Written July 2015 (Revised 2019). This Non-Fiction is dedicated to my daughter, Kihew (‘Eagle’ in Cree), who tells me:
“Today, I wanted to be an angel, so I put on everything white.”
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Rat-ta-tat-tat
Rat-ta-tat-tat
I hear it, but I ignore it.
I am not in the mood for any visitors.
I like it with just God and me.
“Mom, Mom, Mom.”
“What?”
“There is someone at the door.”
Crap. My children answered the door. I wish they would just ignore it. Now, I have to get off the couch and stir. I have to entertain. I hate entertaining.
I hear her, “Hello,” so softly she speaks.
That should be my cue to get up. I still lay where I am. This couch is too comfortable. I have owned it for so long that the couch and I have a special connection. Sometimes, I feel like it is my only friend. The couch outlines my body, and knows my life better than anyone right now. Since the murder of my neighbour, and the recent tragic death of my father, I spend more time than I would like on the couch. My children have special needs and are so active that I find I only have time left for this couch after my writing. I isolate my life and I retreat from visitors. When those that I love come to my door, I try to hide what I have become. I ignore the hellos that come knocking on my door. I hope that if I ignore it, the visitors will simply stay outside my door, and eventually just walk away when they see that I have not come to welcome them. This visitor is not one of those visitors. She is more persistent than the rest. I can hear her footsteps coming towards me. Now, I have to get up. Somehow, God likes to disturb my depression with delusions.
She approaches. I open one eye and squint at her. It is an angel, which I am sure of, to take me home today. Her hair laced with white like a wise old Dene Elder. I open the other eye. I am wrong. It is just a woman with white hair. I am wrong again. It is a young Dene mother, with her son in tow, and her hair is covered in white paint. Strand after strand drenched; more precisely decorated in dry paint. I sit up on the couch and gently pull her by her wrist in a downward motion until she responds to my body language and sits next to me on the couch. I act like a good Dene woman myself, and begin pulling out the paint in her hair. I work my way to the scalp, and pinch a single strand of hair. I pinch my thumb and index fingernails together, and begin pulling in a downward motion. So peaceful pulling my pinched fingernails down her strands of painted hair, one strand at a time. The paint peels off and squiggles into curly loops on my lap. She is quiet and does not protest or question my actions. Native women care for each other and playing with one another’s hair is considered normal. The power source: hair. I am healing her broken soul one painted strand of hair at a time.
My head thumps. I am saying, “Please do not speak,” over and over again in my head, hoping that she connects with me and hears me somehow. She does not hear me.
“They think I am a pet rat.”
I do not hear her properly yet. I am still adjusting to the unexpected visitor.
“You got stuck in a wet vat. Ah, that explains the paint.”
“No, they think I am a rat!” she speaks loudly with anger because she knows I was not listening.
I am slightly embarrassed because I was a teacher and I know the importance of listening. I know that when a person fails to listen, relationships and rapport break down quickly. I would rather stay silent and not talk when I feel the world weighing down on me, but I know that I have to be human again, so I try to listen better. I engage with her by replying properly; as proper as I know how now.
“The whole city has rats. We are breeding them. They breed too fast. That is the problem with rats. Who put paint in your hair? It is so white. I thought you were an angel.”
“Listen. I said they think I am a rat.”
“Why would they think that?”
“I went to the cops. I gave a statement. I told them I was drugged and they tested me.”
I breathe as deeply and as slowly as I can at the mention of the word, “cops.” She knows that I do not like the police. First impressions are essential to any successful relationship. My first memory of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, at the ripe age of nine, was of a middle-aged officer grabbing a fistful of my long Native hair near the roots and throwing me into the back of a police cruiser. The physical pain I felt that day was not as hard as being yanked from my father against my will, and spending my next nine years of life, in and out of foster care. My father always told me to ‘love your enemies,’ so I tried to love them. I have not given up on that mission. I know that there are good and bad people in every organization, so I know there are good officers out there. Once only, I met one nice officer, and I think it was God’s way of telling me that some forms of assimilation are getting better. Once they stop working so hard at controlling Natives, the police will be good. When they actually treat us better, and help us, we will give them the same respect in turn. Sadly, that day has not come for me yet.
“So you went to the rats, and now you are a rat. I do not care about rats. Tell me why your hair is white? Are you sad? Are you getting wiser?”
“I painted my whole house white after I went to the police.”
“Do you feel better?”
“No. Next, I am going to paint it red.”
“Why? Are you mad at yourself?”
She laughs and allows me to keep pulling the paint out of her hair. White-wash. White-washed Native hair. Natives have enough white in our lives, and now we are painting our houses and hair white too. I wonder if the white paint was to make her feel better. Make her pure. Maybe, she is an angel. I pull one hair out from the roots just to be sure she is not one.
“Ouch! Why did you do that?”
“Just, checking.”
“Checking what!?”
“That you are still alive. You look like an angel.”
“I do not feel like one. I feel guilty. They will kill me for being a rat.”
“No, no one will kill you. They are all rats now. I told you that this city breeds rats.”
“We live in the North. There are no rats.”
“You are wrong. There is a hoard of them. You cannot see them, but I can see them. So, do you feel better?”
“No.”
“Okay, then let’s go to the park with the children.”
She smiles and says, “Okay.”
The children have already heard us. Her son calls out to my daughter, “Let’s go to park, Lil’ Princess. You, my Lil’ Princess.”
He is so tiny. Three years old, but speaks well enough for us to understand him. I never told him that that was her nickname, he just knew on his own.
The park is visible from my place, so we sit on the porch while the children play. I manage to skirt away from the conversation of police and the victimization of my friend, as best as I can. I did soak in every word that she told me, and I know she wanted to tell me more, but I am being desensitized to these acts of violence now. That is a very scary thing when you think about it. When something happens too often, it almost becomes normal. The harm done towards Native women should never become normal. It is hideous and makes me sick, but to hear about it all the time now is normal. There are so many Native women who are missing and murdered, and I sit here with my beautiful Native friend who survived. She has survived cancer, addictions, spousal abuse, single motherhood, and now this. People ignore her cries for justice, but I know she will still survive.
I am a Dene survivor like her too. I have had my own battles, including an attempted abduction in Mapleridge, British Columbia. When I was fifteen, a man unknown to me tried to get me into his vehicle, and I ran. When he followed me in his maroon vehicle, I was lucky to see a pedestrian, and I grabbed his wrist and told him what was happening. He whisked me away to his wife in his apartment and called the police. He saved my life that day, but regardless, I never returned to British Columbia again. It is unfortunate, because it was the most beautiful place I ever saw in my life. Bucket list: overcome my fear and return to British Columbia one day to visit my little sister, and visit my first born son’s former home on Vancouver Island. When I go, I will sing a Native song to the Pacific Ocean, to heal her life source. To cure the water, I will sing:
“Aya hey, Aya hey, Aya hey, Aya hey.”
There is a fear that exists inside all Natives, not just the women. Hate has existed for us for far too long. I can prove it with just one word: Beothuk. Need I say more? It has been this way since the day that the first White man came to our land. I do not hate White people. I am half White myself. However, I do know what has been done to the Natives was and still is often done by the Whites. My own French and Spanish father told me this himself; before Native history made it into our school textbooks. He told me this before the United Nations acknowledged the mistreatment of us and before the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women made it into the news.
Such a short conversation my friend brings to my door, yet she ignites a cultural battle in my head. I glance over at my unexpected visitor, and think that she is an angel sent by God. That she was sent to light a passion of fire inside of me. I feel warmth in my belly that was previously knotted and in pain. I have a gut feeling and a thought in my mind telling me to share ‘Our’ story. The sun hits the white paint on her ink-black hair and it looks like it is glowing. I pinch her again; just to be sure she is not an angel. She feels real, and I smile because she is a survivor.
“Ouch. Why did you do that? Why are you smiling? Do you enjoy hurting me too?”
“Just, checking. I am glad you are a survivor. You are strong.”
She looks at me oddly, smiles, and then says, “How many more times are you going to check, so I can be prepared?”
“No more. I am double sure now.”
We live in poor housing. My youngest son calls me a ‘Ghetto Mom,’ and says he does not want to be a ‘Ghetto Kid’ anymore. My daughter brought home her school writing about her life. Her first sentence was:
“I live in the Projects.”
I think she capitalized the word ‘Projects,’ so it would stand out to me, and wake me up from my depression. We once lived in the big city “Projects.”
I laughed when we lived there, and said, “This is not the Projects.”
The southern Projects were clean with almost no garbage, and there was grass and flowers. Where we live, the children play in a park where the sand is littered with weapons: glass, large rocks, sticks, and jagged caribou bones. Last week, I saw a toddler eating a condom in the park. She pulled it right out of the sand. When the ‘Ghetto Moms’ complain, the housing workers pour more sand in the park. The workers never take the dirty sand out; instead they bury the evidence with more sand. I think they are too afraid of what they will find, and have to deal with.
One summer, I raked the park, and I found a bag of crack, a home-made bong, and my own toy from thirty years ago. I laughed and cried. I cried so much the day I had lost it, and that day I found it, I cried pure joy and laughed hysterically. The toy never came from a store. My Daddy picked it out of the dump, and I loved it. It was a plastic bear. It was brown, but when I found it, the paint was worn off and the bear was the colour of a pink Barbie. Maybe, if I leave my friend for thirty years, the paint will just come out of her hair on its own. I decide that if I do that, she will surely become an angel from a broken heart. Her heart will break because I left her. Or worse, her hair will turn white naturally with stress, sadness, and the seasons passing. So, I go back to work, and continue pulling the dry white paint out of her hair, one strand at a time.
No matter how many strands I watch turn from white-wash back to black again. I know I will never get them all out. We are Ghetto Moms living in the Projects, and the world we live in will always be white-washed. The city that has no rats will always be filled with rats. So really, I may just turn into an angel, working and wishing that all that white that hides our darkness, and our brown skin and dark hair goes away. It is a reality; a part of Natives now forever. We will always be stained with white-wash. I read my Bible, and I read the book of Job. I know that good comes from trials and tribulations. So, I thank God for the white-wash, and remind myself that I a
