“Dear God!” Paul said. “Where did these last ones happen?”
“A little community in northern Quebec called Namusat,” Dan said. There was a long pause; Paul understood his friend was collecting himself.
“The entire town has only three hundred and seventy-eight people. It’s devastating!” Dan said. “Everyone’s in shock... grieving. I’m afraid more kids will do the same thing! We’ve got to stop this somehow, Paul! We’ve just got to!”
“I’m on my way,” Paul said.
“Three of our national elders have agreed to meet with the local council,” Dan said. “They’ll be here in a couple of days. Can you come then too?”
“Yes, of course,” Paul said. “I’d very much appreciate hearing what the elders have to say. Are you meeting in Namusat?”
“Yes,” Dan said. “It’s very remote. You’ll have to fly in. Are you sure you can come?”
“Of course!” Paul said. “Can you make sure my visit is low key? No titles, no fanfare, and no big promises or raised expectations. If anyone asks, please tell them I’m just there to learn. Agreed?”
“That makes sense,” Dan said. “In the past, too many politicians and bureaucrats have swooped in with much publicity and many promises. Nothing happened. Nothing changed.”
“Maybe, Dan, we’ll find the same thing... that there’s nothing we can do... that it’s beyond our modest understanding and abilities. Are you prepared for that? Are the elders?”
“Yeah, sadly,” Dan replied. “Hope it doesn’t come to that Paul. We’ve been there many times before.”
“Meet you there in a few days,” Dan said. “And Paul...”
“Yes, Dan?”
“You are my brother,” he said.
There was a long silence.
“Gotcha.”
It was Paul’s turn to choke up.
“Bring a warm parka and sleeping bag” Dan said. His voice sounded stronger. “It’s winter up there, you know... often forty below. Oh, and Paul?”
“Yes, Dan.”
“Forget your fishing rod... this time.”
Both men welcomed the humor.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Namusat, Quebec
“Another two just last night!” Dan Stonechild said. “That’s four suicides here in three weeks. Good God, Paul! Four!”
Paul had just climbed out of a chartered ski plane in the remote First Nations community in northern Canada.
Their embrace was awkward. Both wore knee-length parkas against the bitter cold. Their hands were deep into double-layered mittens, with feet thrust into calf-high fur mukluks.
As they began walking toward town, Paul noticed that snow banks on both sides of the narrow airstrip reached well above their heads.
Dan’s words tumbled out as he struggled with his composure.
“Two young girls... friends,” Dan added. His caring eyes glistened. “Just fourteen years old. Oh God, Paul! Four suicides in this one tiny community! When will it end?”
Paul’s research had revealed the primary cause of suicides among native youth was a lack of hope… despair, having realized that their futures would almost inevitably lead them into alcoholism and drug abuse, just like their parents, siblings, friends, and others in the community. They’d chosen suicide as the preferred alternative.
While the two men walked, Paul scanned the small village. Accumulated snow reached halfway up the squat walls of ramshackle homes and other equally decrepit buildings. The winding roads, haphazardly connected, formed a crisscrossed confusion of narrow passageways piled high with snow on both sides.
Most homes looked unfit for human habitation, but were in obvious use. Wood smoke rose casually out of rusting metal chimneys perched at odd angles on the snow-laden roofs, the eaves host to long thick icicles, many reaching down into the deep snow.
Paul watched as innocent little children ran in all directions on the roads playing made-up games, oblivious to both the frigid temperature and the tragedies that had descended upon their hometown. Dogs joined them, loping and sniffing here and there, occasionally lifting a hind leg beside the snow outcroppings, marking their passage with yellow stains to combine with their predecessors’.
On what seemed like the main road, Paul saw half a dozen lone adults walking slowly, heads down en-route to unknown destinations. A few vehicles, mostly pickups and snowmobiles were stopped on the sides of the road belching exhaust in the thirty below temperatures from engines left idling to keep warm. Other vehicles, looking distressed and unloved, squatted in front yards deep in the snow, some windowless, their engine hoods yawning skyward on behalf of their rusting bodies.
“Are the elders here yet?” Paul asked.
“They came early,” Dan said. “Been meeting since yesterday.”
He turned away self-consciously to wipe at his damp eyes and nose, his mittens dangling from bright red strings that disappeared up the sleeves of his deerskin parka. He blew his nose and said, “They’re waiting for us now at the school. It’s Saturday so there are no classes, of course. The principal said we could use the school this weekend. She asked us to pay for the fuel oil to heat it,” Dan added. “It’s very expensive up here. At night, when the children aren’t in school and on weekends, the heat is turned off to save money.”
Down the road Paul saw a large nameless building he assumed was the school. Most of the paint had peeled off the clapboard siding. On the roof, two frayed blue plastic tarps covered what Paul guessed would be holes in the severely buckled shingles. They were held in place with mismatched strips of weathered wood. The lack of snow on the roof revealed the lack of adequate insulation in the attic.
“Won’t the pipes freeze?” Paul asked.
Dan’s laugh conveyed irony and sadness.
“There’s no running water in the school... never has been,” he said. “Most of the homes don’t have running water. A few did a long time ago, but the water system broke down. There’s no money to fix it.”
“But what,” Paul began.
Dan interrupted, “Wells in summer, and now bottled water and melted snow,” he replied. “And outhouses, mostly. In some cases, they have to throw it into the bushes.”
“Good heavens!” Paul said. “That’s unsanitary... it’s dangerous.”
“Tell me about it, Paul,” Dan said. “It gets worse.”
“This is awful!” Paul said.
“None of these homes was intended to have wood stoves,” Dan said. “These people had to improvise... they had to install their own. Otherwise they’d have frozen to death. Federal bureaucrats years ago decided my people needed new homes... homes with furnaces in the basement. Guess what? No basements were built so there could be no furnaces, and there was no fuel anyway. The houses arrived fully equipped with plumbing. Guess what again? No sewer or water systems either... and no functioning water treatment plant. What kind of message do you think that sends to my people?” Dan asked.
An elderly woman limped out of a narrow walkway leading from an aged house. Bordering the passageway on both sides were six-foot snowbanks. Paul and Dan waited as she walked stiffly toward them, leaning heavily on a homemade cane clasped in her right hand.
“Hello, Emily,” Dan said. He smiled warmly as he embraced the old woman, dressed in a tattered caribou hide parka. “I want you to meet Paul Winston. He’s a friend... came to the meeting of elders.”
Emily Amanust nodded at Paul, shifted the cane to her left hand, and held out her right hand.
“Emily is a retired chief of Namusat,” Dan added. “She is much admired far beyond this reserve for her great wisdom.”
Emily’s expression did not change. Paul watched her look intently at him.
She spoke, her voice sounding weary but strong, and not unkindly, “Many come from outside before you. Maybe they meant good. They just made things worse. Are you one of them?”
“Where do people work?” Paul asked, avoiding the question while trying to inject a more positive tone
.
“We have no jobs,” Emily replied. “My people hunted and trapped and fished this land for many generations. They did good. They weren’t rich, by white man’s ways today, but they supported their families. We were a proud people then. We looked after ourselves.”
“What happened?” Paul asked.
“The colonizers came and after them the government,” Emily replied.
“What do you mean, Emily?” Paul asked.
“They took away our land. They shut down our trap lines and refused to let my father and his father and his father before him hunt and fish much beyond this reserve,” she replied. “That was wrong! It is too small” Anger and sorrow leapt into Emily’s previously calm and gentle bright eyes. “For thousands of years, our ancestral hunting and fishing grounds have ranged many days walk in all directions from here. In those times, our people moved often, to keep from over-hunting and over-fishing. It was our way. We understood and respected nature.”
“Those were their jobs,” Dan said. “Hunting and fishing. That was their work... that is what they did for a living, their careers. It was like that everywhere. Those jobs were taken away from them! I’m not sure who said it first,” he added. “But we are living proof that people need just three things in life to be happy: someone to love, meaningful work, and something to look forward to. The government has taken two of those away from us. Our people have been left with no way to support themselves and no hope of ever being able to do so. That is at the heart of our problems... that is the source of our despair.”
They proceeded slowly in silence, Emily walking between Paul and Dan.
When they arrived at the school, the three national elders were waiting. With them were Namusat’s current chief and the local council, and another local elder.
When everyone was introduced and seated, Chief John Boisvert turned to Paul and said brusquely, “Why have you come?”
Paul heard a sharp edge in Chief Boisvert’s voice, but he could see his eyes were not angry or aggressive. They bore a look of elegance and kindness... and much sadness.
“I have not come with handouts nor have I come with any promises,” Paul replied. “I came to listen, perhaps to learn from you, and with your help perhaps even to understand a little.”
Dan nodded.
Chief Boisvert looked intently at Paul and then at Dan and at Emily. At last, he asked, “Will your coming here make any difference?”
“I really don’t know,” Paul said. “I cannot pretend to have answers when I do not even know the questions. I do know that I must begin by listening. I promise you that.”
Chief Boisvert considered Paul at length, holding him in a solid gaze.
“You are a wise man,” he said quietly. “It is good that you are here. There is much for you to hear and learn. We will proceed.”
Chief Boisvert turned to the others and nodded slightly.
“Mr. Winston is my friend,” Dan told the group after the opening ceremonies. “He’s from America. On the way over here, Emily and I explained to him what governments have done to our traditional way of life... to our ancestral hunting and fishing rights. The same things have happened to Native Americans in his country, as we know this has also been done to indigenous peoples in Mexico, Australia, South America, and in many other countries.”
“Did you tell him about what we got when they stole our land?” asked Joseph Totoosis, one of the national elders.
“You mean these little bits of land they call reserves?” Emily interjected. “And those awful houses?”
“Yeah,” Joseph said. “They think that made it okay for them to colonize our people.”
“Everything got worse!” added another elder. Dan whispered his name to Paul as he spoke: Thomas Martin.
“The missionaries came,” Thomas said. “They wore the clothes of holy men and women. They were not holy.”
“They said they came to pray,” Emily added, standing and pacing around. “They lied. Many came to prey on us.”
The dark humor brought no smiles.
"When we were little,” she continued. "They took us away from our parents. We were put us in schools… what are known now as residential schools. The Queen’s police helped them do it. I was one of them... I was stolen from my family.” Emily paused to compose herself. “If we spoke the language we learned in our homes, we were starved and beaten. They tried to destroy our language, our culture, our way of life... they tried to take the ‘Indian’ out of us... to make us into white men. It did not work.”
The aging Emily swayed with emotion. Dan stood and reached over to hold her arm to steady her, guiding her back to her chair.
“My brother and sister were taken away too,” Chief Boisvert said. “I heard the government put them with white families. My sister was not two years old... my brother four. I don’t know where they are... I cannot find them. Are they still alive? I don’t know. I was sent to one of those residential schools, too,” he added. “I was six. Many, many kids ran away. Some died trying to get back to their homes... many starved, or froze to death in winter. Maybe they were the lucky ones. Some of us were caught and brought back. I was one. They beat me and starved me and humiliated me... and worse… others too.”
Thomas turned to Paul, “We now know that tens of thousands were taken... kidnapped really... and put up for adoption into white families all across Canada, and in the US, and even sent to Europe.”
“They’re still doing it,” Joseph Totoosis said. “Now they’re taking our little children away and putting them in foster homes. Do you know that more than seventy percent of children in foster homes in Canada are First Nation children?”
Paul watched and listened in disbelief as numerous similar personal stories emerged from the others... stories of barbaric treatment imposed by governments and churches and police, upon First Nation children and adults.
“It got worse!” Emily said. Her face was strained and her eyes were red. “The missionaries came and wanted to make our ancestors believe this new religion. They wanted to destroy our ancestral link with nature... with the creator... the Great Spirit. We were taught that we are the guardians of the land for the Great Spirit, but these newcomers in black dresses told us we were wrong. They almost succeeded in making my people believe that, but they failed there, too. They did succeed in convincing our great-grandparents and grandparents that those people dressed in black were holy. They had faith... faith that the church was divine and was humanity’s spiritual guide. They were wrong... very, very wrong.”
“Our people were betrayed,” a woman who’d just arrived added quietly but firmly. She sat near the back row of the chairs, arranged in a semi-circle facing a table in front of Chief Boisvert and Dan. Paul was seated in the front row on the aisle.
He watched with growing sadness as some of the elders wiped at their eyes and cheeks self-consciously with their hands or shirtsleeves... evidently remembering their own experiences and anticipating intuitively what was about to be shared. Many looked down at the floor.
“Some white men who came dressed as holy men were predators,” Joseph said, adding to Emily’s introduction to the subject. “Criminals. We know that, now. They were horrible men who sexually exploited innocent little girls and little boys. They did terrible things to us. We were little children,” he added, his voice barely audible. “We had every right to be protected from harm... from them! But we were not protected... and soon we had good reason to not feel safe anymore. We became their victims… victims of child molesters.
“Our parents did not want to believe the truth. They would not listen when a few of us defied threats from the priests and told them about the horrible things being done to us. Now we are adults, but I still see the emotional scars in the eyes of other survivors. I have those scars on my own heart… I will have them forever. We will never know how many generations before us were abused like this… or how many suicides it caused.”
Chief Boisvert cleared his throat.
&nbs
p; “Mr. Winston,” he said, looking squarely at Paul. “I was one of those little boys who were sexually molested. I’m going to tell everyone here for the very first time what happened to me.” The chief paused, took a deep breath and began, “I was six years old... an altar boy. One day the parish priest told me to stay after church. He took me to the place behind the altar, the sacristy... a sacred place. The priest said that I had been bad and that he was going to punish me. I did not know what I had done wrong. He ordered me to drop my pants and underwear and to bend over a stool.”
Chief Boisvert paused. Paul could see heavy emotion prevented him from continuing. The proud chief shuddered as wet spots appeared on the scarred wood surface of the table beneath his bowed head.
Paul was deeply moved watching Emily leave her seat and walk up behind Chief Boisvert. She put her hand on his shoulder in a gesture of comfort and shared misery.
“The Church denied these terrible things for many years,” the chief said after a few minutes. His voice was low. “The government did nothing to stop it. Now, many years later, there is action. But it is too late for most... for us and for the generations before us. There is no undoing of those terrible things that were done to us. And there is no escape from the pain that rips at our souls, and will until the moment we die.”
The room was eerily silent.
Dan spoke, his voice unsteady yet with the authority that came as the national grand chief of the Assembly of First Nations, “Our people for many generations have been living a horrible nightmare, Paul... a vicious circle that’s spiraled into a Catch-22... nurtured by bureaucratic incompetence... compounded by indifference. It is indifference fueled by an unspoken but clearly deliberate program of assimilation and annihilation... some call it cultural genocide. They deny it but we are the living evidence... history speaks for itself. Is it any wonder why after generations of enduring this... this triple helix of hell—jobless dependency, cultural genocide, and sexual abuse—is it any wonder that alcohol and drugs, and now suicides, are such huge problems... epidemics here? It is the same in all First Nation communities across this country. It’s a national disaster... a national disgrace!
Secret Shepherd Page 27
