As Long as the Rivers Flow (24 page)

“Brothers and sisters! Welcome today to this place of worship. I can feel that many of you are troubled. I know that many of you are seeking to lead better lives. I am certain that many among you are trying to understand why you suffer.

“Do you know why you suffer? I can tell you why! It’s because you are depraved! You are depraved because you were born into sin! The Devil tempted Adam and Eve and they sinned! They lost their innocence and were driven out of the Garden of Eden by the Lord because they had sinned!

“Men and women ever after were born into sin! It doesn’t matter how mighty you are. It doesn’t matter whether you are a king, a queen, a prime minister or even a man of God—all of us, my dear friends, were born into depravity and sin!

“Now I bring you good news. Though your sins be as black as coal, though your sins reek of depravity, you can be saved and go to heaven! You just have to repent, believe in the Lord and be born again.

“Brothers and sisters, be good parents to your children. Spend your welfare money on food and clothing for your little ones and not at Lester’s. Make your children go to bed early. Make your children give up their evil ways.

“If they don’t obey, remember the words of the Good Book, ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child!’ ”

A young man sitting alone at the back of the room then hit a chord on his electric guitar, and everyone rose to sing a mournful old favourite.

“Now brothers and sisters, listen carefully to what I now tell you today,” the preacher said after the congregation took their seats. “A special burden has been placed on us as Native people. When I was a boy, I used to enjoy listening to the elders tell the old stories about Nanabush, the Thunderbird and the Wendigo. They said man was related to the animals and the Anishinabe people had spirit helpers from the land of the ancestors. They said Gitche Manitou was a divine spirit.

“But that is just ignorant superstition. You have to renounce these beliefs if you want to be saved. For the Good Book says ‘Let there be no other gods before me.’ And Nanabush, the Thunderbird and Gitche Manitou are false gods.

“The Good Book is the Word of the Lord. It says man was created in the image of God. We must reject the old view that man is somehow related to the animals! Brothers and sisters, we are not animals. God is not the god of animals. If we were animals, there would be no right or wrong. You could love and help someone, or torture and kill him. It would make no difference. There would be no moral order if we were animals.

“Therefore, I implore you, brothers and sisters, save your immortal souls by coming forward today to be saved. Escape the fate of our ancestors who knew not the Good Book and have been condemned to eternal damnation. Reject pow wows with their glorification of heathen practices. Tolerate not drum circles and Native dancing in the community—even if your children beseech you to bring back the old ways.

“Remove from the walls of your houses the works of art featuring Nanabush and the Thunderbird. For they are idols and false gods.

“Now come forward, I implore you! Come forward, I beg you! Come forward today and be saved!”

The preacher pumped his fist in the air for emphasis as he made each point, and the congregation, in a state of growing ecstasy, responded passionately. Some people stood up to shout “Amen!” Others began to shake and to speak in tongues.

Martha was overcome with joy. She remembered only the bad and none of the good times in her life. Her entire existence had been a living hell, and she now knew why that was so—it was because she had been born into sin and had lived a life of depravity, fornicating and drinking and believing in false gods. She wanted to drown her sorrows in the love of God and start anew. A feeling of euphoria and spiritual fullness came over her and she began to
tremble. The room filled with a blinding light and she rose to her feet, lifted her arms up toward the ceiling and with tears streaming down her cheeks cried out: “I have seen the light! I have seen the light! I am saved! Thank you, Jesus! Oh thank you, Jesus!”

The preacher came down the aisle and led her to the front. He asked her to fall on her knees and she did. He blessed her and told her that she was saved and that her soul would go to heaven when she died.

Martha said, “Thank you, Jesus,” and shouted out, “Amen.”

As she rose to her feet and made her way slowly back to her seat, the preacher began singing.

The congregation joined in with such gusto that the walls of the modest building appeared to shake.

But when Martha went home after the church service, she had second thoughts. What a fool I’ve been. What a spectacle I’ve made of myself. How can I look any of these people in the eye again? Now that I think about it, the preacher’s message doesn’t ring true. It’s no different from what the nuns and Father Antoine used to tell us. Maybe he’s right, but I’m not yet ready to write off the beliefs of the ancestors so easily. It makes no sense that a just God would send Native people, who had not heard the Word of the Lord throughout the ages, to
eternal damnation. And in my heart, I’ll never give up my conviction that Gitche Manitou is the spirit that runs through all things.

Martha was, however, capable of adhering to two seemingly contradictory beliefs at the same time. She thus kept her strong faith in Native spirituality to herself and embraced Christianity on Sunday mornings during church services and on Thursday nights when she joined her new friends singing old-time Negro spirituals with their promise that the oppressed and humble in this life would obtain their reward in the next. Her depression and flashbacks were kept at bay at these times, but came back with greater intensity when she returned home from church and her religious fervour faded. She accordingly resumed binge drinking on Friday and Saturday nights, dimly aware that her behaviour made no sense, but believing she could function no other way.

Without realizing it, Martha began treating her daughter the same way the nuns had dealt with her when she was a girl. She continued to reject Raven’s efforts to help her and found fault with everything she did, nagging her about the way she dressed, the way she wore her hair, the amount of time she spent on homework, the music she listened to and the books she read.

“When I lived in Toronto,” Martha told her, “I saw two kinds of Native people—lazy ones and hard-working ones. The lazy ones were in the gutter. The hard-working ones studied hard, were proud of their heritage and made something of their lives. They became social workers, lawyers, doctors and teachers. Anything the white man could do, they could do. If you don’t straighten out, you’ll end up on the streets just like your father.”

To escape her mother’s tirades, Raven started staying out late at night and sharing her problems with her friends. That upset Martha even more and she would sit waiting for her daughter and berate
her when she came home. Raven would ignore her mother and go directly to bed, rendering Martha speechless.

One night, however, as she waited up for her daughter, Martha began to drink. And the more she drank, the angrier she became, thinking back to the punishments she had suffered at the hands of the nuns for offences not nearly as serious as staying out late at night and most likely getting into all manner of trouble. That led her to remember being beaten and thrown into the coal cellar for trying to help Little Joe, and she began to feel morose and sorry for herself.

By the time Raven came home, Martha had worked herself up into a drunken rage.

“I bet you’ve been smoking pot and making out with the boys,” she said, grabbing hold of her, pushing her down on the sofa and lashing her with a belt. “The Good Book says ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child,’ and this is for your own good.

“From now on you’re going to church every Sunday and I’ll be keeping an eye on you.”

But instead of intimidating her daughter, Martha made her defiant and rebellious. When she tried to hit her again for staying out late, Raven, who was tall and strong, tore the belt from her mother’s hands.

“How’d you like it if I hit you with a belt. Try that again and I’ll let you have it. You make me sick. Pretending to be religious, crying out in church on Sunday about being saved and coming home to drink yourself senseless and beat me. Spider, for all his faults, was never a hypocrite like you. I hate hypocrites! Now back off and leave me alone!”

Martha gave up trying to discipline her daughter and Raven continued roaming the community with kids seeking companionship and love wherever they could find it. They gathered at night behind the impersonal, windowless walls of the co-op to express their
self-hatred and disgust at life and their revolt against their parents by smoking and drinking and littering the ground with empty cigarette packages and booze bottles, by cutting themselves with razor blades, by melting down over-the-counter drugs and injecting them into their veins, by swallowing Oxycodone and Percocet pills stolen from their parents who had smuggled them into the community to feed their own addictions, by inserting their heads into black garbage bags to sniff the fumes of gasoline and hairspray, and by squirting insect repellent straight into their nostrils to get a quick high.

When they emerged from the shadows, they scrawled HYPOCRITES GO HOME on the walls of their overcrowded, polluted and rotting school, giving the finger to the white teachers who arrived each fall promising to be their friends but who often betrayed them by leaving at Christmas and not coming back when the holidays were over. Out at the airport, they did the same thing, writing WELCOME TO HELL on the side of the terminal building to show their disdain for the so-called experts from the outside who flew in regularly to tinker ineffectually with the defective community water, sanitation and electrical systems.

But their rage was not confined to their parents and to the outsiders who had let them down. They turned against each other, like the children in William Golding’s
Lord of the Flies
, with the bigger kids pushing around and exploiting the smaller ones. Initially relegated to the ranks of the young and weak, Raven was ordered to steal money and booze from her mother. When she refused, they tried to slap her around, but she refused to be bullied and fought back, defending herself using a piece of two-by-four as a club.

“Crazy bitch,” they called her. “You’re just as weird as your dingbat brother and mother.” But they left her alone and grudgingly accepted her into the ranks of the dominant group.

Some youngsters just opted out and killed themselves. For the
suicide epidemic that had begun more than two decades earlier in northern Ontario among Native youth, well before Martha left the community for Toronto, had continued unchecked over the years. But in contrast to neighbouring communities such as Pikangikum, Wapekeka and Webeque, where at times in each place up to half a dozen young people took their lives annually, there was usually no more than one death from suicide each year at Cat Lake First Nation.

Thus when thirteen-year-old Rebecca took her life that fall, the shock wave of grief that rolled over the community was tempered by the expectation that it was unlikely there would be another self-inflicted death for some time. But then two more teenagers, Jonathan and Sara, took their lives, one after another in quick succession. And while they all killed themselves just after their thirteenth birthdays, nobody knew if that was just a coincidence.

Despite her problems, Martha was not so self-absorbed that she was unaware that an epidemic of youth suicide was ravaging the community. Every Sunday she prayed along with the members of her church for the souls of the departed. At the band office, it was the main topic of conversation among the staff and the ever-present crowd of hangers-on in the reception area. She even attended the funerals, and sobbed and cried out with the other mourners as the coffins were carried out for burial.

But in the grip of her depression, and either drunk or hungover much of the time, she shared the grief of the others from a distance, numbly, in a mechanical sort of way, just going through the motions. What was happening was horrific but it did not affect her personally. Certainly she never suspected her own daughter might be involved. Therefore when Raven, shortly after her thirteenth birthday, came into her bedroom one Saturday morning, shook her awake and told her she was part of a suicide pact with the three
teenagers who had taken their lives, Martha did not grasp what her daughter was telling her.

“Whaz that? Whaz that? You’ve joined what? What’re you saying?”

“Nothing,” said Raven. “Nothing important.”

Joshua was eating breakfast with his wife when Raven knocked on their door and entered.

“Look who’s here,” he said. “Help yourself to some bannock and make yourself at home. Would you like some hot chocolate or tea?”

When Raven sat down on the couch but remained silent, Joshua’s wife looked at her desolate face and put on her shawl. “I’m going to leave you to it,” she said. “I got a few errands to run” and she went out the door.

“Now, how can I help?” Joshua asked, coming over to sit down beside her.

“Joshua,” Raven said, “you were there for me when Nokomis died. Can you help me again? I’ve no one to turn to and feel really bad. My mother drinks and cares only for Spider and she blames me for driving him into the bush. She never wanted me in the first place and has no use for me now. When I tried to talk to her this morning about something really important, she was so drunk she didn’t know what I was trying to say.”