As Long as the Rivers Flow

by James Bartleman

  Russell, however, managed to obtain possession of the house of a distant relation, an old bachelor, who had recently died. In fact, their new home was just a one-room tarpaper shack. On one side of the room along a wall was an ancient cast iron bed with sagging springs and a filthy mouse-hole-riddled, yellow-stained mattress that smelled of mildew and urine. In the middle of the room, a makeshift stove cut out of a fifty-five-gallon oil drum squatted on legs of empty bean cans, and a column of rusty stovepipes reached up from an opening on the top to the exposed roof, emerging on the other side as a rudimentary chimney. A battered table made of rough lumber with a handmade chair pushed up against it leaned against another wall. A jumble of mouldy, picked-over men’s clothing had been tossed into one corner, and in another was a dipper and an empty galvanized steel pail used to carry water from the lake.

  The only other piece of furniture in the room was a tattered couch that reeked of old, unwashed men and their billy-goat smell. There were mouse droppings on the mattress, table, chair and couch, and dirt and debris littered the floor. The front door was off its hinges, and water-stained pieces of cardboard covered windowpanes broken by children with nothing better to do. Strategically placed throughout the house were empty lard buckets to catch the water that dripped through holes in the tarpaper roof when it rained.

  The new couple made no effort to clean up the shack and to find more furniture. Their friends did not care. The gang of survivors now dropped by every day, sitting on the floor and talking, laughing and arguing late into the night. As before, they celebrated welfare days with bootleg wine and liquor. When they ran out of money, they made a potent homebrew from dry raisins, yeast, water and sugar and kept on drinking.

  Martha’s mother was overjoyed that her daughter was expecting but shocked at the behaviour of her daughter.

  “This is no way to live,” she said, when she went to the shack one morning. “There’s a baby on the way. Grow up. I didn’t raise you to live like a pig.”

  “But you didn’t raise me,” Martha said. “Remember? You sent me away when I was little and let the nuns do the job. So why don’t you leave me alone? I know what I want. I’ve got more in common with the kids who were with me at that school than with you!”

  After her mother left, Martha celebrated by filling a glass with homebrew and drinking to freedom and to the revenge she was exacting against her mother. But her angry words masked another truth. While resigned to having the baby, she did not want it, afraid to bring into the world someone whose lot in life would probably be as miserable as hers. Besides, she had no idea how a child should be raised, and had not the slightest wish to learn.

  Perhaps unconsciously passing a message of rejection to her unborn baby, she abused her body by drinking heavily for a month before it was born and was drunk during its delivery. When she sobered up, however, and saw her baby, a boy, for the first time, her maternal instincts kicked in, and she was overjoyed, convinced that her child was absolutely the most beautiful, the most intelligent and the most lovable infant that had ever existed.

  That opinion was naturally enough shared by her mother who took pride in assuming the role of Nokomis, or grandmother, to the little one. The two women, united in their common love for the little boy, put their differences aside, at least for a while, and Martha left Russell to move back home to occupy her old room. Her mother took out of storage the tikinagan that Martha had used when she was a baby, and gave it to her daughter for the baby. Shuffling around her cabin, she fussed over Martha and took great pride in her grandchild.

  Martha liked being spoiled and had big plans for her baby. His name, she decided, would be Spider, after a prominent web-shaped birthmark on his forehead. He would have an easier life, she was determined, than she had had. Thankfully, the last residential school in the province had just closed its doors for good, and Spider would not face the prospect of being torn from her at the age of six to be raised by white people in an institution devoid of love.

  Several months later, however, after a fierce quarrel that started when Martha’s mother made a disparaging comment on the quality of her daughter’s housekeeping that escalated into a full-blown verbal battle in which both women dredged up past real and imaginary wrongs, Martha strapped Spider into the tikinagan and returned in a huff with him to the shack. Russell had prepared the way by coming every day to her mother’s home to plead that she come back to him. He loved her, and parents should live together, he said. Their friends were wondering if she thought she was better than they were. And Martha, even if she would not admit it, was now in love with him.

  Her broken-hearted mother went to the shack in a final attempt to reason with her.

  “You’re making a big mistake. If your father was still alive, he’d tell you the same thing. Just think of the well-being of Spider. Your roof leaks, your house is dirty, full of empty beer bottles and cigarette butts and the windows are broken. All the drunks and good-for-nothings hang out here. You can’t raise a child in such conditions.”

  “Look who’s talking,” said Martha. “There you go preaching to me about how to be a good mother, and yet you sent me away at the age of six to that school. You wouldn’t even believe me when I told you I was being molested. You’re a hypocrite and I hate hypocrites. Now go away and leave me alone!”

  Martha’s mother was only in her early forties but like many Native people of her generation who had spent years on the land, looked much older, with a deeply lined face and sunken mouth filled with the blackened stumps of diseased teeth. When her daughter unleashed her torrent of recriminations, she bowed her head and bit her lip.

  Once Martha had finished, she tried to make amends. “I can’t deny I let you down and wasn’t there when you needed me. I’m also bad tempered and hurt your feelings. But I can help you with Spider now. I’m his Nokomis and I love my little grandson. Can’t you let bygones be bygones and forgive me?”

  Martha slammed the door in her face

  Martha and Russell reverted to their old ways, welcoming their friends back to their shack and drinking heavily. When she was sober, Martha made an effort to feed Spider, to play with him and to keep him clean. More often than not, she drank too much and forgot he was even there. Other unwed mothers moved in with their babies and they, like Martha, let their infants go hungry and left them in soiled clothing while they drank, smoked and partied.

  One day, officials of the Ontario Children’s Aid Society, responsible for the welfare of children in Canada’s most populous province, arrived on their doorstep.

  “We regret,” they said after inspecting the living conditions of the babies, “but the infants in this house are being neglected. It is in their interest that we take them away and put them up for adoption to couples in Canada and the United States who will give them the love and care they deserve. The new mothers and fathers will not be told of the origins of the children and the children will never know the names of their biological parents. To protect them, you will never be told where they are being placed, and you will never see them again. Our decision is final and you have no recourse under the law.”

  The officials took the babies, including Spider, and departed.

  5

  Change Comes to the Reserve

  IN SHOCK OVER THE REMOVAL OF SPIDER, Martha did not fully grasp the extent of her loss for some time. At first, she blamed white people in positions of authority for trying to force her and the mothers of the other children taken away by the Children’s Aid Society to conform to the standards of the outside world. Then the full weight of what had happened hit her. How could she live without her little Spider? How would he be able to cope without his mother? She could not bear the thought she would never see her baby again.

  To make it worse, she knew deep down inside that her mother and the Children’s Aid Society had been right. She should have been a better mother. She had not taken care of Spider’s basic needs and had been a drunk. Her friends lived aimless lives and neglected their kid
s. She deserved what she got. However, perhaps all was not lost.

  “I’ve decided to quit drinking,” she told Russell. “Why don’t you do the same and we head off to Toronto and make a new life for ourselves. There’s no future here. We could look for Spider. Maybe we could get him back if we show Children’s Aid we’ve cleaned up our act.”

  “I didn’t know you believed all that stuff they fed us at school about the wonderful life we would have if only we lived like white people,” he said. “You stop drinking and take off if you want. I like it here and am not going nowhere.”

  “I wouldn’t leave without you,” was Martha’s answer. “I’ll wait as long as it takes for you to change your mind.”

  Russell’s answer was to take the tikinagum and throw it out the door, shoving Martha out after it.

  “Now go home to your mother if you know what’s good for you.”

  He returned to drink and to brood sullenly as the other couples who had lost their children to the Children’s Aid Society partied. Several hours later, by now blind drunk and belligerent, he ordered everyone out, angrily telling his guests not to come back. He then seized an axe and in a wild fury chopped great chunks of wood out of the walls and broke up the furniture. Hurling the axe to one side, he kicked over the stove, stomped on the stovepipes and smashed with his fists the shack’s few remaining unbroken windows. His rage spent, he settled down on the floor, his back against the wall, a bucket of homebrew and a dipper beside him, and drank until he passed out.

  When he came to and saw Martha standing in front of him, he lurched to his feet, knocked her down and kicked her repeatedly in the ribs, howling drunkenly, “I warned you. I warned you. I warned you not to come back.” He then took a gallon of coal oil, sloshed it on the floor, set it alight, and as Martha crawled out the door of the burning shack, slipped away into the bush.

  “You’re lucky to be rid of that maniac,” Martha’s mother told her as she recovered at home from her injuries. “He could have killed you. But now you can get on with your life. You’re only eighteen and whatever you decide to do, I’ll be there for you.”

  “I’m going to go to Toronto,” Martha told her. “I’m going to Toronto to find Spider as soon as I’m back on my feet.”

  But as time passed, Martha thought less and less about leaving for the big city, and when the government decided to give more authority to Native people across the country to manage their local affairs, she obtained one of the low-level administrative positions that became available at the band office and settled down into a comfortable life with her mother. Although the two headstrong women continued to clash, their relationship improved as the years went by, particularly after Martha learned to speak proper Anishinaabemowin and they began spending their summers together at the old trapping cabin, fishing, picking blueberries and experiencing some of the life they had enjoyed in the old days on the land.

  Well aware that her mother preferred country to white man’s food, Martha ensured there was always game and fish in the house. She took up a position on the shore of Cat Lake, shooting migrating geese by the hundreds, smoking and curing them for later use in a small traditional birchbark wigwam beside the house. Throughout the winter, she set snares for rabbits that her mother made into stews and roasts, tanning the skins to transform into blankets, coats and mitt liners. Every fall she joined one of the hunting gangs who went after big game deep in the bush, gaining a reputation as a crack shot who brought down her share of moose and deer, and as an expert butcher who could more than hold her own in dressing and quartering animal carcasses.

  Her mother could now barely suppress her pride in the hunting prowess of her daughter, and the two women were now able to joke about how green Martha had been when she returned from residential school. And each year, Martha would tell her mother that she would be leaving for Toronto “as soon as I get myself organized,” but she never did.

  Meanwhile, as the 1970s became the 1980s, the outside world came to the community. The bureaucrats with the money in Ottawa issued contracts to white entrepreneurs to push through a rough but serviceable winter road that would connect Cat Lake with the small, white town of Pickle Lake one hundred miles due east, and the all-weather highway to the south. After freeze-up, workers mounted bulldozers to cut a track through the bush and over the frozen muskeg, pushing aside trees and boulders, shoving sand and gravel into ravines and building causeways to gain access to the lakes and rivers. After the arrival of the first heavy snows, they used modified snow groomers of the type used to prepare hills for skiing farther south to pack the snow down into a drivable road. And from December to March, they kept the road open through the bush and across the lakes by regular snowploughing with graders.

  The opening of a road, if only for a few short winter months each year, allowed other contractors to haul in building supplies, prefabricated buildings and everything else needed to erect a new school, a nursing station, jail, and an airport with a one-room terminal building and all-season runway. The band council began replacing the old log cabins with bungalows complete with electricity and indoor plumbing. A co-op came in to take over from the Hudson’s Bay store. Satellite dishes appeared on the sides of homes, and the residents were soon watching the same programs as the people in the south.

  The people lost no time in using the winter roads to drive out to visit relatives in neighbouring reserves and to make expeditions to the south. Everyone looked forward to the excitement of the trip to Pickle Lake. Those who could cobble together the money would continue on to even more distant places like Sioux Lookout and Thunder Bay where there were shopping centres and movie theatres. Wives wanted to stock up on detergent, toilet paper and pasta that cost a fraction of what was charged locally. Husbands were interested in cars and trucks, even if they could only admire rather than buy the latest models. Some visited used car lots and bought old clunkers that they nursed back home. When the wrecks fell apart, they put them up on blocks in front of their homes and cannibalized them for spare parts. The young men made for the topless dance bars to ogle the women, sometimes drinking too much and getting themselves into trouble. Children nagged their parents to take them to McDonald’s and Burger King and to the movies to see scary films and to let them hang out at the malls, just like the white kids. Everyone relished the chance to catch up on the latest news from friends and relatives who had moved to the city, and who were expected, by aboriginal custom, to invite them to stay in their homes, as their guests, for the duration of their visits.

  And just as matters seemed to be going their way, the young people began to kill themselves, and not just at Cat Lake First Nation. In other remote fly-in Anishinabe, Oje-Cree and Cree communities throughout the north, at places no one in the south had ever heard of—Pikangikum, Poplar Hill, Slate Falls, Sandy Lake, Deer Lake, Kee-Way-Win, Sachigo Lake, Bearskin Lake, Big Trout Lake, Weagamow Lake, Muskrat Dam, Webeque, Wapekeka, Kasabonika Lake, Neskantaga, Kashechewan, Nibinamik, Fort Severn, Weenusk, Fort Albany, Attawapiskat, Marten Falls, and Eabametoong—the youth started to die.

  Children as young as twelve were doing it. Girls as well as boys were involved. They joined together in suicide pacts, they copied the actions of friends who had killed themselves and they deliberately overdosed on drugs before doing themselves in. More often than not, they hanged themselves, making a statement in the extreme manner of their deaths that they considered themselves to be fundamentally worthless and to merit suffering as they left this world. In the farewell messages, many said they had no other way to escape pain and almost all of them said life was not worth living.

  Across the vast northern wilderness, families were shattered emotionally and communities were left deeply scarred and in a state of shock. Schools and band offices closed and there were wakes and funeral services. People, many of them strangers, alerted to the tragedy by the Native-language radio station, Wawatay, broadcasting from Sioux Lookout, came from reserves across northern Ontario to demonstrate solidarity with the be
reaved in the face of the incomprehensible suicide of one of their children.

  If the death was in the winter, the people would mount their old broken-down vehicles and travel great distances by winter road to the home of the grieving family. In summer, a few would come by boat, but most arrived by air, somehow finding the money for the fare. They would be met either at the shore or at the airport by volunteers in pickup trucks who would drive them to the home of the deceased. There they would take their place outside in the lineup of friends, neighbours and other visitors from far away, and wait patiently to go in to express their condolences.

  When their turn came, they would mount the steps of the stoop, push the door open, enter the house, grasp the hands of the family members waiting solemnly inside, averting their eyes in accordance with their custom, and express their sorrow over and over again in the soft, measured tones of their language: Nin kashkendam, nin kashkendam, nin kashkendam.

  After handing over simple gifts of food—a loaf of bread, a small bag of flour or sugar, a fish, a smoked goose, a piece of venison or moosemeat—they would stand silently and respectfully in front of the simple wooden coffin holding the body of the young person in the living room. And later that evening, they would return to sit throughout the night, weeping and keening and singing the heartfelt, comforting old hymns in Anishinaabemowin with the families of the bereaved.

  After the formal church funeral service, usually held in the school auditorium or hockey arena to accommodate the press of numbers, the people would go home and life on the reserve would slowly return to normal.