Stolen Life (63 page)

She was down and tried to bite my leg. I hate that worse than anything except hair-pulling, and as I hit her I bent too low and she got me by the hair too. So I grabbed hers and she groaned and curled up. But I leaned back, pulled her head up to meet my punches, and hit her face full force at the same time.

I said, “Say it’s over!”

But she wouldn’t. She heaved up and had me by the upper legs and was running me like a linebacker into the sightline of the guard bubble. The Rep yelled, “Not there, not there!” but she kept pushing me right back against the glass wall where the guards can see, so I used the glass as leverage to shove her away.

We both landed right in the laps of the women watching. They struggled to get out from under us, and I wrestled out from under her too. I couldn’t feel anything in my hands any more; she bounced me on one leg across the room and grabbed my hair above the rubber band that holds my braid and it broke. She used all her weight to pull me over by one braid, I was bent across her but not down, I realized we were inside the bathroom door jamb and she had me up against the wall.

I yelled, “This’s the last time you’re touching my hair!” and I got a fistful of hers and banged her head against the steel door. I heard it crack, I could feel from her weight she was going down, but I was so enraged—my hair!—and then a shout: “Six! Six!”

Her old lady, and a young girl were in the doorway, both screaming.

Then: “Yvonne, Yvonne … enough already!”

I was in my cell. Shaking so badly I had to sit down on the bed.

Jane and the other sister showed up at my cell door. They came in, they started to brag me up. But I told them, don’t get into that, I’m no way proud of what happened.

“Just stupid games. We went at each other to give you guys excitement off our pain.”

Then a Jamaican inmate showed up. She said she had covered my back in there and I thanked her; though I knew it was partly because she hated Whites so much. But she didn’t stop there: to my surprise she turned on Jane, whose abuse by Joe was the reason I had made the complaint in the first place.

“How come you left your sister all alone down there?” she said, her usually loud voice even louder. “She coulda been killed!”

Jane looked ashamed. “I really thought someone’d get killed, I didn’t want to get pulled into it.”

“So you just left her, to take it——”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I interrupted. “Thanks again, for the cover, but I’ve got to go, visit my old man.”

“No!”

“Yeah, so please.”

“God, you just taken care of business and you carry on, clean up, go visit—you got jam, girl, and then some!”

I found I could stand again. And there was my name being called over the intercom; time to leave for the visit. The guards said nothing about my hands when they cuffed and shackled me for movement to Collins Bay; they seemed to see nothing and they never asked a thing. Dwa saw how strange my face looked.

“You musta really cut loose on somebody,” he said. “Or did you go through a wall with your bare hands?”

“Real thick wall,” I said. “I never got through.”

He saw how much I hated what I’d done. I laid my head in his lap and we were quiet together through the whole visit. Then our time was up, and I was returned to my cell on the A Range in the Prison for Women. Sore, sad, stupid.

Some stories need to be told, then told again.

A prison like P4W is not a livable reality. You are bombarded with control and instruction and restriction and useless information, endless courses—but what is the point of it all if you’re in for life and never get a chance to live freely what you’re supposed to have learned? Inside you can’t live it, and so you never actually know it.

So, prison is no place to recover. From anything, either the grief of memory, or loss, or abuse, or the diseases of addiction. But if you’re a Native and you can get the help to seek and find and claim your spiritual name, a lot can be changed. You can discover your destiny. Your life can bridge back to the origins of your family and people, you can seek out your colours, your clan, your spirit keepers. You may find the self you never knew you were.

As Jung explains it, you can “emerge into your own myth.”

I had laid Jung’s book
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
down open, to keep my page. And I saw on the back cover that he died five months after my conception: 6 June 1961: four months later I was born. Something to think about. He writes:

Jung was so right, to my own understanding, when he spoke of “bloody struggles” and “ultimate testing.” I had those for sure. And at the end of his life, in the chapter “Visions,” he is right again:

An ego that endures the truth. My great-great-grandfather Big Bear was deeply connected to Bear. He was a carrier of the bundle of the Bear Spirit, and his body died during a blizzard
on the Little Pine Reserve in Saskatchewan, 17 January 1888, and—as they say—was buried on the banks of the Battle River where it flows on to Hudson Bay and into the world water of the oceans. Before I was born, before I emerged as flesh from my mother, my spirit’s name was Medicine Bear Woman.

Receiving my name gave me a way to adapt the problems of my past to the possibilities of my future, however restricted and controlled it would be. My existence would fulfil what the Creator intended for me.

I must tell the story again.

One day in 1992, after I had been door and firekeeper for the sweat lodge inside P4W for over a year, I offered tobacco to the Elder who was visiting us then, Vern Harper, and asked him (“Be careful what you ask for!”) if I could receive my spirit name. He was always joking, and this was so serious I joked too:

“I don’t want, you know, a name like ‘Speckled Frog Sitting on a Stump,’ something like that!”

He laughed with me. But he said nothing, so I continued to keep the sweat-lodge area clean, to close the entrance of the lodge when he and the Sisters of the Hood went inside. I kept the fire burning to heat the stones, and I waited. He visited regularly but said nothing. I was struggling, trying to prepare myself for the appeal of my sentence in October.

Then one day when I was again carrying and placing the stones in the lodge pit, he said to me, “You’re coming in today.”

In the fourth round, after he had sung and prayed, Vern told me my name. And also my colours, which I had not asked for.

I knew the name was true. My grandma Flora had called me that; I could hear her voice saying it. My place was behind her wood stove, warm and quiet, and she talked in the shifting light of a wick burning in animal fat:

Muskeke Muskwa Iskwewos. Say it
.

And now I knew certainly that I was a spirit in the physical world, I knew I had a destiny. Maybe now a lot of what I always thought was insane in my life, what drove me crazy trying to understand, maybe I could deal with it. As Carl Jung writes,
“We cannot think of the physical life of civilized man except in terms of problems. It is the growth of consciousness that we must thank for the existence of problems: they are the dubious gift of civilization.”

When I got back from my visit with Dwa at Collins Bay, I was called to Medical, and they asked to see my hands. The nurse said staff had reported damage to my hands; they feared they might be broken. What had happened to them? They know I never report anything, I don’t gossip or personally complain, but they could see my hands and I’d thought of something.

“I was late for lock-up,” I said, “running too fast for the stairs, so I reached up and hit the steel pole on the handrails with my knuckles, the back of my hand.”

She didn’t look at me, just studied my hand. Then she said, “Both hands? It looks like there could be broken bones in there. I’ll send you for x-rays.”

They did not tell me what they found. I was given Tylenol Threes with codeine, a very big drug for anyone in P4W. I couldn’t hold the little medicine cup they were in, so I dumped them over into my palm. They helped, immediately. And I walked away with my sleeves pulled down over my hands, but everyone knew I was on the Med line and the gossip went around, “How did she get Threes?”

The woman I fought couldn’t get out of bed. I heard that some inmates were giving her their Meds for her pain and that she was deaf in one ear from a broken eardrum. I went to my cell and prayed; not for myself, but for what was going on, and all I now had to do.

For two years I’d been working in Crafts on a special shield. I finished it now with an eagle on it, the messenger of the Creator. Then I went to her cell on the range and asked if I could talk with her. Her girlfriend was with her; it was the first time since the fight that I had seen either of them. There was a strange smell in the cell: she was lying flat on her bed.

She tried to sit up. I could see it was hard, and she hid her face from me. I bent my face to the floor to give her as much privacy as I could in that cramped space.

“I brought you a gift,” I said. “A sort of peace offering.”

I presented the shield to her, and for a moment she said nothing. I couldn’t look at her.