Cree woman’s memoir is raw, healing
HELEN KNOTT
At one point, Helen Knott was found in a ditch, having been left for dead after a violent sexual assault. Her story is a harrowing and powerful account of a descent into addiction, a hard road back, and what it takes to heal the wounds of sexual violence. In the dedication to her book, In My Own Moccasins, she offers her story to “the women who cannot remember and for those who choose not to.” Mom taught Sunday school when I was a child. When she was around children, she came to life. She created all these interactive songs that would get every six-year-old and their brother hyped on Jesus. We went to church every Sunday in rooms that were swollen with the spirit and full of gospel songs that we sang in Cree. Mom was a proper woman who bent over backward for her kids. She tended gently to other people’s children. And those kids flocked to her. Mom had a knack for knowing how to make them feel special. She showed the troublemakers extra attention and an extra dose of gentleness. It made them take a liking to her and they smartened up real quick in her presence. On school trips, Mom always sat with the class outcasts. The ones who were poorer than us and had stringy unwashed hair. I remember being upset about sitting alone in a school bus seat while Mom sat with Gladys and Todd behind me. Mom knew those kids needed some additional love and she didn’t let my pouting get in the way of her giving it to them.
When I was in kindergarten, she made me clothes and matching accessories by hand. I was the object of adoration for many years because Mom always went above and beyond when dressing her little princess. Mom grew up poor and she told herself, “No white people will ever look at my children like dirty Indian kids.” Those are good memories. But the memories of my mom shapeshifted into something else entirely for a period of time.
My first year as a teen and I was enough trouble to have to be shipped away to Prince George. That was also the year my mom started to drink.
I know she spent too many late nights stressing over whether I would be alive in the morning when I took off drinking. She would spend hours combing the streets to find me. She tried to be strong for me and broke under the weight of it all.
When I returned home from Prince George six months later my mom had disappeared.
Instead, I found an angry drunken woman living in her skin. Us Native women know how to disappear. It’s an art, really — we can disappear even when we are right in front of your face. Sometimes on purpose, sometimes out of safety, sometimes by force, and sometimes because we can’t see ourselves anymore.
Most of the women in my family have battled with depression. Most of the women in my family have lost this battle at some point in their lives and vanished somewhere deep inside themselves. This was Mom’s era of defeat. My dad was absolutely consumed by work. His desire to give us what he never had took him completely away from us. Funny how that works. His presence in the household was a rare sight. Mom disappeared and Dad pulled a vanishing act. That separation only deepened the divide between my mother and sobriety. When he was home and she was drunk, which was often, she would follow him around the house screaming obscenities at him.
My dad would cuss a few times back at her before I would hear the clinking of his keys and the slamming of the front door. I always wondered where he would go. I would wait to hear the door open again and to hear his voice calling us, so we could leave with him. But, he never did come back for us and it always hurt to be abandoned by him and left with my mom. I knew that sometimes he didn’t go anywhere. He just slept in the truck in the driveway. Even so, I still wanted him to take us away, even if it was just ten feet outside of the madhouse in which we lived back then.
My littlest brother would always be the one to de-escalate Mom and speak soothing words to her. I disliked her during those moments. It’s because I saw so much of myself and my inability to stay sober in her and her life. I think she saw the same in me and she damn well didn’t like it either. We were each other’s reflection of our own failures. So, when Dad left I became the target of the whisky death machine that controlled her. She would then follow me around the house and call me names until I locked myself in my room or my brother whisked her away. My struggle wasn’t isolated. I remember staying at a friend’s house one time and the same scenario broke out. Her father locked himself in the bathroom and I could hear her mom calling him a bastard while she pounded on the door. We snuck out of the house when they moved the argument downstairs. We put her little brother in the back of my mom’s car, which I had borrowed for the night. I was sixteen and finally had some freedom in the form of a licence. We all slept in my bed that night because my home, for once, was actually quiet.
The fighting and yelling seemed like normal behaviour among a lot of the Native friends I had. I didn’t have any white friends once I became a teenager, so I didn’t know what their homes were like. I had naïvely imagined that their homes were the kind that served cups of hot cocoa on the kind of days when you needed them. Their homes were the kind that had hot water year-round and a working furnace. In these homes they probably had a family game night where the mom made turnovers or popovers, or whatever shit white people make for their kids. The dad would chuckle, “You little rascal,” while he messed up his son’s hair with his hand. The dad would let his son win the board game. In my mind, white homes had the monopoly on family happiness. From the upcoming book In My Own Moccasins: A Memoir of Resilience by Helen Knott, copyright © 2019. Reprinted by permission of University of Regina Press. In-stores Aug. 24, 2019