Midnight Light by Dave Bidini

Author:Dave Bidini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2018-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

A BOY AND HIS DOG

I spent the next day riding around Fort Simpson in a slow-moving truck, which was about all I was good for. I rode with Gerry Antoine, the fifty-something Dene chief of the Liidlii Kue First Nation, and Dëneze’s uncle. The reason I know this, and the reason why the name of his community is spelled correctly, is because whenever Gerry dropped a word that left me searching, he asked that I hand him my notebook. He laid it across the dashboard of his F-350—rather, his wife’s F-350; she had the day off from her cleaning business and we were using her car—and, with my V Point pen, he carefully wrote the words on the page. The purring of the truck’s engine and the soft scratching of the pen proved a comforting sound, more so after my trials in the air the previous afternoon.

You could tell that Gerry was a good guy. While I know that’s not a description to challenge the writings of Proust or Nabokov, I don’t care: with some people, you just know. Gerry had smoky features with friendly eyes and a laugh pushed out from his stomach. He spoke slowly and deliberately and the pace of his speech had a fugue-like rhythm, never hurrying to get to the next note. The truck moved at slow speeds to match the calm of his storytelling, and sometimes we simply stopped, idling, on the highway, sitting for minutes at a time while the chief continued his narrative.

I asked Gerry how a recent gathering of Dene chiefs had turned out, and he said: “Well. We drummed for nine days,” proving that those who measure the nature of their success by hours-of-music-played inevitably find one another. Gerry was warm-spirited, but his storytelling was direct—the faintest trace of bullshit seemed beyond him—particularly when talking about residential school classrooms and the oppressive residential home where his heart was held captive and where his identity as an Indigenous person was systematically knifed away.

Gerry spoke about his anger—that he talked about this in a calm, almost arrested, manner made his feelings more impactful—after having been wrenched from his home when he was two years old and forced into residential school until the year he turned fifteen. At school, instructors refused to allow him to see his sister, even though she studied in the same building. Things were just as bad where he lived, his foster parents forbidding him to speak Dene or see his family, who lived on Rabbitskin River, twenty-four kilometres from Fort Simpson. “Everything that happened in that house—knocking on the wrong door, dropping a plate—was cause for punishment, which, for me, meant the strap and getting pulled around by the ears. They took away my confidence and self-esteem,” he said. “I felt like I was always doing something wrong. They gouged me clean.”

Gerry tried to make himself invisible, as any kid would, but his retreat into the interior to protect whatever was left of his identity—there wasn’t much, he admits—produced a sense of awareness about the world, his world, their world.

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