Halfbreed Read online

  The country was different from my home. There were miles of bald prairie over which the wind blew endlessly. The ranch was on the banks of the Bow River, and despite the stark landscape it had its own special beauty. Not far from the ranch house, the foreman said, was an old Blackfoot campsite considered a sacred place to the Blackfoot people. It was on a hill, and there were traces of a sundial and teepee circles. Many stories were told by the men on the ranch and people in town about the Blackfoot Indians, none of them favourable. However, once word got around that I was half Indian I never heard any more, except for the odd legend that someone remembered.

  On Saturday afternoons I would go into town with the ranch hands to do my shopping, and after taking Lisa to an elderly baby-sitter, I would have a beer with the boys and go to a movie or a dance. The only close friends I made were a young couple, Ken and Sharon, who owned a small ranch.

  Ken came from a large family and they all lived communally—his mom, dad, three sisters and six brothers and their wives. They were wild and rowdy and reminded me of my own people. The boys travelled the rodeo circuit, and when they were home for weekends it was one continuous rodeo. They owned a lot of horses and bucking stock, and would hold what they called “Jackpot Rodeos.” Everybody there would put money in a hat and at the end of the day whoever had the most points would collect it all. Because of my love for horses, I was soon involved in all these gatherings. Sharon and I became close friends, the only close woman friend I had had since Karen and I were kids.

  However, my troubles were soon to begin, just as in Kristen. The guys at the ranch were good to me, treating me like a kid sister and were very protective towards Lisa and me. It was easy to get along with the men at the rodeos as they respected my ability to handle horses. But I was young and attractive, with a baby and no husband. I lived alone with fifteen or twenty men and I was part Indian. I drank whiskey, drove fast, and spent a lot of time with the wildest family in the district. Soon the women were talking and the men stopped treating me like an equal, and instead became interested in me as a woman.

  In Kristen I had, out of anger and frustration, deliberately given people something to talk about, but here, I was sick and tired of parties and men. I wasn’t interested in any man, or for that matter, anyone period. All I wanted was to stay the hell out of trouble and be left alone. But I managed to really mess things up. I liked to gamble and played a lot of poker, not just with the men on the ranch, but with those in town as well, and I did drink a lot, and I did travel in the company of men—but only because I was comfortable with them. I found it very difficult to talk to women, in fact I was frightened to death of them. So other than Sharon I had no friends of my own sex. Once I realized people were starting to talk, I started to stay home and didn’t go anywhere except to do my shopping. That was even worse, because then people said I was pregnant.

  To add to my problems Cal had hired two new hands. When they arrived I was almost sick with fear. I’d met one of them somewhere. That night at supper I tried to appear calm, and once we were seated the guy asked me if I’d ever lived in Vancouver. I answered, “No, but I’ve been there to visit an aunt a couple of times.” He remarked how much I looked like a girl he’d met there once. Then he laughed and said, “Hell, she’d never be on a ranch cooking anyway.” Cal was there for supper that night and he knew I’d come from Vancouver. He casually asked what the girl had been doing. Before Ray had time to answer, Shawn, the other new guy, cut in and said how some people certainly looked alike. He knew a guy in Belfast who could have passed for Cal’s twin. I could have cried I was so relieved, because then everyone started talking. Ray kept at me for nearly a week. Whenever he had a chance he’d asked me questions until I was so uptight I could hardly sleep.

  Then one morning after everyone had gone to work Shawn came in. He asked me if I was the girl Ray was talking about. I said yes and I told him everything, and how I was afraid I’d end up on drugs again. I told him I needed this job, and if Cal knew he’d probably fire me because there was already enough talk. He told me not to worry, that he’d talk to Ray and straighten him out. Ray never said any more to me, but I was always afraid of him.

  I liked Shawn; he was from Belfast, and had only been in Canada a short time. I’d never met a man like him in my life. He was kind, gentle and very strong. I needed strength; I was so tired of being alone with no one to ever really talk to. Shawn talked to me and gave me strength, and I guess I came as close to being in love as I could ever be. I stopped being a tough girl, and for the first time in years I felt warm and alive, but it was all over in a very short time. We came home from a wedding dance one night and there were policemen waiting for us. They grabbed Shawn, put handcuffs on him and he was gone. I was told he was wanted for murder in Belfast, and later I heard he had received a life sentence. I don’t know if it was true—I never heard from him again. I was fired the following week, and if he wrote to me I never received the letters.

  Chapter 20

  I FOUND A SMALL HOUSEKEEPING room in Calgary and tried to decide what I was going to do now. I looked through the paper hoping I’d find a job but there was nothing that I could do with my kind of experience or education. Then I saw an ad for a hairdressing course. I remembered the beauty shop I had always gone to when I was at Lil’s and thought of how well-dressed the girls were who worked there, so I knew the pay must be good. I found a convent for Lisa, the Providence Crèche in Calgary, and paid her room and board for the six months I would be in school, and then I went out to look for part-time work.

  I found one job waiting tables at the bus depot from eight in the evening till midnight. Then I found another one at the racing stable from six to eight each morning, rubbing down horses and walking them. I got up at five-thirty, went to the barns until eight, rushed home to shower and change, and got to school by nine. After studying till four o’clock, I would eat, visit Lisa or try to sleep for a couple of hours, and then go and wait tables till midnight. After about two months I felt like a walking zombie. Besides being physically exhausted, I knew that I was three months pregnant. I’d been hoping for a long time that I wasn’t, and had tried not to think of it, but finally one night I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I was so tired and depressed. It didn’t matter how I looked at my problems, there was just no way that I could find a solution. If I stopped working, I’d have no money or food. If I stopped school, I’d have no training for a job. If I finished school, I couldn’t get a job anyway because I’d be having a baby. The restaurant would fire me once I started looking pregnant, and there was just no way I could live on the money I made rubbing down horses, even if they did let me stay. All I wanted to do was lie down and sleep and never wake up again. I wrote a letter to the Sisters at the Crèche asking them to keep Lisa. I was going to commit suicide, I said, but to please not tell her how I had died. Then I went out and bought eight bottles of iodine and drank them all. Nothing happened, except that I got violently sick and ended up in the hospital, and my budget was a few dollars shorter for my trouble.

  A girl with whom I had become friends visited me in hospital, and came to my room when I got back home. She said she knew someone who would give me an abortion. The woman was a former nurse and it would be a clean job. I told her I couldn’t afford an abortion, but Arlene said, “The woman is my mother and she’ll do it for free if I ask her.”

  Arlene made the arrangements for me to be at her mother’s house on a Saturday night. The woman left me alone while she went into the bedroom to make preparations. While she was gone I started thinking, and I knew that I couldn’t kill my baby; I would just have to find a way to manage somehow. When the woman returned she knew I had changed my mind. She came over and, putting her arm around me, said, “It’s going to be hard but you can do it.” We drank coffee and talked until daylight. She told me that she had been deserted by her husband and left to raise seven children, and although she was a registered nurse in a Calgary hospital, she c
ouldn’t make enough money to feed and clothe them, pay rent and a housekeeper’s wages. So she had started giving abortions, but had been caught and given a six-month sentence. Her children were taken away from her and placed in foster homes and she lost her licence to nurse. When she was released she couldn’t get her children back and she began to drink heavily. Since then she had been in and out of jail, mostly due to alcohol, but she had learned in prison how to avoid being caught on an abortion charge. Her children were nearly grown up now and were in all sorts of trouble. She didn’t know who was to blame—herself or the Welfare Department. But she just didn’t give a damn anymore. I remember sitting there with her and thinking, “Here we are, the two of us, and we weren’t any different from any other women. What happened anyway? Why do we have to fight so damn hard for so little?” I wondered then if good, straight women ever experienced the torment, agony and loneliness we had to face, and if they did, how in hell did they cope?

  We talked about marriage, children—all sorts of things. I guess it was the first time since I had left Cheechum that I ever talked to a woman about anything personal. At one point she said to me, “You know Maria, it takes a special kind of man to marry women like us and live with us without dragging up the past. I’m in my late forties and I’ve never met one yet. Maybe you will someday. I hope so, because you don’t belong in this rat race.” I went to bed that night thinking, “If I don’t belong here, then where the hell do I belong?”

  Arlene told me a few weeks later that her mother had been picked up and given a three-year sentence in Kingston Penitentiary in Ontario. I didn’t see this woman again until years later, when I went as a representative of the Metis Association of Alberta to speak to the Women’s Section of Fort Saskatchewan jail. She was doing two years less a day for forgery. She grabbed my hand as I walked by and said, “You made it, Maria. I knew you would.” She went back to her cell before my speech was finished. She didn’t want to talk to me again, and I understood.

  * * *

  —

  I managed to finish the hairdressing course two months before Laurie was born, and then one of the nuns at the convent where Lisa was staying arranged a housekeeping job for me in a private home. Laurie was a beautiful baby, and for the first time in my life I prayed. I didn’t know if there really was a God, but at that moment it didn’t matter. I loved my baby, and though I didn’t know how we were all going to survive, I was sure that somehow it would all get better.

  When I was discharged from hospital I moved in with a girlfriend who had two children and was living on welfare. Marion was an Indian involved, after a fashion, with different Native activities in Calgary. I attended a couple of meetings with her but didn’t go back after that. The people at those meetings reminded me of that Indian man in a suit who had come to our camp with a delegation of townspeople long ago. They seemed to me to be second-hand suits, whose owners were desperately trying to fit in, but never quite succeeding. The whites at the meetings were the kind of people who had failed to find recognition among their own people, and so had come to mine, where they were treated with the respect they felt they deserved.

  I got a job in a beauty salon and started work immediately, while Marion babysat for me. Wages were very poor and after two weeks it was obvious that I would never manage on my salary. I finally went to the welfare office because I was really desperate, and Marion had said that they had to help me and would. The social worker who talked to me was a very cold man, who, upon discovering that I had two hundred dollars, told me I had to spend it first and then come back and see him. That night Marion scolded me. “If you want help, never tell them the truth. Act ignorant, timid and grateful. They like that. Tomorrow we’ll go shopping and spend the two hundred.” So next morning we spent the two hundred dollars on clothes for myself and the girls. Then she gave me her welfare coat, as she called it, to wear, as it was hardly appropriate to go to Welfare well dressed.

  I went to the office in a ten-year-old threadbare red coat, with old boots and a scarf. I looked like a Whitefish Lake squaw, and that’s exactly what the social worker thought. He insisted that I go to the Department of Indian Affairs, and when I said I was not a Treaty Indian but a Halfbreed, he said if that was the case I was eligible, but added, “I can’t see the difference—part Indian, all Indian. You’re all the same.” I nearly bit my tongue off sitting there trying to look timid and ignorant. I answered a hundred questions and finally he gave me a voucher for groceries and bus tickets, and told me to be sure I found a cheap apartment or house, because government money was not to be wasted. I left his office feeling more humiliated and dirty and ashamed than I had ever felt in my life.

  That afternoon I said to Marion, “To hell with it. I’m not going through that business again. I’ll go back on the street—at least there I’m not going to feel guilty about spending government money, and I’ll be earning every cent of it.” Marion tried to reason with me saying, “Once summer comes we can make a few dollars here and there. The Calgary Stampede always needs Indians. There’s no need to go out and earn a living on the street. We can fix up outfits for ourselves, and go to powwows, and put on for white people, and get paid.”

  I was horrified at what she was saying. I couldn’t see myself in an Indian woman’s costume, parading around while white people took pictures of me. I asked her if she was serious, did Indians really get paid to be Indians for tourists? Marion answered that business was good in Calgary for Indians. White people said it was a cultural thing, so no one thought it was bad.

  Talking to Marion that day I saw myself wearing gaudy feathers and costumes and dancing for a place in society. To me it was the same as putting on a welfare coat to get government money. So I told her, “Forget about being a white man’s Indian, and make some real money. That’s the only thing this rotten world recognizes and respects.”

  Chapter 21

  I DIDN’T GO BACK ON the street, but I nearly did many times. The only thing that kept me away was my fear of using dope again and losing my babies for good. I stayed on welfare for six months and kept my head down, wore an old coat and acted timid and ignorant until I thought I’d go mad. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore, and told them to shove it. I found a job as a waitress in a small town south of Calgary, and managed to survive on the meagre salary I made. I found a young girl who was pregnant and had no place to go, and she babysat for her meals and a place to live. I never used dope again but I did a lot of drinking and I swallowed a lot of pills. One thing I’ve always found is that if you’re looking for food, shelter, clothing, or just someone to talk to, there’s never anyone around. But if you’re looking for a party there’s always lots of people who will spend a fortune seeing that you stay blissfully drunk.

  I was drinking more and more all the time, but I wasn’t as fortunate as many people who can get drunk and forget. Instead I’d drink myself sober and feel worse. I wanted to go home and see my father and my Cheechum. I’d never written to her or Daddy and I didn’t even know if they were still alive. Sometimes when Marion would come out from Calgary to visit me, and would tell me about her family, I’d feel so lonely I’d cry.

  Marion was going to AA meetings, and wanted me to come to Calgary some weekend and go with her, but I refused. I didn’t want any part of those meetings, or those people. It was bad enough that I had a drinking problem and was managing to stay off drugs—all I needed to add to my troubles was a room full of drunks. She had to be out of her mind.

  My life became an endless circle of work, drink, and depression. I managed to keep food in our mouths and a roof over our heads, but that was about all.

  I’d often seen Indian people in the town. Sometimes they’d come into the restaurant where I worked, but I never tried to be friendly. Most of the time they were drunk, and sometimes they would get into fights. They would leave their children in their cars, or on the street, and sit in the bar for hours. I saw white people do the same thing t
oo, but I didn’t give a damn about them. Many of the young girls came to the restaurant, and the white men would make crude jokes and try to pick them up. Many times I burned with rage and hatred, but I tried to suppress these emotions. But it was hard, and once I hit a man with a pop bottle and cut his head because he was pawing a young girl.

  There was another time when two little Indian boys came in. They were about four and eight years old. The place was nearly full, and in order to reach the bathroom they had to walk the length of the restaurant. About halfway down the room sat a group of white men who had just come out of the bar, drunk and noisy. The little boys caught my eye as soon as they walked in. The mother had come in with them, but when she saw all the people she stayed outside. The children stood there, tiny, ragged, and big-eyed. They looked so much like my little brothers a lump came to my throat. As they started down the aisle one of the men yelled, “Watch it! The bow and arrows are coming.” The older child stopped for a second when everyone started to laugh, put his arm around his little brother and, with his head up, continued walking. The men laughed at them and the younger boy started to cry and they ran the rest of the way. I shouted at the men to stop. I was so angry I could scarcely speak. The place became very quiet. No one looked at me when I ran to the washroom and brought those little boys out. The little one was crying and I carried him out to the car. I didn’t say anything to their parents—I just wanted to go away and forget the whole incident. Every so often the memory would come back of that little boy with his arm around his brother, and each time it filled me with frustration, hopelessness and despair. I could have blamed the parents for being too gutless, but how could I? Deep down inside I understood why they were afraid, because I was afraid too, only I showed my fear in a different way.