How a People Die - Softcover

Name: How a People Die
Author: Fry, Alan
ISBN: 9781550171068

Fry, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1550171062 ISBN 13: 9781550171068

Verlag: Harbour Publishing, 1994

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It's Saturday morning on the Kwasi Reserve. The citizens are red-eyed and bleary, their shabby houses littered with empty bottles. But this Saturday is different. Last night while her parents partied, a baby girl died in her crib, her body crusted with filth and sores.

RCMP Corporal Thompson stirs up a hornet's nest when he charges the infant's parents with criminal neglest. But who, or what, really killed Annette Joseph? "Tell us how a people die," one character says, "and we can tell you how a people live."

When How a People Die appeared in 1970, its chilling picture of a culture mired in squalor caused an international sensation. Now, as a plague of substance abuse and suicide sweeps Canadian reserves, it is more timely than ever. In a new introduction, author Alan Fry offers alternatives to the bleak future he envisioned in How a People Die.

". . .required reading for anyone who is seriously concerned about the [present] social turmoil."
-Vine Deloria, author of Custer Died For Your Sins and God is Red

"Come on Indians, dammit yes, read this book and get angry." -David Monture, Indian News

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�ber die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alan Fry was born in Lac La Hache in 1931, and spent fifteen years as an Indian agent in rural BC. His other published works include The Revenge of Annie Charlie, Come a Long Journey, The Burden of Adrian Knowle, Ranch on the Cariboo, and with Wilf Taylor, Beating Around the Bush. He lives in Whitehorse.

Auszug. � Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Corporal Thompson had fifteen years in the force, serving in rural and small municipal detachments in British Columbia where local Indian populations reeled in their struggle with alcohol.

It had been prior to his service that Indians could in no way legally possess or consume alcoholic drinks of any sort. He had lived then in Williams Lake where his father had finished his service and retired from the now disbanded BC police.

There were few detachments outside Williams Lake through the whole of the Cariboo in those days and indeed no need of any. The hinterlands of that cow town were sparsely populated by ranchers preoccupied with working their lands and cattle and surviving the depression. Here and there far apart were Indian reserves of a wide range of sizes and settlements.

Most Indian families had some horses and a few head of beef cattle and rights to a piece of meadow on the reserve where they cut hay to feed their stock in the winter.

A few had substantial herds, good small ranching operations by any standards. Those who had very little of their own worked out for the white ranchers in the haying season and did a little trapping in the winter.

Everybody was poor, white or Indian. Even the large ranches looked in ruins with beef at five cents a pound on the hoof. The man who contracted hay at a dollar a ton in the stack or joined the ranch crew at a dollar a day and his board often had more to show for it after the steers were sold in the fall than the rancher himself.

With everybody on their uppers it didn't occur to anyone, white or Indian, that the Indians were underprivileged or that they suffered under a suffocating paternalism.

There no doubt was paternalism, depending on what you meant by the word. Thompson had travelled, when he wasn't in school, out into the back country with his father on patrol. They stopped at Indian villages that were accessible by road and there was a considerable display of respect on both sides. The Indians all knew his father, they called him Mishter Dompshon in the molasses slow drawl of their labored English, he called them by Chowloo or Pete or Billy-whatever first name they used, Indian or English.

They seemed childishly happy to see him and there was much smiling and nodding along with labored talk-except when his father put specific questions about some misdemeanor in which case there would still be much smiling but no more talking or nodding.

A few times he and his father made joint patrols with the Indian agent. Corporal Thompson's recollections from these trips were of a powerfully decisive but kindly man who listened to plaints of poverty, marital disputes or problems about irrigation ditches, all with equal patience, then gave out clothing, rendered judgements or ordered work to be done as a patriarch might in his own family. The boy gained the impression that the people did do as he told them and that they were satisfied of the wisdom of his instructions but of course it may have been only an impression.

It was paternalism all right, Thompson reflected, and that's pretty bad stuff according to the papers nowadays and the reason the Indians are in such a bad way. Yes, sir. All that stifling paternalism. No chance to live their own lives. Under the thumb of the government all the time. Never learned to make a decision on their own. Well, maybe. But it was damn remarkable how the Indian agent in Williams Lake must have kept all the Indians from living their own lives or making their own decisions when he had such a large territory to cover that he reached some of the more remote reserves less than once a year. Now wait a minute, Thompson. You're getting worked up again about all this unrealism about Indians nowadays. Yeh. Okay. Simmer down.

There was a little trouble in town of course. Indians liked to come into Williams Lake and whoop it up a bit and there was a fluctuating business in back alleys and livery barns, especially at stampede time, in wine and rotgut whisky.

Sometimes even out on the reserves there'd be a little excitement following a home brew party but nothing that ever amounted to much. It all made very little work now and again for the police.

But after the war there was a prosperity such as hardly any Indians and few white men had seen before and a fair sprinkling of Indian men came back from a time of military service and equality. The pressure began to build for granting equal liquor privileges to Indians.

Old Thompson retired about that time but his concern for Indian people stayed very much alive. He understood the arguments for putting everyone on the same footing but he thought he knew his Indians well enough to predict disaster. It was going to be damned expensive equality and the Indians were going to pay the price.

In the event, a compromise was granted in which Indians could drink by the glass in the beer parlors but couldn't buy anything from the parlors or the government liquor stores to take home.

The disaster materialized. The Indians converged on the one place where lawfully they could drink, the beer parlors, and all hell was to pay. Since most of the beer parlors in the Cariboo were located in Williams Lake, most of the paying was done right within the confines of that hitherto fair to middling peaceful place on the frontier.

Some used the phrase "piled up like cordwood" to describe the accumulation of passed-out Indians which developed after closing time in the vicinity of the parlors-the rather predictable consequence of a now you can, now you can't regulation of drinking. Since you couldn't carry any away in a carton, you tried to carry it all away in your stomach.

Piled up like cordwood. The phrase stuck in the younger Thompson's memory. It epitomized the change in attitude of the townspeople to disgust and revulsion, sometimes, at best, of a you-can't-blame-them-it's-our-fault-not-theirs kind of looking down, but even in that there was contempt.

But a change from what? It was hard for Thompson to remember. He knew his father's attitude, he thought, and he remembered bitter words between his father and others following on some phrase that granted less than humanity to Indian people. "Some of that smoked meat," he remembered once in reference to an Indian woman and there'd damned nearly been blows.

Still there hadn't been, he thought, the disgust and revulsion before the terrible spectacle created by opening the beer parlors to them. There had been respect and courtesy in the stores and the hospital and in the government offices. But was that really the town? Did the town really have an attitude? Perhaps the town just ignored the Indian people, apart from necessary trade which, after all, was as profitable to the town as to the Indians.

Thompson, in his memory, was not sure. Because really, apart from the visits on patrol with his father and the evident relationship that existed between his father and many Indian people, his abundant impressions began after the beer drinking started.

In a few short years, good men were reduced to alcoholism and poverty. The cattle were sold, the hay mowers rusted in the long grass of the uncut meadows, and the horses pawed the snow for last summer's grass to see them through the winter.

Men fought with their wives, families broke up, children were neglected and a death toll from accidents and violence in which alcohol was inevitably the decisive factor filled the pages of the small town papers.

The optimistic said, well, it's going to take time, isn't it? I mean, you can't expect this generation to adjust to it. But we had to make a start sometime, didn't we? When the next lot grows up, they'll be used to the privilege and they'll take it in their stride.

Others said, damn it, why this stupid halfway...