As Long as the Rivers Flow (9 page)

Night turned to day, and the Wendigo, still clutching the little girl in a tight, icy grip, soared upwards toward black storm clouds that appeared on the horizon in the shape of the residential school where Martha had suffered so much. Other winged Wendigos, dressed in the black habits of nuns, and led by one with the head of Sister Angelica, crawled out from under the eves of the building and launched themselves into the air to escort her back to her prison. But suddenly a raven streaked out of the sun, drove off the Wendigos, and as day reverted to night, returned her to her friends and family.

Martha woke early the next morning shaken and fearful. To her and to most people she knew on the reserve, dreams were not the meaningless activity of cerebral neurons firing randomly during sleep but messages from the other world about the future. She dragged herself from bed and went to the house of Joshua Nanagushkin, a family friend who was home with his wife and
young children from Thunder Bay where he had a job teaching school. A serious, good-natured individual in his mid-thirties with kind brown eyes, Joshua had attended the same residential school as Martha two decades earlier and his experience there had been positive. Father Antoine, interested only in little girls, had paid him little attention, and as a pious, well-behaved, astute and intelligent student, he had been a favourite of the nuns.

Over the years, he had become the most respected person in the community, widely admired as someone who had made it on the outside but who had kept his Native language and his love and knowledge of the old wisdom. For years, the elders had been urging him to come home to stay and be chief. He promised that he would, but only after he had retired from his teaching job.

Martha knocked on the door of his family’s home and entered without waiting to be invited in, as was the local custom.

Joshua, who was sitting at the kitchen table preparing lesson plans for the coming school year, got up and gave her a hug.

“Look at you,” he said, “all grown up and so good-looking! I heard you were back. Was school as bad as everyone says?”

Martha nodded her agreement and said. “I need to talk about it. Do you think you’d be able to spare a few minutes?”

“Of course I can. We go back a long way. I’ll never forget when you were just a little girl and you used to come home from the land in the summers. You were always so happy and such a little devil. Let’s first have some tea and walk over to the lake. I could use a break anyway.”

At the shore, the two friends sat down on a log half-buried in the sand beside a fire pit. The night before, a happy family had gathered around a bonfire at this spot to fry fish and bannock and to talk and to laugh. Before leaving, they had poured water on the fire to put it out and to ensure it did not spread into the nearby
tinder-dry bush. A smell of wet ashes and grease lingered in the air, as did wisps of smoke from embers buried deep in the charred sticks of wood that were not completely extinguished.

Neither said anything, hypnotized by the magic of northern Ontario on a summer morning. Off in the distance, high in the sky, they could see eagles and hawks on the hunt. Waves, pushed by an onshore breeze that kept away the bugs, lapped at their feet, and gulls wheeled above calling out to each other. Children were swimming and messing around in canoes. A happy elder walked by, carrying his gear and bait, on his way to his boat and looking forward to a relaxing day of fishing.

Eventually Martha shook off the spell and pointed up at the towering cumulus clouds.

“Do you see that? The clouds that look like the ancestors paddling a canoe? Just like the picture painted by the shamans on the rock wall across the lake? They look so sad. It’s as if they know what’s happening to us young people today.”

Martha went on to tell Joshua that she had been feeling awful since she had returned. Her relations with her mother were bad and there were times when she just wanted to die. She had just had a dream that deeply troubled her. Could he help?

“I’ll do my best, Martha,” he said. “Tell me what really happened to you at the school and what’s been going on since you’ve been back.”

Martha talked and Joshua listened, interrupting only to clarify particular points or to encourage her to continue. Finally when Martha had no more to say, Joshua told her that he had been aware Father Antoine had been preying on the little girls for a long time but this was the first time anyone had ever provided him with the soul-destroying details. She should tell the police, he said. He would go with her to provide moral support if she wanted.

“No! No! Please, no,” Martha said. “He’ll just say I was lying, the nuns would back him up, the police would take his word over mine and I’d be the one who got into trouble. Besides, I just want to turn the page and move on.”

“Are you sure?” Joshua said. “He needs to be stopped.”

When Martha once again refused, Joshua said, “It makes me sick to think he’s going to get away with his crimes. But I’m not going to try to make you do something you don’t want to do.”

When Martha did not reply, Joshua did not press her further. The two of them spent the next half hour gazing silently at the ancestors in the clouds until they changed form and disappeared.

“I think I’m now ready to let you know what I think about your dream,” Joshua said. “In the old days, the elders liked to tell us stories about bearwalkers casting spells on people and the Wendigo stomping through the bush during the spring thaw, eating trappers and their families. They used to say the bite of a Wendigo would turn someone into another Wendigo. Today, not too many people believe those stories, and they’re usually told just to scare the children. They’re like the tales everyone tells nowadays about Count Dracula, vampires and werewolves. But there are people, and I’m one of them, who believe there’s a lot of truth in tales, especially those about the Wendigo, if they come to us in dreams. Only today, the Wendigo is not the cannibal who eats the flesh of the Anishinabe people. It’s an unseen spirit of destruction and death that eventually destroys the person it’s inhabiting and that person’s kids.”

When Martha looked at him in disbelief, Joshua said there was more.

“I don’t want to frighten you,” he said, “but the part where the bearwalker warns you about the Wendigo inside you is really important. I think the Creator is telling you that Father Antoine is a Wendigo and he turned you into one as well by what he did to you.
He’s letting you know that the monster inside you will push you to kill yourself, if not now, at some other time in your life. It also means you will drive someone else, perhaps someone dear to you, to die some day.”

“Then even worse things are going to happen to me?” Martha asked.

“Not necessarily,” said Joshua. “Because there’s a raven in your dream who rescues you. It represents someone who will help you to heal yourself one day, but only if you’re willing.

“Now, about your mother,” he said. “I’ve known her all my life and she’s a wonderful woman. Sure she’s made mistakes. But we all have. Do you think she had any choice about sending you to the school? The Mounties would have come for you. We had no rights as Native people in those days. We don’t have too many today for that matter. So don’t judge her harshly. I’m sure she loves you in her own way but she’s from a different time and doesn’t understand today’s young people. As for your mental sickness, your mother is right in saying that in the old days people never seemed to feel bad like they do today. If they did, they called it something else and got help from the shaman. In any case, you’re not the only one around here who’s troubled. Many students return from residential school in rough shape.”

When Martha remained silent, Joshua made one final effort to reach her.

“You’re only sixteen, Martha. Are you going to spend the rest of your life tormented by the things that happened to you in that school? Maybe you should be asking yourself what you really want out of the rest of your life.”

“What I really want,” said Martha, “what I want more than anything else, is to get away from my mother and this place and make a fresh start somewhere else.”

“Then why don’t you go for it?” Joshua said. “You can make a good life for yourself without even leaving the north. Why not try your luck in Sudbury, North Bay or Timmins? If you come to Thunder Bay, my wife and I could put you up. If you’re really brave, why not try Toronto?”

Their holidays over, Joshua and his family left for Thunder Bay, leaving Martha deeply frustrated and tired of always having to submit to the will of others, whether her mother, the nuns, Father Antoine or even the Creator himself. The more she thought about it, the more outraged she became, and she decided to defy everybody and everything and leave the reserve for good, as soon as she worked out where to go.

While her relations with her mother did not improve, no longer did she spend her days in tears and her nights reliving the trauma of residential school. Feeling better, she began spending time with other residential school survivors who also had grown apart from their families and the community. With nothing to do, they slept in late and got together in the afternoons and evenings at a secluded spot where they used to play as children. There they lit a campfire and talked until dawn about matters they could never have discussed with their parents.

One night, they organized a party that would change Martha’s life. Some time before, the council had authorized modest welfare payments to Martha just as it had to the others returning home for good from the residential school, and she was able to make a contribution to the common pot. After receiving their weekly handouts at the band office earlier in the day, the young people had gone to the Hudson’s Bay Company store for cigarettes and to the bootlegger’s for wine and gin. Before long, they had built a roaring fire and were having a good time, sharing their cigarettes and passing their
bottles around. As always when they got together, they told their war stories about life at the school. As always, the lead was taken by Russell Moonias, a tall, solidly built teenager, a few years older than Martha.

At residential school, although Russell had a reputation for being quick tempered and not to be crossed, the students had looked up to him as someone who had never been afraid to defy the nuns. His reputation was made when, at twelve, he had run away from the school with stolen food and a canoe, paddling upstream more than a hundred miles trying to make it home only to be caught and returned.

Everyone was familiar with the details. How the nuns had summoned the Mounties and they had taken after him in a boat powered by twin thirty-horse Johnson outboard motors, as if he was an axe murderer rather than a homesick kid. How he heard them coming while they were still a long way away off, paddled to shore and hid with his canoe until the Mounties went past. How the Mounties frantically roared up and down the river trying to find him, eventually figuring out how he was evading them. How they went upstream, cut their engines and drifted down silently on the current until they surprised him. How he led them on a wild chase through the bush until they cornered him and took him into custody. How instead of being angry with him, they laughed and said they didn’t blame him for wanting to go home, but he would “be in for it” when the nuns got their hands on him.

Thus, even though they had heard his story many times, his friends listened attentively when once again he repeated his account of the adventure that had been the defining incident of his short life.

“Do you remember that time I ran away and the Mounties brought me back and Sister Angelica wanted to make an example
of me in front of all the kids? She was giving me the strap and I just smiled at her. That made her mad and she tried to hit me really hard but I pulled my hand away at the last second and she hit herself right on the thigh? Do you remember that? How she howled and started to cry? They beat the shit out of me down in the basement but it was worth it just to see the face of that bitch when she got a taste of her own medicine.”

“Yeah, do I ever!” someone said. “I got the strap that time, just for laughing. But I didn’t care. Never bothered me. Didn’t scare me.”

“Who did they think they were anyway!” added Russell. “Coming onto our land and treating us like animals. What a bunch of hypocrites. That fat priest making the little girls see him alone just to feel them up and do even worse things to them. The nuns knew what he was doing and did nothing about it.”

Like young people everywhere, they also talked about what they wanted to do with their lives. Some wanted to return to the land.

“I’m gonna get married and go live in my father’s cabin on the old trapline,” one person said. “I don’t have an outboard, but I know where I can get a canoe to get there. There’s lots of game over there and plenty of good fishing. Since no one has trapped there for years, I should get a good haul.”

“You gotta be dreaming,” was the comment of another. “There’s nobody on the land any more. It’s a lot easier to live on the reserve, collect welfare and maybe get a little work in the summers fighting bushfires for the government. You hardly know how to paddle a canoe. And who taught you to trap and skin animals? Where you gonna get money for a grubstake? If you brought back furs, where do you think you’d sell them? The market collapsed years ago.”

“Better watch out or the Wendigo will get you!” someone else
said. “It’d love eating tender young Injuns even if they were raised on residential school slop.”

Others could hardly wait to leave to take their chances in the big city.

“My uncle Amos went off to Toronto years ago. He’s back for a holiday. He says there’s lots to see and do in the big city and lots of work if you want it. Says it sure beats lying around doing nothing here. But it’s a long way. It takes about twenty-four hours by bus to get there. Every two or three hours, it stops to pick up new passengers and to let you buy something to eat if you want. The drivers change every now and then but you can stay on board till you reach Toronto.”

“I heard the same thing. All you gotta do is bum a ride out on one of the float planes to Pickle Lake. There are buses going south every day from there and tickets are cheap.”