By Colin McGregor
We’re at the entrance of a cellblock, my young friend and I. The recreation period has just begun. People jostle us as they pass by to head out to the prison yard.
B* is 22 years of age. He is big and quiet. He is learning to read. But today, we are not reading together. His attention is focused on a pile of photos he is holding in his hands. He shows them to me, one photo at a time.
“This,” he says, “is my son.”
Leaning precariously on a table, a two-year-old child teeters, his light brown eyes looking directly into the camera. In front of this round-headed boy is a large cake. We can read, written in icing: “(The name of the child) WALKS.” On the cake sit a teepee and a pine cone, both made of sugar.
B* bears the wide smile that all fathers share.
He explains to me that the Cree of Mistissini hold this ceremony with their sons as soon as they can walk. The neighborhood gets together to celebrate the occasion. They erect a tent and get the child to walk on a bed of tree needles. Afterwards comes the cake. In one photo, a chubby kid, twice as fat as the son, stands beside the cake, which he is devouring with his eyes. In the background I can see large wooden bungalows and a muddy alley.
There are always a few young Cree from Mistissini at this jail. They are proud, polite and reserved. Their town is perched on the edge of Quebec’s largest natural lake, surrounded by “hairy” black spruce trees with their fine needles. Our prison in Cowansville, in the Eastern Townships, is far from this community: 11 hours by car. B* will not see his son until he leaves prison.
Like most of the Mistissini Cree here, B* is serving a sentence for one of the stupid errors young men commit when drunk on a Saturday night in a town full of guns. When B* is freed and goes back home he will not need to beg. Where the northern sun shines on the shores of their enormous lake, the streets are paved with gold: there is uranium, diamonds, fish, and money from the James Bay Agreement. There are large brick houses like you might find in Outremont. It is a community where solidarity and forgiveness reign.
A sign in the newsroom of the Washington Post reads: “The answer to all your questions is money.” But sometimes this is not true. The French and English schools of Mistissini are incredibly well equipped: and yet, in a four-year period the town’s schools only graduated two students, both women in their twenties.
Beginning in early high school, students sniff glue and gasoline in the woods. The teachers call their parents. The parents remember their brutal treatment at the native residential schools of their childhoods. And nothing is done. Students who want to study have nowhere to hide: the nearest public library is in Chibougamau, 89 kilometres away.
But once they reach prison, with the temptations of home far away, these men begin to concentrate on their studies. They learn mathematics; they learn to read and write in English, French, and sometimes in their native language, Cree. Some are math savants, burning through the textbook in this subject, but then stuck in other subjects such as English and French and history.
On the other hand, the Inuit in southern Quebec prisons come from the 14 villages along the province’s north coast, strung out like a pearl necklace hundreds of kilometres long. Each village speaks its own Inuktitut dialect, During the long hunting trips that can take weeks, they learn the dialects of neighboring villages. English may be their fourth or fifth language. Verb conjugations in French are a complex puzzle. Though French education is available in the villages, the Far North is still mostly an anglophone world.
Teachers and counsellors working for the prison, as well as volunteer tutors from outside prison and even some inmates participate in the education of Indigenous persons. There are specific federal programs aimed at Indigenous persons behind bars. Within Cowansville’s city limits sits the farm of former Canadian prime minister Paul Martin. He runs a foundation, the Martin Family Initiative, dedicated to Indigenous education. They help finance the Yamaska Literacy Council, the group of volunteers who come to the jail and help Indigenous men in their learning. Through the Council, Mr. Martin’s foundation pays for many of Yamaska’a literacy books and other materials.
In his autobiography, Martin describes the idyllic valley where he lives, with sheep grazing in green fields. Inside out gray concrete cellblocks, we can well imagine this nearby valley. From time to time a tutor from Bromont comes and sits with B* in the prison chapel.
Together, they hunch over illustrated stories involving snowshoes and moccasins in a book paid for by a former prime minister. Life can be very strange.
In a cellblock corridor, B* shows me another photo of his son. He is emerging from a tent full of his relatives. He is supported by his mother’s brother.
“If I had been there,” B* tells me, “it would have been me helping him walk. The boy looks like me, right?”
The child is looking directly into the camera lens, with a lot of intensity for a two-year-old. I look at his eyes. I see B*.
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