Waking Nanabijou

Uncovering a Secret Past

Jim Poling,

• Publisher: Natural Heritage
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781459714410
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Sozialwissenschaftliche Biographien

A woman from Northern Ontario is buried; her earthly papers reveal a mystery. Veteran Canadian journalist Jim Poling took on the most important assignment of his career: Just who was his mother? Why did she take a lifelong secret to her grave?

In his search for clues throughout his childhood years in Northern Ontario, the author goes to Chapleau, the railway town where the people he believed were his ancestors played out their roles in building the railway. It ends in the Prairie village of Innisfree, Alberta, home to Joe LaRose, convicted horse thief and father of a girl destined for trouble.

A search that began in anger at his mother's secrecy concludes with an understanding of her actions. In the process, he explores the place of families within Canadian society and reveals the shameful ongoing discrimination against Native Peoples and the abusive treatment of illegitimacy. Throughout, glimpses of working life in newsrooms add insider perspectives on the "handling" of our daily news.

A former Indian Affairs reporter, Poling shares insights into the ongoing plight of Canada's First Nations people. He observes that Canada will never realize its true potential until positive steps are taken to resolve longstanding issues.

Book One

WATER

1 — EVEREST FUNERAL HOME

I did not cry the evening that she died. I stood in the doorway of the hospital room after the nurse slid her eyelids shut and stared like a deer dumbfounded by car lights penetrating the forest edge. I did not run to the bedside to touch her hand or kiss her face. There didn’t seem to be any point. It was over. My mother was dead at age sixty-three, and displays of grief would be for me only, and would change nothing. So I turned and went down to the hospital parking lot, which stretches out to the edge of St. Mary’s River in downtown Sault Ste. Marie.

Falling darkness turned the water a deep and dangerous black, broken here and there by the reflections of lights from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan on the other side. The river passed swiftly below my feet, as I remembered how much she feared the water. I thought that the darkness and the lapping would bring on the tears. I wanted to cry for her, but I could not. Not because I didn’t love her, not because I wasn’t sad, not because hurtful events had created a gap in our closeness. The tears just would not come.

Tears never did come easy for me. I grew up in a time and family in which crying didn’t count for anything. The people of my childhood lived through a terrible Depression and war. When tough things happened, you picked yourself up and moved on.

It had been a long time since I last cried. Twenty years, in fact. That dirty time in November 1960 when I leaned over my dad’s coffin at Everest Funeral Home in what is now Thunder Bay and kissed his waxen forehead, dried my tears, and became the man of the family at age seventeen.

Now in August 1980 on the St. Mary’s riverbank in Sault Ste. Marie, my mother dead in the hospital behind me, I was destined to return to the Everest Funeral Home and all its agonizing memories. My mother had willed it. She had made me promise to bring her back home to Thunder Bay, Everest, and her final resting place in Dad’s grave at St. Andrew’s Cemetery.

So two days after her death, I fulfilled the promise and stood in the sunshine near the heart of downtown Thunder Bay, emotions exploding inside my chest, tears rimming my eyes. The viewing parlour inside Everest Funeral Home was dim and close, the air sickeningly sweet with the smell of dying flowers. When I saw her in the coffin, I bolted back outside. It wasn’t so much the coffin, or the atmosphere in which it sat. I had been to Everest many times before. Poling family dead all went to Everest, then made the short trip across the street to St. Andrew’s Roman Catholic Church, then up the hill to the cemetery. As a child, adolescent, and adult, I had kneeled at coffins there to touch the stiff hands of four grandparents and, most horribly, the younglooking man with a full head of black hair. My father died on us when he was forty-four, and when he did, I knew that nothing else in life could ever hurt as much.

Everest itself did not scare me. I was there as promised. I brought my mother home from the place where she had fled when my father died. She had made me promise to ignore the feelings of her second husband and to take her body out of Sault Ste. Marie, the Soo or Sault for short, and bring her to Thunder Bay to be buried beside Dad. She knew this request would hurt Bill Brooks, the Algoma Steel foreman she married after moving to the Soo to escape the misfortunes that had fallen on us. She had been adamant, on her deathbed and in her will written at Christmas 1978, soon after she discovered her bladder cancer: “In the event of my death I am to be brought home to Thunder Bay and buried with my beloved husband Ray Poling. No ifs, ands or buts. That’s the way I want it.”

The will indicated that she knew she was relegating Bill Brooks to be a bystanding mourner at her funeral, with the added hurt of knowing she had married him out of necessity.

She wrote, “Sometimes circumstances force one to do things that we do not care to do. I know, Jim, you did not approve but in my case it was a necessity so my kids could live and eat the way they were accustomed. I love you all dearly and just feel badly I was unable to share my home and feelings openly. But then I’m sure you understand.”

I was not sure that I did understand. I never took to Bill Brooks, but then how many young men accept the new husbands of their widowed mothers? Bill would arrive at Everest soon for the wake, and I felt sorry that he had to come to this strange place in a strange city to see his wife buried with her first husband.

The body of my mother, Veronica, had arrived earlier in the day in a hearse, another bizarre twist she had thrown into her funeral arrangements. She had insisted that I promise to have her driven from the Soo to Thunder Bay, called Port Arthur and Fort William when she moved to the Soo. She feared flying as much as she feared the water and could not tolerate the thought of being on an airplane, even as a corpse. So I hired a hearse to drive her body seven hundred kilometres on a two-lane highway around the rocky shore of Lake Superior. The ride must have been rough because when they opened the coffin for the viewing, there was a dark red bruise at the corner of her mouth.

Seeing her bruised face was the final drop of water falling into a glass filled to the rim. My sorrow overflowed and I turned on my heels and hurried outside. Emotions washed over me like the waves beating against the stone breakwater in Thunder Bay harbour. To hold them back, I lifted my head and stared at the cars whizzing by on the street where maroon and yellow streetcars once clattered and clanged their way to and from downtown. In the old days, people hopped on and off the cars as they pleased. Those not in a hurry, or not too tired, walked the sidewalks, pausing occasionally to exchange greetings and news with a friend or neighbour.

The only person on foot on this day was an older lady carefully navigating the broad steps of St. Andrew’s Church, a centre of our family life a lifetime ago. Soon I would cross the street and climb those same steps, following slowly and sadly behind a coffin in a family ritual repeated many times in the past.

The distraction of the cars and the lady climbing the church steps were not enough to stop the dam that was about to burst inside me. As the final stress fractures started to let loose the sobbing, pinpoints of red light blipped weakly along Algoma Street, becoming stronger and more urgent as they came closer. They stopped down the street from the rear of St. Andrew’s and I knew they were at St. Joseph’s Hospital. More flashing lights gathered and stopped, congesting the street outside the hospital entrance.

St. Joseph’s had never seen such a traffic jam of emergency lights before. This was no delivery of bumped and bruised victims of a two-car fender-bender. Something big was happening and my reporter instincts yanked me off the edge of an emotional breakdown and told me to find out what it was. I loped across the street and almost ran down a passerby hurrying from the hospital scene. I couldn’t wait to get the details, so I stopped him to ask what the commotion was about.

The man explained breathlessly that an ambulance had brought Terry Fox into the hospital. The news jolted me. What were the chances of me running across Terry Fox, someone who had become an important part of my work as a journalist? I asked what happened. Was he hit by a transport?

Reporters always conjure up the worst scenarios. Terry Fox smacked down by a runaway transport while he ran his Marathon of Hope for cancer was a story too huge to even imagine. The passerby said he didn’t know, but one of the cops thought he was sick again.

I stopped to consider the information. Terry Fox was a skinny kid with ruddy-faced determination and a head of curly hair that looked like steel-wool pot scrubber. He lost a leg to cancer and dreamed of running across Canada from sea to sea to raise money for cancer research. He travelled from his West Coast home to St. John’s, Newfoundland in April and on the twelfth of that month in 1980 dipped his artificial leg into the Atlantic Ocean and started running the roughly 7,500 kilometres back home to the Pacific.

His Marathon of Hope began as the usual oddity in the news. People often biked, marched, or rolled hula hoops along the highways to raise money and attention for one cause or other. The reporters in the towns they passed through paid small attention to them.

Sometime during the spring, the Terry Fox run had grown beyond just another highway sideshow. It appeared organized and determined. By June he had ran all the way into Ontario, and the people of the country’s most populous province began to pay attention. The white T-shirt, running shorts, and artificial leg that he threw forward in a trademark gait, began making the daily news. He became a star in southern Ontario, and as he rounded the top of Lake Superior, people realized that this crazy kid might run all the way across the country on one leg. People gathered at the roadside to cheer him on. Donations piled up like a blizzard pushing snow against a fence. National reporters elbowed aside the locals to get at the story.

I owned part of this story. I was the bureau chief for the Canadian Press (CP) — the national news service — in Vancouver and Terry Fox lived in the Vancouver suburb of Port Coquitlam. I had already began sketching some plans for when he crossed the Prairies, ran through the mountains, and down the slope to the Pacific where he would dip his plastic leg in triumph. This would be a dream news event: a starry-eyed cancer kid completing an incredible journey of hope, courage, and sheer guts.

The only reason I wasn’t back in Vancouver making coverage arrangements for his triumphant return was Veronica’s illness and now her death.

Being in Thunder Bay with Terry Fox in some kind of trouble could be considered, in other circumstances, a stroke of journalistic good fortune. I needed to get into that crowd, gather up the details, and telephone them fast to CP in Toronto. They would be stunned to hear their British Columbia bureau chief dictating this international scoop from Thunder Bay. I composed pieces of the story as I ran down the street, even though I didn’t know what it was yet, and I thought how important it was to be in the right place at the right time. I had a knack for stumbling into stories, and this was just another example.

My mind roared ahead, then my feet slammed to a stop. I turned and looked back. There was the Everest Funeral Home, still sitting on the corner. The coffin still occupied the viewing room. My mother still occupied the coffin. Bill Brooks and others soon would arrive for the family gathering, followed by the wake. The deceased’s eldest child, the guy in charge of all the arrangements, was running down the street to cover a story.

I turned and sauntered back toward Everest. Even I couldn’t do this, leave my mother’s funeral to cover a story. I had skipped many family events to cover good assignments. Off somewhere taking notes when the kids were out trick-or-treating for Halloween. Parts of two Christmas seasons away reporting in Cuba. Numerous birthdays and anniversaries, hockey games, and concerts missed. Gone for eight weeks wandering Saskatchewan for stories just days after our twins were born. My wife, Diane, at home alone with two newborns and two toddlers in a strange place while I interviewed disgruntled wheat farmers, worried business people in dying prairie towns, and pilots rescued from crash sites in the far north. Even I couldn’t be so shameful as to walk away from my mother’s funeral for a story.

I was a reporter because of Veronica. Not only had she tricked me into that trade, she had led me in that direction since I was a child. She was a storyteller, a great storyteller, and it is no surprise that I grew up wanting to tell stories.

Thunder Bay was a perfect nurturing place for storytellers because it wallowed in Ojibwe legends. The city lived in the shadow of Nanabijou, the Sleeping Giant that dominates the eastern horizon. Storytellers say that Nanabijou is the sleeping body of a great chief who protects the rich silver deposits at Silver Islet near his feet. When anyone tries to get near the silver, he awakens and terrorizes the people with flying bolts of lightning and awesome thunder that shakes the hills and whips the lake into a fury.

That was legend. Terry Fox down the street was fact. Not knowing what was happening to him at St. Joseph’s and what would happen to the Marathon of Hope, gnawed at my reportorial instincts and pride. It hurt that this was one big story that I would read about and not write myself.

I went back to Everest and Veronica and the folks filing in for the viewing. I tingled with the voltage of being close to a big story. There is no bigger charge than reporting fast-breaking news. Being fast, being first, and being accurate. It seemed incredible that I had to turn my back on this one. Little did I know, however, that while Veronica’s death denied me one big story, it would lead me into the greatest reporting assignment of my life. An assignment in which I would discover who my mother really was and where she came from.

2 — LaFRANCE

All I knew about my mother was what I had observed growing up as her son and what she had told me. What she told people did not always match reality. Her storytelling often mixed fact and fiction. Who she said she was and where she came from turned out to be “faction,” a blend of fact and fiction.

Veronica enhanced real-life situations with dramatic imagery. One day she hauled me to an upstairs bedroom of the home we shared with her parents and balanced me on the windowsill. An inmate at the Port Arthur jail was to hang that morning. When they hanged someone back then, they lowered the flag atop the jail building as a signal that the deed was done. We had no hope of seeing anything — the jail was a good two miles away — but Veronica was a storyteller and by placing me in the window, she could tell a story of crime and punishment with more impact by urging me to look hard to see the flag being lowered. The hanging was real, but seeing the jailhouse flag was fantasy.

She had a flair for drama. Many years after the hanging, she presented me with a wrapped gift. I undid the wrapping to reveal a plastic Indian doll, a chief with removable headdress. She told me that this was the last toy she would ever give me because I was a man now and it was time to put away the toys of childhood.

Another time she took me by the hand and led me into the basement to her cherished cedar hope chest. She sat me down on it and said she was going to tell me the story of her family. The story stayed with me the rest of my life and became an important clue in my search to discover who she really was. She told it slowly and with the flair and expressions of a great actress.

Not long after Europeans first occupied Canada, a dashing young man in Normandy shot another man in a duel over a woman. He fled to the New World. The ship carrying him to Quebec City foundered in a storm and crashed onto the rocks. The young man was tossed overboard and washed onto a riverbank. He opened his eyes to see a beautiful Indian princess nursing him. She healed his injuries and restored his health and they married. So began the LaFrance family in Canada.

As with most of her stories, parts resembled the genuine history of the LaFrance family. Other parts were sheer fantasy. She took some facts and blended them with her fantasy, and the reason she did so became evident only long after her death, when I discovered who she was.

Her parents were the LaFrances, Joseph Isidore and Louise LaFrance, both railway people. Both grew up beside railway tracks, where the shrieks of steam locomotives and thumps of shunted cars were the sounds of life itself. Most people they knew had lived and died within earshot of the tracks, spending their lives devoted to ensuring that the trains ran on time. Their days were tied to arrivals and departures, frequent separations, and worry about accidents. Despite that, railway life was a good life that brought special privileges, respect, and good pay for a locomotive engineer.

Railway life brought Louise and Isidore together when the new century turned. Both their families had migrated to Chapleau, a frontier town carved out of the northern Ontario bush in 1885 as the Canadian Pacific Railway moved west to fulfil the national dream of a rail line from Atlantic to Pacific. Louise grew up in the rail camps along the Ottawa Valley and beyond — as construction crews pushed the rails relentlessly west. She and her sisters and brothers lived wherever their father Oliver Aquin, an immigrant from France, could find work building the railway as it moved along through places such as Black Donald Creek, Chalk River, Mattawa, and Nosbonsing. When the rails stretched west beyond Chapleau, Oliver stayed behind in the North Bay-Sudbury-Chapleau region with crews tending th...