Top Quotes: “A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder” — Ma-Nee Chacaby

Childhood

“My name is Ma-Nee Chacaby, I am an Ojibwa-Cree elder, and I have both a male and a female spirit inside of me. I have experienced a long, complicated, and sometimes challenging journey over the course of my life. My earliest memories are of gathering kindling, making snowshoes, and hunting and trapping in my isolated Canadian community, where alcoholism was widespread in the 1950s. In 2013, more than half a century later, I performed a healing ceremony and then helped lead the first gay pride parade in my city, Thunder Bay, Ontario. This book describes the extraordinary path that led me to this place.”

“My kokum told me she had sixteen pregnancies during that period. Several of her babies were stillborn or died in childbirth. Others died during childhood from diseases, like smallpox, or accidents, like drowning. Only six of my grandmother’s children survived into their teen years, including Deborah, my mother, who was Lelilah’s youngest child. At home, my grandparents spoke in Cree, Ojibwe, and French, so their children grew up knowing all three languages. Most of my grandparents’ surviving children stayed with them into adulthood, except for an older son and daughter who joined a residential school at some point during the family’s travels. I don’t know whether my grandparents chose for those two children to enroll in school, or it was something that the government forced them to do. I also don’t know what happened to that aunt and uncle. My grandparents never saw them again. By the time my kokum was raising me in the 1950s, she expressed a lot of sadness about losing contact with them, and she believed they were dead.

My grandmother became blind during her travels with my grandfather. As I understand it, she lost her vision slowly over a period of years, and not as the result of an injury. She later told me that my grandfather wanted to take her to a hospital to have her eyes examined, but she never agreed to it. My grandmother was wary of hospitals because most of the people she’d known who’d gone into them had died, and she did not trust white people’s medicine.”

“I refused to wear skirts like other girls. Instead, I would strip off my skirt and run around just wearing my heavy bloomers, which were held up by a string, a safety pin, or a belt. My bloomers were made of a thick, warm, blue material that puffed out along my thighs, but came together with elastic at my knees. I saw them as pants, not underwear, and they were very comfortable, so I loved wearing them. But no one else wore bloomers the way I did, and some people seemed to see me as strange, stubborn, or dumb. A few called me a “devil’s child.””

“A woman from the Department of Indian Affairs admired my painting. She asked my uncle Jacques if she could take it to Ottawa to show to people there, and then bring it back the next time she returned. My uncle and I agreed. That woman did return later, but she never brought back my painting. I tried to ask her about it. When she realized what I was asking, she spoke to me in English, which I did not understand, and hit her head in a dramatic way, as if to say that she had forgotten it.”

“When I was about seven or eight years old, some white people came to interview my grandmother. I realize now that they wanted to record her stories, but at the time I did not understand what they were doing. My kokum was supposed to answer their questions inside of a tent, using an Anishinaabe interpreter. The white men had set up a battery outside the tent, and connected it via wires running underneath the canvas to a machine with big wheels inside. I watched a man set it up and test the equipment by talking into the machine and then playing back his own voice. I understood they wanted to do the same thing with my grandmother’s voice, but I feared they might capture her entirely, and keep her inside the machine. So I waited outside the tent until I heard my grandmother say, “ya (Yes),” agreeing to talk. They then played her voice back as a test. As soon as I heard that, I took the little hatchet I carried on my belt, chopped through the wires, and moved away quickly. It took a while for the men to figure out why their machine had stopped working. They said they couldn’t repair it there, so they just wrote down my grandmother’s responses to their questions instead. Nobody knew who had cut the wires, except for my grandmother, who guessed it was me. She talked to me about it later and tried to reassure me that they would not have hurt her.”

“When I was eight years old, my mom told me and other people that she had a baby growing inside of her. Over the following months, I did not pay attention to whether her stomach grew or not. Then one day my mom and stepdad went away for a long time. When they returned, they brought back a baby boy named Andy. From the time Andy was a baby, I was responsible for looking after him a lot of the time, so he always called me “maamaa” or “mum.” For many years I assumed he was my mom’s and stepdad’s biological child, which made him my biological half-brother, but when I was in my late thirties my cousin Flora told me that my mom and stepdad had adopted Andy. Flora explained my mom and stepdad did not want it widely known that they were adopting a baby, so they pretended my mom was pregnant before they brought Andy home.”

“When I was about seven years old, he brought home a radio for the first time, and I was fascinated by it. He turned it on, and when I heard people talking and playing the fiddle, I wanted to see where they were inside of that radio. So one day, when everyone else was busy, I took the radio apart. But I couldn’t find any people inside of it, not a single soul! When my stepdad found me with the radio in pieces around me, he exclaimed, “What have you done?!” Then he told me to take it all to the kitchen table and put it back together again. And I did. It took me quite a while, but I got it back in working order.”

“I also experienced sexual abuse when I was left in some of my relatives’ care. When I was about five years old, I had to stay with my aunt Renee and her family for some nights. I slept near a stairway in the long house. On one of those nights my aunt’s husband, Aziinii, came and sat on my bed in candlelight. He was a stocky man, with a smooth, hairless face and shoulder-length hair. He started touching me. His hands felt coarse, like he did not cut his fingernails. He grabbed my hand and made me touch something slimy and squishy on his body. It felt awful. I wanted to scream, but he covered my mouth. He kept saying, “shhhh! Shhhh!” with a lot of force. I did not understand what he wanted, but I knew it felt terrible. I felt like I was going to throw up. He came back during other nights and molested me again. Sometimes he was very rough.

My uncle Azini was the first of several men and teenage boys who sexually assaulted me during my years in Ombabika. Some of those men told me that what they were doing was okay, that it was normal, and that I should enjoy it. From an early age, though, even when I did not fully understand what they were doing and I didn’t have the words to describe it, I still knew it was wrong. But I also felt confused. I felt ashamed, like somehow what was happening was my fault. Those men and others made it very clear to me that I should not talk about such things, because if I did, the men would be sent away and their families would suffer.

I once tried to tell Renard that I had been molested, and he replied, “Well, I don’t really know what to say. You shouldn’t be telling me this, you should be telling your grandmother.” And I did try to tell my grandmother, but when I went to her, I found I couldn’t say it out loud.

My mother was often with my kokum, and I didn’t feel comfortable talking about it in front of her. I tried to ask my grandmother about it indirectly, like it was a question about someone else. She said that when that kind of a thing happens, the adult knows what he or she is doing, not the child, so the child is not responsible for it. But I was still afraid to tell her. I feared I would hurt a lot of people.

Many other girls in Ombabika learned to keep heavy secrets like this. Three times I came upon a girl being raped, or right after she had been raped, and each time it was kept secret afterward. When I was about nine years old, I was out hiking and listening to musical sounds around me when I heard someone crying and sniffing quietly. I followed the sound and found a naked girl who was tied to a tree. I had seen her before, but I didn’t know her name. She had already freed one of her feet, and I quickly untied her other leg and both wrists. Then she grabbed me and shook me, saying, “Don’t ever say anything to anybody about this! If you do, we’ll both be in trouble!” She made me feel like I had done something wrong.

Then, when I was ten or eleven years old and I was on my way to a friend’s house one morning, I heard someone screaming in the woods. I didn’t know why the person was screaming, but it scared me, so I ran the rest of the way to my friend’s house. She wasn’t home, so I waited for her to return. When she got there, she was naked and crying, and I realized with horror that she had been the one who was screaming. Her mom shoved me into a corner and grabbed a blanket to cover her daughter. She washed her and put her to bed. My friend continued crying the whole time. She never saw that I was there.

Afterward her mother told me, “You can’t ever tell anybody what you just saw. Never tell anyone!” Then she told me to leave. Later, there were times when I tried to talk to my friend about what had happened to her, to let her know that things like that had happened to me too. But she never wanted to talk about it. She was angry when I brought it up and told me that nothing had happened. She said I was just looking for trouble.

Then a third time, when I was about the same age, I was again walking in the woods when I heard men yelling, “Yeah!”, so I went to see what was happening. I found them in a clearing, gang raping a teenage girl I knew. She also had been tied to a tree by her arms and legs. I was terrified. I think I must have gone into shock. I ran to look for someone to help, but when I found my godmother, Irene, I wasn’t able to speak. I stuttered as I tried to tell her what was happening. She made fun of me, saying, “What, is somebody bugging you again?” When I finally got my breath back, I didn’t tell her what I had seen.”

“At first, when my stepfather took me away on trapping or hunting trips, I was grateful to him. I thought he just wanted to teach me and to protect me from my mother. But at some point during our years of trapping together, he molested me. I can’t remember exactly when it started or how often it happened, but I believe it happened more than once. I have a clear memory of one incident. We had been caught in a snowstorm far from a trapping hut, so we built an emergency snow shelter. It only had enough space for our bodies, so we were lying down, packed close together. He was behind me. Then he suddenly grabbed my body, and started groaning and making strange noises. felt something hard on my back. At first I thought he was sick, and then I realized what that stiff thing against my body was. After that experience, I was afraid of my stepdad. When we returned to Ombabika, he kept telling me not to say anything about what had happened. I avoided him. I think we went trapping again together, but I had nightmares and I screamed when he touched me. In the end he told me, “You’re going through a rough time right now, and I am part of it, so I won’t bring you trapping with me anymore.””

“I received a copy of my birth certificate and saw that Phillip was recorded as my father on it. Over the years, though, some members of Phillip’s family and other people who knew my mother around the time when she became pregnant told me that they did not believe he was my father. One woman mentioned that my mom had a different, long-term partner while she was in the sanatorium. She believed that Phillip only claimed to be my father out of kindness toward me and my mother. To this day I do not know whether he truly was my biological father.”

“Max was the first person I met who had hair the colour of sunshine and naturally blue eyes. The only comparison I had was my grandmother’s blind eyes, which had some blue in them. So I guessed Max was blind and gave him a little stick to use to guide himself. Then I took his other hand in mine, and I walked him carefully down to the river. Once we were there, I prepared a long stick for him to use as a fishing rod, and I put it in his hands so he could fish with me. He smiled at me the whole time, but it wasn’t until I put my hands in front of his eyes, crinkled up my nose, and made funny faces at him, that he finally burst out laughing. At that moment I realized he could see.”

“When I was about eleven years old, Shiigohbii and I began to sniff car exhaust and gasoline fumes to get high. We were introduced to sniffing exhaust by a boy about my age named Ivan. Sometimes Ivan put a paper bag around the exhaust pipe of a car to capture as many fumes as possible before breathing them in. Once in a while, when a driver was drunk and did not notice, Ivan rode a car’s bumper for as far as he could, breathing in fumes directly from the exhaust pipe. There were even times when Ivan held on to a car and breathed in the exhaust as it dragged him behind it. Afterward, he laid on the ground and told us how good he felt. So we tried it too.”

“When I was about the same age, some older boys caught me alone when I was on my way home from school in wintertime. One of the boys was white, and the rest were Anishinaabeg. They gagged my mouth, tied my long hair to a tree, and stripped me naked. They put snow all over my chest and back. Laughing the whole time, they slapped my butt and played with different parts of my body. I peed all over myself. Finally, they hung me from a tree upside down and left me. They said they would come back with my clothing later. I was freezing cold by the time a woman passed by and found me. She was one of Jane’s relatives. I remember she cried as she got me down from the tree. Then she went to get her boyfriend, a white man, to help carry me home. Afterward, my mother was angry and beat me for being outside naked.”

“When I was about twelve years old, some white men came to Ombabika and took away most of the children to residential schools, including my brother Andy, my cousins Angela and Justin, and my stepsister Matilda. Parents did not understand why their children were being taken from them, but they were unable to stop it. Only a small number of school-age children were left behind. They did not catch us because we were not in Ombabika the day they rounded up all of the other kids. I had been at the trapping grounds with my stepdad. When we returned later, Ombabika was strangely quiet.”

“In the following few years, some parents left Ombabika to try to find their children and bring them back. In the end, a few were successful. Some children ran away from residential schools and made their way back to Ombabika on their own. Others only returned after many years, when they were already young adults. But a number of those who were taken away that day never returned. There were parents who never saw their children again.”

“My stepsister Matilda was away for the longest time. We didn’t see her again for years. In the end, she ran away from her residential school with a group of other kids. They walked the 500 kilometres back to Ombabika. It took them many months, and at least one child died along the way.”

Adolescence

“By the time I was fourteen or fifteen years old, Bonnie, Jane, and I often went to dances and parties, like those that were held at a local store, where the owner had a small hall with a jukebox in the back. Many teenagers hung out there. One day the owner told us he was planning to rent out the hall and sell the jukebox, because he needed the cash. We organized a twenty-four-hour dance-a-thon to raise enough money to keep the jukebox and hall open to us for another year. Adults sponsored us, with the agreement that half of the winnings would go to the store owner, and half to whoever was still dancing at the twenty-four-hour mark. My cousin Pascal and I took part in the dance-a-thon together. At that age, he was about my height, had a fair bit of acne on his face, and cut his hair to look like one of the Beatles, because he loved their music. Pascal and I danced every style of dance we knew during the dance-a-thon: jigs, the twist, waltzes, square dancing, and free dancing. Sometimes we slowed down to eat and drink, but we didn’t stop. People began to drop out, some by choice, and a few by fainting. Pascal finally fell down and said he couldn’t continue. But I kept going! I was the only one left dancing when they stopped the music at the twenty-four-hour mark, so I won. Of course, when my mom found out that I had made all of the dance-a-thon money, she asked me for it, and I gave it to her.”

“Starting when I was a young child, probably when I was four or five years old, my grandmother told me that I had two spirits. She would gently poke me in the chest and say, “Little girl, you have nizhin ojjaak (two spirits) living inside of you.” Over the years she explained this to me by saying that some people were special and had both a male and a female spirit inside of them. She said that two-spirit girls often were drawn to activities that boys usually did, like me when I explored the bush and went fishing and trapping.

As I got older, my kokum told me more about people who had two spirits. She said that when they grew up, some married a person of the opposite sex and had babies, but others never married, or chose to live with someone of the same sex as a couple.”

“My grandmother told me that two-spirit, same-sex couples used to play an important role in Anishinaabe communities, because they adopted children who had lost their parents. Sometimes, she said, individuals with two spirits had other special duties, like keeping fire, healing people, or leading ceremonies.”

Marriage

“For the wedding, Jane and my other girlfriends dressed me in a lime green jacket that I thought looked ugly, and even kind of slimy. They also put makeup on my face. When I saw myself in the mirror, I thought I looked strangely old. But I didn’t tell them. I never complained, because I was trying to go along with what everyone expected of me. Gus and I said the words the minister told us to say at the ceremony. Then another big drinking party was held at Gus’s mother’s house. The party was actually spread out between her house and the house next door, with people going back and forth between the two. When I went into the other house at one point, I found Gus there having sex with someone else. Gus apologized, but I was upset and disgusted. It took me several months to forgive him.”

“My first years with Gus were not terrible. I bought our first house with the money I had saved in my Hudson’s Bay store account from my trapping work. Before we got married, the store manager told me that some white people were moving away from Auden, and I had enough money in my account eleven dollars to buy their house from them. I agreed to buy it.”

“I couldn’t read some of the names that were written on envelopes, but people could read their own names when they came to my house to pick up mail.”

“On one of those trips, while Martin was asleep in my arms, I watched a television for the first time. Late one night when the program ended, a newscaster came on the screen to sign off the air. I was shocked when that stranger spoke to me directly, saying “Good night.” I waved to him and politely replied, “Good night.” Only later did someone explain to me that people on television could not see or hear me, even when they seemed to be talking to me personally.”

Divorce

“I left almost everything of value behind — my beloved dog, my canoe, my gun, and a beautifully carved dresser and mirror that my grandmother had left me. The four of us got off the train in Longlac, and from there we walked the thirty-five kilometres to Geraldton. A teacher from Ombabika was walking the same route and helped me carry my bags. Martin was almost two years old, but he did not yet walk, so I carried him in a sling across my chest. Andy held Sarah by the hand as they walked beside us. Along the way it started to rain, so we got off the road for a break, and I made tea. I remember the teacher was surprised that I could make a fire in the rain. The children were hungry, but all I had to give them was tea with sugar.

When we finally arrived in Geraldton, I went straight to the post office. The people there were very kind. They fed the children and made me lie down to rest. They also brought me all of my paycheques and cashed them for me, leaving me with more than $1,000. The Geraldton post office was right next to the Greyhound bus station, so the children and I were able to get right on a bus to Thunder Bay. Once we arrived there, I made my way to my friend Jane’s house to drop off the kids. Then I went straight to the emergency room at McKellar Hospital, My face was very swollen on one side, so I couldn’t open one eye. My nose and my jaw were broken in different places. I had lost several teeth, and my mouth was badly infected. The doctors at the hospital put me into surgery right away and began the long process of repairing my injuries.”

“For one hour each day, Karen and I watched Sesame Street with the four small children, because it helped us to learn English and the alphabet too. Jane’s brother, Nick, also helped to teach me the alphabet. I bought some hard-backed journals to practise writing A to Z, and Nick checked that I got all of the letters in the right order. After I had learned that well, I practised writing full English words and sentences.”

“A social worker came out to talk to me. She said that Martin and Sarah had been taken into foster care. I could see them in a supervised visit for ten minutes the next day, but otherwise they would stay in foster care unless I got sober. She strongly encouraged me to join AA, saying that it would help me stop drinking.

I went back to my apartment, but the landlord had thrown all of my stuff out on the curb and locked me out. I became homeless. I did go back to the Children’s Aid office to see my kids for that first supervised visit, but then I went on a drinking binge and I did not see them again for several months.”

“After I joined the central AA group, I also had a very bad experience with an AA member. He offered to drive me home one night. Once I was in his car, he locked the doors and drove me far outside of the city to an isolated place in the bush. Then he attacked me, and forced me to perform sex acts on him. He ripped off my clothes and was trying to rape me when I managed to get the door open and escape. I rolled down a hill and ran deep into the woods to hide. He called out to me in the darkness, saying he would just drive me home if I came back. I stayed hidden, and finally he drove away.

I started walking back to Thunder Bay along the highway. I was half-naked, bruised, and bleeding. After some time, a car pulled up behind me and I could hear a woman calling me. She and her husband took me to McKellar Hospital. The doctors there took care of me and called the police. A policewoman asked me who had tried to rape me, but I did not tell her the man’s name. I was probably still in shock. Also, I was frightened and confused to have been assaulted by a long-time AA member. Being at a very early stage of my recovery, I was trying to trust and follow what I was told by more experienced program members.”

“Dr. Boyle sexually assaulted me during my only appointment with him. The day I went to see him, I was his last scheduled patient. I recognized him as an older white man from AA meetings, and I remembered he had been sober for many years. As I entered the exam room, I heard him tell his secretary that she could leave for the day. He had me sit in an examination chair and then moved his equipment into position around my head. The machine locked my head in place, so when Dr. Boyle sat a few inches in front of me, he could look through the equipment directly into my eyes as he tested them. My other doctor had examined my eyes in the same way before.

Unlike my other doctor, though, Dr. Boyle told me that I had a very serious eye problem and to understand it he needed to examine my breasts. I refused, telling him he could not do that, but he forced himself on me. I struggled and fought him as he touched my breasts and roughly tried to take off my shirt, breaking off one of my buttons as he did it. I yelled at him to stop, but he just kept saying I needed to calm down so he could assess my condition. Then he tried to unzip my pants. I kicked and kneed him with all my strength. I guess I hurt him or the equipment enough to make him stop, because he finally let me go. I shot out of the chair and ran for the door. Dr. Boyle said, “No one is going to believe you if you tell them about this. You have a lot of problems, and it’s your word against mine.” I was shaking as Ileft his office.”

Second Marriage

“Having only experienced an abusive, arranged marriage, I decided to try marriage to a man who I chose myself. So one day, on the spur of the moment, I asked Nate whether he would marry me. We were playing cards at the time, and Nate was so shocked that he fell off the corner of the bed where he was sitting. He nervously said that no one had ever asked him to marry her before. And then he told me he had to leave and quickly left. I did not see him again for a week, and even then he didn’t give me an answer. Three weeks after my proposal, though, he came up to me and said, “Okay, I’ve never been married.Let’s give it a try.””

“He told me that I was legally blind. He explained that, even with new lenses, my vision was so impaired that I needed to give up my driver’s licence. He said he was required to inform the motor vehicle licence office, but I could go there myself to have my eyes re-examined, if it would help me believe his assessment. I did as he suggested and I completely failed the test, so I handed in my licence. My job with Child and Family Services required me to drive all over Winnipeg to visit rural clients in areas where there was no public transportation. When I informed my supervisors that I could not drive anymore, they said I could continue long enough to train my replacement and to say goodbye to my clients, but then they would have to let me go.

After I lost my licence and my job, I went through a very dark period. I fell apart. I stayed in my room in the basement for weeks, just sleeping and crying. My work had been very important to me. I had loved everything about it helping other Anishinaabe families, earning a good salary, and financially supporting my family. Being unable to drive or read and write easily, I feared that I would never get a good job again. I worried that I would not be able to support my family, and we would lose the life I had worked so hard to build. I felt like suddenly I was losing my identity, my hard-won independence, and my financial security, all in one go.”

Second Divorce

“In the fall of 1987, at the age of thirty-seven, I moved back to Thunder Bay. It was the only time in almost twenty years that I had not had children with me during such a big transition. At first I stayed in a friend’s apartment, and I started attending local AA meetings. Then I found an apartment on Algoma Street. A male AA member helped transport my things to my new place, but afterward he tried to force himself on me. He threw me on the bed, kissed me, and tried to take my pants down. I shouted at him and hit and kicked him until he got off of me. As he left, he said he would come back later to finish what he had started. I told him that if he did, I would tell everyone we knew in AA about it.”

“Not long after I arrived in Thunder Bay, I started attending a regular lesbian and gay AA meeting. It was the first meeting of its kind in the area. In July 1988, we wanted to celebrate the group’s one-year anniversary by renting a local tour boat called the “Welcome Ship” on Lake Superior. Our request was refused, because we were an openly gay and lesbian group. We organized a public protest in response. At that protest, I was interviewed by a reporter from a local TV news station. I was worried, because I knew people might give me a hard time about it later, but I was tired of hiding. I believed that we needed to speak out against the injustices we faced. My grandmother had told me that I would face many difficulties in life. She had said that I would have to meet them with courage, like a warrior. I kept her words close to my heart when I participated in that television interview.

Still, I was not prepared for the hostility I experienced after the interview aired. Before 1988, very few people had come out publicly in Thunder Bay, and none of them were Anishinaabe. Afterward, a lot of people recognized me on the streets, in the mall, and in coffee shops. Some turned and walked away when they saw me, while others spit on the sidewalk when I went by. A number of people at regular AA meetings were mean to me and rejected me. Someone left threatening messages on my answering machine. The police came to investigate them, but they couldn’t identify the caller, or make the person stop.

Most people in my family also shunned me. Several of my extended family members refused to talk to me when they saw me in public places, including my cousin Flora, who was usually pretty easygoing. A few of my relatives yelled and swore at me. Sometimes their rejection came from Christian beliefs about homosexuality being evil. Others were mad because Anishinaabeg already were struggling with prejudice, and they thought that I was making it worse by leading white people to believe that Native people were gay too. It was like they thought I had changed in a deep, horrible way. They didn’t understand that I was the same old Ma-Nee, but that I had become more self-aware and open.”

“In the months following my TV interview, I was attacked three times when people recognized me on the streets of Thunder Bay. I don’t know if any of the assaulters had been drinking or not. The first time I was targeted by a group of white women that I didn’t know on St. Paul Street. They were led by a heavy, red-haired woman who came up behind me, grabbed me around the chest, and threw me up against a wall. I saw her angry expression close-up just before she hit me in the face, and tried to smash my head against the wall. I managed to push her away and duck down to the ground. I rolled up in a ball, covering my head with my arms to protect myself. The red-headed woman shouted at me, calling me all kinds of racist, sexist, and homophobic insults as she kicked me. The people who were with her started to beat me too. I thought I was going to die, but a taxi driver saw what was happening, stopped his car, and pulled me out of the group. Then he took me to St. Joseph’s Hospital. My face was swollen, my nose was bleeding, my ribs ached, and I was very bruised all over my body, but at least they did not break any of my bones. The nurses at the hospital patched me up and talked about admitting me to the hospital overnight. They also wanted me to speak with the police. I just wanted to go home, so I snuck out of the hospital and spent the next few days alone in my apartment. I did not tell anybody else what had happened, and I did not open the door for anyone.

The second time I was assaulted, the group was led by one of my female relatives. I was walking down a sidewalk when out of nowhere she grabbed me and started hitting me and calling me names. Again, I dropped to the ground and rolled up in a ball to protect myself. She was with four Anishinaabe men and women who also beat and kicked me. The whole time, she shouted at me, saying that I was ruining life for other Native people by being a lesbian. Once again, the beating only stopped when a taxi driver came to help me and managed to pull me into his car. He rescued me soon after the attack began, so they did not injure me as much as the first group had, although I still had bruises all over my body. That taxi driver was a white man, like the first one.”

“The relative who attacked me on the sidewalk was the same person who came after me the third time. That time, I saw her before she reached me, and I ran away. She and another Native woman chased after me. I tripped and fell. Then I heard one of them say, “Give me that knife,” as they approached me. I jumped up and took off, running as fast as I could. I was terrified! I crossed a road in front of traffic to get to the women’s centre, which was not far away. A few cars honked at me, but I made it there before my relative and her friend caught me.

Once I realized how many people had seen my interview — and how aggressive some of them were with me — I was pretty scared. I did not nderstand why certain people seemed so threatened by me, as if I had some great power that could harm them. I became much more careful. I stayed home a lot. When I did go somewhere on foot, I always found someone to walk with me, and I did not go very far. Instead, I went to two or three nearby places that I considered safe. I stopped going to the inner city unless I had at least two other people with me.”

Midlife

“The first time I saw the Atlantic, I could not contain myself. When I caught a glimpse of the waves ahead of me beyond the dunes, I took off running, leaving Leah and her friends behind. I danced on the beach and laid down in the cold water. I was wearing my big northern parka, so I did not get too cold, even though I ended up dripping wet.

By the end of our visit, Leah and I agreed that I would return to Canada to make arrangements for my apartment and other things, and then I would come back to the United States to live with her. As a treaty Indian, I did not need special permission to live or work in the U.S.”

“During the day, I explored the surrounding area on my own. It was hard for me to get around, because I did not know the roads and couldn’t read street signs. Leah encouraged me to use a cane I had been given by NIB. I tried walking with it a couple of times, but I didn’t feel comfortable with it. I decided to just use my old approach of walking carefully and slowly, asking for directions when needed, and stopping when my vision became too poor. Usually I could see a limited distance in front of me, but there were times when my vision completely clouded over for an hour or two. When that happened, I just sat down wherever I was, and I waited until my sight returned. That could be a frustrating, vulnerable, and frightening experience, especially because I never knew exactly when my vision would come back. So when I was on my own during those first months, I mostly travelled on foot in a small area around our house — to AA meetings, coffee shops, and a nearby cemetery, where I ate lunch by the river under maple and oak trees.”

“Leah and I always tried to see as much of the parade as we could. We liked to walk backward through it, and sometimes we climbed trees to get a better view. I remember once getting stuck in a tree and not being able to get down again until a kind man came out of the parade to help me.”

“We had agreed that I would stay with Sarah and her boyfriend, Ken. On the first night, Ken became angry and shouted homophobic insults at me. He kicked me out of their apartment in the middle of that cold, winter night. I found a pay phone and called my brother, Andy, who still lived in Winnipeg with his girlfriend, Lori. I asked if I could stay with them for the rest of that night, and he agreed. While I was there, I explained why Ken had kicked me out, and I ended up coming out to Andy. Andy asked me why I had never told him that I was a lesbian when we lived together. I explained that I had been struggling with it myself at the time. During that visit, Andy acted like he was okay with me being a lesbian. Later, though, when I was back in Thunder Bay, he phoned me when he was drunk. He said that homosexuality was wrong and he did not accept it. I told him that we both would just have to live our lives the best way we knew how.”

“For my first six months back in Thunder Bay, Leah and I continued to write to each other regularly. We also recorded tape cassettes which we sent by mail. Sometimes we talked on the phone, but that was very expensive, so our conversations didn’t last long.”

Elder Life

“As I write this in early 2014, I receive a total of $1,000 a month in disability assistance and social supplements, which is about half of the monthly minimum-wage income in Canada. Half of my income goes toward rent for my apartment, which has one bedroom, a living room, a half-kitchen, and a bathroom. I use the remaining $500 each month to pay for water, electricity, heating, phone, Internet, and groceries. Some Anishinaabe reserves provide their band members with additional income, but I have never received anything from Fort Hope.

I get my disability assistance cheque at the beginning of each month, so at that time I stock up on groceries, mostly buying things on sale. I never buy red meat, but I eat it when someone offers it to me, and once in a while I buy turkey, chicken, or pork to have at home. I often make dishes out of rice, tofu, and nuts. I drink a lot of water and herbal teas. I stopped drinking coffee, Coca Cola, and other forms of caffeine when I entered the post-traumatic stress disorder treatment program in 2005, because they required that, and I have continued to avoid caffeine since. I love fresh produce and I eat many salads. Usually I buy as much produce as possible at the start of the month, and then store what I can in a cupboard, or chop it up and freeze it to use later. Still, by the end of the month, my freezer, refrigerator, and cupboards are usually pretty bare. I try to take advantage of opportunities to get additional quality food for free or at a reduced price. Sometimes I buv a “Good Food Box” for only twenty dollars when the women’s centre provides large containers of fruit and vegetables to local people on a limited income. At Christmas time, a Thunder Bay charity also provides free food hampers to people in need, so I stand in line in the cold with other poor people to receive one of those. It especially helps to get extra food at that time of the year, because I receive my January disability assistance and social supplements in mid-December, before social service staff go on vacation. After buying a few small Christmas presents for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, it can be difficult to make it all the way to the end of January on what remains.

Even on my limited income, I still sometimes give money to friends or family members who are struggling more than I am.”

“A couple of times young people at bus stops have even called me “faggot.” I guess they didn’t only confuse me for a man but for a gay man, given their word choice. When that happened, I replied, “Thank you,” which surprised them, and afterward they left me alone.

I have less tolerance for racism, and I experience it far too often. It can be as simple as how white cashiers treat Native customers, whether it is in an expensive specialty camping store, or in a large chain supermarket. At my local Safeway store, for example, I often see white clerks cheerfully greet white customers and then ignore me or other Anishinaabe customers once we get to the front of the line. They also treat our groceries more roughly and sometimes act like we aren’t there, and instead help a white customer behind us. When this happens, I usually make a joke about it, saying, “What am I, chopped liver?” I have appreciated when people in line behind me, both Native and white, have laughed and supported me. At their worst, supermarket cashiers have actually refused to let me buy certain items because I am Native. Twice store clerks have picked a bottle of Listerine out of my groceries and told me that they didn’t know if they were allowed to sell it to me. I think they were afraid that I would go outside and drink the mouthwash for its alcohol content, and they saw it as their job to take it away. Both of the times that this happened, I made a formal complaint to the store manager and then I was able to buy the mouthwash.”

“Recently I was waiting for a bus when I saw a teenager who looked like he was having a hard time, and I said as much. He replied with hostility, saying, “What’s it to you? Why should you care?” So I asked him, “Why shouldn’t I? I do care, and I’m willing to listen.” He still was angry when he answered me, saying, “You got all day?’ I replied, “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do. I could sit right here and listen to you if you feel like talking to me. I’m an elder and I have good listening skills.” So that’s how we started talking. He told me about the problems he was having with his girlfriend, and that his dad accused him of things he didn’t do, and then hit him. He said that he was sick and tired of it all. I missed the next two buses while listening to him, and then I took him to McDonald’s for a soda and we sat together there for a while longer. I asked him if he could stay with any relatives, and he said no. Before I left, I gave him my card and other contact information of people who might be able to help him. I did not hear from him again, but at the bus stop only a few days later, I saw his face on a poster for missing children.”

“I also have taught university students in Ojibwe courses and language camps in Thunder Bay, Toronto, and Minnesota. Fifteen or twenty young people usually attend those intensive courses. Most of them have some Ojibwa heritage but have never learned Ojibwe, and they are very serious about learning the language. For four days, we only speak Ojibwe from 8:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m., and after that time they can use English if they want to, but usually they don’t. I am not paid for such work, although sometimes organizations give me gift cards or grocery cards, and I usually receive transportation, accommodation, and meals for the courses that involve travel.”

“On the Friday night of that first Thunder Pride week, I also dressed up as Elvis and participated in the drag show. Fifty years after I secretly wished to dress like Elvis as a teenager in Ombabika, I finally got to do it. It was fun! At first, the younger people in the audience seemed stunned. Based on the poetry reading and the healing walk, they probably thought that I was just a serious elder. But when I sang and pranced as “Elvis,” they laughed and clapped and started chanting my name. I was happy to show them that being a spiritual person and an elder is not all about seriousness and loss.”