by Rudy Wiebe
“Get up again,” I told her, “and I’ll knock you down again.”
She got up, and I came in with a right to the bottom of her jaw, followed by a left cross, and she went down again. She lurched to her feet, and the same thing happened, but she’d called me out and as long as I was up she was the one who had to call it quits. She was lying on the floor—and I never kick—so I dropped into a squat beside her and told her, “Say enough. Say it’s over.”
But she started to get up, and halfway there she grabbed my leg and I tried to push her down—I don’t pull hair—and I had to hop on one leg with my hands on her shoulders so she couldn’t flip me when she got up, both of us trying to keep our balance. I hate wrestling—box and get it over with.
Her old lady tried to break in on us, but the Rep yelled, “One on one, now fuck off!”
She was down and tried to bite my leg. I hate that worse than anything except hair-pulling, and as I hit her I bent too low and she got me by the hair too. So I grabbed hers and she groaned and curled up. But I leaned back, pulled her head up to meet my punches, and hit her face full force at the same time.
I said, “Say it’s over!”
But she wouldn’t. She heaved up and had me by the upper legs and was running me like a linebacker into the sightline of the guard bubble. The Rep yelled, “Not there, not there!” but she kept pushing me right back against the glass wall where the guards can see, so I used the glass as leverage to shove her away.
We both landed right in the laps of the women watching. They struggled to get out from under us, and I wrestled out from under her too. I couldn’t feel anything in my hands any more; she bounced me on one leg across the room and grabbed my hair above the rubber band that holds my braid and it broke. She used all her weight to pull me over by one braid, I was bent across her but not down, I realized we were inside the bathroom door jamb and she had me up against the wall.
I yelled, “This’s the last time you’re touching my hair!” and I got a fistful of hers and banged her head against the steel door. I heard it crack, I could feel from her weight she was going down, but I was so enraged—my hair!—and then a shout: “Six! Six!”
Her old lady, and a young girl were in the doorway, both screaming.
Then: “Yvonne, Yvonne … enough already!”
I was in my cell. Shaking so badly I had to sit down on the bed.
Jane and the other sister showed up at my cell door. They came in, they started to brag me up. But I told them, don’t get into that, I’m no way proud of what happened.
“Just stupid games. We went at each other to give you guys excitement off our pain.”
Then a Jamaican inmate showed up. She said she had covered my back in there and I thanked her; though I knew it was partly because she hated Whites so much. But she didn’t stop there: to my surprise she turned on Jane, whose abuse by Joe was the reason I had made the complaint in the first place.
“How come you left your sister all alone down there?” she said, her usually loud voice even louder. “She coulda been killed!”
Jane looked ashamed. “I really thought someone’d get killed, I didn’t want to get pulled into it.”
“So you just left her, to take it——”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I interrupted. “Thanks again, for the cover, but I’ve got to go, visit my old man.”
“No!”
“Yeah, so please.”
“God, you just taken care of business and you carry on, clean up, go visit—you got jam, girl, and then some!”
I found I could stand again. And there was my name being called over the intercom; time to leave for the visit. The guards said nothing about my hands when they cuffed and shackled me for movement to Collins Bay; they seemed to see nothing and they never asked a thing. Dwa saw how strange my face looked.
“You musta really cut loose on somebody,” he said. “Or did you go through a wall with your bare hands?”
“Real thick wall,” I said. “I never got through.”
He saw how much I hated what I’d done. I laid my head in his lap and we were quiet together through the whole visit. Then our time was up, and I was returned to my cell on the A Range in the Prison for Women. Sore, sad, stupid.
Some stories need to be told, then told again.
A prison like P4W is not a livable reality. You are bombarded with control and instruction and restriction and useless information, endless courses—but what is the point of it all if you’re in for life and never get a chance to live freely what you’re supposed to have learned? Inside you can’t live it, and so you never actually know it.
So, prison is no place to recover. From anything, either the grief of memory, or loss, or abuse, or the diseases of addiction. But if you’re a Native and you can get the help to seek and find and claim your spiritual name, a lot can be changed. You can discover your destiny. Your life can bridge back to the origins of your family and people, you can seek out your colours, your clan, your spirit keepers. You may find the self you never knew you were.
As Jung explains it, you can “emerge into your own myth.”
I had laid Jung’s book Memories, Dreams, Reflections down open, to keep my page. And I saw on the back cover that he died five months after my conception: 6 June 1961: four months later I was born. Something to think about. He writes:
It seemed to me that one’s duty was to explore daily the will of God (the Creator). I could only conclude that apparently no one knew about this secret […]. I knew from experience that grace was accorded only to one who fulfilled the will of God (the Creator) […]. It was then that it dawned on me: I must take responsibility, it is up to me how my fate turns out […].
From the very beginning I had a sense of destiny, as though my life was assigned to me by fate and had to be fulfilled. This gave me an inner security, and, though I could never prove it to myself, it proved itself to me. I did not have this certainty it HAD ME [Yvonne’s capitals] […]. I was outside time, I belonged to the centuries; and He who gave answer was He who had always been.
Jung was so right, to my own understanding, when he spoke of “bloody struggles” and “ultimate testing.” I had those for sure. And at the end of his life, in the chapter “Visions,” he is right again:
It was only after the illness that I understood how important it is to affirm one’s own destiny. In this way we forge an ego that does not break down when incomprehensible things happen; an ego that endures the truth, and that is capable of coping with the world and with fate. Then, to experience defeat is also to experience victory.
An ego that endures the truth. My great-great-grandfather Big Bear was deeply connected to Bear. He was a carrier of the bundle of the Bear Spirit, and his body died during a blizzard on the Little Pine Reserve in Saskatchewan, 17 January 1888, and—as they say—was buried on the banks of the Battle River where it flows on to Hudson Bay and into the world water of the oceans. Before I was born, before I emerged as flesh from my mother, my spirit’s name was Medicine Bear Woman.
Receiving my name gave me a way to adapt the problems of my past to the possibilities of my future, however restricted and controlled it would be. My existence would fulfil what the Creator intended for me.
I must tell the story again.
One day in 1992, after I had been door and firekeeper for the sweat lodge inside P4W for over a year, I offered tobacco to the Elder who was visiting us then, Vern Harper, and asked him (“Be careful what you ask for!”) if I could receive my spirit name. He was always joking, and this was so serious I joked too:
“I don’t want, you know, a name like ‘Speckled Frog Sitting on a Stump,’ something like that!”
He laughed with me. But he said nothing, so I continued to keep the sweat-lodge area clean, to close the entrance of the lodge when he and the Sisters of the Hood went inside. I kept the fire burning to heat the stones, and I waited. He visited regularly but said nothing. I was struggling, trying to prepare myself for the appeal of my
sentence in October.
Then one day when I was again carrying and placing the stones in the lodge pit, he said to me, “You’re coming in today.”
In the fourth round, after he had sung and prayed, Vern told me my name. And also my colours, which I had not asked for.
I knew the name was true. My grandma Flora had called me that; I could hear her voice saying it. My place was behind her wood stove, warm and quiet, and she talked in the shifting light of a wick burning in animal fat:
Muskeke Muskwa Iskwewos. Say it.
And now I knew certainly that I was a spirit in the physical world, I knew I had a destiny. Maybe now a lot of what I always thought was insane in my life, what drove me crazy trying to understand, maybe I could deal with it. As Carl Jung writes, “We cannot think of the physical life of civilized man except in terms of problems. It is the growth of consciousness that we must thank for the existence of problems: they are the dubious gift of civilization.”
When I got back from my visit with Dwa at Collins Bay, I was called to Medical, and they asked to see my hands. The nurse said staff had reported damage to my hands; they feared they might be broken. What had happened to them? They know I never report anything, I don’t gossip or personally complain, but they could see my hands and I’d thought of something.
“I was late for lock-up,” I said, “running too fast for the stairs, so I reached up and hit the steel pole on the handrails with my knuckles, the back of my hand.”
She didn’t look at me, just studied my hand. Then she said, “Both hands? It looks like there could be broken bones in there. I’ll send you for x-rays.”
They did not tell me what they found. I was given Tylenol Threes with codeine, a very big drug for anyone in P4W. I couldn’t hold the little medicine cup they were in, so I dumped them over into my palm. They helped, immediately. And I walked away with my sleeves pulled down over my hands, but everyone knew I was on the Med line and the gossip went around, “How did she get Threes?”
The woman I fought couldn’t get out of bed. I heard that some inmates were giving her their Meds for her pain and that she was deaf in one ear from a broken eardrum. I went to my cell and prayed; not for myself, but for what was going on, and all I now had to do.
For two years I’d been working in Crafts on a special shield. I finished it now with an eagle on it, the messenger of the Creator. Then I went to her cell on the range and asked if I could talk with her. Her girlfriend was with her; it was the first time since the fight that I had seen either of them. There was a strange smell in the cell: she was lying flat on her bed.
She tried to sit up. I could see it was hard, and she hid her face from me. I bent my face to the floor to give her as much privacy as I could in that cramped space.
“I brought you a gift,” I said. “A sort of peace offering.”
I presented the shield to her, and for a moment she said nothing. I couldn’t look at her.
“If you accept it,” I said, “then it’s over. If not … well, I’ll know where we stand. But I’m offering it to you, to let you know I’m really sorry. If you take it, then it’s finished.”
She said, “I’ll be proud to take it. Thank you.”
Both her eyes were black; her whole face one battered bruise. And I started to cry, knowing I’d done that to her. And I told her how sorry I was. I said, “Let’s never play these stupid games for them again.”
And she promised me that. I gave her all the Threes I had, and she told me about her visit to the doctor about her face. She told him she tripped and fell down the stairs, and we laughed aloud, our stories so close. But they also asked her whether she’d been in a fight with me. Why? I asked. Well, your hands and my face, and they keep a suspect file on everything, they’re always piling up files, every inmate carries sixteen tons of paper at least.
I said, “Let them suspect all they want.”
“Well,” she said, “you’re sort of yellow around the cheeks too.”
“That’s nothing to what else you did—every muscle is sore, every bone aches.”
“Let’s see your hands,” she said. I showed her. “Pretty bad, eh?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You’ve got guts, there’s no giving up. You’re a real Cool Hand Luke!”
So we laughed; and she and I agreed we would not shank each other. I went outside to my work in the yard. The Black inmate was there digging out dandelions; they sail in and grow, the stone walls of P4W don’t stop dandelions.
“I told those stupid women long ago,” she said, “leave Yvonne alone, I told ’em, quiet water runs deep. You became the Bear, you swatted her down with a huge paw.”
But I just wanted to be low-profile again. To be left alone.
And I was. Whatever they wrote down on my secret file, my official security rating remained medium. The Healing Lodge for Federally Sentenced Women at Maple Creek, Saskatchewan, was about to open; it would accept only minimum-security inmates, but in September 1995 I was transferred out of P4W with the prayer I would never see it again. I was brought back to the prairies, and for a few months I was held at the Regional Psychiatric Centre, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, less than two hours from Red Pheasant by car. My family has been known to drive farther than that for an evening beer, but no one came to visit me.
The year 1995 was my roughest in prison, even worse than 1993, when I lost my appeal. Maybe Sergeant Burnett’s good letter about me—no one asked him to write it—after he escorted me to North Battleford had something to do with my luck turning. Nothing official was ever said to me about the fight, and in fact, after I was transferred to the Regional Psychiatric Centre in Saskatoon in September, my security rating was dropped from medium to minimum. Then on 11 December 1995, I arrived at the Healing Lodge built in the hills south of Maple Creek on the land of the Nekaneet Cree Nation.
Okimaw Ohci. Still a prison, but with no wall or fence. Just tall poplar trees and air, the sacred ground of the Thunder-Breeding Hills sloping down to the long horizon on the prairie. Thank the Creator.
15
What You Did, and Where You Did It
Today makes it two years I’ve been in prison. Today I remember the pain and suffering not only of myself, but all who were involved. […] When I saw that man’s family in court, I cried within myself for them. As I saw the anger they had. […] I can’t help but want to give the dead man’s family love, love they will need so much. But they will never accept me as long as hate outweighs their pain. I pray they not hate us, because if they do, their little ones suffer. I know the man suffered, and was hurt in a most cruel and bad way. All dignity was taken away in his death. I don’t know if what Shirley Anne said about him was true, and now a lot of people perceive him as a child molester. I don’t know. And truly, who am I to judge? None of it was intended to happen. I did not even hate the man, I pitied him. I don’t know why it happened. I can hate no one, and if I do, it doesn’t last. I do know, if what happened had not happened, I would have tried to help him again. […] I always need time to let the anger pass, then if he had come and we were alone, I know I would have talked to him.
–Yvonne, Journal 1, 15 September 1991
THE HEALING LODGE in the Cypress Hills of southwestern Saskatchewan came into existence because of the Task Force on Federally Sentenced Women. In its report in April 1990, it recommended that the single Kingston Prison for Women—P4W—be replaced by five regional women’s facilities across Canada, and that a “Healing Lodge be established in a prairie location where Aboriginal federally sentenced women may serve all or part of their sentences.” Early in 1991, a Healing Lodge Planning Circle began to make plans and receive submissions, and in February 1994, the Nekaneet Band voted to grant a site for the lodge on its small reserve south of Maple Creek. The Maple Creek/Nekaneet submission was accepted because it “demonstrated a strong tradition of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cooperation, an offering of sacred land … and a strong sense of responsibility.” Construction started in August 1994, and in
December 1995 Yvonne Rose Johnson became the fifth federally sentenced woman to be accepted there.
It was in Okimaw Ohci that Yvonne could finally gather the courage to recall in sequence the crime for which she was sentenced, and the strength to speak it out.
After a ceremonial sweat led by her adopted father, Elder Gordon Oaks of Nekaneet, and further consultation with Elder Pauline Shirt of Toronto, Yvonne chooses a “good, wise” course of action. On 26 December 1996, in the Elder’s apartment at the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge, she speaks for hours into an audio recorder.
She will make five tapes in all and, as she states at the outset, they are there for use by the lawyers who will help her in her case, for me, and also for Judge Lynn Ratushny, head of the Self-Defence-Review (SDR) appointed by the Government of Canada. The purpose of the SDR is to make a “review of cases of women convicted of homicide which occurred in the context of an abusive relationship.”
On 29 December, Yvonne personally gives me a copy of the tapes when I visit her in the presence of Pauline Shirt. I began listening to them on 2 January 1997. I have heard and read about parts of these events before, but this is the first time I hear her speak, in a connected sequence, what she remembers of what happened in the basement of her house in Wetaskiwin, Alberta, on 14 September 1989. In the following excerpts, taken verbatim from the tapes, the events of that dreadful evening are seen through Yvonne’s eyes.
I have taken Pauline Shirt as my Elder, and she is present with me at the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge while I tell this, for spiritual support, guidance, counselling, and for friendship. Today is December 26, 1996. I do this in a ceremonial way, and it is covered under the medicine, and I believe the spirits are here to help me. My sole purpose in doing this is to give it to the Creator, to give it to the spirits in the hope to get some sort of understanding, to put some sort of closure to all of it. To make a bad situation better if possible […]. It’s time for me to be as a medicine bear woman and to deal with these things […]. Please try to hear me with your spirit […]. Then use your mind to do what you think is best […].
