JUST AFTER MY SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY IN 1929, I went to the home of our band chief with my parents. I did not know that this visit had anything to do with my future. I don’t think I ever considered the future; the present was enough for me. I believe I thought that I would go on forever living with my parents, looking after the young ones, following the family on its seasonal wanderings. I should have known better. After all, I was now sixteen and I knew that marriages had been ar-ranged for many girls who were my age and younger.
In our village we had watchmen. These were villagers who were appointed by the chief to arrange marriages, guard the morals of the young people, and watch over the people of the reserve. The watchmen were sometimes stern and hard. A few were different: they were appointed by the chief because they felt a concern for the welfare of the people. After 1940, we no longer had watchmen on the reserve, but when I was a girl they were powerful. Their word was law.
Walking to the chief’s home, entering his house, I did not expect my parents to tell me why we were making this visit. I’m sure that it didn’t occur to my parents to tell me that my marriage was about to be arranged. No, just as when I first went to school, an announcement would be made when the plans were final. That is the way it was done in our village.
The chief and my parents talked together. I stayed in the background, as was expected of a young girl in the presence of her parents and the chief. I heard my parents tell the chief that they had talked to the watchmen and that they agreed to my marriage with Lazare John.
“When next the priest says Mass in the village, they will be married,” said the chief.
“I agree,” said my mother.
Johnny nodded.
And still no one spoke to me. No one asked me, “Mary, do you agree? Do you wish to marry this young man? Do you, Mary, even know Lazare John?”
Now, when I remember the days before my marriage, I think of a moth beating its wings against a lighted lamp. I knew that there was no escape for me. The chief, my parents, and the watchmen had decided that I was to marry Lazare John, and from that decision there was no appeal.
I did not dream of questioning the decision or of saying to my mother, “I don’t want to get married! I want to go to work in a hotel or a hospital or in somebody’s house, a house with nice things that I can take care of! I want a career. I don’t know anything about being married! I don’t know this Lazare! I have seen him but I have never spoken to him. Please, please, don’t make me get married!” Still less did it occur to me to say, “I won’t get married! I refuse!” These things, and many more, I said to myself day and night, but I never said them to my mother, to the chief, or to the watchmen.
Day by day, with the arrival of the priest approaching, I grew more scared. I knew that when I married Lazare I would have to leave my family and live in the John home. I didn’t know anyone in his family. How could I suddenly go into the home of strangers and live as if I was one of them?
Worse still, I knew nothing about sex—what would happen to me when suddenly I was this man’s wife? I had never been alone with a boy in my life. Apart from my family and relatives, I had hardly exchanged a word with someone of the opposite sex. And if my shyness had not made me avoid boys, my early training at Lejac and the knowledge that I would be the talk of the village if I was seen with a boy kept me silent. I had danced with them, but this was always under the watchful eyes of my mother and the elders.
In our culture, sex was never discussed. Most young girls were told what happened to their bodies when they became women. Young people might be warned that if they slept with an unclean person, they would get a disease. But that was all.
Lazare John was seven years older than me. I knew that he was the son of a chief, that he was considered a ’mother’s boy’ and that his family lived across the village from us. I had often seen him with a group of boys, but until the day we were married, I had never exchanged a word with him.
Lazare’s father was Chief Vital John. His mother Margaret came from a reserve far to the south of our village. The John family, along with the Antoine family, were considered to be at the top of the social scale in the village, because both families were headed by hereditary chiefs. This gave them a good deal of status on the reserve.
Lazare was one of six children, two boys and four girls. He was the youngest son; for some reason, his mother favoured him over his older brother Felix. I had heard that when Lazare went to the Mission School in Fort St. James, his mother moved to that village to be near him. He was so unhappy away from Stoney Creek that he and his mother returned to our village after one year, and Lazare never went to school again.
Poor Lazare ... in my distress at being ordered to marry and leave my family, it did not occur to me that he might be equally unhappy. He was no more consulted about his wishes than I was. As I was to discover, he was just as shy as his reluctant bride.
The day I dreaded arrived. The priest came to the village to say Mass. I felt as if this must be happening to someone else—it couldn’t be me, Mary Paul, the girl who wanted nothing more than to live with her parents forever, who, if she left them, yearned for a career in a hospital or in a home with nice things. It couldn’t be me putting on my Sunday dress and the coat I had bought so happily from the Army and Navy Store two years before. Could it be me walking to the Catholic Church in our village to be united in matrimony with a man named Lazare John? But it was.
I had gained only one small victory. A widow was going steady with my mother’s first cousin, and I convinced the two of them that they should be married on the same day as me. At least there would be others in the front of the church; everyone wouldn’t be looking at me.
After the ceremony, I ran home alone. I crouched in a corner of our cabin and I cried with such violence that my chest hurt. I felt as if my world had come to an end, that I had been condemned to some terrible fate that would go on for-ever and ever.
My parents, my relatives, came in. They tried to comfort me. Nothing helped. To me it was just like going away to school again, but now I knew that from this journey I was taking, across the village and into the house of strangers, there was no return. Finally, in an effort to cheer me, my aunt called out to me, “Why are you crying? Tonight you are going to sleep with your husband!”
I cried louder than ever.
In a few minutes, Lazare came to our cabin. He didn’t look at me. He said, “Come.”
And I went with him, away from my parents’ home.
Looking back, I think that I was lucky. If I had to marry—and I know that given the times and our culture, there was no escape from the decision of my parents and the watchmen—I was fortunate to marry a man as kind and decent as Lazare John. Many young Native girls were not as lucky.