m careful; I don’t pack a shank. We stand or sit in a circle and the inmate Unit Rep does all the talking: she says everybody’s getting too tense, who gives a fuck about some staff asshole anyways. Then she comes to the point:
“Yvonne, stop getting in everyone’s face. We all know what you did, you told us yourself.”
She was talking about my dropping an inmate’s name when making a complaint on a staff member, and she pushed her face up to mine, so close I could look right down her throat. She was talking, though I don’t know what she said. I was watching her mouth move, her throat open.
Then she stopped. About twenty women sitting around or standing there, quiet. We’re supposed to have privacy for unit meetings. The guards can’t see us, but they’ve got two-way speakers and can hear it all, and sometimes they come around the corner and tell us whatever they please. But this time they didn’t move out of their bubble.
I said to the face up against mine, “Okay, I did that. Now do you have a personal problem with me?”
She walked across the room to her friends, hesitated, then turned from beside her friends and said, yes. Yes, she has a problem.
“You got my old lad
y involved too,” she said. “And I’ve got a big problem with that.”
Her old lady was sitting right there, and I could see she’s surprised to hear this. She works in the gym area, but I never mentioned her in my complaint, and all she had to say now was she knew nothing. But she didn’t explain.
“Okay,” I said. “I apologize if you got involved.”
I stood by myself in a corner of the room and the Unit Rep yelled, she thinks loud is authoritative, “Anybody else got anything to say to Yvonne?”
Another woman spoke up. I’d challenged her girlfriend the day before because she sided with staff on an issue, and she backed down at my challenge. But then, to save face, she lied to her woman; she told her she’d backed down only because I threatened to shank and gang-pile her.
“… if you get outa line again, Yvonne,” the old lady of the woman who backed down at my challenge was still yapping, “I’ll smash your face, I’ll knock.…”
I was so sick and tired of all this, finally I just said, “You want a piece of me?”
She’d talked herself up, everybody had heard her. “Yeah,” she said. “Fucken right I do.”
“Okay, I’m here. Let’s dance.”
I took off my jacket, the one with zippers at the wrists. She came at me running, and I went into my boxing stance the way Leon taught me, legs braced, knees slightly bent. She came on swinging wildly, but when I fight I shut off my pain. I hit her with three rights and a left jab and she hit the floor.
