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Peyakow: Reclaiming Cree Dignity Kindle Edition
Following his award-winning debut memoir, Mamaskatch, which masterfully portrayed a Cree coming-of-age in rural Canada, Darrel J. McLeod continues the poignant story of his adulthood.
In Mamaskatch, McLeod captured an early childhood full of the stories, scents, and sensations of his great-grandfather’s cabin, as well as the devastating separation from family, ensuing abuse, and eventual loss of his mother that permeated his adolescence. In the equally potent Peyakow, McLeod follows a young man through many seasons of his life, navigating an ever-turbulent personal and political landscape filled with loss, love, addiction, and perseverance.
Guided internally by his deep connection to his late grandfather, in a constant quest for happiness, McLeod strives to improve his own life as well as the lives of Indigenous peoples in Canada and beyond. This leads him to a multifaceted career and life as a school principal, chief treaty negotiator, executive director of education and international affairs, representative of an Indigenous delegation to the United Nations in Geneva, jazz musician, and, today, celebrated author.
Weaving together the past and the present through powerful, linked chapters, McLeod confronts how both the personal traumas of his youth and the historical traumas of his ancestral line impact the trajectory of his life. With unwavering and heart-wrenching honesty, Peyakow—Cree for “one who walks alone”—recounts how one man carries the spirit of his family through the lifelong process of healing.
In Mamaskatch, McLeod captured an early childhood full of the stories, scents, and sensations of his great-grandfather’s cabin, as well as the devastating separation from family, ensuing abuse, and eventual loss of his mother that permeated his adolescence. In the equally potent Peyakow, McLeod follows a young man through many seasons of his life, navigating an ever-turbulent personal and political landscape filled with loss, love, addiction, and perseverance.
Guided internally by his deep connection to his late grandfather, in a constant quest for happiness, McLeod strives to improve his own life as well as the lives of Indigenous peoples in Canada and beyond. This leads him to a multifaceted career and life as a school principal, chief treaty negotiator, executive director of education and international affairs, representative of an Indigenous delegation to the United Nations in Geneva, jazz musician, and, today, celebrated author.
Weaving together the past and the present through powerful, linked chapters, McLeod confronts how both the personal traumas of his youth and the historical traumas of his ancestral line impact the trajectory of his life. With unwavering and heart-wrenching honesty, Peyakow—Cree for “one who walks alone”—recounts how one man carries the spirit of his family through the lifelong process of healing.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMilkweed Editions
- Publication dateAugust 10, 2021
- File size2933 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Praise for Peyakow
"McLeod reflects on his adulthood as a queer, Cree man working to improve life for other Native people in Canada in his moving latest . . . The result is a heartwrenching meditation on love, loss, and identity." —Publishers Weekly
"A former teacher with extensive training in French and a natural politician, McLeod quickly fell into a succession of roles involving the negotiation and renegotiation of treaties. Particularly newsworthy are his investigations over a long period of Native children victimized by the residential school system, forcing a pro forma apology on the part of the Canadian government that acknowledged 'that the existence of the schools was profoundly disrespectful of Aboriginal people.' Every such acknowledgment, every line of every treaty, came at the cost of considerable legal, linguistic, and cultural wrangling . . . Sheds welcome light on little-known aspects of the interaction of Indigenous peoples with politically dominant outsiders." —Kirkus Reviews
"McLeod reflects on his adulthood as a queer, Cree man working to improve life for other Native people in Canada in his moving latest . . . The result is a heartwrenching meditation on love, loss, and identity." —Publishers Weekly
"A former teacher with extensive training in French and a natural politician, McLeod quickly fell into a succession of roles involving the negotiation and renegotiation of treaties. Particularly newsworthy are his investigations over a long period of Native children victimized by the residential school system, forcing a pro forma apology on the part of the Canadian government that acknowledged 'that the existence of the schools was profoundly disrespectful of Aboriginal people.' Every such acknowledgment, every line of every treaty, came at the cost of considerable legal, linguistic, and cultural wrangling . . . Sheds welcome light on little-known aspects of the interaction of Indigenous peoples with politically dominant outsiders." —Kirkus Reviews
"[Peyakow] presents the Native experience in raw vignettes from the life of the author—the lowest lows and the highest highs . . . In a blend of drama, tragedy, and comedy, Peyakow is an epic tale of one man's journey to find his culture and to help his people. For anyone interested in how a Native person navigates through current day Canada, this book is rich with personal experience and wisdom." —Alberta Native News
"Darrel J. McLeod's Peyakow takes the reader on his personal odyssey and reveals the history of a country with a dark colonial mindset regarding Aboriginal people . . . Peyakow is a page turner. Take the time to read and understand the history of Indigenous people in Canada through books such as this." —ABC BookWorld (Canada)
"Peyakow is an autobiographical continuation of Darrel J. McLeod's life that follows his raw debut memoir of growing up, Mamaskatch. In this one, McLeod focuses a lot on his time working in branches of Canadian Government, often an emotionally taxing job; many of the white folks in government have varying degrees of racism against First Nations citizens, particularly directed at anyone seeking compensation and acknowledgment of the cultural genocide that severely impacted nations across the continent. Meanwhile, many Indigenous people attempting to work with the Canadian government on these issues see McLeod as 'working for the enemy' . . . and after seeing how some politicians act behind the scenes, McLeod can't help but wonder if sometimes they were right. This book is more than just politics, though—Peyakow, 'the one who walks alone,' is also an ongoing history of family ties as well as trauma, the complexities that come with it, and McLeod's continuing personal journey of connecting with his Cree heritage, and combining it with his identity as a gay man. McLeod's work both as an activist and as a writer is incredibly impactful, and the life he's lived certainly hasn't been easy. Peyakow leaves the reader with a lot learned, and a lot to think about. Unflinching, honest, and powerful." —Andrew King, Secret Garden Bookshop
Praise for Mamaskatch
“Mamaskatch dares to immerse readers in provocative contemporary issues including gender fluidity, familial violence, and transcultural hybridity. A fast-moving, intimate memoir of dreams and nightmares—lyrical and gritty, raw and vulnerable, told without pity, but with phoenix-like strength.”—Jury Citation, Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction
“Mamaskatch reminded me of my childhood and the Indigenous people I love dearly. The hard and brilliant life breathing on the pages brought me to tears, to joy, and to grace. Darrel J. McLeod tells a coming-of-age tale familiar to many Indigenous people, but our histories, and our families’ truths, are mostly unwritten. The work he’s doing is powerful and overdue.”—Terese Marie Mailhot, author of Heart Berries
“A haunting and joyful ode to the resilience of an often complicated, always extraordinary mother. Intimate and affecting, Mamaskatch asks complex questions about the legacies we inherit and the way in which self-invention is a crucial act of survival.”—Esi Edugyan, author of Washington Black
“Affecting and full of heart . . . Through these fragmented stories, we see McLeod navigating conflicting desires within his sexual, spiritual, and native identities, and ultimately thriving.”—BuzzFeed
“A dark book, but a hopeful one too, as McLeod finds ways of understanding and coming to terms with his complicated life . . . McLeod tells [his story] movingly and beautifully.”—Book Riot
“Honestly stunning. McLeod’s clear writing lays bare his complicated ties to his family, his lovers and his country in a memoir that moved and haunted me.”—Eden Robinson, author of Son of a Trickster
“A heart-wrenching mîwâsin memoir full of vignettes that are so intricately woven that they guide you through with grace, sâkihiwêwin, humour, and maskihkîy. This is a narrative built through continuums that detail the lives of the McLeod family through their queer travails, trans realities, bannock and stew conversations, and a plethora of intergenerational traumas and triumphs. I can feel the warm embrace of the Three Sisters wrapping around me as I read this, that heart-drum beat resounding beneath its literary cadences, the frigidity of the Athabasca kissing my heels, and a narrator who teaches me from his very first passage in this memoir that a good story is a medicine song that re-members and re-animates, in true nehiyawewin fashion, those who have paved the way for us and those for whom we pave.”—Joshua Whitehead, author of Jonny Appleseed
“McLeod’s memoir is one that will get under your skin for so many reasons, and then live there. The horrors of residential schools, the complications of being Indigenous in a world that wishes we would go away, and family ties that stretch to the point of breaking in almost every way imaginable, not to mention struggles with identity and sexuality. It may sound like too much for one narrative to support, but McLeod handles it with the light, magical touch of a born storyteller. This story is one you won’t soon forget. Heartbreaking, uplifting, terrifying . . . yes, all these things, and more.”—Chris La Tray, Fact & Fiction
“Mamaskatch is no easy read, but it’s an absolutely necessary one. McLeod recounts snapshots throughout his life, including his mother’s alcoholism, numerous accounts of sexual abuse, and coming up gay in a colonized Canada, where the whites have attempted to convert Natives to Catholicism. Mamaskatch is a very personal memoir that also documents the long-lasting aftermath of what colonization has done to Native communities. This book will break your heart, and it will make you think about a lot of things in North American history that need to be brought to light. Essential.”—Andrew King, University Book Store
“The poignant reflections of a Cree family in 20th century Canada, Mamaskatch is one of the best memoirs I’ve experienced! Filled with the questioning and self-doubts of a child suffering abuse after abuse from abuser after abuser, McLeod’s prose exposes the strength of someone who has survived: ‘Mamaskatch! We’re free!’“—Randy Schiller, Left Bank Books
About the Author
Darrel J. McLeod is the author of Peyakow and Mamaskatch, which received the Govenor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. He is Cree from treaty eight territory in Northern Alberta. Before deciding to pursue writing in his retirement, McLeod was a chief negotiator of land claims for the federal government and executive director of education and international affairs with the Assembly of First Nations. He holds degrees in French literature and education from the University of British Columbia. He lives in Sooke, British Columbia.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Yekooche
I could barely keep up with elder Catherine Bird as she sped through the now dense, now clear-cut forest to get to Yekooche, a Dakelh village eighty kilometres north of Fort St. James, British Columbia. It was June 1990, and the local school district had been asked by Tl’azt’en First Nation to take over the community school in Yekooche from the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs the next fall.
Why was Catherine in such a rush? Was she testing me―curious to see if a Cree boy turned city slicker, now a rural school principal driving a new cherry-red Suzuki Sidekick, could keep up with her older crimson Dodge pickup? We hydroplaned over vast puddles, shimmied over uneven washboards and plowed through a layer of fresh gravel before slowing to cross the tiny wooden bridge that spanned a moat around the village. I didn’t dare take time to admire the new leaves that shimmered on stands of alder trees filtering the spring sun. I had forgotten how fine dust clogs the sinuses.
What would these people think of me? Could they accept me as a fellow Indian, even though I was a mixed-blood Cree who had an expensive haircut and fancy clothes and who spoke eloquent English? Fitting in was critical, though I wasn’t sure why. I thought about how Catherine had confronted me the day before on the steps of the school district offices in front of my new boss, Louise Burgart, the assistant superintendent.
“Hadih―so you’re Cree, eh? They’re our neh-bors and eh-nemy―stole our horses ’n womans.” Looking stern, she paused, glanced from me to Louise, who was blonde and at least six inches taller than Catherine, then back at me again. Once Louise’s cheeks had pinkened and my eyebrows had furrowed, Catherine let out a loud girlish laugh. “I jus’ lie―good to have you here, T’airl.” She stretched out her eagle-claw hand and clasped mine. Her hand was as strong as Mother’s, though it wasn’t a man hand like Mother’s had been. No, I decided, Catherine wasn’t testing me, she was just doing what she always did. She knew these back roads like the face of her eldest child.
Chaos. That was the only word to describe what was going on in the classroom I visited in the dilapidated schoolhouse the next morning right after recess. I was the only visitor to venture in― the Indian Affairs director, Juanita Tupper, and my boss, Louise, waited outside. A warped forty-five vinyl record of a Beatles song played on the small school-issue turntable, the melody wafting in and out. I -ee wah na … hol…yor… ha-a-a…wah na…hol... your ha-a…
Then a witch. That was honestly what I thought I saw. A woman with long, matted grey hair, a wrinkled face, missing teeth and chipped and gritty fingernails was perched behind her desk fidgeting with some papers. Instant tears, which I blinked back. About fifteen kids with thick black hair were scattered around in one cluster on the floor by a cluttered bookshelf, a few cutting something out at a table covered with junk. Others were at their desks doing arithmetic worksheets. Torn textbooks and tattered paperbacks lay on the floor and countertop as if they had been flung there. Many curious glances in my direction, but everyone was too shy to say anything. Did they see me as I hoped, as another Indian who wanted to help them get out of the rut of poverty, dysfunction and sorrow, or were they even aware of their situation? Did they care in the slightest way who I was? Through the bank of windows I could see large crows flitting between tall spruce trees and alders, cawing over each other impatiently and making guttural clicking noises. I thought of home―Spurfield, and the dozens of cousins I grew up with in Smith, Alberta. We all had thick black hair like that. Classes had been organized, clean and strict at our school, but the crows outside were identical.
That afternoon, I strolled to the cemetery at the edge of town and paused beside the white picket fence around one grave. I looked toward Shass Mountain and began to pray―not to Jesus or to God, but to the ancestors of this place. I asked them to accept me, to protect me and guide me to do the best I could to help their descendants.
At two in the morning in a cabin along the shores of Stuart Lake, I woke with a sucking hollowness in my chest. Was I really going to do this―move north on my own, leaving my teaching job and friends in Vancouver? More importantly, was I going to leave Milan? When the emptiness didn’t recede, I lay in the dark, thinking. I pictured my classroom at Trafalgar Elementary, on the west side of Vancouver, and wondered how my students would have reacted had they seen Yekooche, the school building and the students―the beauty, the starkness, the unkemptness and the abject poverty. I thought about the contrast between my wellequipped and neatly organized classroom, tastefully decorated with student art, and what I had seen at the Portage School. I would have to get rid of everything but the furniture and start anew. What would we do for phys. ed.? There was no gym or even a playground. I would have to recruit an entirely new team of teachers, and that wouldn’t be easy. The next day I would need to start ordering books and poring over resumes.
I tried to lull myself to sleep by picturing Milan’s bulky hands and his kind, loving gaze. Milan had purchased a trendy condominium in Kitsilano, where we had settled into a comfortable life with a circle of caring friends, the type of friends I could only have dreamed of having in northern Alberta or in Calgary― teachers, a school principal, a physiotherapist, a Guatemalan friend and one who was Rotuman. Weekly dinner parties. Weekend mornings at Granville Island Public Market enjoying coffee and croissants while we listened to buskers were followed by hours of me singing my favourite tunes and accompanying myself on piano or guitar at home. Surely Milan would stick with me through the transition to working and living in Yekooche. He had been so supportive in my university years, through my five years of teaching and through my sorrow when first my sister Debbie died, and then Mother.
Why was I making this drastic change in my life? Was I trying to rebuild my connection with Cree culture after losing my only bridge to it―Mother? Was I trying to get back to my roots, or was it simply more escapism, a distraction to avoid my predicament― a collapsed and diminishing family, sexual confusion, an uncertain future, a constant fear of falling into a downward spiral and losing everything?
The next day over a lunch of Chinese Combo C at the King’s Inn, the frumpy but energetic Indigenous education resource teacher for the school district asked me in her peculiar British accent, “Do you have any idee-er whot you are getting into? Just last week there was a crisis in the communit-ih. A young man they call John-John wandered through town shooting his hunting rifle into the air―nobody could stop him. And many people in Fort St. James will show you the bullet holes in their vehicles from when they worked in the bush near Yekooche. Not only that, my friend, you have an im-po-ssible job. Too much inbreeding―everyone’s last name is the same. Didn’t they tell you? Who would ever want to work there?”
“I’m not worried or afraid. I come from a community like that,” I said stoically. What I was really thinking was that I had prayed to the ancestors at Yekooche―they would protect and guide me. “Oh, and Toni, with respect to inbreeding, I read somewhere that this has actually been a problem with the British royal family. Is that true?”
***
“There’s a rock in t’err.” Tilly peered up at me with bloodshot eyes that were partially concealed by frayed black hair. We were standing on the porch of my temporary home, a large trailer beside the school, eating peaches from the bushel I had bought as I passed through Kamloops. It was August by now, and I had been in Yekooche for a month.
“It’s not a rock, it’s the pit. This is a peach, Tilly.”
“A pit! What fer?”
“The seed, Tilly, to grow a new peach tree.”
“Hadih―none of d’em kinda trees aroun’ here!”
How I handled Tilly’s visit would send a message to all the other kids, or at least that was my intent. If you wanted to meet the new prin-ci-pl, you’d have to sit outside with him on the porch steps to visit. It may have seemed strange that I didn’t invite them in, especially to the teenagers used to visiting the former principal in his trailer. In my head I was very clear about why, though I couldn’t bring myself to tell them. I thought about my farewell lunch in Vancouver with my friend Linda.
“So, you’re going north to sexually abuse children, Darrel? Is that why you became a principal in a remote Native community?”
Linda raised her right hand, palm up, and looked me in the eye. She was a sign language interpreter at Trafalgar Elementary and a lesbian activist who had taken training in sexual abuse prevention and now considered herself an expert.
I was dumbfounded. “Are you out of your mind, Linda?”
“Victims often become perpetrators―I had to ask.”
Linda’s line of questioning was like a forging fire. My determination to protect the children in my new school grew steelier than ever. In fact, I became obsessed with it. Everyone in Yekooche probably thought I was a cold fish, and luckily I only had to enforce my policy once when the high school teacher, Randy Wallace, told me he had let a couple of boys sleep over in his trailer one night to bond. I ordered him to never repeat that.
***
Marlene and Robert McCracken, the whole-language gurus, were giving a week-long workshop in Monterey, California, late that summer, and I knew I had to go. Whole language was at the avant-garde of English language instruction methodology and its advocates were convincingly charismatic.
“Well, there is money in your budget for professional development, Darrel, and this would be amazing. We can’t cover travel costs, but the rest would be fine,” my boss, Louise, bubbled.
“I’d like to take the whole team, Louise: Catherine, Leona, Debbie and myself.”
“Hmmm. I’m not sure what the perception of that will be in the district―professional development in California. Tell your team to keep it quiet when you guys start up in September.”
Catherine Bird was no less confident driving through the California redwood forest than she had been flying through the boreal forest of northern BC. She shifted gears in my cherry Sidekick as if she were driving an eighteen-wheeler. We had got to know each other quickly, proving that the saying “Sudden acquaintance brings repentance” is not always true. The more we talked, the more we bonded, and we agreed―we were on a mission. In Yekooche that fall, we would set up the best literacy and Carrier language programs anyone had ever seen.
“You havta write your own stories down, T’airl. They will help others,” Catherine insisted one evening as the four of us sat in a trendy beachfront restaurant chatting after a long day. I had been telling them the story of my prospective singing debut at the age of nine―how it was cancelled because Mother had left home and I couldn’t find anyone else to give me a haircut. Mrs. Earl, my Grade Four homeroom and choir teacher, had given me an ultimatum― get a haircut or no solo. “Old Bonebags” was sung by the choir instead, while I stood at the back blubbering.
Catherine told us about raising her eleven kids as a single mother after her husband passed away, how she had become a hunter and a skilled outdoorswoman to provide for her family. Later in life, her mastery of Dakelh, the local dialect, had helped her to get training as a teacher.
***
“I’m Darrel; this is Debbie, Leona, Mrs. Bird and Mr. Wallace,” I announced at the assembly on the first day of school. “You already know Art and Sally, the teaching assistants.” In Monterey we had discussed how we wanted to be addressed by the students, and I was respecting the teachers’ wishes to use either their first names or their proper titles. Instead of being crammed into a stuffy gymnasium, we were gathered on the shore of Babine Lake. Some men and older teenaged boys from the community had just pulled in their large nets, which were overflowing with frisky sockeye salmon. Catherine, Art, Sally and I had finished cooking and serving pancakes, bacon, eggs and hash browns to the students, parents and grandparents who had come to the week-long fish camp we’d set up to inaugurate the school year. After people had finished eating, Catherine made an announcement in Dakelh and we split into groups for morning activities. We knew we had to keep our opening remarks brief―the men and elders needed to get started on preparing and preserving the fish.
Early that afternoon, after sampling a soup made with the heads, spines and roe of salmon, along with celery, potatoes and onions, I went over to the round smokehouse where the women elders sat on the ground cutting fish, sipping Labrador tea, talking and giggling. They were so graceful at cutting open the oily red fish and then butterflying each side once more to create four connected flaps that they threaded onto a long pole. They gave me a sharp knife and watched as I awkwardly sliced a salmon into four jagged flaps. They laughed at my clumsiness with the knife, but I felt like I belonged.
The next afternoon I went blackberry picking on the hillside. These definitely weren’t the blackberries that grew on the coast. They resembled blueberries and tasted similar, but were on taller bushes. Some of the smaller kids joined me, and when we had almost filled one bucket, a stocky boy named Isaac sauntered over and muttered, “Prin-ci-pl―Monique, she wanna see you. That hers cabin at da bot’um o’ da’ hil.”
“Okay, tell her I’ll be right there.”
I had met Monique when I first arrived. Her aged husband, Abel, reminded me of my great-grandfather Joseph Powder, my mosom―he didn’t speak English and was a serious provider, always trapping, hunting and harvesting plants, ensuring the smokehouse out back of his tiny cabin near Spurfield, Alberta, was never empty. My mother, two siblings and I had lived there with Mosom until I was five. He chewed snuff and smoked a pipe briefly in the evening to relax. I wondered if Abel chanted and drummed in the early morning like Mosom had.
Monique was the matriarch of one of the two large Joseph families in the community. She had lots of children, and they in turn had children and in some cases grandchildren. So far I had met Art, who was in his fifties and worked at the school, and Henry, her next eldest. John-John was her youngest.
Monique was very much like my Auntie Helen and my Cucuum Philomene, with her wind-worn squarish face and prominent cheeks, except that she was heftier and much more direct than any of my aunties. It was her advice that had helped me set the school up for success, though I knew I couldn’t follow everything she said literally. “No use startin’ school first week o’ Se’tember― we gotta fish ’n hunt ta get food for da’ winter. We all go across’t t’a Babine fer a week or two. An’ Fridays―forget Fridays. E’ryone gotta go down ta town ta cash cheques, go shoppin’ ’n play bingo. ’N t’em teen-agers―t’ey can’t sit in school for hours ’n hours lis’nin’ and writin’ stuff down―gotta be out ’n about doin’ stuff. Learnin’ thin’s t’ey can use right now. And t’at Isaac, sometimes he be real stubborn. You jus’ grab that son-o-bitch by the hair an’ tell ’em he has ta listen. Tell ’em Monique gif’ you permission.”
Louise had supported me completely when I met with Mike Fitzpatrick, the district superintendent, to tell him that I wanted to start the school year with a week-long fish camp at Babine Lake, and that I wanted the school to operate on a four-day week.
Now I stood in Monique’s doorway, smiling, wondering what she would say this time.
“Hadih, principl’. See y’re pickin’ d’em berries. T’ose are mine―t’is is my territor-ih.”
I could feel her power. I was surprised she was confronting me, and I hoped she wouldn’t notice that I was shaking slightly. I moved closer and extended my hand.
“Tansi, Monique. Nice to see you again. Yes, I know. These are your berries and this is your territory. I was picking them for you―in this bucket I swiped from your porch,” I answered with a nervous chuckle.
“Hadih. Mussi cho. Where you from anaways?”
“I’m Cree from around Lesser Slave Lake. Grew up there mostly, but went to high school in Calgary and lived in Vancouver too.”
“So, you’re Dakelh? Hadih, we got a Dakelh prin-ci-pl.”
“Close enough,” I said with a chuckle.
From then on, Monique was one of my staunchest allies.
That night, sitting around the campfire with the school staff and a few parents, I prompted a round of laughter as I told a story about the kids calling out to Catherine and Randy during the day’s activities. Mista' Bird, Mista' Bird―help me with my kite. Missus Wallus―Missus Wallus―come see how we set net to catch salmon. No matter how many times Catherine and Randy corrected the children, they were stuck with Mr. Bird and Mrs. Wallace. I felt content, welcome and respected, but I missed Milan and could hardly wait to get to Fort St. James to call him from a pay phone. I hadn’t yet told anyone about him and the significant role he played in my life.
***
Normal classes were set to begin the second week of September for everyone except the teenagers, who were at an outdoor camp to learn orienteering, survival skills, canoeing and Dakelh language. In the weeks to come, the older students would have workshops instead of regular classes―hairstyling, baking, basic cooking, drum making, hide tanning and other skills to build their self-confidence and give them a positive experience at school. The plan was that we would ease them into a more structured academic program in November.
By 9:15 on the Monday of the second week, only a handful of the seventy or so students we had registered had showed up. So at 8:00 a.m. on the Tuesday, standing on the steps of the school, I played “Reveille” on my high school trumpet. I was on my third round of “ta-ta-tadada ta-ta-tadada” when Art pulled up in his pickup truck and began honking his horn in rhythm with my playing.
“Hadih. Ever craz-ih, prin-ci-pl,” Art called out as he studied me, his head cocked to one side.
Everyone thought I was joking when I announced later that day that the whole school―students, teachers, assistants, the secretary and I―would begin a mandatory fitness program: every day, twenty minutes before morning recess, we would go for a run or a walk. Sally and Art were lined up to serve hot soup and bannock to each person as they returned, a role the teenagers would take over once back from camp.
The next day, around 11:00 a.m., we got a surprise visit from the district superintendent. Mike spent a half-hour in the school, observing and scribbling notes. “You have your staff dressed nicely―so professional,” he said in a singsong voice as he stepped out onto the porch and offered me his hand. Mike’s timing couldn’t have been better. Art and a few other men had just driven up to the school with truckloads of smoked and dried salmon, jars of bear grease, a pile of bear meat, tanned hides and a quartered moose to show the kids what we had accomplished during our week at the fish camp.
***
By the end of September, though, I was discouraged. Randy was having problems with the teenagers’ behaviour. I’d learned that Isaac and a couple of other teens were sniffing gas. Leona and I had discovered that the literacy challenges with the intermediate class were even greater than we had thought. A few of the primary children had emotional problems we couldn’t address. Our book order was late. The telephone system we had hoped the band would install would cost five thousand dollars and there was no budget for it, so we were stuck with the expensive and unreliable radio phone.
The previous Friday, when the band manager invited me to Tach., the larger community across the lake, for a meeting, I had hoped for good news. Instead, he gave me an ominous warning about getting involved in the politics of the community. The Yekooche elders were upset about how they were being treated by the larger community, the Tl’azt’en Nation, who administered their affairs, and they wanted to separate. The band manager was afraid that I would help them with this. Our conversation, or rather his monologue, went like this:
“You’re not gonna help ’em with this, mister. Last principl’ tried. Keep your nose out of it. Oh, ’n the construction of the new school’s been delayed―won’t turn the sod before next spring, but yer house should be ready by middle of October. You won’ havta stay in that camper much longer. Nice o’ ya ta give the trailers ta yer teachers.”
I wasn’t aware, but the Dunne Za―the top hereditary leader who was also the elected chief―was about to enter a turbulent time in his leadership. In fact, he had just bought a white elephant with a large settlement the community received―a cement plant, complete with trucks, that never returned to operation mode.
The moment I got back to Yekooche from Tach., I knew I had to return to the cemetery to plead with the ancestors. It was all getting to be too much. I set out from the school to walk the kilometre or so along the main road, which ran parallel to the creek. The fresh air and idyllic country setting calmed me. As I walked, I reminded myself why I was here. For years I had longed to be surrounded by empathetic brown faces, as I had been in my childhood. I’d missed hearing Cree spoken fluently, its comforting musicality. The language spoken here was Dakelh, a Dene language, but that didn’t matter―it was beautiful too. I wanted to harvest and feast on traditional foods, re-establish my oneness with nature. Along with all of this, I hoped to reduce the misery and suffering in this forsaken and exploited community. If I could make a difference in the lives of even a few Yekooche children or adults by walking alongside them for a while, my purpose would be accomplished and I could move on.
Henry Joseph spotted me through the picture window of his house, a two-room shack where he and his wife, Lorna, lived with their seven kids, and came out to join me. I told him my woes.
“Why ya don’t go ta the church ta pray? Agnes, she has the keys.”
“I pray differently, Henry. I don’t believe in all that stuff anymore―Jesus dying for my sins, heaven and hell.”
“I don’ wanna believe it too, but it’s all we know. Four generations, maybe five all been ta residential school at Lejac. I don’t wanna believe in hell, but I can’t talk about that―can’ even let myself think about it. I get scared.”
I thought about the prayers the elders gave at the opening of events and meetings. Even though the prayers were in Dakelh, they always began with the sign of the cross, and Jesus’s name would be sprinkled throughout.
As we strolled, Henry described the uniform he had had to wear for the marching band he played in as a boy at the Lejac residential school. He described the animosity between boys from different regions and how that continued to this day, then spoke more about the deep fear of ending up in purgatory or hell the priests and nuns had instilled in him and others.
Henry avoided the bull moose in the room, and so did I― sexual and physical abuse by the priests and nuns―but I didn’t know how he could have escaped it. We strolled along the dirt road side by side in silence for another ten minutes or so, my heart pounding with excitement. This was the type of connection and acceptance I had come here for.
That Friday night, around ten o’clock, I bumped into Henry outside the five-and-dime store in downtown Fort St. James, not far from the notorious bar everyone called the Zoo. He saw me as I was coming out with a can of Dr Pepper and a bag of Old Dutch chips, walked over and flashed his disarming smile. Even with a few missing teeth and wrinkles from stress and drinking, he was
still handsome.
“Hadih, T’airl. T’su in’ t’oh,” he said as he moved in close. His breath had that all-too-familiar sour fermented malt smell, and his eyes were glazed and bloodshot.
“T’su ‘us t’oh,” I answered.
“Hadih. You learn fast. Goot ta see ya. Hey―kin ya lend me ten bucks, jus’ need ten bucks―pay ya back nex’ week.”
“Henry, you already bin drinkin’, man. Can’t give you money to go drink it up.”
He paused for a second. Then his smile vanished, and his eyes became glassy marbles. His gaze burned into mine as he body-slammed me against the coarse stucco wall of the store, and my pop and chips went flying. His sturdy hands were suddenly around my throat, squeezing.
“I could fuckin’ kill you, man―right here, right now.” Droplets of his saliva sprayed my face. I blinked and stiffened. I peered directly into his eyes and summoned as much ch’i as I could.
“I know, Henry.” I strained, then paused a second to peer into his glassy eyes. He was way stronger than me, but I raised my hands onto his shoulders to try to calm him―also to push back hard if it came to that.
“Yes, you could kill me―for sure, Henry. But you won’t. I’m your friend. Your brother.”
***
“You don’t look Native”: it was a common reaction when I told white locals in Fort St. James, Vanderhoof or Prince George that I was Cree. I knew what they were really saying―you don’t appear down-and-out like the Indians around here. At the fall barbecue the education director of Tl’azt’en First Nation threw for the teachers from Yekooche and Tach., a few people told me the same thing. One teacher, Alex, was adamant about it. “Filipino or Chinese, maybe,” he said.
“Alex, Darrel is Cree from Alberta,” the director’s wife scolded him. “The school district checked his background and references before hiring him.”
Unfazed, Alex grabbed his guitar and pulled his chair closer. He slid one of his meaty, jean-clad thighs between mine, and before I could pull my chair back or sit up straight he started strumming his guitar while plucking a strong bass line on the back beat. His voice was a tenor like mine but more natural, no vibrato and more rasp. He sang a song I’d never heard before, about becoming lovers and marrying fortunes together, regarding me intensely the whole time. I felt myself flush.
I was sure everyone was staring at the two of us, but Alex didn’t seem to care. Thankfully the rest of the lyrics were abstract― the ending talked about looking for America. Generous applause.
Alex nodded at the group, smiled and handed me the guitar.
“I hear you play.”
“Yeah, but not nearly as well as you.”
“C’mon. Show us what you’ve got.”
I started Travis picking, then launched into “Beautiful” by Gordon Lightfoot. Ugh, why had I chosen the sappiest love song I knew? Would people think my song was in response to Alex’s barely veiled invitation?
Alex invited me back to his house after the barbecue. I was worried what people would think―just what I needed, to start the school year off with rumours―but I went anyway. I was astonished to find a full PA system in his living room. He set me up with a mic, connected his guitar and passed it to me. He asked me to perform “Beautiful” again. “Put your heart into it,” he said.
This time I was more intent in my performance, holding his powerful gaze as best I could.
“You’ll have to come back next weekend, my man. My girlfriend will be here, but she’ll be busy with her two kids.”
As I drove through Fort St. James on my way back to Yekooche, I stopped to call Milan. When I heard him say my name with glee, I felt guilty. He must have sensed something different in my voice as I told him about the evening. “D.J., you can’t sit on two chairs,” he said. “You’ll have to choose.”
“What do you mean, Milan? Everything’s fine. I’ll see you in a couple of weeks in Vancouver, okay?”
***
“Jump, Darrel―now! Jump up and down fast. Wave your arms and yell!”
“Alex. What the hell?”
“Whoooo whoooo, it’s us. We’re from Tach.! Aaeeeiiiieeyyy!” Alex screamed.
“Whooooooooo hoooooooo! Aaiiiiiiiiyyy.” Bewildered, I echoed his cry.
“Now hit the ground,” he yelled as he threw himself down and pulled his springer spaniel, Che, in close.
I dropped to the ground as ordered. “What’s going on?”
“Listen.”
A boat motor in the distance, faint but getting louder.
“Hunters. With powerful rifles and scopes. They had us in their sights, I could feel it.”
Alex slung his arm over my shoulder as we walked back to his house. I loved the affection I got from him, but secretly hoped nobody saw us like that. When we got home, we planned to roast the goose one of the teen boys from Yekooche had given me.
After we’d eaten, Alex raved about the meal, how juicy and succulent. “Way better than domestic goose,” he sighed with contentment. “We’ll go bird hunting next weekend. Get some grouse, blue or spruce. Maybe duck. They’re all delicious.”
That night in his living room, Alex announced he wanted to do some improvisation, with him playing chord progressions and me inventing melodies. He laughed when my first attempt came out with “one, two, three, four, five six, seven, nine” as the lyrics.
“Are we composing kindergarten songs or what?”
I found a melody I liked and repeated it. I sang it to “la” for a while, and then to my surprise Cree words started to come out of my mouth, lyrics Mother had sung to a Hank Williams tune: “Ki wîhkâc peyagun tapscotch niya.” I hadn’t heard her Cree version of “May You Never Be Alone” since before she’d left home when I was ten. I sang it over and over with Alex’s accompaniment, tears streaming down my face.
After a few minutes, Alex stopped playing, came over and pulled me into a hug. “Come on―let’s take a break.” He sat down and patted the couch beside him.
I rested my head on his shoulder, tears still leaking out of my eyes. I loved the power of his aura, but I felt silly.
“That was beautiful. Don’t ever hold back your emotions, my man. Let go when they come on strong like that. What was going through your mind?”
“Well, I saw my mother. She died last year of cancer. She used to sing that song late at night when she was drinking. She and Mosom, my great-grandfather, were here dancing around the room to our music.”
“Here, let me blow out the candles. Get comfortable.”
Alex eased me into a lying position, then he stretched out beside me, pulling me in so close I was breathing his exhalation. Shyly, I placed my arm over his chest. After a half-hour or so, I got bolder―I unbuttoned his shirt, slid my hand inside and kept it there.
I had a new glow as I drove back to Yekooche the next afternoon. Alex had accompanied me as far as Fort St. James, and we’d eaten Chinese food at King’s Inn. There were lots of people from Yekooche and Tach. there having an early dinner. Did they sense the romantic connection between Alex and me? It didn’t matter. All we’d done was share a lovely dinner and cuddle, and Alex’s friendship and warmth had helped to mollify the longing I felt day and night to be with Milan and my close friends in Vancouver.
***
My visit to Vancouver the next long weekend was surreal. I was excited to return to the city and have time at home with Milan. I’d brought a good-sized steelhead trout and moose tongue for him and our close friends, Ted and Yolande, John and Sheila, to sample.
On the Saturday morning Milan and I followed our weekend routine: we enjoyed a caffe latte and croissant at the Blue Parrot on Granville Island while reading the Vancouver Sun, then perused the market stands for tasty vegetables and fruit, stopping to listen to buskers between purchases. Later I went to the hairstylist who was skilled at shaping my wiry and wavy hair into a low-maintenance cut. Sporting my new hairdo I went downtown to window shop.
I used to love days like this, but it wasn’t the same―something had shifted in me. I missed the serenity of Stuart Lake, the forest, wildlife and the disarming sincerity of the people of Yekooche. The urban anonymity I used to bask in now troubled me. I felt lost in the sea of indifference of the people milling about or hustling past me.
When I got back to our condo in Kitsilano I rushed to look at myself in the mirror. The hairstyle I had thought was très chic in the salon made me seem effeminate.
Milan had invited our friends over for dinner so I prepared the moose tongue as an appetizer the way I’d seen Mother do. I sliced it thinly against the grain and served it with rye wafers, baby dills and Dijon mustard. To my dismay, my friends wouldn’t touch it.
***
The drive from Fort St. James to Yekooche was bumpy and dusty but uneventful, with time for me to mull over my weekend visit to Vancouver―the Thanksgiving dinner Milan had organized. It was great to see my friends, but I wasn’t sure where I belonged anymore. What if I fell into a chasm between two solitudes? The next weekend I was planning a trip to Tach. to see Alex and my Turkish friend Umit, who taught high school there. I’d brought back some Wild Turkey bourbon and a couple of packs of Gitanes cigarettes from the city for Umit and me to enjoy. A bundle of foreign magazines, too.
My thoughts were interrupted by a black bear that dashed from the ditch into the forest. A couple of logging trucks zoomed by in the opposite direction, their loads swaying in the wind. I pulled into a turnoff for a pee.
A kilometre or so along the road to Yekooche, I noticed a couple of pickup trucks parked along the curb. Four men huddled near the edge of the forest, absorbed in studying something on the ground. I stopped and headed in their direction for a better look. It was big Alan, Art with his son Chris, and Dean.
“Hadih, principl’, come over here,” Alan yelled.
“All right! Let’s see what a Cree boy from the city can do,” Dean called out.
When I got closer I saw they were kneeling alongside a huge bull moose, its antlers rotated to one side.
“You wanna clean ’im principl’? Ya havta be real careful. If you do it wrong, you can spoil the meat.”
Panic flooded my body, then a thrill. You can do this, Darrel, I thought. You’ve always wanted to clean a moose. You’ve cleaned rabbits―dissected rats and a fetal pig. And you’ve watched people butcher and clean moose and deer many times.
Alan fetched a large blue tarp from his truck, and the men slid it under the moose, rotating the carcass until the animal was on its back with its glossy eyes staring right at me, each pupil a sideways oval.
The moment wasn’t lost on me. The men weren’t sloughing off their work, they were honouring me. Intense emotions welled up but I held them back. Be calm, Darrel. Focus. Don’t blow this.
I inserted the large hunting knife Alan handed me just below the sternum and pushed the blade toward the animal’s anus, cautious not to perforate the bowel. Then I came back to the starting point, reinserted the metal blade and slit the skin in the other direction. When I pulled the skin flaps apart, a pungent vapour escaped, overwhelming me. My glasses steamed up. I’d have to feel my way around. I held my breath. I slid one hand inside the throat along the windpipe, then grasped its distal end. I inserted the knife carefully again―no bowels to perforate up there, but I didn’t want to cut myself. My sleeves were completely soaked with blood by now and oh my god, the odour. I thought I was going to faint.
It took all my strength to cut the esophagus and the windpipe. I pulled them away from the spine, slicing the connective tissue with my other hand.
Next I had to cut the intestinal and urinary tracts. I’d watched a pathologist pull the same mass of organs out of a human cadaver in one fell swoop on my second day of work as an orderly at Vancouver General Hospital, and I knew it would impress the men if I could do the same. I cut the tissue up and down the body cavity, then pulled gently but steadily, using my own body weight for leverage.
Still on their knees, the Yekooche men shuffled in closer. I felt their body warmth as I pulled the entrails out in one bunch. The four of them swung into action. One went for the liver, another for the heart and yet another for the lungs. The bible. They knew the elders’ tastes and would deliver the organ meats accordingly.
“T’airl, I’ll stop by tomorrow with the head and the tenderloin― you can have the tongue and nose, too, but I want the antlers,” Alan said, sounding apologetic.
As I glanced at my hands, covered in drying and clotted blood, a shiver rolled through me. For a second, I was sure I’d seen Mother’s hands in place of mine. As a boy I had loved watching her bulky hands skilfully slice and separate sinew from flesh. I felt a pang of joy. It intensified as I strode back to m
I could barely keep up with elder Catherine Bird as she sped through the now dense, now clear-cut forest to get to Yekooche, a Dakelh village eighty kilometres north of Fort St. James, British Columbia. It was June 1990, and the local school district had been asked by Tl’azt’en First Nation to take over the community school in Yekooche from the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs the next fall.
Why was Catherine in such a rush? Was she testing me―curious to see if a Cree boy turned city slicker, now a rural school principal driving a new cherry-red Suzuki Sidekick, could keep up with her older crimson Dodge pickup? We hydroplaned over vast puddles, shimmied over uneven washboards and plowed through a layer of fresh gravel before slowing to cross the tiny wooden bridge that spanned a moat around the village. I didn’t dare take time to admire the new leaves that shimmered on stands of alder trees filtering the spring sun. I had forgotten how fine dust clogs the sinuses.
What would these people think of me? Could they accept me as a fellow Indian, even though I was a mixed-blood Cree who had an expensive haircut and fancy clothes and who spoke eloquent English? Fitting in was critical, though I wasn’t sure why. I thought about how Catherine had confronted me the day before on the steps of the school district offices in front of my new boss, Louise Burgart, the assistant superintendent.
“Hadih―so you’re Cree, eh? They’re our neh-bors and eh-nemy―stole our horses ’n womans.” Looking stern, she paused, glanced from me to Louise, who was blonde and at least six inches taller than Catherine, then back at me again. Once Louise’s cheeks had pinkened and my eyebrows had furrowed, Catherine let out a loud girlish laugh. “I jus’ lie―good to have you here, T’airl.” She stretched out her eagle-claw hand and clasped mine. Her hand was as strong as Mother’s, though it wasn’t a man hand like Mother’s had been. No, I decided, Catherine wasn’t testing me, she was just doing what she always did. She knew these back roads like the face of her eldest child.
Chaos. That was the only word to describe what was going on in the classroom I visited in the dilapidated schoolhouse the next morning right after recess. I was the only visitor to venture in― the Indian Affairs director, Juanita Tupper, and my boss, Louise, waited outside. A warped forty-five vinyl record of a Beatles song played on the small school-issue turntable, the melody wafting in and out. I -ee wah na … hol…yor… ha-a-a…wah na…hol... your ha-a…
Then a witch. That was honestly what I thought I saw. A woman with long, matted grey hair, a wrinkled face, missing teeth and chipped and gritty fingernails was perched behind her desk fidgeting with some papers. Instant tears, which I blinked back. About fifteen kids with thick black hair were scattered around in one cluster on the floor by a cluttered bookshelf, a few cutting something out at a table covered with junk. Others were at their desks doing arithmetic worksheets. Torn textbooks and tattered paperbacks lay on the floor and countertop as if they had been flung there. Many curious glances in my direction, but everyone was too shy to say anything. Did they see me as I hoped, as another Indian who wanted to help them get out of the rut of poverty, dysfunction and sorrow, or were they even aware of their situation? Did they care in the slightest way who I was? Through the bank of windows I could see large crows flitting between tall spruce trees and alders, cawing over each other impatiently and making guttural clicking noises. I thought of home―Spurfield, and the dozens of cousins I grew up with in Smith, Alberta. We all had thick black hair like that. Classes had been organized, clean and strict at our school, but the crows outside were identical.
That afternoon, I strolled to the cemetery at the edge of town and paused beside the white picket fence around one grave. I looked toward Shass Mountain and began to pray―not to Jesus or to God, but to the ancestors of this place. I asked them to accept me, to protect me and guide me to do the best I could to help their descendants.
At two in the morning in a cabin along the shores of Stuart Lake, I woke with a sucking hollowness in my chest. Was I really going to do this―move north on my own, leaving my teaching job and friends in Vancouver? More importantly, was I going to leave Milan? When the emptiness didn’t recede, I lay in the dark, thinking. I pictured my classroom at Trafalgar Elementary, on the west side of Vancouver, and wondered how my students would have reacted had they seen Yekooche, the school building and the students―the beauty, the starkness, the unkemptness and the abject poverty. I thought about the contrast between my wellequipped and neatly organized classroom, tastefully decorated with student art, and what I had seen at the Portage School. I would have to get rid of everything but the furniture and start anew. What would we do for phys. ed.? There was no gym or even a playground. I would have to recruit an entirely new team of teachers, and that wouldn’t be easy. The next day I would need to start ordering books and poring over resumes.
I tried to lull myself to sleep by picturing Milan’s bulky hands and his kind, loving gaze. Milan had purchased a trendy condominium in Kitsilano, where we had settled into a comfortable life with a circle of caring friends, the type of friends I could only have dreamed of having in northern Alberta or in Calgary― teachers, a school principal, a physiotherapist, a Guatemalan friend and one who was Rotuman. Weekly dinner parties. Weekend mornings at Granville Island Public Market enjoying coffee and croissants while we listened to buskers were followed by hours of me singing my favourite tunes and accompanying myself on piano or guitar at home. Surely Milan would stick with me through the transition to working and living in Yekooche. He had been so supportive in my university years, through my five years of teaching and through my sorrow when first my sister Debbie died, and then Mother.
Why was I making this drastic change in my life? Was I trying to rebuild my connection with Cree culture after losing my only bridge to it―Mother? Was I trying to get back to my roots, or was it simply more escapism, a distraction to avoid my predicament― a collapsed and diminishing family, sexual confusion, an uncertain future, a constant fear of falling into a downward spiral and losing everything?
The next day over a lunch of Chinese Combo C at the King’s Inn, the frumpy but energetic Indigenous education resource teacher for the school district asked me in her peculiar British accent, “Do you have any idee-er whot you are getting into? Just last week there was a crisis in the communit-ih. A young man they call John-John wandered through town shooting his hunting rifle into the air―nobody could stop him. And many people in Fort St. James will show you the bullet holes in their vehicles from when they worked in the bush near Yekooche. Not only that, my friend, you have an im-po-ssible job. Too much inbreeding―everyone’s last name is the same. Didn’t they tell you? Who would ever want to work there?”
“I’m not worried or afraid. I come from a community like that,” I said stoically. What I was really thinking was that I had prayed to the ancestors at Yekooche―they would protect and guide me. “Oh, and Toni, with respect to inbreeding, I read somewhere that this has actually been a problem with the British royal family. Is that true?”
***
“There’s a rock in t’err.” Tilly peered up at me with bloodshot eyes that were partially concealed by frayed black hair. We were standing on the porch of my temporary home, a large trailer beside the school, eating peaches from the bushel I had bought as I passed through Kamloops. It was August by now, and I had been in Yekooche for a month.
“It’s not a rock, it’s the pit. This is a peach, Tilly.”
“A pit! What fer?”
“The seed, Tilly, to grow a new peach tree.”
“Hadih―none of d’em kinda trees aroun’ here!”
How I handled Tilly’s visit would send a message to all the other kids, or at least that was my intent. If you wanted to meet the new prin-ci-pl, you’d have to sit outside with him on the porch steps to visit. It may have seemed strange that I didn’t invite them in, especially to the teenagers used to visiting the former principal in his trailer. In my head I was very clear about why, though I couldn’t bring myself to tell them. I thought about my farewell lunch in Vancouver with my friend Linda.
“So, you’re going north to sexually abuse children, Darrel? Is that why you became a principal in a remote Native community?”
Linda raised her right hand, palm up, and looked me in the eye. She was a sign language interpreter at Trafalgar Elementary and a lesbian activist who had taken training in sexual abuse prevention and now considered herself an expert.
I was dumbfounded. “Are you out of your mind, Linda?”
“Victims often become perpetrators―I had to ask.”
Linda’s line of questioning was like a forging fire. My determination to protect the children in my new school grew steelier than ever. In fact, I became obsessed with it. Everyone in Yekooche probably thought I was a cold fish, and luckily I only had to enforce my policy once when the high school teacher, Randy Wallace, told me he had let a couple of boys sleep over in his trailer one night to bond. I ordered him to never repeat that.
***
Marlene and Robert McCracken, the whole-language gurus, were giving a week-long workshop in Monterey, California, late that summer, and I knew I had to go. Whole language was at the avant-garde of English language instruction methodology and its advocates were convincingly charismatic.
“Well, there is money in your budget for professional development, Darrel, and this would be amazing. We can’t cover travel costs, but the rest would be fine,” my boss, Louise, bubbled.
“I’d like to take the whole team, Louise: Catherine, Leona, Debbie and myself.”
“Hmmm. I’m not sure what the perception of that will be in the district―professional development in California. Tell your team to keep it quiet when you guys start up in September.”
Catherine Bird was no less confident driving through the California redwood forest than she had been flying through the boreal forest of northern BC. She shifted gears in my cherry Sidekick as if she were driving an eighteen-wheeler. We had got to know each other quickly, proving that the saying “Sudden acquaintance brings repentance” is not always true. The more we talked, the more we bonded, and we agreed―we were on a mission. In Yekooche that fall, we would set up the best literacy and Carrier language programs anyone had ever seen.
“You havta write your own stories down, T’airl. They will help others,” Catherine insisted one evening as the four of us sat in a trendy beachfront restaurant chatting after a long day. I had been telling them the story of my prospective singing debut at the age of nine―how it was cancelled because Mother had left home and I couldn’t find anyone else to give me a haircut. Mrs. Earl, my Grade Four homeroom and choir teacher, had given me an ultimatum― get a haircut or no solo. “Old Bonebags” was sung by the choir instead, while I stood at the back blubbering.
Catherine told us about raising her eleven kids as a single mother after her husband passed away, how she had become a hunter and a skilled outdoorswoman to provide for her family. Later in life, her mastery of Dakelh, the local dialect, had helped her to get training as a teacher.
***
“I’m Darrel; this is Debbie, Leona, Mrs. Bird and Mr. Wallace,” I announced at the assembly on the first day of school. “You already know Art and Sally, the teaching assistants.” In Monterey we had discussed how we wanted to be addressed by the students, and I was respecting the teachers’ wishes to use either their first names or their proper titles. Instead of being crammed into a stuffy gymnasium, we were gathered on the shore of Babine Lake. Some men and older teenaged boys from the community had just pulled in their large nets, which were overflowing with frisky sockeye salmon. Catherine, Art, Sally and I had finished cooking and serving pancakes, bacon, eggs and hash browns to the students, parents and grandparents who had come to the week-long fish camp we’d set up to inaugurate the school year. After people had finished eating, Catherine made an announcement in Dakelh and we split into groups for morning activities. We knew we had to keep our opening remarks brief―the men and elders needed to get started on preparing and preserving the fish.
Early that afternoon, after sampling a soup made with the heads, spines and roe of salmon, along with celery, potatoes and onions, I went over to the round smokehouse where the women elders sat on the ground cutting fish, sipping Labrador tea, talking and giggling. They were so graceful at cutting open the oily red fish and then butterflying each side once more to create four connected flaps that they threaded onto a long pole. They gave me a sharp knife and watched as I awkwardly sliced a salmon into four jagged flaps. They laughed at my clumsiness with the knife, but I felt like I belonged.
The next afternoon I went blackberry picking on the hillside. These definitely weren’t the blackberries that grew on the coast. They resembled blueberries and tasted similar, but were on taller bushes. Some of the smaller kids joined me, and when we had almost filled one bucket, a stocky boy named Isaac sauntered over and muttered, “Prin-ci-pl―Monique, she wanna see you. That hers cabin at da bot’um o’ da’ hil.”
“Okay, tell her I’ll be right there.”
I had met Monique when I first arrived. Her aged husband, Abel, reminded me of my great-grandfather Joseph Powder, my mosom―he didn’t speak English and was a serious provider, always trapping, hunting and harvesting plants, ensuring the smokehouse out back of his tiny cabin near Spurfield, Alberta, was never empty. My mother, two siblings and I had lived there with Mosom until I was five. He chewed snuff and smoked a pipe briefly in the evening to relax. I wondered if Abel chanted and drummed in the early morning like Mosom had.
Monique was the matriarch of one of the two large Joseph families in the community. She had lots of children, and they in turn had children and in some cases grandchildren. So far I had met Art, who was in his fifties and worked at the school, and Henry, her next eldest. John-John was her youngest.
Monique was very much like my Auntie Helen and my Cucuum Philomene, with her wind-worn squarish face and prominent cheeks, except that she was heftier and much more direct than any of my aunties. It was her advice that had helped me set the school up for success, though I knew I couldn’t follow everything she said literally. “No use startin’ school first week o’ Se’tember― we gotta fish ’n hunt ta get food for da’ winter. We all go across’t t’a Babine fer a week or two. An’ Fridays―forget Fridays. E’ryone gotta go down ta town ta cash cheques, go shoppin’ ’n play bingo. ’N t’em teen-agers―t’ey can’t sit in school for hours ’n hours lis’nin’ and writin’ stuff down―gotta be out ’n about doin’ stuff. Learnin’ thin’s t’ey can use right now. And t’at Isaac, sometimes he be real stubborn. You jus’ grab that son-o-bitch by the hair an’ tell ’em he has ta listen. Tell ’em Monique gif’ you permission.”
Louise had supported me completely when I met with Mike Fitzpatrick, the district superintendent, to tell him that I wanted to start the school year with a week-long fish camp at Babine Lake, and that I wanted the school to operate on a four-day week.
Now I stood in Monique’s doorway, smiling, wondering what she would say this time.
“Hadih, principl’. See y’re pickin’ d’em berries. T’ose are mine―t’is is my territor-ih.”
I could feel her power. I was surprised she was confronting me, and I hoped she wouldn’t notice that I was shaking slightly. I moved closer and extended my hand.
“Tansi, Monique. Nice to see you again. Yes, I know. These are your berries and this is your territory. I was picking them for you―in this bucket I swiped from your porch,” I answered with a nervous chuckle.
“Hadih. Mussi cho. Where you from anaways?”
“I’m Cree from around Lesser Slave Lake. Grew up there mostly, but went to high school in Calgary and lived in Vancouver too.”
“So, you’re Dakelh? Hadih, we got a Dakelh prin-ci-pl.”
“Close enough,” I said with a chuckle.
From then on, Monique was one of my staunchest allies.
That night, sitting around the campfire with the school staff and a few parents, I prompted a round of laughter as I told a story about the kids calling out to Catherine and Randy during the day’s activities. Mista' Bird, Mista' Bird―help me with my kite. Missus Wallus―Missus Wallus―come see how we set net to catch salmon. No matter how many times Catherine and Randy corrected the children, they were stuck with Mr. Bird and Mrs. Wallace. I felt content, welcome and respected, but I missed Milan and could hardly wait to get to Fort St. James to call him from a pay phone. I hadn’t yet told anyone about him and the significant role he played in my life.
***
Normal classes were set to begin the second week of September for everyone except the teenagers, who were at an outdoor camp to learn orienteering, survival skills, canoeing and Dakelh language. In the weeks to come, the older students would have workshops instead of regular classes―hairstyling, baking, basic cooking, drum making, hide tanning and other skills to build their self-confidence and give them a positive experience at school. The plan was that we would ease them into a more structured academic program in November.
By 9:15 on the Monday of the second week, only a handful of the seventy or so students we had registered had showed up. So at 8:00 a.m. on the Tuesday, standing on the steps of the school, I played “Reveille” on my high school trumpet. I was on my third round of “ta-ta-tadada ta-ta-tadada” when Art pulled up in his pickup truck and began honking his horn in rhythm with my playing.
“Hadih. Ever craz-ih, prin-ci-pl,” Art called out as he studied me, his head cocked to one side.
Everyone thought I was joking when I announced later that day that the whole school―students, teachers, assistants, the secretary and I―would begin a mandatory fitness program: every day, twenty minutes before morning recess, we would go for a run or a walk. Sally and Art were lined up to serve hot soup and bannock to each person as they returned, a role the teenagers would take over once back from camp.
The next day, around 11:00 a.m., we got a surprise visit from the district superintendent. Mike spent a half-hour in the school, observing and scribbling notes. “You have your staff dressed nicely―so professional,” he said in a singsong voice as he stepped out onto the porch and offered me his hand. Mike’s timing couldn’t have been better. Art and a few other men had just driven up to the school with truckloads of smoked and dried salmon, jars of bear grease, a pile of bear meat, tanned hides and a quartered moose to show the kids what we had accomplished during our week at the fish camp.
***
By the end of September, though, I was discouraged. Randy was having problems with the teenagers’ behaviour. I’d learned that Isaac and a couple of other teens were sniffing gas. Leona and I had discovered that the literacy challenges with the intermediate class were even greater than we had thought. A few of the primary children had emotional problems we couldn’t address. Our book order was late. The telephone system we had hoped the band would install would cost five thousand dollars and there was no budget for it, so we were stuck with the expensive and unreliable radio phone.
The previous Friday, when the band manager invited me to Tach., the larger community across the lake, for a meeting, I had hoped for good news. Instead, he gave me an ominous warning about getting involved in the politics of the community. The Yekooche elders were upset about how they were being treated by the larger community, the Tl’azt’en Nation, who administered their affairs, and they wanted to separate. The band manager was afraid that I would help them with this. Our conversation, or rather his monologue, went like this:
“You’re not gonna help ’em with this, mister. Last principl’ tried. Keep your nose out of it. Oh, ’n the construction of the new school’s been delayed―won’t turn the sod before next spring, but yer house should be ready by middle of October. You won’ havta stay in that camper much longer. Nice o’ ya ta give the trailers ta yer teachers.”
I wasn’t aware, but the Dunne Za―the top hereditary leader who was also the elected chief―was about to enter a turbulent time in his leadership. In fact, he had just bought a white elephant with a large settlement the community received―a cement plant, complete with trucks, that never returned to operation mode.
The moment I got back to Yekooche from Tach., I knew I had to return to the cemetery to plead with the ancestors. It was all getting to be too much. I set out from the school to walk the kilometre or so along the main road, which ran parallel to the creek. The fresh air and idyllic country setting calmed me. As I walked, I reminded myself why I was here. For years I had longed to be surrounded by empathetic brown faces, as I had been in my childhood. I’d missed hearing Cree spoken fluently, its comforting musicality. The language spoken here was Dakelh, a Dene language, but that didn’t matter―it was beautiful too. I wanted to harvest and feast on traditional foods, re-establish my oneness with nature. Along with all of this, I hoped to reduce the misery and suffering in this forsaken and exploited community. If I could make a difference in the lives of even a few Yekooche children or adults by walking alongside them for a while, my purpose would be accomplished and I could move on.
Henry Joseph spotted me through the picture window of his house, a two-room shack where he and his wife, Lorna, lived with their seven kids, and came out to join me. I told him my woes.
“Why ya don’t go ta the church ta pray? Agnes, she has the keys.”
“I pray differently, Henry. I don’t believe in all that stuff anymore―Jesus dying for my sins, heaven and hell.”
“I don’ wanna believe it too, but it’s all we know. Four generations, maybe five all been ta residential school at Lejac. I don’t wanna believe in hell, but I can’t talk about that―can’ even let myself think about it. I get scared.”
I thought about the prayers the elders gave at the opening of events and meetings. Even though the prayers were in Dakelh, they always began with the sign of the cross, and Jesus’s name would be sprinkled throughout.
As we strolled, Henry described the uniform he had had to wear for the marching band he played in as a boy at the Lejac residential school. He described the animosity between boys from different regions and how that continued to this day, then spoke more about the deep fear of ending up in purgatory or hell the priests and nuns had instilled in him and others.
Henry avoided the bull moose in the room, and so did I― sexual and physical abuse by the priests and nuns―but I didn’t know how he could have escaped it. We strolled along the dirt road side by side in silence for another ten minutes or so, my heart pounding with excitement. This was the type of connection and acceptance I had come here for.
That Friday night, around ten o’clock, I bumped into Henry outside the five-and-dime store in downtown Fort St. James, not far from the notorious bar everyone called the Zoo. He saw me as I was coming out with a can of Dr Pepper and a bag of Old Dutch chips, walked over and flashed his disarming smile. Even with a few missing teeth and wrinkles from stress and drinking, he was
still handsome.
“Hadih, T’airl. T’su in’ t’oh,” he said as he moved in close. His breath had that all-too-familiar sour fermented malt smell, and his eyes were glazed and bloodshot.
“T’su ‘us t’oh,” I answered.
“Hadih. You learn fast. Goot ta see ya. Hey―kin ya lend me ten bucks, jus’ need ten bucks―pay ya back nex’ week.”
“Henry, you already bin drinkin’, man. Can’t give you money to go drink it up.”
He paused for a second. Then his smile vanished, and his eyes became glassy marbles. His gaze burned into mine as he body-slammed me against the coarse stucco wall of the store, and my pop and chips went flying. His sturdy hands were suddenly around my throat, squeezing.
“I could fuckin’ kill you, man―right here, right now.” Droplets of his saliva sprayed my face. I blinked and stiffened. I peered directly into his eyes and summoned as much ch’i as I could.
“I know, Henry.” I strained, then paused a second to peer into his glassy eyes. He was way stronger than me, but I raised my hands onto his shoulders to try to calm him―also to push back hard if it came to that.
“Yes, you could kill me―for sure, Henry. But you won’t. I’m your friend. Your brother.”
***
“You don’t look Native”: it was a common reaction when I told white locals in Fort St. James, Vanderhoof or Prince George that I was Cree. I knew what they were really saying―you don’t appear down-and-out like the Indians around here. At the fall barbecue the education director of Tl’azt’en First Nation threw for the teachers from Yekooche and Tach., a few people told me the same thing. One teacher, Alex, was adamant about it. “Filipino or Chinese, maybe,” he said.
“Alex, Darrel is Cree from Alberta,” the director’s wife scolded him. “The school district checked his background and references before hiring him.”
Unfazed, Alex grabbed his guitar and pulled his chair closer. He slid one of his meaty, jean-clad thighs between mine, and before I could pull my chair back or sit up straight he started strumming his guitar while plucking a strong bass line on the back beat. His voice was a tenor like mine but more natural, no vibrato and more rasp. He sang a song I’d never heard before, about becoming lovers and marrying fortunes together, regarding me intensely the whole time. I felt myself flush.
I was sure everyone was staring at the two of us, but Alex didn’t seem to care. Thankfully the rest of the lyrics were abstract― the ending talked about looking for America. Generous applause.
Alex nodded at the group, smiled and handed me the guitar.
“I hear you play.”
“Yeah, but not nearly as well as you.”
“C’mon. Show us what you’ve got.”
I started Travis picking, then launched into “Beautiful” by Gordon Lightfoot. Ugh, why had I chosen the sappiest love song I knew? Would people think my song was in response to Alex’s barely veiled invitation?
Alex invited me back to his house after the barbecue. I was worried what people would think―just what I needed, to start the school year off with rumours―but I went anyway. I was astonished to find a full PA system in his living room. He set me up with a mic, connected his guitar and passed it to me. He asked me to perform “Beautiful” again. “Put your heart into it,” he said.
This time I was more intent in my performance, holding his powerful gaze as best I could.
“You’ll have to come back next weekend, my man. My girlfriend will be here, but she’ll be busy with her two kids.”
As I drove through Fort St. James on my way back to Yekooche, I stopped to call Milan. When I heard him say my name with glee, I felt guilty. He must have sensed something different in my voice as I told him about the evening. “D.J., you can’t sit on two chairs,” he said. “You’ll have to choose.”
“What do you mean, Milan? Everything’s fine. I’ll see you in a couple of weeks in Vancouver, okay?”
***
“Jump, Darrel―now! Jump up and down fast. Wave your arms and yell!”
“Alex. What the hell?”
“Whoooo whoooo, it’s us. We’re from Tach.! Aaeeeiiiieeyyy!” Alex screamed.
“Whooooooooo hoooooooo! Aaiiiiiiiiyyy.” Bewildered, I echoed his cry.
“Now hit the ground,” he yelled as he threw himself down and pulled his springer spaniel, Che, in close.
I dropped to the ground as ordered. “What’s going on?”
“Listen.”
A boat motor in the distance, faint but getting louder.
“Hunters. With powerful rifles and scopes. They had us in their sights, I could feel it.”
Alex slung his arm over my shoulder as we walked back to his house. I loved the affection I got from him, but secretly hoped nobody saw us like that. When we got home, we planned to roast the goose one of the teen boys from Yekooche had given me.
After we’d eaten, Alex raved about the meal, how juicy and succulent. “Way better than domestic goose,” he sighed with contentment. “We’ll go bird hunting next weekend. Get some grouse, blue or spruce. Maybe duck. They’re all delicious.”
That night in his living room, Alex announced he wanted to do some improvisation, with him playing chord progressions and me inventing melodies. He laughed when my first attempt came out with “one, two, three, four, five six, seven, nine” as the lyrics.
“Are we composing kindergarten songs or what?”
I found a melody I liked and repeated it. I sang it to “la” for a while, and then to my surprise Cree words started to come out of my mouth, lyrics Mother had sung to a Hank Williams tune: “Ki wîhkâc peyagun tapscotch niya.” I hadn’t heard her Cree version of “May You Never Be Alone” since before she’d left home when I was ten. I sang it over and over with Alex’s accompaniment, tears streaming down my face.
After a few minutes, Alex stopped playing, came over and pulled me into a hug. “Come on―let’s take a break.” He sat down and patted the couch beside him.
I rested my head on his shoulder, tears still leaking out of my eyes. I loved the power of his aura, but I felt silly.
“That was beautiful. Don’t ever hold back your emotions, my man. Let go when they come on strong like that. What was going through your mind?”
“Well, I saw my mother. She died last year of cancer. She used to sing that song late at night when she was drinking. She and Mosom, my great-grandfather, were here dancing around the room to our music.”
“Here, let me blow out the candles. Get comfortable.”
Alex eased me into a lying position, then he stretched out beside me, pulling me in so close I was breathing his exhalation. Shyly, I placed my arm over his chest. After a half-hour or so, I got bolder―I unbuttoned his shirt, slid my hand inside and kept it there.
I had a new glow as I drove back to Yekooche the next afternoon. Alex had accompanied me as far as Fort St. James, and we’d eaten Chinese food at King’s Inn. There were lots of people from Yekooche and Tach. there having an early dinner. Did they sense the romantic connection between Alex and me? It didn’t matter. All we’d done was share a lovely dinner and cuddle, and Alex’s friendship and warmth had helped to mollify the longing I felt day and night to be with Milan and my close friends in Vancouver.
***
My visit to Vancouver the next long weekend was surreal. I was excited to return to the city and have time at home with Milan. I’d brought a good-sized steelhead trout and moose tongue for him and our close friends, Ted and Yolande, John and Sheila, to sample.
On the Saturday morning Milan and I followed our weekend routine: we enjoyed a caffe latte and croissant at the Blue Parrot on Granville Island while reading the Vancouver Sun, then perused the market stands for tasty vegetables and fruit, stopping to listen to buskers between purchases. Later I went to the hairstylist who was skilled at shaping my wiry and wavy hair into a low-maintenance cut. Sporting my new hairdo I went downtown to window shop.
I used to love days like this, but it wasn’t the same―something had shifted in me. I missed the serenity of Stuart Lake, the forest, wildlife and the disarming sincerity of the people of Yekooche. The urban anonymity I used to bask in now troubled me. I felt lost in the sea of indifference of the people milling about or hustling past me.
When I got back to our condo in Kitsilano I rushed to look at myself in the mirror. The hairstyle I had thought was très chic in the salon made me seem effeminate.
Milan had invited our friends over for dinner so I prepared the moose tongue as an appetizer the way I’d seen Mother do. I sliced it thinly against the grain and served it with rye wafers, baby dills and Dijon mustard. To my dismay, my friends wouldn’t touch it.
***
The drive from Fort St. James to Yekooche was bumpy and dusty but uneventful, with time for me to mull over my weekend visit to Vancouver―the Thanksgiving dinner Milan had organized. It was great to see my friends, but I wasn’t sure where I belonged anymore. What if I fell into a chasm between two solitudes? The next weekend I was planning a trip to Tach. to see Alex and my Turkish friend Umit, who taught high school there. I’d brought back some Wild Turkey bourbon and a couple of packs of Gitanes cigarettes from the city for Umit and me to enjoy. A bundle of foreign magazines, too.
My thoughts were interrupted by a black bear that dashed from the ditch into the forest. A couple of logging trucks zoomed by in the opposite direction, their loads swaying in the wind. I pulled into a turnoff for a pee.
A kilometre or so along the road to Yekooche, I noticed a couple of pickup trucks parked along the curb. Four men huddled near the edge of the forest, absorbed in studying something on the ground. I stopped and headed in their direction for a better look. It was big Alan, Art with his son Chris, and Dean.
“Hadih, principl’, come over here,” Alan yelled.
“All right! Let’s see what a Cree boy from the city can do,” Dean called out.
When I got closer I saw they were kneeling alongside a huge bull moose, its antlers rotated to one side.
“You wanna clean ’im principl’? Ya havta be real careful. If you do it wrong, you can spoil the meat.”
Panic flooded my body, then a thrill. You can do this, Darrel, I thought. You’ve always wanted to clean a moose. You’ve cleaned rabbits―dissected rats and a fetal pig. And you’ve watched people butcher and clean moose and deer many times.
Alan fetched a large blue tarp from his truck, and the men slid it under the moose, rotating the carcass until the animal was on its back with its glossy eyes staring right at me, each pupil a sideways oval.
The moment wasn’t lost on me. The men weren’t sloughing off their work, they were honouring me. Intense emotions welled up but I held them back. Be calm, Darrel. Focus. Don’t blow this.
I inserted the large hunting knife Alan handed me just below the sternum and pushed the blade toward the animal’s anus, cautious not to perforate the bowel. Then I came back to the starting point, reinserted the metal blade and slit the skin in the other direction. When I pulled the skin flaps apart, a pungent vapour escaped, overwhelming me. My glasses steamed up. I’d have to feel my way around. I held my breath. I slid one hand inside the throat along the windpipe, then grasped its distal end. I inserted the knife carefully again―no bowels to perforate up there, but I didn’t want to cut myself. My sleeves were completely soaked with blood by now and oh my god, the odour. I thought I was going to faint.
It took all my strength to cut the esophagus and the windpipe. I pulled them away from the spine, slicing the connective tissue with my other hand.
Next I had to cut the intestinal and urinary tracts. I’d watched a pathologist pull the same mass of organs out of a human cadaver in one fell swoop on my second day of work as an orderly at Vancouver General Hospital, and I knew it would impress the men if I could do the same. I cut the tissue up and down the body cavity, then pulled gently but steadily, using my own body weight for leverage.
Still on their knees, the Yekooche men shuffled in closer. I felt their body warmth as I pulled the entrails out in one bunch. The four of them swung into action. One went for the liver, another for the heart and yet another for the lungs. The bible. They knew the elders’ tastes and would deliver the organ meats accordingly.
“T’airl, I’ll stop by tomorrow with the head and the tenderloin― you can have the tongue and nose, too, but I want the antlers,” Alan said, sounding apologetic.
As I glanced at my hands, covered in drying and clotted blood, a shiver rolled through me. For a second, I was sure I’d seen Mother’s hands in place of mine. As a boy I had loved watching her bulky hands skilfully slice and separate sinew from flesh. I felt a pang of joy. It intensified as I strode back to m
Product details
- ASIN : B09C69YGWF
- Publisher : Milkweed Editions (August 10, 2021)
- Publication date : August 10, 2021
- Language : English
- File size : 2933 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
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- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 247 pages
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Garry Eames
5.0 out of 5 stars
Peyakow touched my soul.
Reviewed in Canada on December 7, 2021
Darrel, has written a deeply moving story, a truth I understand. I recommend this book to readers who can empathize with others' suffering, sadness and the consequences of individual and cultural abuse, but can also appreciate joy and kindness.
