Monsters

Content warning: Abuse of children, elders, animals, and Indigenous people. Mention of residential school trauma, religious trauma, police violence, lateral violence, and anti-Indigenous racism.

I

grew up in Canada afraid of my parents. Afraid of my grandmother. Afraid of my teachers. Afraid of other kids. Afraid of Jehovah. Afraid of what I would do next which might earn me a beating. “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” This was something I often heard at the Kingdom Hall, and I don’t think there was a day of my childhood when I didn’t get a spanking for something or another. The last time I was hit by a relative was when I was 19 years old. I disagreed with my father on something, I don’t remember what, and he retaliated by slapping my face.

A decade ago, I found myself continuing the cycle. I was moving into a new house. Heavy furniture was being lugged about and my sister had shown up to help, bringing my nephew, a hyper toddler who, like me, has attention deficit disorder. He wouldn’t or couldn’t listen, and I was terrified he would get hurt, so I pulled him across my knee and gave him three quick smacks. His crying eyes screamed out their bewilderment and betrayal, and I vowed never again to raise a hand against a child, even if it was “for their own good.”

My parents were beaten by their parents, by their teachers, by clergy, and by the military. They grew up with army veterans, with shell shock, with severe religious upbringings, and with a cornucopia of trauma. Beatings were the order of the day. It’s what they knew; it’s what was preached to them as being correct, and they fell in line. So when I went to school and was beaten by a teacher, I said nothing. I was ashamed, even though I’d done nothing wrong. Corporal punishment had been banned since the late 60s, but at Keswick Valley Memorial in the 1970s, teacher-administered beatings were standard. Each teacher’s desk sported a strap to be wielded across the palms or a yardstick for rapping across knuckles. If a teacher couldn’t do it, the principal would. My grade two teacher was a sadist. She used a thick leather strap on me in front of the entire class. My hands burned and swelled so that I couldn’t hold my crayons, and although my eyes watered, I refused to cry. I grew up with the other adage of “don’t cry or I’ll give you something to cry about.” So when I got older and the other kids got meaner, I said nothing. I told no one about the thrashings they gave me. The one time I tried to fight back, it was the feeble, half-hearted pawing of the terrified, and it only earned me a bigger beating.

They were trying to teach me to become a monster like them, but I never dreamed of vengeance. I dreamed of getting in a big bus accident and saving their lives. Then they’d be sorry. Then they’d realize I wasn’t a bad person and they would start being nice to me. It never happened, of course.

I felt sorry for some of my bullies. I knew they had it worse than I did. They could tell I pitied them, and beat me all the harder for it.

Patty, the girl who lived up the hill from me, used to beat me up to steal my lunches. She was too proud to ask for food, so she laid into me like her father laid into her before he rented her out to his hunting buddies for the night. I let her take my food; she never had any of her own. She had scars across her back from her daddy’s horse whip instead. Incest was all too common in the backwoods of New Brunswick.

When my father was a teenager, he ran away from home and lied about his age in order to join the military. An excellent sharpshooter, he was trained to fight tanks and take down attack dogs. Even after he left the army, he continued to kill dogs. If a dog ever bit a child, he killed the dog on the spot. I never told him about how the neighbour’s dog nipped me once for standing too close; I didn’t want the dog to die. I never asked him how he was trained to fight dogs. It never occurred to me until I was an adult that he must have practised. I asked him to teach me how to protect myself, but he would not teach me. He said I’d hurt someone.

I wasn’t going to let anyone lay hands on me again. It was my first great rebellion, and a schism between me and the religion I was born into.

When I was 15 years old, I wasn’t afraid of being hit anymore. I had grown accustomed to the abuse, and I would stand impassive while girls alternated between slapping me across one cheek and then the other. “Turn the other cheek.” That was another thing I heard a lot at the Kingdom Hall. I didn’t see the point. If you turn your cheek, that one just gets hit, too. Dad wouldn’t teach me how to fight, so I took matters into my own hands. I wasn’t going to let anyone lay hands on me again. It was my first great rebellion, and a schism between me and the religion I was born into. I grew my fingernails, filed them into talons. I carried a heavy purse. And I was prepared to fight like a feral cat if anyone tried to hurt me again. The first to try was Steven. He grabbed at me. Tried to trip me. Took swipes at me while I was waiting for the bus. I spun my purse like David’s sling and slammed it down atop his head. He never bothered me again.

The next time it was Laird. He sat in the seat behind me on the bus, and while everyone cheered, he tried to put gum and glue into my hair. I told him to stop, and when he didn't, I slashed my claws across his throat. Blood poured down his slit neck, and the kids on the bus all took a sudden breath in. But Laird decided to double down. He came in again to grab my hair and I seized his wrist, sinking my long nails into his flesh all the way to the quick. “You will never touch me again,” I told him. I was right. He did not. Though the verbal abuse continued, no one laid hands on me again at school. I had felled my Goliath. When I moved out on my own, I began studying martial arts. I contemplated becoming a soldier like my dad.

Don’t cry or I’ll give you something to cry about. I was like the fabled boy of Sparta, eviscerated by a fox rather than show any pain. I was like the fabled boy of Sparta dying stoically. I never wept when I was bullied, though I’d weep in private, where there wasn’t a chance of someone seeing my weakness. I didn’t cry when my grandfather died. And when I looked around at all the people weeping at his funeral service in the Kingdom Hall, I felt disgust. How could they cry when I could not, and he had meant so much to me? How could they cry? They had no right. And then I couldn’t cry anymore—not even in private, not out in the woods, not under the covers of my bed late at night. My tears were all dried up, and they didn’t return for years. Not until I finally stopped going to the Kingdom Hall. And while I sat dry-eyed amongst the weeping mourners, my grandmother took my 12-year-old sister aside and told her all the sordid details of my grandfather’s adultery. She said nothing of her own.

My grandmother was not a kind woman. Is not a kind woman. I don’t know how to refer to her in this moment. She is my grandmother in limbo, dying a long, slow death for decades, until the autumn of 2022, when she took another bad fall that may have accelerated her decline.

She had fallen a few months before that, too, gashing her head open. At 97 years old, her skin was too thin to be stitched back together again.

A few weeks passed, then I received a call from my sister. “She has fallen,” my sister told me, and the cops had to bash down the door during a wellness check. I can’t help but remember the cops assaulting a disabled woman in 2020 at the downtown Kitchener police station. I was ready to fight to save her from whoever was attacking her. Her cries for help and screams of pain filled me with adrenaline. I tore toward the screams with fists clenched, ready to throw down, only to see three cops dragging her by her arm across the asphalt. Her shoulder was dislocated, and her breasts hung out of her yanked-up shirt. I froze, pulled out my phone to record, and they let her go as soon as they saw it. No proof—just cops standing by a woman weeping on the ground. I stayed with my phone pointed at them until she got away. I kept my phone trained on them until I got away, too. When I told my husband what happened, he thought I was exaggerating.

I can’t help but picture the cops who opened fire on women sitting by a fire at Six Nations a few years ago. One of my friends, a Haudenosaunee elder, was there. She texted me in a panic. “They’re shooting at us!” she said. The cops shot at the women to capture footage of angry Indigenous men charging the police cruiser. And since the police control the narrative, the media published an article portraying violent Indigenous people attacking police without provocation. The racism is systemic. We are still depicted as savages. But I mustn’t dwell on these things. I must think of my grandmother. I must think about how these cops broke into my grandmother’s house, and wonder if they entered with guns drawn, as they did the time I arranged a wellness check for another loved one. I didn’t know then how dangerous cops are. I didn’t know. But I mustn’t focus on that right now. I must think of my grandmother, the woman who hectored her children and her grandchildren for so many years. She is likely to die soon from this last fall. She was already so frail. She is suffering from dementia.

Already overloaded with images of trauma, I receive more heavy news. On that same phone call with my sister, I learn that my father is a residential school survivor—that he never got my sister and me registered for Mi'kmaq status because he was afraid the same thing might happen to us. The last residential school closed when I was in my 20s. Maybe he did save us. I knew some of the stories of how he was mistreated at school. I knew how he and all his friends tried to burn their teacher-rapist to death on Bonfire Night, but I never knew until I was 51 years old that this brave, terrified boy was in residential school.

So much makes sense to me now.

So much doesn’t.

A week passes, and I receive another message from my sister. My grandmother didn’t fall. My grandmother, with her talcum powder bones, was beaten. It doesn’t matter that she was not kind. Who would assault a 97-year-old woman like that? Batter her all around her house?

A monster.

The police aren’t investigating. Why would they? She is a drain on society anyway, probably doing the medical system a favour by dying. It’s not like she was important. She is going to die anyway.

The cops won’t investigate monsters.

The cops won’t investigate.

Monsters.

So here I sit over a thousand miles away from my Schrödinger's grandmother. She’s alive. Not alive. Murdered. Not murdered.

Where do all these monsters come from, and how can we keep ourselves from becoming monsters, too?

A month passes, and my grandmother is alive. Her brain is bleeding, and she is getting meaner. I don’t know if she is any meaner now than she was before she was attacked. In the 1990s, she threatened to disown me if I didn’t give her a cutting from a houseplant. I was going to offer it to her anyway, but I told her I didn’t want her money—that she could go ahead and disown me. In 2015, I went to visit her. I had my picture taken with her. When she finds out that I’ve shown the picture to other people, she threatens to disown me again. Too late, I think. You already did. I visited her for the last time in 2019. I hadn’t been there for more than ten minutes before she turned vicious and I left.

While my grandmother’s brain is bleeding, I dream about how my father looked over her house—how he saw the blood on her bed, her walls, her curtains, and the floor. My mind fills in all the details. When I wake, I learn she has been secretly spending time with the town drunk. Was he the one who attacked her? She continues to lie about her relationship with him. She lies about a lot of things. I remember how she tried to tell me that back in her day, no one had premarital sex and that during WWII, soldiers never swore—as if anyone could ever believe these things. My grandfather was a WWII veteran and cursed all the time.

One time, when I was in my early 20s, I stayed up with my dad in her living room watching war movies. In the morning, she told my mother that Dad and I were up all night watching pornos together. Mom, Dad, and I all looked at one another with horrified expressions. Why would she ever say such a thing?

In early October of 2022, my mother has to go to my grandmother’s house to collect clothing for her. My grandmother won’t be coming home. She is incapable of telling the truth—incapable of caring for herself anymore—and she rages, rages, rages. She ripped up my baby photos, the ones that adorned her bedroom mirror when my grandfather was still alive. She tore them up. I tell my mom I am sorry my grandmother is being so cruel. “It’s no big deal,” says my mom, but it is.

Three days later, I’m being grilled by another Inuk over Instagram—one who I’d considered a close friend. She is filled with rage. I fear that if she were to be in the same room with me, she would physically attack me. Because I wasn’t raised in community, she has concluded I’m not Inuk. I tell her my Inuit ancestors’ names, from my father to my great-grandmother. None of them lived in Inuit communities. My great-grandmother left Baffin Island in the 19th century to marry my Welsh great-grandfather. My one-time friend does not believe me. She calls me a liar and says my father wasn’t Inuk unless he wore an Eskimo tag. There were no Eskimo tags in Newfoundland. Anxiety floods all my senses. This is someone I care for, and she is filled with hatred for me.

I wasn’t raised in an Indigenous community. I wasn’t raised in any community. I was separate from society. My family was taught by the Jehovah’s Witnesses to be no part of this world, and we lived by that decree. For much of my childhood, I grew up houseless, living in campers in trailer parks, campgrounds, and people’s yards all over Canada while Dad chased jobs that kept petering out. I attended numerous schools in rural and remote areas and had very few friends. My family lived on the land; we often lived off the grid. Dad may have hidden going to residential school from me until I was 51, but he never hid being Inuk, although he called it Eskimo.

I always knew I was Eskimo. I knew it when I helped with the foraging and harvesting. I knew it when we harnessed the dogs to bring in the firewood. I knew it when he killed the fish he caught by biting their heads. I knew it when I helped butcher the animals he hunted or raised. I knew it when he told me Inuit fairy tales alongside European fairy tales. I knew it when we went out into the bush and cooked bannock over a stick while tea boiled in the billy. I even knew it when I turned up my nose at seal and Arctic tern meat as a kid.

This is what the monster of colonization has done: it killed the Indian in the child until that child and all that child’s children no longer have an identity.

But now I’m being questioned on Instagram. No community claims me. I’m Schrödinger’s Indigenous person: not Inuk enough to be accepted as Inuk by other Inuit, not Mi’kmaw enough to be considered Mi’kmaw by other Mi’kmaq. What hope do I have of being considered Inuk by other Inuit? A friend of mine is full-blooded Inuk but was kidnapped by the government from her mother on the day she was born during the Sixties Scoop. She was sold to a white couple and raised in the southern part of the country. She is not accepted by her original community. If she cannot be accepted, what hope do I have, being the child of a half-breed and a white woman? This is what the monster of colonization has done: it killed the Indian in the child until that child and all that child’s children no longer have an identity. Systemic racism and genocide turns people against one another.

I abandon my Instagram account. Being accused of being a pretendian by someone I considered a close friend shakes me to my core; it guts me like a fish. This week has been more than I can handle. I am in a constant state of anxiety and lose control of my thoughts. What if she is right? Am I a monster? Have I been lying? Have all of my ancestors lied to me all along?

For years I have been looking into genealogy. I can find information on many generations on my mother’s side of the family, but I can find nothing of my father’s side past his grandparents, and even that is just their names and places they lived during a census. There are no other physical records. My ancestors lived in backport Newfoundland. My father was born there when it was still a British colony, and records are few and far between. It’s as though my father’s side of the family doesn’t exist outside of oral tradition.

There’s nothing about the Mi’kmaq side, though I know my grandmother came from the Gander River Micmac community. Nothing about the Inuit side, though my father says his grandmother came from Baffin Island. Nothing about the European side, though I was taught one great-grandfather was from Wales and the other from England. That whole side of my family is undocumented, aside from where they lived and when they were born. Their stories are in my memory. My father’s mother, Melinda, was a child bride who skipped across the ice floes. My father’s grandmother was named Phebe. I feast and honour them in ceremony.

My head is a tornado of horror. I cannot stop dwelling on my grandmother’s bleeding brain, my father’s experiences at residential school, and the idea that I’ve done my niece a disservice by taking her to powwows and Inuit feasts. Have I doomed her to the same accusations of being a pretendian? Am I a bad auntie? I want to go to sleep and never wake up. Instead, I seek out an elder’s advice. I seek out counsel.

The good people of Tungasuvvingat Inuit help me. I may not have a community, but the people at this organisation help me. It takes me weeks to gain control of my own thoughts again—to do anything but move through life in a fugue. Now that I’ve left social media, I feel adrift. Few friends check in on me. When I leave social media, it’s like I never existed. I wonder if I am real.

It’s the end of 2023. Most of my time is spent on my own. Somehow, my grandmother is still alive, living in a dark corner of a long-term care facility. She occasionally sends messages, via my mother, to say she’s thinking of me. I don’t know what to think about that. I send her a card, but it goes unanswered.

I visit my parents. My father has had COVID twice; long COVID is destroying his mental and physical health. The disease transformed him from a frightening and powerful warrior to a fear-filled and pitiful old man. Now that my grandmother is in care, her house has been sold. I help my parents parcel out her belongings. I don’t see any of her collection of racist kitsch. I hope my parents have destroyed it. I think of how I’ve been disowned. Mom gives me my grandmother’s crystal sugar dish. I think of my grandmother every morning when I take sugar from it for my tea.

Her last letter to me sits on my desk, the shaky writing faded and almost illegible. In it, she says, “Won’t it be nice when I am dead?” She finally does die in May of 2024, just before my 30th wedding anniversary, and just before she would have turned 99 years old. She did not want an obituary or a service; she wanted to be forgotten.

I lose touch with most of my friends. I used to march in solidarity with other Indigenous people, used to go to powwows and Inuit feasts. Now, I am afraid to go to them because the Inuk who hates me might be there. I do not want a fight. I am also afraid to go because no one wears masks, and I cannot risk getting COVID. I’m high-risk. I catch it at the dentist’s office, anyway, and it takes me months to recover. I don’t recover fully; I tire too easily, and going to the gym exhausts me, so I must spend the rest of the day in bed.

I used to teach folks how to forage, but then I became too ill to continue. I’m afraid of not being able to pass my teachings of the land on to other people. I’m afraid of ending up a shell of myself like my father. I exist on the periphery—an urban hermit growing heritage vegetable seeds to send to elders, Indigenous food sovereignty groups, and my parents, who still live on the land. I throw myself into my writing; it’s what I have the energy to do.

In July of 2024, I return to the Maritimes to visit my parents. My father’s health continues to deteriorate. He is no longer strong enough to go for a walk on the beach with me, but he opens up more about his past. I discover the reason I can’t find any records of his side of the family: his abusive teacher destroyed all the school records. Culpable deniability, I suppose. If there are no records of the children being in the 1950s-equivalent of residential school in Newfoundland, there can be no proof they were ever abused. And I also learn that, in the early 1950s, the records office in Newfoundland burnt down. That explains why I can’t find genealogical records.

A month later, I revisit Instagram for the first time since leaving it. I see that a magazine who published one of my stories has nominated it for a prize. I smile until I scroll down and see that an Inuk I don’t recognize and have never spoken to is telling everyone in the thread that I am a pretendian. The story that was nominated doesn’t even have anything to do with Indigeneity. I am being hunted by people who do not know me. I fear the only thing that will make them happy is if they chase me to my grave. My spiral of anxiety begins anew.

I don’t want to be a monster. I want to help other people.

I am afraid to tell people I am Inuk or Mi’kmaw, though I am proud of my Indigenous heritage. I tell them I am, anyway. I am used to fear. It is my exhausting, monstrous companion.

Who are the monsters? Are we all monsters? I don’t want to be a monster. I want to help other people. I want to spread kindness because there is too much stress, pain, fear, and anxiety in this world.

What will tomorrow bring? No more monsters, please. No more monsters.