The Playground
I was seven years old when I started the first grade. Learning was easy for me, and in the first few weeks the teacher began to ask students struggling with concepts to sit with me. I offered them help, but my help must have made my peers feel small. This somehow amplified the superficial skin color differences between us. But my intellect gave me status I enjoyed. In that role I felt needed, even safe under the watchful eye of my teacher.
My parents were church planters on the First Nations reservation where I attended school. As such, they were not universally appreciated. Some thought they were smuggling the culture of the white man into their community and diluting their identity. Somehow, either by my classroom role or my missionary kid status, I attracted the attention of an older boy with a score to settle.
The early Spring sky was leaden and a cold drizzle made the playground muddier than usual. I made my way, alone, toward the edge of the playground, mud sucking at my galoshes with every step.
I came to a dead stop. A shadow loomed over me. Looking up, I saw someone wearing a traditional fringed and beaded moose-hide jacket. He looked at me, through me.
“Wemistikoshe!” he spat it out like a curse word, though all it meant was white man, and was no justification, to my mind, for what followed.
Grabbing my shoulders, he pushed down hard while driving his knee upward, connecting with my crotch like a lightning bolt. Nearly split in two, I writhed face down in the muddy school yard, unable to get up, alone, ignored by my first-grade companions.
Some time later, the bell rang to end recess, and good boy that I was, I got up, staggered bent over and collapsed on the bench outside our classroom. The teacher, scolding my tardiness, soon saw something was wrong.
Tears streaming, I somehow explained what had happened. Though she was concerned, she sent me home alone. I remember the mile-long walk. I was exposed and alone, fearful and in agony. Every step seemed to take superhuman strength.
I remember passing the airport hangar and walking along the airstrip, mud pulled hard enough to take my boots, so I doubled up my toes to keep them in place. The open air around me felt ominous as I took step after step.
The air strip received shipments of food and fuel, medicine and merchandise for the Hudson’s Bay store that served the community. Did the legacy of trapping and exploitation by European traders have something to do with what had been done to me? I am still not sure, but what happened was personal, and the Hudson Bay Company and I were as unrelated as any two entities on planet Earth could be.
After that, my memory is fuzzy. Days of pain. Difficulty urinating, and a massive bruise where none should ever be. Sleepless nights.
Aloneness.
