Time went on and I began to wonder if I was going to be a ward of the system forever — or until I reached adulthood, which to me meant forever. Since I was in a different province than my grandparents, they couldn’t come to my rescue and remove me from care. So, I waited. I waited for my mom to leave Ron and to stop drinking so that I could be back in her care again.
Each hour felt equivalent to a day for me, and after what seemed like a decade, the day finally came when I could go home. When my mom and I walked into our old house it was cold, half-empty and full of bad memories, but thankfully, Ron was nowhere to be found. My mom wrote Ron a goodbye note and left it next to a pile of overdue bills. She did one last sweep of the house as she slowly gathered her things to leave and I remember thinking that I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I stayed close to her side, impatiently tugging on her clothing trying to get her to hurry up. I was worried that at any moment Ron would barge through the door. Thankfully there was no sign of him, and my mom and I boarded the first train headed North without looking back.
I was so excited to be free again and on a train with a real conductor who would yell at me for running up and down the aisles, “For the last time, sit in your seat young lady!” It’s a wonder we didn’t get kicked off the train. We travelled for three days, until we reached the big city of Edmonton. In the city, we sat in the train station while my mom schemed our next move. Looking back now, I don’t think she had thought through how we were going to make it all the way up North, but I trusted her completely as I followed her to the bus station. We boarded a dusty, dark bus with maroon-coloured seats and tinted windows, on route to Yellowknife where the trains don’t run.
My mom ran into her childhood friend on one of our bus stops at a gas station outside of a tiny northern town that was swarming with blackflies and herds of buffalo. She was tired of being on the cramped bus and decided to ride the rest of the way home with him instead.
There wasn’t much room in his old Suburban, so I had to sit in the back on top of a large foamy. He had the back windows rolled all the way down as we sped down the old dirt highway that went on for what seemed like forever. When we finally arrived in Yellowknife, my hair was full of dust and sticking straight up. I couldn’t even run a comb through it.
We were dropped off outside of my grandma’s apartment building. My mom rang and rang the buzzer but there was no answer, so she told me to run to the local diner downtown to find my grandparents. I was embarrassed to be seen with my hair a mess, but I found my way to the diner where my grandma and papa recognized me before I saw them. They laughed at the wild child that I was and drove me home.
Chapter 4
After we arrived in Yellowknife, my grandmother became my primary caregiver and raised me in her small, one-bedroom apartment downtown. I slept on the floor over a thick, makeshift mattress made from blankets piled on top of one another to make it feel more like a real bed. I had red and yellow plastic milk crates stacked up against the wall to use as dressers for my clothes. We had one channel and no remote control for our small black-and-white television decorated with tinfoil antennas.
My grandma would stay up late working on the finishing touches on one of her delicious cherry pies or shuffling back and forth between playing solitaire and sewing while humming to herself and tapping her fingers on the table rhythmically. I always wanted to play cards with her, but she told me that I was too young to play cards at night. To her, playing cards and laughing at night were forbidden to children. She said that if a child plays cards late at night, the joker would dance around them in their sleep.
One night, my persistence must have annoyed her enough to change her mind. She let me play cards with her, but I soon regretted it because that evening I was scared to death of falling asleep for fear of seeing the joker dancing around me. Whenever I heard a noise, I would jump up in fear while my grandma snored away peacefully.
My grandparents drank quite heavily in their younger days, but my grandma quit drinking soon after I moved in and my papa followed in her footsteps not long after. They knew that they needed to be healthy and sober in order to raise me, and just like that, they stopped overnight. My grandma told me that her eldest son had visited her in a dream and told her to put the bottle down so that she could look after me, and she took that as an important message. From then on, my grandmother did the best she could to raise me. I always had clothes on my back and food on the table.
My grandma tried not to have store-bought meat if she could help it. She always had fresh caribou meat on hand and fried it up with a generous amount of lard so that I could soak a piece of bread in the pan grease afterward, for a treat. She would cut caribou meat into tiny, bite-sized pieces and put it on the side of her plate for me, and I would grab a piece, run away to play or watch T.V. and come back for more when I was hungry. Bannock and jam was dessert, and if I was lucky, my grandma would give me some caribou bone marrow, which is a delicacy, and dry meat with butter and salt.
It was easier to eat traditional food because it did not cost money. Sewing was my grandma’s main source of income, but it was hardly enough to get by. She was hired by a local outfitting company that sat her in the back of the store in a little room, where she would sew up a storm. She was a humble woman, modest about her work, which is why she could never bring herself to ask for a raise. She never got the credit and recognition that she deserved for her hard work and was taken advantage of. She was underpaid, and her designs were imitated like so many Indigenous artworks that have been appropriated.
Nonetheless, she loved what she did and she always made time to make me fancy homemade parkas and mitts to keep me warm and show me off. But the fact that I had adorned beautiful, homemade Dene clothing gave some of the kids at school a reason to pick on me, simply because I looked different than they did. I wore my beautiful warm parka and mitts with pride until I realized that I was being made fun of for it. I started asking my grandma to buy me mitts and boots like the other kids had. I couldn’t ignore the snickering in the hallway as I walked by, and I started to feel like a target. Even the teachers made comments on my garments and looked at me like I walked out of a different time zone. I didn’t want to stick out anymore; I just wanted to look like everyone else and fit in. I didn’t think for one second about how this must have hurt my grandma. She put in so much time, energy and love into keeping me warm. But, she didn’t disagree with me and asked my mom to bring me to the store to get some new outdoor gear. After that, I went to school looking like everyone else. If I could have only seen then that all the lovely pieces she sewed together for me were priceless, and that I was blessed to have something that money could never buy.
***
Aside from being bullied FOR how I looked, my behaviours and personality were attacked and made fun of by my elementary school arch nemesis Lindsay. Lindsay and I were in the same class. The first time I met her, she pushed me against the wall outside of the school during recess and the uneven rock siding sliced one side of my face open just below my eye. Lindsay would continuously find some reason to make fun of me, and because I didn’t stick up for myself, it only got worse. One day in math class, she sharpened her pencil as pointy as she could just so that she could stab me in the leg with it when no one was looking, and the lead from the pencil broke off in my leg. To this day, I still have a noticeable piece of lead in my leg. It’s a great conversation piece in the summer when I’m wearing shorts.
Lindsay’s reign of terror didn’t stop even when my grandma was nearby. One beautiful, sunny day my grandma and I were walking home from the corner store. If you live in the North, where our summers are short, you will come to know that these days are few and far between, so I cherished the warmth of the sun on my face as I skipped down the street ahead of my grandma. It was a particularly hot, arid day. Summers in the North are like the desert, dusty and dry. My grandma bought me a pop to quench my thirst. As I took a sip of my pop, fro
m the corner of my eye I saw a girl with yellow hair and a ponytail swinging behind her come running at me with all her might, and then she shoved me from behind. I went flying and ended up lying on the sidewalk of Main Street with a deep gash in the palm of my hand from the can of pop that I was holding, which skidded underneath me. My grandma yelled Dogrib obscenities at this little, seemingly innocent girl who was laughing and running away. Mind you, if my grandma wasn’t as stout and hefty as she was she probably would have gone running after Lindsay, but instead she helped me up from the sidewalk and dusted me off.
This type of bullying went on for years until, finally, I stood up to her. I told my best friend’s dad how afraid I was that, any day, she was going to beat me up after school, and he gave me one of the best pieces of advice I ever got. He said, “Let her throw the first swing. After that, it’s self-defence.” It never occurred to me that I could fight back and defend myself. Being given permission from an adult to protect myself was just what I needed to be brave.
As my best friend and I walked home from school the next day, I looked behind me and, sure enough, the entire class was following Lindsay, who was following me. I wanted to run away, but I held my head high and stopped in the back alley of the school. I took a deep breath and turned around to face my adversary, and we were soon surrounded in a classic fight circle by our peers. I went through what I had practised over and over in my head the night before, and I envisioned what I would do when Lindsay hit me. There’s something about fear that drives a person out of their comfort zone and forces them to do things that they wouldn’t otherwise dream of doing. Up until then, I hadn’t ever gotten into a real fight.
Words were said, her face was in my face, and after she threw the first punch I didn’t hesitate for one second. I grabbed Lindsay by her blonde ponytail, the hairstyle that she wore every day of her life, and swung her around until her feet practically lifted off the ground. She landed in a heap next to a garbage can crying, embarrassed mostly, I’m sure. “It’s not fair, you didn’t fight fair!” she yelled. I didn’t care if she thought I had fought dirty. She hadn’t been fighting fair for years. I was nothing less than exhilarated and pumped full of adrenaline. A new life had just been breathed into me and, somehow in that three-second girlfight, I became a different person — or maybe it was already in me and Lindsay had just awakened it. Whatever the case, I was grinning ear to ear as I left Lindsay leaning against the garbage can wondering what just happened. I didn’t know I had that kind of strength in me; only a few minutes before the fight I was trembling and possibly about to pee in my pants.
Looking back, if there is one thing I learned that day, it’s that everyone is in our lives for a reason. Lindsay was in my life to shake me up and make me tough. I can now come to terms with the years of cruelty, shame and bullying that I underwent and all the days that I dreaded going to school afraid of Lindsay’s wrath, because those hard times prepared me for even harder days ahead.
***
Most summers I WOULD BE shipped off to northern Alberta to spend time with my aunt Clara and my first cousin Rae. Rae and I looked a lot alike, but she was smaller than I was and had beautiful, long, thick, black hair from her dad’s Inuit side. Rae was a year older. She was always one step ahead of me and made fun of me a lot, but since she was my family she had to love me and take it easy on me.
One summer, my aunt Clara and her husband planned a road trip up to Alaska. They had bought a little camper trailer and got it ready for our big trip up the Alaskan highway. Our road trip was a memorable one. Rae and I didn’t appreciate the scenery as much as her parents, but we had fun panning for gold and roasting marshmallows whenever we stopped to set up camp for the night along the way.
Catherine and Rae dressed up on Halloween (photo credit Norine Lafferty)
On one of our stops, we set up camp in a place just outside of Whitehorse. “Catherine, can you come with me to the outhouse?” Rae asked. “I’m scared to go alone.” I was happy to be of assistance and proud that she needed my companionship. I followed her along the wooden-planked pathway leading up to the outhouse. “Can you look inside first?” she asked. “Sure,” I replied without a second thought. I opened the door and looked inside to make sure it was safe. That’s when I realized that, right above me, in the corner of the outhouse was an angry hornet nest. I turned to run and saw that Rae was already on the other end of the path, looking back and laughing at me in her mischievous way.
I was too slow for the hornets; they caught up to me and stung me in the back of the head with what felt like a round of gunfire. I had to sleep on my face with a swollen head that night, and the dead hornets had to be picked out of my tangled hair one by one.
The wildlife really loved me that summer, because on that same trip, I found myself face to face with a moose. I was skipping along on the trail in front of everyone else, not paying attention to where I was going, when not more than one foot in front of me stood a moose calf. The calf looked like he came straight out of a cartoon. He literally had a piece of straw hanging out of the side of his mouth and was chewing it sloppily while a swarm of black flies formed a perfect halo around his head. When my aunt saw that I was too close to the calf, she made hand signals for me to back away slowly. The cow was in the bushes about fifteen yards away and was rearing up to charge at me. The bushes were swaying, and she was making a noise that only a mama moose can make when her babies are in danger. I got away just in time, or I would have been trampled.
When we reached the city of Anchorage, Alaska, we headed straight for the mall. As we were checking out of the department stores, we felt a rumble beneath our feet. At first, we thought it was an earthquake, but when we walked outside we were in a thick cloud of eerie black ash. The city that was bustling only a few minutes before was silenced. We were smack dab in the middle of a volcano eruption. We went back to our campsite, and everything was coated in three inches of soot. It was an unnerving scene that looked like something out of a horror movie. We quickly packed up our campsite, scooped some of the ashes off the picnic table and kept them as a souvenir. Then we started our long journey home, with Rae and I singing along with the radio to the latest country hits the entire way.
Years later, I was hosting a barbecue on Canada Day when my mom got an unexpected call from my aunt Clara. When she got off the phone she said, “Rae is gone,” and the tears came rushing out. Rae was one of the most honest people you could ever meet. She was to the point, blunt and unapologetic. I’ll forever cherish her competitive nature and her cheeky wit. She made the rules to all of our childhood games, and I followed. She will always have a place in my heart.
Chapter 5
At around age twelve I DECIDED I wanted to live with my mom, to my grandma’s disapproval. My mom was living in an apartment on the other side of town by herself and always had people coming and going. Living with her meant that I had free reign to do whatever I wanted. My mom was never any good at discipline. She leaned toward the side of neglect, though not on purpose. She was blinded by her own issues, and her honest effort at sobriety was short lived every time she tried. Since I had the place to myself most of the time, I had friends over often and we would hang out in my room and listen to music. That was the point when my life took a turn for the worse, and the quiet, reserved girl was replaced with a gothic, experimental troublemaker. I started smoking cigarettes and pot. At school, I could be found in the smoke pit trying to be like the kids that I thought were cool. Only I wasn’t cool, and neither were they; I was a wannabe. As in any school there are the classic generalizations, different groups classified by their attached stereotypes. I didn’t know which category I fit into.
In my first year of middle school, before my bad girl image took over, I hung out with the “smart kids” but I never fully felt that I belonged. I knew I was as smart as them, but I was on a different level than they were. It was undeniable when I would go over to their house to visit, becaus
e they always had the seemingly perfect family, expensive clothes, signed up for all the costly extra-curricular activities and had all the luxuries that I lacked. They grew up not knowing what it was like to go without. This made me self-conscious and, even though they didn’t judge me, the invisible divide was always there. So, I slowly separated myself from them and started hanging out with the kids that I felt more comfortable with, because I could relate to them. We were on the same level. The kids who were smoking and acting up in school seemed to have the same issues as I did, and soon enough I could be found in the smoker’s pit in the bushes around the corner from the school.
My homeroom teacher expressed her concerns to me after school one day and said, “Catherine, what is going on? You are one of my best students. I’m worried about your slipping grades.” But, by that point, I was uninterested in doing well in school because I had nobody to hold me accountable to anything, and I was beginning to become more interested in fitting in than passing tests.
I became friends with Mandy, a girl across the hall from my apartment. Mandy convinced me to try smoking her mom’s pot stash, which she kept hidden underneath her mattress. Soon enough, I was smoking pot daily. We hung out in Mandy’s room listening to grunge rock and playing Ouija board. We even went as far as trying to summon our favourite rock stars from the dead, but the board started spelling out the word “devil” instead. We got so freaked that we threw the Ouija board, but not before the fire alarm was mysteriously set off next to the door of my apartment unit and I was blamed for it.
Fire is a powerful, unworldly element. My mother’s house burnt down when she was a kid. My mom is certain that it’s because she took something from a graveyard and brought bad luck home with her. She told me never to take anything from a graveyard because of what happened to her. She and some friends wandered around the Back Bay near the shore of the Great Slave Lake on the grounds of the old cemetery, where the graves are now slowly rising to the surface because they were buried on a hill next to a small creek that eventually started to run through the graves, rotting the wood and exposing the caskets and bones, disturbing the peaceful corpses. She and her friends came across a small, wooden box and, when they opened it up, they found a miniature silver fork, knife and spoon. They divvied out the utensils and my mom ended up with the spoon. Not long after, my mom’s house burnt down and both of her friends experienced unfortunate tragedies in their families. When my mom’s house burnt down, she told me that the only thing left standing was a large picture of the last supper that was hanging on the wall next to the rosaries, which were barely singed.
Northern Wildflower Page 4
