Run As One

My Story

Errol Ranville

• Publisher: MyHome Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781773370606
• eBook ISBN: 9781773370613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

Errol Ranville has been running all his life: from chronic poverty and racism in rural Manitoba; a discriminatory music business; alcohol and drug addiction; and the responsibilities that come with being regarded as a role model. Though Errol has faced seemingly insurmountable barriers as an Indigenous performer in a predominately white music business, his band C-Weed & the Weeds released several #1 songs and went on to score JUNO nominations in 1985 and 1986. Errol was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Indigenous Music Awards in 2011. Errol's autobiography Run as One is filled with love and passion as he embraces the role of trailblazer for the countless musicians that follow his path.

Chapter 1

Magic In The Music

Errol was pretty off the wall as a youngster, kind of full of himself, rambunctious, full of energy, scrappy. He would get into fights at school. He even had a fight with a teacher once, a physical fight. He challenged authority. He still does. He had a lot of nerve, a lot of guts, and this carried through into his adult life and probably had a lot to do with his success and the success of the band. He is very driven.
—Wally Ranville, brother

I was in school with Errol. It was a two-room school, grades 5 to 8 in one room and grades 1 to 4 in the other. The principal had left so the teacher in grades 1 to 4 became sort of the head of the school. She was a bit strap happy and tended to give the strap for a lot of things. And I guess the grade 8 boys had done something, I cannot even recall what it was, so she brought them all in and stood them in the back of our room. We were all seated in our chairs. One by one they held out their hands and she gave them the strap. Whack! Errol was in the middle of the lineup. When she came to him, he moved his hand and she hit her leg. She got angry. We didn’t know whether to laugh or what exactly to do. She put her hand out to hold his and of course he just yanked his hand out and she slapped her hand. Now she was furious. I cannot really recall what happened after but what sticks in my mind is he actually stood up to her because she gave the strap for no apparent good reasons. He wasn’t going to take that from anyone. That’s the kind of person Errol was.—Curtis Johnson, Eddystone resident

Running. I’ve been running all my life. Running from chronic poverty and racism in rural Manitoba, from a discriminatory music business that told us “We don’t want your kind here,” from people trying to label me and my music, from alcohol and drug addiction, from the responsibilities that come with being regarded as a role model. And running from a horrific accident that took away the love of my life, leaving me both physically and emotionally broken. Running is in my DNA. I read a saying once: “The only way I am ever going to get to go to Heaven is by running away from Hell.” That saying sure applies to me and my current situation. A man on the run.

The name Ranville originates from France; Normandy to be precise. Ranville is a town on the northwest French coast that was liberated from German occupation by the Allies on D-Day, June 6, 1945. It was the first French community to be liberated. There is a Commonwealth cemetery situated up from the beach called Ranville Cemetery. The town dates back to Roman times. My brother Bryan, the family historian, traced our family roots back to 16th century France. Jean De Rainville and his wife Elizabeth De La Gueripierre emigrated to North America around 1678, settling in New France (Quebec). On arrival somehow the name was recorded as Rainville, dropping the De. Their occupation was listed as fur traders and subsequent generations included voyageurs who made the arduous canoe journeys west to trade with the Indigenous peoples. In 1753, Joseph Rainville (Renville) married Miniyuhe, daughter of Mdwakanton Dakota Chief Big Thunder of the Kaposia Village near Lower Agency Reserve in Minnesota and settled in what is now northern Minnesota. From this, the town of Renville grew. Further intermarriage with Sioux tribes led to the Renville family extending into Montana and as far north as Pembina, North Dakota. Joseph Renville, the son of Joseph Rainville above, (whose name was later changed to Renville), in 1804 married Marie (Tonkanne) Little Crow, the daughter of Petit Carboneau and the niece of Chief Little Crow. On the July 3, 1823, Joseph joined Major Stevens H. Long’s expedition to the source of the St. Peters River. He was highly valued and was chosen by Colonel Dickson to command the Sioux contingent of the expedition at the rank equivalent to a Captain in the British Army. By the time the American Fur Company bought the Columbia Fur Company, Joseph was established at Lac Qui Parle and maintained an army of warriors known as the Tokadantee or “Prairie Dogs.” This group later evolved into the Renville Rangers under one of his sons. The Renville Rangers were an Indigenous group on horseback who kept the peace between the white settlers and the Sioux tribes in Minnesota.

There was no firm border yet and Indigenous people moved back and forth. But once the 49th parallel was set as the dividing line between British North America (Canada) and the United States, Renville and its occupants, including my mixed-marriage ancestors, found themselves on the American side. My father is American Sioux and a direct descendant of the Renville Rangers. It’s a proud history.

Around 1862 an uprising alternately known as the Sioux Uprising or the Dakota Conflict arose from the ill treatment of the Sioux and Dakota tribes by the American government. Starvation was rampant as the government failed to adequately provide sufficient supplies to the Indigenous communities according to the treaties that had been negotiated by Dakota Chief Little Crow. In response, several white settlements were raided. The American response was heavy handed. The military captured and interned hundreds of Indigenous people and over three hundred were sentenced to death. On December 26, 1862 at Fort Ulm near Mankato, Minnesota, thirty-eight Sioux and Dakota were hanged in the largest mass execution in American history. Four of those hanged were direct descendants of my family. Fearful for their own safety, my father’s family managed to escape across the Canadian border. Running from the hangman. But despite finding refuge in Canada, that fear never left them and continued to impact successive generations in Canada, including my father. They took the name Ranville to avoid being caught and did not register with the Canadian government for fear of being deported back to the US to be hanged. They lived their entire lives outside the treaties and never registered under the Indian Act. My great-grandfather, Jonas Ranville, who is my father’s grandfather, was the first of our family to come across to Canada. Jonas Ranville is the father-in-law of Métis leader and Father of Manitoba, Louis Riel. He gave refuge to Louis Riel when he hid in the US for a period of time.

My grandfather Francois ‘Frank’ Ranville, born in 1882, didn’t feel comfortable living close to the American border so he went north of Dauphin to Crane River. There he came across a priest who had a twelve-year-old girl, Henrietta Nepinak, a Treaty Indian from Pine Creek, under his care after she had caused some commotion in the community. Frank worked all summer clearing the property around the church and building a white picket fence. At the end of the summer, the priest had no money to pay him so he gave Frank the girl. Frank and Henrietta married in 1915 in Pine Creek and had twenty children of which seventeen lived to adulthood. One of them was my father, Emile Ranville, born on March 29, 1919 in Crane River. Frank went on to own a large cattle ranch and was respected in the community.

A river divided my grandfather’s land, known as Ranville Point (Big Sandy Point), from the rest of the community. When the federal government Indian agents would come around to register the Indigenous members of the community around Crane River for their treaty rights and give them new English names and provisions like bread and sugar, my grandfather refused to cross the river. He didn’t want to be registered because he feared that once they knew who he was, they would send him back to the United States. He never registered with the Canadian government. That is why we slipped through the cracks and lost our treaty rights. He lived his whole life in fear of the hangman, my dad and his dad. They were outlaws running from the kangaroo courts that were being held along the Minnesota border in 1863 and randomly hanging Sioux Indians as a result of the so called “Sioux uprising of 1862.” In the 1863 operations against the Sioux in North Dakota, Colonel Sibley, with two thousand men, hunted the Sioux into Dakota Territory, by 1881, the majority of the Sioux had surrendered to American military forces. In 1890, the Wounded Knee Massacre ended all effective Sioux resistance to the settlers on our land.

I lived outside the treaties all my life. I never had a status card. We lived our whole life as Métis. Later, with the C-Weed Band, I often had difficulty crossing the US border because of my lack of status as a Treaty Indian. But after I turned sixty, the federal government announced Bill-C31, which stated that if your grandmother was treaty then you could apply for treaty rights. Henrietta Ranville (nee Nepinak), my grandmother, was a treaty Indian of the Pine Creek First Nation. But I had to jump through all sorts of legal hoops before sending off my application to Ottawa. A few months later I received my card in the mail. It’s now official. After sixty years, POOF, I’m now an Indian. The first thing I did was go out and buy a brand-new Chevy Suburban and with my Status card saved the sales taxes on it, $5700. It’s a small price to pay for giving up the land mass known as Canada or Kanata.

∞

My dad, Emile, was living in the small town of Eddystone, east of Ste. Rose du Lac and north of Ebb and Flow First Nation. He had left his father’s cattle ranch to strike out on his own. With sixteen siblings he wasn’t going to inherit anything. Dad was a jack-of-all-trades labourer. He could do just about anything, notably carpentry. While working in Eddystone, he met Mary Catherine Spence, born April 24, 1912, the daughter of Joseph Spence, who my father was working for. She was twenty-nine and unmarried; he was twenty-two. They wed on September 29, 1940 in Winnipeg where Dad was working in a meat-packing plant. They operated a rooming house on Broadway in Winnipeg.

Dad was functionally illiterate. He never learned to read or write. When growing up, he spoke what was referred to then as “mud French,” a conversational French/Cree derivative. Cree was his second language, Saulteaux his third, and around age seventeen he learned English. My parents could both speak Saulteaux but didn’t dare do so. Like his father and grandfather, Emile remained fearful of the government sending him to the States, so he insisted we only speak English. The Canadian government had banned the use of our Native languages. If you were caught speaking your language at school, you would be suspended for two weeks. If you were caught a second time the suspension would double to one month and so on. So Indigenous kids would fail their grade that year because they would get behind and couldn’t catch up. The following year they would then be in a class with kids a year younger than themselves, would become discouraged, and ultimately quit.

Because Dad had no carpentry license and couldn’t read or write, he was often taken advantage of by local businessmen. He would be paid less because they knew they could get away with it. He wasn’t going to dispute the wages because he didn’t want to involve the government, once again from fear of deportation. Sometimes things turned ugly when alcohol was involved and there would be physical altercations. He worked hard all his life. He had to, as the family grew to twelve children. He instilled in all of us a strong work ethic. You don’t get anything free; you have to work for it. Mom could read and write because she had been educated at a residential school. She was raised Catholic and was extremely religious. We went to church every Sunday until one by one we gradually stopped. But my father wasn’t religious. Far from it. He never went to church. Once I snuck out of church one Sunday morning and went back home. I looked in the window and there was Dad, sitting all by himself in the house. The whole community would be at church and he’d be sitting alone on the bench. He used to say, “God’s not going to put food on this table. If I don’t go out and work, we won’t have any food on the table!” I couldn’t argue with that.

I loved my dad. He was my hero. He passed away in 1990, Mom in 1995.

My oldest siblings Valerie (born 1942), Stirling (born 1944), Delphine (born 1946), Gerald Bryan (known all his life as D-Bine born 1948), Gordon Nelson (born 1949) were all born while the family lived in Winnipeg, but soon after, Emile and Mary moved back to Eddystone. There wasn’t much in Eddystone then: a post office, general store run by the Johnsons, a school, church, later a garage, and a mud trail to Crane River a few miles north up the road. We didn’t own any land. When the local municipality would build gravel roads back then, they had something called a road allowance, the land between the road itself and where the farmers fences started. Dad took over a tiny cabin that was on the road allowance across the road from the elementary school. We lived as squatters on that land. Initially it was one room with a packed mud floor. We all slept in a row on the mud floor on blankets (Dad later put in a wood floor). No mattresses. There was a stove in the middle of the room for heat and cooking. In winter when it was 40 below zero, someone would have to get up in the middle of the night and stoke the stove. We had no inside toilet and no running water. We didn’t even have electricity or a telephone. We pretty much lived in the bush. Uncle Angus was the only one who had a phone in all of the families. He was the only one who had electricity. We didn’t get electricity until much later in the game. Dad wired the house himself. I must have been ten years old so that was in the early ‘60s. Dad was a commercial ice-fisher in winter and worked on the farms in the summer.

Poverty has an ugly face. I was scarred by it, we all were. We knew we were poor. We were kind of a spectacle in the community for our chronic poverty. Mom’s younger sister Ida was an Oblate nun in St. Boniface and would send clothing to us on the train that stopped in nearby Ste. Rose du Lac. We would unload the boxes before tearing through them trying to find something we could wear. These were all hand-me-downs the nuns collected and we would then hand them down between us as we grew out of them. Imagine starting school in the clothes your older brother wore the previous year. That was our reality. I remember a pair of women’s shoes in one of those boxes. I got stuck with them. I was laughed at for wearing them but I needed shoes and this was all there was. Kids can be cruel.

Our whole life was based around the monthly grocery bill at the local grocery store owned by the Johnsons. It never got paid off completely but Dad would pay it down whenever he could, enough for us to get credit for the next time. We were all aware of that bill. It was like that Tennessee Ernie Ford song “Sixteen Tons”: “I owe my soul to the company store.”

I remember one time walking 1½ miles to the grocery store with my dad. I was pulling a cart along the gravel road. He intended to fill the cart with groceries. In the store I was drooling over all the food as I was always hungry back then. Dad loaded up the cart and went up to the counter. He put all the groceries on the counter. Other people were there watching him do this. Mrs. Johnson was standing there waiting to be paid. Dad was expecting to have it all put on our account. She looked at the all the stuff and then at him and said, “You can’t put anything more on the bill.” We left everything on the counter and walked out. It was a horrible public humiliation and hard for me to see my father, who I admired so much, having to face that. I never forgot it. He was a proud man who came from a proud heritage, a direct descendant of the Renville Rangers of Minnesota. My brother Wally remembers a similar incident, but in that case, Mr. Johnson told Mrs. Johnson to let Mom take the groceries home. If he hadn’t, we’d go hungry and we often went hungry. Sometimes all we had to eat was oatmeal that Mom heated up on the stove. I used to try to snare rabbits to help out with food. We had an old single shot .22 rifle and when I turned twelve, I was allowed to use it to hunt. One day while hunting I faced a deer but made the mistake of looking into its eyes and I couldn’t shoot it. I just could not kill something living.

Dad built onto the house as the family grew, Randall Francis ‘Randy’ Ranville was born in 1950. Walter David ‘Wally’ Ranville made his appearance in 1952. And I was born Errol Sydney Ranville on August 1, 1953 at the hospital in Ste. Rose Du Lac. The family was rounded out by Norman Ralph Ranville in 1954, Rene Lionel Ranville born in 1955, and finally Donna Marie Ranville in 1958. Donald Clifford ‘Don’ Ranville was born in 1951. He was our first cousin, the son of my dad’s sister, but lived with Uncle Angus for his first ten years before my mom and dad adopted him at age twelve. There we were twelve kids in all. Dad added two main floor rooms and an upstairs over the years as the family expanded. He was an excellent carpenter.

Because of the age differences betwee...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Note from Phil Fontaine
• Note from Eric Robinson
• Introduction - Walk Me to The Edge
• Chapter 1 - Magic In The Music
• Chapter 2 - Play Me My Favourite Song
• Chapter 3 - Bringing Home the Good Times
• Chapter 4 - I Wanna Fly
• Chapter 5 - On My Way Back Home
• Chapter 6 - Run As One
• Chapter 7 - Redemption
• Acknowledgements