A CURTAIN OF RAIN FALLS SOFTLY across the tin roof, mixing like a snare drum with the rhythm of Frog Lake on the tape player. There is the smell of red cedar and the shadows of two men carving in silent concentration. The shed is Native Brotherhood territory but I’m welcomed here not just because my great-grandmother was Ojibway, but because in the eyes of the Brotherhood, anyone who has done as many years in a white man’s prison as I have must be all right.
Under the yellow light tacked to the crossbeam, our little carving shed becomes a world unto itself. Space and time seem to pause together and suspend the three of us in a gift of place. The razor wire, the gun towers, the years behind us, and the years ahead don’t hold much weight in the curve of this moment.
Bobby kicks the cedar shavings from a moon mask he’s been working on into a small pile. Narcisse, an elder, who has been whittling a talking stick, unfolds his tobacco pouch and rolls a cigarette. No hurry, we’re on Indian time as he’s fond of saying. I mark my page in a new hardcover I’m reading, Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach, the story of young Haisla “Flower”, a girl coming of age in the coastal village of Kitamat.
I turn Bobby’s moon mask in my hands, checking the depths of the cuts, running my thumbs along the swirling grain. I pass the mask to Narcisse. Bobby is encouraged enough by Narcisse’s silent inspection to suggest mother of pearl for the eyes. Narcisse says “abalone shell.”
Young Shawn comes running in out of the rain. He squeezes the water from his ponytail, his long blue-black hair as shiny as a crow’s tail, hangs his soaked benny on a nail. Underneath he’s wearing a sweat top illustrated with a pair of manacled hands and the words “Free Leonard Peltier”. Shawn made the sweater’s logo when he first drove up on this bit but in the ensuing months his consciousness has shifted from the political towards the spiritual and his red fist has become unclenched. He says now of the sweater, “It’s more like wearing a poppy, to remember, plus it keeps me warm.”
Shawn reaches under the workbench and makes me a present of one of his drums, a caribou hide stretched over a pine frame. Last week, I helped him bang out a gradual release plan and filled in the corresponding applications. Afterwards we sat together to write a different letter, this one to his Tsinii Al up in Haida Gwaii. I had to dig it out of him to find words, his words, to make it his voice and his letter. Shawn had come down from Masset and landed in the East End of Vancouver. When the pavement came between him and the earth, he fell into confusion, addiction, and when welfare was no longer enough, he became involved in senseless crime. Many of his friends ended up in small boxes in cheap funeral homes but Shawn ended up here in a bigger box. Prison, is, simply put, the bottom rung of the welfare ladder.
The Correctional Service of Canada tries. They recognize the gulf between native and white rehabilitation. They encourage the Native Brotherhood to function, they hire native contract workers to act as counsellors, teachers and Elders. They allow the carving shed, the sweat lodge, and a private space for healing circles. In spite of the tension and mistrust from both sides, the red path is attainable — if a native prisoner recovers his culture, he recovers himself.
Tonight, Shawn’s face is etched in troubled lines as deep as Bobby’s mask. He tells me he wanted to take the money from selling his drums and make restitution to his ex-landlady, the woman who returned home to broken locks, smashed lamps, and missing valuables. Case management had turned him down, stating there is no process within Corrections to make restitution without a court order.
A hundred years ago, Shawn would have faced his victim and his village in a longhouse. Restitution would have been part of the determination. Shawn would have been punished and the circle would have been damaged but it would not have been broken.
In Eden Robinson’s story, her uncle Mickey has just landed on the doorstep after a long absence. He’s been “away.” Uncle Mickey is wearing a “Free Leonard Peltier” T-shirt. But as Uncle Mickey begins an overnight boat trip, taking young Lisa Marie up to the traditional oolichan fishing grounds, I suspect that out there amongst the seals and Kermode bears, where the dark water laps at the stone beaches and bleached logs stick out like old bones, that Uncle Mickey will not be denied his process, the one that existed there ten thousand years before the first iron bar was ever poured.