JENN ASHTON

Grandmothers

I put down my toast and reached out to touch the screen. It was an automatic reflex and as close to them as I could get, being separated by more than a century. I can’t remember why my cousin and I started researching our family background. We had only heard bits and pieces of our past and even my dad only knew things by hearsay. I guess we just felt it was time, and we wanted to know details. I reached out to the band office and they worked for months putting the information together for me, once I had given proof of who I was. I told them we should hurry because some of the family members who were interested in this information were elderly, and there was a great need to feel whole and grounded, and whole some more. My dad was nervous about what I would find. He had heard rumours. And he did know things, painful things, so we pried the lid gently; I didn’t want to uncover anything that would make people uncomfortable. Slowly, slowly I went, and slowly, slowly I posted the information on our family group Facebook page, making sure to watch the reactions and making sure I wasn’t upsetting anybody, or stepping on toes, or going too far. For most of the family, this was a full-circle experience. I’m one of the younger generation, and for me, because I had no beginning, it felt more like putting in a piece of the puzzle. I felt like I had finally come home, and even though that sounds trite and overused, I felt a “sameness” with all the women who came before. And when I reached out and touched the screen, the weave of time that connected us all was palpable. Before I had even found that branch of the family tree, the research I had done opened my eyes to why we were the way we were, and the reality of reserve life and the reality of forced moves, the reality of the separation from tradition and children. It’s all true and it came on down the line in our genes. The distraction and subtraction and aloneness was and is real to us all. My immediate family didn’t know how to be; it just wasn’t strong enough to stay together. So, in the ninteen-seventies I was a fifteen-year-old mother, and then I was a sixteen-year-old bride. I thought I would do better than my family before, but

then I divorced at seventeen and moved through life with no net in place. A single parent still frowned on because of my age. This was back before people wanted to help, and I was offered only a scowl instead of a boost. It has taken my whole life to feel solid. Only after these fifty years do I feel whole and restful. Had I known our family history earlier, I think I would have felt this sooner, because all the women before me have also walked the path of everything I’ve done and been through. I was never actually alone. Once we had our family lines written out, stories started to emerge from the thirty-five members of our Facebook group. Tales of rumrunners, teen pregnancies, marriages, divorces, suicides, addictions, loss, and doing things that you just had to do to get by and make a life for your kids. If I had known all of this before, I don’t know if I would have made different decisions, but I would not have felt so desolate in the decisions I did make. Without those communication lines, I didn’t have a safety net—that weave of history to fall back on to know that I would be okay. My great-times-four grandparents were Hul'qumi'num from Penelakut Island and lived there before the Europeans came, and then left, and before they came again and shot cannons at the longhouses along the shore. They were from penálaxeth', but they didn’t stay, and instead made their way to Vancouver, before it was called Vancouver. When I recall my time growing up, it’s funny to me the places I was drawn to, places like Stanley Park where my great-times-three grandmother was born and where I learned how to swim in the place where her old village of Xwáýxway stood. The waves along the shoreline there carried me to her embrace without my even knowing. I try to think what my life would have been like had I known that she was married to the chief, and that in our family lines there were many chiefs. Would I stand straighter? Or if I had known that my great-grandmother and auntie were taken to residential school when they were only three years old, or that old Auntie R painted her face white to try and fit in, or that Auntie C was a rumrunner back in those days, or that half the family were children of the Italian grocer? Would I have felt better knowing that everybody had a hard life and everybody made mistakes?

I always felt like I didn’t fit. I just did not know how to be. It was like walking on sharp shale gravel with nobody to tell you that if you wear your shoes it won’t hurt so much. Though some people may call that “teen angst” or different stages of growth and maturity, I carried that feeling with me from my earliest memory until today, when my hand touched the screen of my laptop and I read their names aloud, and saw their lifelines and stories. Our family was full of secrets. So full, they had to close up that bentwood box and pretend it never existed, that there was no before. There wasn’t a choice in their time. But now the lid is open and the secrets are seen. In the light of day, they’re not as fierce and sordid as they once were—they’re so far away now. My father is happy to know that the rumours he had always heard were true. In opening the box we’ve all come together and I feel like I’m sitting in a hammock woven by the past, safe and sound. I’m swinging back and forth between then and now, kicking my feet up in the air, and laughing at the fantastical stories. The sadness about how things were for us and our ancestors is pushed out by this change. I don’t know how all this information will shape my future, but I hope my grandchildren will feel the safety of that weave. I hope they will know they have a line tied from their genes to this land so they won’t float away. They’ll know who they are and where they came from and that has to make a difference. For me, I’m happy the project is over. I’ve gone back as far as I can. There are no elders alive that know the story further back than this. For those five generations that still live in salty air and cedar and smoke from the fire, it’s something we can now all think about and rely on and feel in our bones. We are the descendants of the people who were here first. When the box is open, the air can get in.