The Shaman's Knife (4 page)

“When she got pregnant the only way she would know was because she wouldn't menstruate. Then she would get bigger, of course, but never knew for sure when the birth would come until she started to have pains.”

At that point I had to stop and smile when she was talking, before I went on in English. “Her last child was born when the family was on a long move to a winter camp,” I said, “The pains came on so suddenly and so close together that she was still trying to get her pants off when the baby was born.”

Mother was laughing at the memory, looking around at us with her eye flashing, her mouth open, the ruined lower teeth showing below the upper dentures and above her heavy lower lip as she laughed, her hair straggling over her dressing gown with the two thin braids hanging one over each shoulder. She was pointing at me and nodding meaningfully.

“Matteesie!” Erika said. “You?”

“That's what they tell me,” I said. “I always figured that having to fight my way through a pair of caribou-hide pants to get born was what made me so short.”

I translated that for mother and the place was rocking with laughter, the story going from group to group around us.

I was thinking that this laughter was not a bad way to exit—I didn't want to tire Mother—when the huge middle-aged Inuit woman named Sophie from Cape Dorset, who managed Franklin House, came in. “Matteesie, you're wanted on the phone.”

“Will you ask them to hold a minute?” I asked. “We're just finished here.” Erika caught the cue and rose immediately. “Can I get a quick picture of the two of you together? Then I'll get out.”

I stood beside my mother and put one hand on her shoulder. She covered it with her own. The photo was taken. I said in Inuktitut to Sophie that maybe my mother should have some rest now in her room, then to my mother that I would be back in a minute. When I left the lounge, some of the other women, the young and pregnant and the sick and mostly old, were chattering among themselves about stabbing a polar bear on the foot so it couldn't fight as well.

They didn't believe that any hunter would dive under the bear and try to get it from below. But, pointing at me and laughing as I left, they certainly did believe the part about me being born on the trail to winter camp before my mother could get her pants down.

 

The telephone was in the entrance hall, I picked it up and said hello. The voice at the other end was the RCMP commissioner's motherly, even grandmotherly, Québecoise secretary at headquarters in Ottawa. “Buster wants you, Matty.” She was the only person at headquarters who openly called the commissioner Buster. In turn, her nickname among the rest of us was Old Ironsides, mainly because she still wore massive “foundation garments.”

“Tell me what it's for, so you can tell him you couldn't find me if I don't like it.”

She said, “No, but what he has in mind I think you're going to like.” Pause. “Oh, he's just picked up another line. I'll put you through when he's finished. Anyway, I wanted to say I'm real sorry about your mother and we've been wondering how she is this morning?” I told her what we'd been doing and she said, “Darn, that's good, great that she feels up to it, sounds like fun!” And then, abruptly, “He's taken another call. I'll have to put you on hold.”

She had started with the RCMP as a teenage typist from her French-speaking home across the river in Hull, and had stayed through the reigns of several commissioners before Buster. One of her sons was in the force, too, which might have been why I'd got in the habit, whenever Buster called me directly, as he did from time to time, of trying to get an advance tip from her as to what it was about. Often enough it seemed she'd feel that a cop out in the blue somewhere, faced with God knows what, might benefit from a little preparation before dealing with the force's highest of the high.

Also, she knew that Buster had practically invented me, in my present role. In my late twenties, after being an RCMP special constable in the north for years, I'd been accepted to take the full officer's course at the RCMP training establishment in Regina. He was commanding officer there and from the start took a special interest in me.

Turned out, I found later, that after several stints in the Arctic himself, he'd written a lot of memos urging that more natives should be recruited and trained for general police work. A natural place to look for candidates had been among us specials, whose main work was not so much policing as helping white officers, doing the joe jobs around detachments, a dead end. When Buster's memos bore fruit, I had been asked if I was interested and had jumped at it. In Regina, there were thirty in the class, and I was the only native. If I didn't do well, I knew that I'd have to go back, maybe forever, to being a special.

I was determined not to forfeit this chance and as it turned out, I didn't. At graduation, when Buster called us up, he did it as usual in reverse order to our final marks. As the marks got higher and higher and I still hadn't been called, my tension and joy rose—and I was the last one he called to the podium. I remember that as I walked across the stage he watched me with an oddly quizzical look. When I stopped in front of him, hardly believing that I'd passed with the highest marks in the class, I came just to his malletlike chin. He'd played college football for Queen's and then briefly pro for the Ottawa Roughriders before joining the police. I felt like a boy scout meeting a giant. Everybody was applauding except maybe a few who thought natives in the force should forever be there for chopping wood, cooking, doing dishes, hunting or fishing for dog food, translating on occasion, doing real police work only when there was no white man around to take charge.

But there was no doubt about Buster's beaming “Way to go, Matteesie!” Then he added something I didn't fully understand at the time: “We'll be seeing one another as we go along.”

All I thought was, sure, we're national police, we do police work right across the country. We tend not to be left in one place long. We're bound to meet occasionally. I figured that was what he meant.

What I didn't know was that he'd already got his next posting to become officer commanding the big Inuvik subdivision, with about five dozen all ranks from specials on up. He told me years later when we got to know one another better: “When you were walking toward me on that platform in Regina, I had a sudden thought that with all the territory we cover in the Arctic we should have a unit that specializes in native crime, and that you were the first guy who seemed to have the qualities to make it work.”

Actually, whether a native investigative unit was a good idea or not, it never really came about except in a somewhat different form—establishing at headquarters in the late 1980s the Community and Aboriginal Policing Directorate, a mainly aboriginal group to advise on setting up separate aboriginal police forces. As Buster went on and up to bigger jobs, we often met and discussed cases in accord with one of his specialties, talking man to man. But if anything was needed to finally cement the relationship, even move it to another level, it came late one night in Inuvik a couple of days before a royal tour was supposed to arrive. I was a sergeant by then, assigned to local security. He, with the rank of deputy commissioner, was in charge of security for the whole tour. He'd come early to Inuvik because a protest by western Arctic Inuit showed signs of erupting into militance, not against the visiting royals, but to use the media throng covering the royal visit as a vehicle to draw attention to a long-delayed land-claim settlement.

He called me to his room at the Mackenzie Hotel. “Would you go and talk to them, see what you can do?” he asked.

I did. It turned out to be actually not all that difficult. The protesters included many Inuit that I knew well and respected, and they knew this. On the night before the royals were to fly in, at the meeting the Inuit held to plan their strategy, I managed to get to a microphone. Speaking in Inuktitut, I told them what I believed, that we as a people generally speaking didn't have much to beef about. We had schools, medicare, social assistance; there was not an aboriginal people anywhere in the world who had been treated as well as we had.

“I support what you are trying to do, getting the land claims settlement, and would like to see it done faster, but I'm just asking that you find some other way than this to put pressure on the government. As you know, I am an Inuk. You are my people. But part of my police job is to see that whoever wants to see the royals in this once-in-a-lifetime visit to our land should get to see them, without violence or difficulty or anything that would damage our reputation as reasonable people.

“What I am asking is that you call off the public protest you have planned, which no doubt will get out on a lot of TV news programs but I don't think will do anything to speed the land claims. What I am offering is that I will sign the document you have drawn up and hope to present to the royals. I will sign it as Sergeant Matthew Kitologitak, RCMP, senior native officer in charge of security.”

There was a deep silence, then murmurs for and against.

What really turned the tide was when I said, “It took me ten years to get to be a sergeant! You are my people. I'm signing your protest and maybe risking my job by doing that. You wouldn't want to do something, some real disruption, that would have me broken back down to special constable, would you, back to being just Matteesie, the special?”

I don't know whether that should have worked, but it did. My people like to laugh. They laughed! They came up and said, “Hey, Matteesie, what a comedown to be a special again! Maybe you'll be lucky and get assigned to Paulatuk!”

Many reporters assigned to the royal tour had covered the meeting. My plea got a lot of mileage across the country. The idea that I had put my job on the line to support my own people had a sort of romance that the media loves—especially, I found, the English press, which has lots of experience in covering royals among distant tribes and falls gratefully on any change from the rather boring respectful norm.

On the appointed day the visit, including handing the royals our petition, went off without incident. When the press, the royals, the welcoming and farewell committees, and stray dignitaries gathered at the airport to fly out, Buster pushed through and stood in front of me with a little grin twitching at the corners of his mouth. All he said, shaking hands, was, “Well done!”

But the other effect was that the whole incident, the well-reported meeting, the flourish with which I signed the petition, the TV film of my people laughing and pushing forward to joke at me, made me a name, however briefly. In Cece MacAuley's
News/North
column she termed me “a native who stood up to be counted, without turning his back on his people.” And she is Metis, not Inuit.

All of this, I think, also made it easier for Buster to push me along, give me breaks that I might not have got otherwise. Over the years, as he rose higher and his influence grew, he pushed courses at me that the force paid for, forensics at University of Toronto, criminal psychology at Michigan State, even a year at Princeton studying, as I used to say, the morning paper.

What he had in mind—laugh if you want to, some in the police did—was to make me a well-rounded native cop by moving me along in a way that made use of my Inuit beginnings but equipped me to operate in the white world. Whenever there was a case that he saw as being specifically Matteesie Kitologitak's, quite often he jumped in personally instead of passing things along through deputy commissioners or superintendents or anyone else. I thought of him in command of the vast fortresslike headquarters in Ottawa, a huge job, but the Arctic, it seemed, was still his baby. When something up here sounded like me, usually it would be his voice I heard on the phone. We talked often. This time, after I had stood a while at the phone in the corridor at Franklin House, finally I was put through to him.

“Matteesie! How's your mother?”

I told him what I'd told Old Ironsides.

“You want to stay there for a while, see her out of the woods? I know we had you ticketed for Sanirarsipaaq, but that was before we knew she'd been hurt in that damn thing. But I've just been looking at the preliminary report from the detachment. Not much in it. Whatever the reason, we sure as hell need somebody else on the scene fast.”

He was giving me the opening, and I knew it.

I took a deep breath, and said my piece honestly. “Tell you the truth, sir, there's nothing much I can do here. I can always get back in a hurry if . . . if I'm needed. And one more thing . . .”

“What's that?”

“I'd go crazy here if we kept on getting zeros out of Sanirarsipaaq. What I mean is, yeah, I'm on my way, quick as I can.”

“Good man! That makes me feel a lot better.” Brief pause. “Ah, one other thing. I know you left in a hell of a hurry after getting back from Nain. Is there anything that needs doing around your house that I can send somebody to help Lois with?”

A kid shovels the walk and the drive. She's got a car. Maybe somebody who would kiss and hug a lot as we once did, who would send her flowers and take her to bed would help. “Can't think of anything,” I said.

At that moment I heard another phone ring in his office and he said, “Look, I'll be out for a couple of hours, but get me for sure again before you leave, I've just got a note handed to me saying there's some other stuff on the case coming in.” Abruptly, he hung up.

I saw my mother to her room, a single, and into bed, and touched her sore head gently and told her I was going to Sanirarsipaaq. She just nodded as if that was no surprise, no more than she had expected from her son the policeman. Tiptoeing out, waving back at her from the door, I then skipped an invitation for lunch with Erika, who had hung around waiting. We walked down the street together. She kissed me warmly when we parted in front of the Yellowknife Inn.

“Good for my image,” she said, “neckin' with the great Matteesie in public.”

“Not bad for mine, either.”

“Thanks for the help, Matteesie.”

A few yards down the street she turned and waved. I like people who do that, rather than marching off as if that's that. Sometimes the way Erika acted made me thoughtful about where we might go from here if I didn't already have Lois and Maxine. But I know that although men and women being attracted to one another outside of marriage is a fairly well known human condition, usually not acted upon, out in the open it looks like a bad thought, like that line in one of Leon Redbone's songs, “She ain't Rose. But she ain't bad. And Rose ain't here.”

For shame, Matteesie.

In downtown Yellowknife, RCMP G Division headquarters, Justice Department offices and courts, other government offices, the liquor store, drugstore, hotels, bars, the Wildcat Cafe, the ramshackle
News/North
building, bums, shopping, travel agencies, you name it, are all a short stroll apart.

I checked in at headquarters and went straight to Superintendent Abe Keswick, with whom I'd worked often over the years. When I requested a guard put on my mother twenty-four hours a day he stared at me, startled, and then got it.

“Sole witness,” he said.

“Right.”

“We'll start it right now.” He picked up his phone.

From his office I went to records to read whatever was on file about the last few days in Sanirarsipaaq, including the same file Buster had received by fax. I learned little I didn't already know, except that the young man who had been murdered, Dennis Raakwap, had a couple of hundred dollars in his pocket at the time. Meaning on the face of it that robbery didn't seem to have been the motive. There was also a mention in an internal memo from someone in G Division personnel that with Barker going on leave and Corporal Alphonse Bouvier having been there only a few weeks from Spence Bay as his replacement, the detachment could use someone else, pronto. Buster and I had solved that one in our phone call. I read also that a forensics specialist would be moving in as soon as possible, maybe a couple of days, to check out the house. The file said that the bodies would be flown out under guard and turned over to forensics, all of that being procedure, by the book. Unless I got there before they left, I wouldn't have a chance to look at them myself and maybe see a few things Barker and Bouvier hadn't noticed—so I should get there today. Fast.