LIFE GOES ON. WHEN, IN THE MIDDLE of a depression a woman has a husband and a growing family, when the struggle to survive, to keep food on the table and the family clothed, takes all of her energy, there is no time to grieve, to look back with sorrow and regret. Mark and Alec and Melanie had no parents—we had to think of the living and try, if we could, to forget the fresh graves in the village cemetery.
By this time, my stepsister Bella was married to Mike Ketlo. Once my mother’s funeral was over and the shock of her death had lifted a little, Bella and her husband, Lazare and I, sat together and discussed the future of the three children. In the end it was decided that Bella would take Melanie and that Mark and Alec would live with me. Eventually, Melanie and Alec went to Lejac; Mark stayed with Lazare and me until he died.
A white friend of mine told me about an old song that has the line: “Consumption has no pity for blue eyes and golden hair.” I guess it doesn’t have pity for the dark eyes and hair of the Native people either.
Mark, my half-brother, was five years younger than me. He was twenty-two years old in 1940, when the Second World War was going on. He was called to Vancouver to undergo a medical for getting into the army. Before he left Stoney Creek, he could talk of nothing but what he would do and where he would go when he was a soldier. He did not pass his medical. It was discovered that he had tuberculosis. He grew depressed when he couldn’t get in the army and instead of going into a hospital for treatment or coming home to me, he wandered the streets of Vancouver, sleeping out at night, bumming around during the day.
Finally, when he was almost dead, he was taken to the tuberculosis sanitorium at Coqualeetza near Hope in British Columbia. I was notified that he was there.
I was determined that Mark would not die away from his family. I did everything but beg, borrow and steal until I had my return fare so that I could visit him. When I finally reached him, I could see that he had not long to live. He begged me to take him out of the hospital, to bring him home with me. I went to the doctors.
“I want to take my brother back to Stoney Creek,” I said.
“We cannot agree to that,” they answered. “We do not believe he will survive such a trip.”
“He is going to die, whether it is here or there,” I replied. “He wants to die in his own village.”
The doctors argued, but their words meant nothing to me. I remembered myself as a little girl, in bed sick with the 1918 flu, and an old woman coming to me and saying, “You have a baby brother. His name is Mark.” This was the brother whom I had looked after as an infant and a little boy, and who had come into my home and my care after my mother’s death . . . no, I would not leave him to die alone in a strange building.
The doctors finally threw up their hands. Mark came home with me. I will never forget the trip back to Stoney Creek. Mark was put in a berth; I had a lower berth beside him. I lifted him and turned him—he was as light as a feather, just skin and bones. More than once, I thought he would die before I could get him back to our village.
My aunt and I put him in my parents’ old house, and there we looked after him until he died. How he fought for his life! He was determined to live.
“Mary,” he said to me over and over, “I don’t want to die! I’m only twenty-two years old!”
He lived just one week after I brought him back to Stoney Creek. But at least he died in his village, surrounded by his own people.
We knew so little about tuberculosis. We didn’t know that it was infectious, that extra precautions had to be taken to prevent the spread of this dread disease.
We took in a young boy, an orphan, who had tuberculosis. Many village people told us that it was dangerous to have him in our home, but we ignored their warnings. Lazare and I thought it was a matter of simple charity to offer the dying boy a home. The Indian Agent gave him a small ration each month, but apart from that, nobody in the Indian Agent’s office or in the public health showed an interest in the welfare of the boy or warned us of the dangers to which we were exposing our own children.
The poor young boy took a long time to die. We gave him what care and comfort we could, but in the end, he had no resistance with which to fight the disease.
Not long after he died, in 1952, we discovered that our two little sons, Ernie and Gordie, had tuberculosis. Fortunately, they were not badly infected, but nevertheless, they were hospitalized in Miller Bay Hospital near Prince Rupert. They were away from me for a year, and in that time, I was only able to pay them one visit. When I saw them, they were in the same crib, fighting and rough-housing and as lively as they could be.
The nurses loved them. “They are real little imps,” said one nurse to me. On that visit, Gordie and Ernie showed very little interest in me; as the youngest and most lively patients in the hospital, they were surrounded with love and attention. Because they were so young, they had become used to the hospital quickly.
I still remember how lonely I felt as I left them, tumbling over each other in their crib. I was relieved that they were not homesick, but how empty my house in Stoney Creek seemed when I returned after that visit to Miller Bay!
I believe it was my daughter Helen and her battle with tuberculosis which nearly broke my heart. She was my second child, born in 1932, and in a way that I cannot put into words, we were so close that sometimes each of us seemed part of one whole. When things went badly for Helen, it was as if they were happening to me.
When she was of age to attend school, Helen was taken to Lejac; I suffered homesickness and hunger and anxiety with her, almost as if I was reliving my own years in that institution. She left school when she was fourteen and found work on the cleaning staff in Miller Bay Hospital. Within a year, she was a patient in the hospital where she had been working.
She was hospitalized for fifteen years. Her entire girlhood was spent as a patient in Miller Bay and then in Coqualeetza, near Hope, where poor Mark had spent such a short time.
Helen cried a lot when she was in Miller Bay. She would write to us, begging us to come and see her, or to send her crochet cotton or knitting wool so that she would have activi-ties that would keep her busy. How bitter it was for Lazare and me that we could visit her only once in a while! How I hated our poverty when I had to write to her and say that we could not afford to send her even a ball of wool. Those were hard hard years for Helen and our family.
When she had been in Miller Bay for some years, she met a man from Skidegate Indian Reserve on the Queen Charlottes. He was called Swede Jones. After many years, when she was discharged from the hospital as cured, she and Swede were married in the United Church in Skidegate. No doubt she would have been married in our little Catholic Church in Stoney Creek, if her sister Winnie had not had an unfortunate experience with our priest.
Winnie had also met a Haida from Skidegate, Ed Young, whom she wished to marry. Ed was a member of the United Church. Winnie brought Ed to her father and me and told us that they wished to be married. Lazare and I went to the priest in Stoney Creek, a Frenchman.
“Our daughter Winnie wishes to marry Ed Young, who is a Protestant,” we said to the priest. “Will you marry them in our village church?”
“No,” said the priest. “I cannot marry a Protestant in our church. Your daughter should marry a good Catholic boy.”
Lazare and I were insistent. “She does not want to marry a Catholic boy. She wants to marry this Ed Young!”
“You and your husband are committing a sin when you encourage this marriage,” said the priest. “You will be sorry if you continue with this foolishness!”
Lazare and I, Winnie and Ed, returned to our home. We talked things over. Lazare and I had given our consent to this marriage, and we were not willing to withdraw it. In the end, we journeyed to Prince George and Winnie and Ed were married in the home of the United Church minister. The following Sunday at Mass, all hell broke loose!
The priest announced from the pulpit that because Mary and Lazare John had consented to their daughter’s marriage outside the church, they and their whole family were excommunicated. Well! Everybody in the village was furious.
“It’s not up to him to excommunicate any person!” said one.
“Only the bishop has the right to excommunicate!” said another.
“Just ignore him!” said a third.
And that’s just what Lazare and I did! We went to Mass the next Sunday as usual. We went to Confession, we took Communion, and never once, not on that Sunday or on any other Sunday, did the priest refuse us the sacraments of the church. His excommunication just faded away.
He was a strange man, a good man and yet, a kind of dictator too. I remember that he was very upset with Gus, Johnny Paul’s brother. After Johnny’s death, Gus left his wife, enfranchised himself and set up housekeeping with a white woman. The priest was bothered about Gus, and said more than once, “If Gus were to die, I wouldn’t know what to do with him.” Gus had many friends on the reserve and this kind of talk from the priest angered people.
“What do you mean?” they asked. “Gus is Catholic. Why wouldn’t he be buried like any other Catholic?”
“No,” said the priest, “I wouldn’t know what to do about him. I couldn’t have a service for him in our church, and I wouldn’t want to have him buried in our cemetery.” There was much grumbling in the village about the priest, about his efforts to excommunicate Lazare and me, and his statements about Gus.
And yet, when Lazare and I were building our second house, the one we lived in until just a few years ago, this French priest came over many times and helped us put up walls and work on the roof. He never once apologized for trying to drive us out of the church.
And poor Helen . . . her troubles were not over. Before long her tuberculosis flared up again and she was back in Miller Bay. Finally, in a last desperate effort to save her, she was removed to the sanitorium in Coqualeetza, and one lung was removed. She was nearly thirty before she was finally out of the sanitorium. By that time, she and Swede were sepa-rated. The marriage was at an end.
Helen worked on the Queen Charlottes, and, in later years with Stoney Creek students attending St. Joseph’s School in Vanderhoof. For seven years, she was the band manager on the reserve. Time and again, she found herself back in hospital. At those times we knew that her one over-worked lung was unable to do the work that needed two.
A few months ago, we lost her.
As if tuberculosis had not robbed me of enough, there was another sorrow for me. When she was in her mid-forties, Bella, who had been a sister and more than a sister to me, died of tuberculosis in her home in Stoney Creek. I was with her when she died.