While I was going to school in Kamloops, I found out that some of my friends were taking courses that were transferrable to universities. I dreamed of going to university but didn’t think it would ever happen because of my family and community commitments. The opportunity came in 1993. Our community had our elections for chief and council coming up again in April, and I decided not to run. An incident that happened a few months before made me realize that it was time to step down as chief and do something else.
I was heading into town in my vehicle. Dealing with the Department of Indian Affairs and ignorant White people in general always made me angry, and that day was no exception. I was in a bad mood and passed three young White boys who were hitchhiking. I did not know them and did not stop to pick them up even though I easily had enough room in my vehicle for all of them. I happened to glance in my rear-view mirror as I passed them and saw that one of them had given me the finger. All of a sudden, I felt such intense anger. That little gesture brought back full force all of the hatred I felt towards White people. Even though I probably got the finger for not stopping to pick them up, it brought back all the racist policies that the Department of Indian Affairs had forced on our people. It brought back the inequities of the justice inquiry, and it brought back all of the negative social conditions my people had to endure because of the White ancestors of these three boys.
I turned my vehicle around and drove back past the boys, then pulled a U-turn and steered my vehicle straight towards them. They had to jump off the side of the road to avoid getting run over. I stopped the vehicle, got out, and went over to where they stood, swearing a blue streak at them for giving me the finger. They were big boys, and it never occurred to me that I might be putting myself in danger. Instead, they seemed to be in shock. I screamed at them and all the hatred I felt came pouring out of me. One of the boys started talking back to me and we got into a screaming match. I finally got back in my car and drove away, leaving them standing on the road. I fully expected a visit from the RCMP but no one came looking for me. Maybe the boys were just too surprised to get my licence plate number. That incident helped me realize I was getting way too cynical. My anger at the way my people were forced to live was getting to me.
Over the years, I had watched my protective big brother Mike deteriorate from work in coastal logging camps or planting trees in the Interior to drinking too much and working less and less. Eventually, he became a chronic alcoholic on the streets of Williams Lake. One time, Mike was ordered by the courts to attend a treatment centre in Prince George. He came back looking healthy and said he was glad to no longer wake up with a hangover. I asked him if he was going to quit drinking for good. He said that although he liked being healthy, being sober also allowed him to start thinking about his life – something he didn’t like to do. Whenever his mind ran back to earlier events, he wanted a drink so he wouldn’t think. It wasn’t too long before Mike was drinking again.
Years later, I spotted Mike picking up bottles near a McDonald’s restaurant outside Williams Lake. I turned the car around and went to talk to him. We exchanged a few words and I gave him twenty dollars. Just as I was about to leave, Mike said to me, “Don’t ever think I don’t miss you, Bev.” I got all choked up and told him that I missed him too. Of course, we didn’t hug or even touch. He just walked away, and in my rear-view mirror, I watched him head towards town. He had stopped picking up bottles because he had enough money to buy his booze for the day.
My heart was broken. I cried off and on all the way through my day. I cried for the young man he once was, the potential he had, the dreams that had been squashed, the dark memories and anger he tried to escape with the use of alcohol and drugs. I cried for the person he had become. My big brother had been reduced to one of society’s outcasts – nothing more than a dirty nuisance that needed to be obliterated.
Yes, in some ways Mike had become a threat to society. Over the years, he told me some of the things he had done to other people, and I found it difficult to imagine this protective man harming others. Mike, however, did not get to this place all by himself. Like so many other people, Aboriginal or not, Mike had a lot of help getting where he is today. Mike never told me directly but, based on a few hints he let slip over the years, I suspect that he had been sexually abused at the Mission. He suffered from the same low self-esteem that I had and he quit school in grade nine or ten. I think Mike’s life was predetermined before he ever left the Mission. Booze for Mike was an escape that he adopted early in life, and it had him in a full headlock by the time he was in his early twenties. How could he possibly live up to his full potential with all that hurt and pain weighing him down?
The streets of Williams Lake are full of men like Mike. They nickname themselves the “Troopers.” All have relatives in the surrounding communities and families who love them. All are human beings no matter how bad they may look. They have funny and interesting stories, and they are loyal to their friends and relatives. Many times, though, I have watched non-Aboriginal people walk by these street people with a look of disdain, dislike, and even sometimes a look bordering on hatred. They quickly condemn the Troopers but simply have no idea of what Aboriginal people have experienced. What do non-Aboriginal people know of the discrimination we have been put through for their benefit? What do they know of the feelings we have for them but do not show?
When Mike first started to live on the streets, he would plan his trips to jail so that he could spend the winters under a warm roof with three square meals a day. He knew what crime to commit, how long it would take to get through the courts, and what sentence he was likely to get. One summer, Mike told me that it was almost time for him to do a break and enter. He knew what time of year to commit a crime so that he would be out by the next spring.
Doing time in jail was not a hardship for many Aboriginal people. My brother Morris spent many years in prison. He said, as did many others, that the residential school was worse than any prison. Morris spent ten years at the Mission, longer than most. He said he would have spent less time there, but he got into trouble with the law and, when given a choice of going to jail or back to the Mission, he chose the Mission because he had never been to jail before. Later, after he did go to jail, Morris remembered his choice and said, “If I knew jail was going to be better than the Mission, I would have gladly gone to jail.” It is a sad, sad situation when the prison system is a step up from the residential-school experience.
Oscar Williams from Sugar Cane, like so many of our people, spent a good deal of time in prison. At one court hearing, Oscar was sentenced to nine months in prison. He told the judge, “I can do that standing on my head!” So the judge added another three months, giving Oscar “time to get back on his feet.” Oscar went to prison so many times that he learned the justice system and started to defend himself in court. He became quite good at it and was a thorn in the side of the RCMP in Williams Lake. They would manage to convict him of something, and he would appeal the sentence and be back in Williams Lake in no time.
In 1990, at the age of ninety-four, Gram decided to move away from Deep Creek. Although I still lived there with her, Gram found she was alone too much because I travelled a lot in my job as chief and, even when I was home, I was often out of the house with my kids and their many activities. During the winter at Deep Creek, Gram had to go downstairs to put wood in the heater in the basement and that was getting to be too much for her. Gram was still independent. She cooked for herself and still tried to bake bread. At first, she insisted that she stay by herself in her house at Deep Creek. When she began to find it difficult to walk and needed someone to live with her and look after her, we renovated her old house at Soda Creek, which was right next door to Mom, and Mom went over daily to check on her. With Mom’s help, my grandmother lived by herself until she was ninety-eight years old. Eventually, Mom got a new house that was up the hill and a long ways away from Gram, so Gram decided to move in with Mom. Mom’s taking responsibility for Gram allowed me to take a much-needed break from Aboriginal politics and go to university.
Jacinda and Scott were on their own by this time. Bill encouraged me to fulfill my dream of going to university. I eagerly applied and was accepted into the University of Victoria. Tony, who was still at home with us, moved with Bill and me to Victoria. I was thirty-eight years old and admitted to the university as a mature student.
University opened up a whole new way of thinking for me. Little light bulbs in my brain went off left, right, and centre. The experience was just as liberating as when I had discovered self-help books. My first-year studies in university included psychology, philosophy, political science, and English. It was also recommended that I take a history course, but I didn’t want to because I knew that all the history that I had been taught up to then was inaccurate and I had Gram’s voice in my head.
Gram always talked about how she did not like what the White people did to the Indians, but she never confronted non-Aboriginals or told them no if they asked for something. I guess her residential school training stayed with her throughout her life too. She told me about Eddie Herd, a White man who lived near the Aboriginal people. Eddie Herd was a poor man when he came to the Williams Lake area. He would regularly go house to house in the Aboriginal community bumming things he needed from the Aboriginal people. Of course, the Aboriginal people always helped him out. When Eddie Herd finally made it on his own and established a productive ranch near Deep Creek, he turned his back on the Aboriginal people who had helped him. Gram said they would be walking down the street in Williams Lake and, when Eddie Herd saw them coming, he would cross the street so he would not have to talk to them. Eddie Herd would not even acknowledge the Native people who had helped him for years. That seemed to be the common theme of interactions between Aboriginal people and newcomers. Gram said, “The Indians saved lots of those White people. They didn’t know how to get around in this country; now they think the Indians are no good.”
History that I had been taught up until I went to university started with the White man. I knew Aboriginal history began in this country long before that. I tried to fit other courses into my schedule but, in the end, the only one that would work was a history course. Resigning myself to the situation, I decided to suck it up for the first semester, take the history course, and get the three credits I needed for a full-year course. Once I got into class, I was amazed that for the first two weeks we talked about history before everyone else got here – the history of Aboriginal people. Things had definitely changed since the last course I had taken more than twenty years before. I eventually majored in history.
My other courses were all so interesting. I learned about non-Aboriginal politics and their party platforms and policies. I took a couple of courses in international politics and learned how countries interact with one another. I studied Plato and Aristotle and their views of raising children to be the best they could be. That made me think about the upbringing of most Aboriginal children, and the contrast was stark – Aboriginal kids were raised to self-destruct; nothing in our training was geared to help us do our best. In philosophy class, I learned to think critically and to question everything. I even learned to ask, “Is there a God?” I had been so programmed into just accepting the existence of a God who we all will answer to at the end of our lives. Maybe I had not fully embraced the Catholic church’s teachings in my life, but I was scared enough to believe they might hold some truth. When I first met Bill and one of our discussions got around to religion he told me, “You know there isn’t a God, don’t you?” I was sure he was going to be struck down right there and then. The more I read and thought about what I was learning, the more I could see that organized religion was a tool men in power had invented to control people. I thought about the teachings at the Mission and saw the total hypocrisy of their organization. I lost any respect I may have had for organized religion.
In history, I learned that much of the philosophical basis of environmental education stems from the Aboriginal people’s relationship with the land. One of my history books said that the Iroquois had a days-long Thanksgiving ceremony in honour of the sun, the wind, the rain, the earth, and everything that grows. The Europeans thought this “pagan” relationship to the land was proof of inferiority. Today, everyone knows the importance of our relationship to the land. Later I realized other courses included the teachings of Aboriginal people. The more research is done, the more we realize that people all over the world enjoy the fruits of Aboriginal contributions without being aware of their origin, from plant-based medicine and world cuisine, to sports and military strategy, to government, language, and architecture and so on and so on. All races have contributed to what we have and learn today.
I went on to get a law degree from the University of British Columbia, articled with Miller Thomson LLP, and went to work for the B.C. Treaty Commission in Vancouver. I often went back to Soda Creek to visit Gram and the rest of the family, and on one of my visits to Gram, she had cooked a whole meal for me. By age ninety-nine, though, Gram had become very sick and very skinny. I stayed with Mom for four months that summer and nursed Gram while she was sick. I was sure she was going to die, so every day I made her take a few teaspoons of hooshum (whipped soapberries, also known as Indian ice cream), and that is all she would eat. Then one day she woke up and declared, “I’m hungry!” Gram recovered fully from then on, but at the age of one hundred, she fell and broke her hip, and we had to move her into Deni House, a care facility. My daughter, my niece Marnie, and I all took turns going into the hospital every day to make sure Gram’s needs were being met. Gram’s mental abilities were intact until the evening before she died. She then started laboured breathing and we knew the time was soon. We all said our goodbyes to her and told her that we loved her. I leaned and whispered in her ear that if she needed to go, then she should go. She was surrounded by her family when she died about two o’clock in the morning.
I really get angry when non-Aboriginal people become “experts” on Aboriginal people. They come into our territories and gather information for four or five years and they become the experts and our elders like Gram, who have lived the life of a First Nations woman, become mere footnotes. Aboriginal people are the only experts on Aboriginal people. I don’t care how many years people go to school to learn about us. Unless they have lived our lives, they are not the experts.
When I first ran for chief of my community, it was not because I saw the whole political picture of how things needed to improve for Aboriginal people. I ran because some of my community members were unhappy with the way a few programs were being administered on our reserve. It was about this time that programs were being transferred from the Department of Indian Affairs to administration by the chief and council in our communities.
In my second two-year term as chief, I started going to a few provincial meetings as part of my duties. It was at these meetings that I received what I call my “Masters in Aboriginal Politics.” Only after listening was I able to connect the everyday issues that happened in my community to the bigger political picture. I was amazed at what I heard and the anger I saw at these meetings. People were mad about the way Aboriginal people were being treated, and the feelings expressed were like none I had heard before. I remember at one of these meetings, Bill said, “All the money you get from the government is welfare! Until we rightfully take our place in society and have control of the money that comes from our territories, it is all welfare!” That statement shocked me, but those kinds of statements opened up a new way of thinking.
At one of these meetings, I was on a pay phone when reporters were chasing George Watts, a high-profile Aboriginal leader, for an interview about Meares Island, which his people were trying to protect from logging. He turned around a short distance from me and the message he sent to government and the logging industry through the media left a lasting image in my mind. George was angry and he let them know it. The thing that amazed me most was his ability to speak his mind without inhibition and to articulate his opinion from a position of strength and confidence. George and Bill were not prisoners in their minds like too many of us who attended the schools. There have been many Aboriginal leaders, right from first contact, who have continued to fight for our rights, but many of us were temporarily disabled. Over the years and with my two university degrees – a bachelor of arts with a major in history and minor in political science and a bachelor of law – I have become aware of the bigger issues, not only in my community and in other Aboriginal communities, but also to some degree around the world.