In late spring, Edmund Metatawabin will embark on a journey that will take him north from his home in Fort Albany to the land of his ancestors.
It’s a sacred area in Cape Henrietta Maria, where the southern tip of Hudson Bay and the northwestern tip of James Bay meet. It’s where the ancient ceremonial grounds and a few scattered structures of his people still stand.
“We were there for about 3,000 years and then we started to go along the shore of Hudson Bay northward or southwards along the shore of James Bay,” Metatawabin says. “It’s about 300 miles from here. It’s hard to get to. I’ve flown over it many times but have never been.”
For Metatawabin, it’s the next chapter in a healing process that began in the 1970s in the backyard sweat lodges of southern Alberta. Now 67, the former chief of Fort Albany First Nations has carved out an impressive career as an educator, writer and activist.
But his Governor General Literary Award-nominated memoir, Up Ghost River: A Chief’s Journey Through the Turbulent Waters of Native History, covers troubled times, when the mental and emotional scars of a horrifying childhood spent at a residential school named St. Anne’s led to a long battle with alcoholism and family dysfunction.
It’s a reminder that, while Metatawabin is renowned as an educator who is dedicated to teaching young natives about the traditional ways of the Cree, he still sees himself in some ways as a student who continues to learn and heal.
“It’s going to solidify the stories I’ve heard,” says Metatawabin, when asked what he hopes to gain from the trip north this spring. “If I’m able to see the rocks that stand in the circle and the uniqueness of our people and their perseverance of living on the land will be strengthened and the faith in that system will be made stronger. People say ‘I’m going to Mecca.’ Maybe, it’s that sort of feeling. For me, it’s going back to that ancient area and seeing what will happen.”
No stranger to the spotlight when it comes to bringing the horrors of the residential school systems to light, Metatawabin and other survivors of St. Anne’s fought the federal government to get documents released to the public and testified during the Truth and Reconciliation hearings. Up Ghost River, co-written by journalist Alexandra Shimo, is a harrowing personal tale about brutality and healing, one that Metatawabin says has been brewing in him since the late 1960s.
While only a third of the novel deals with the sexual and physical abuse he suffered at the notorious St. Anne’s, it is those passages that are getting the most attention on book tours. Metatawabin was in Calgary during WordFest, and spoke at the Glenbow Museum.
“The public are always so shocked,” he said. “They are commenting that they didn’t really know this was going on while they were going on with their daily life. First Nations are not really in the curriculum. We are set aside in the reserves to be forgotten.”
Metatawabin was seven years old in 1955 when he was sent to St. Anne’s, a school run with both brutality and incompetence by the Catholic Church. He suffered abuse at the hands of both school officials — including a particularly frightening figure named Sister Wesley — and a Hudson Bay store manager who sexually assaulted him. Metatawabin recounts being tortured in a crude electric chair, being whipped and being forced to eat his own vomit. A voracious reader, Metatawabin read Victor Francl’s Man’s Search for Meaning as a university student in the early 1970s. That book dealt with the author’s experiences in Auschwitz during the Second World War. The idea of cultural and personal eradication hit home.
“It was so familiar, I said ‘this sounds like residential school,’” Metatawabin says. “It was a plan. It was intentional. It was a policy. It was no accident. Everything is designed for abuse. The sexual abuse was rampant. We had about 12 missionary brothers and the same number of sisters. Each one of them had their own child that they took after hours into their own area for sexual gratification. We knew that to be normal.”
As a young husband and father, Metatawabin suffered from alcoholism that threatened to destroy his family. A friend encouraged him to go to the Edmonton area in 1977, where he went through a spiritual reawakening as he immersed himself in Cree traditions.
“I met elders out west and they had their sweat lodge in their backyard,” Metatawabin says. “I was shocked. ‘You have a sweat lodge in your backyard? What will the missionaries think?’ They said ‘That’s not their business. This is our church.’ It was surprising me to meet elders that were absolutely confident in their own traditions. They taught me different ways of believing — the four directions, the sacred fire and the place of man within that sacred fire.”
The Governor General Literary Award winners will be announced on Tuesday.