Good Medicine: The Unusual Journey of "Just a Drunk Indian"

By Joe Medicine

"Sometimes people say I got charged with murder because I was ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time.' No. I was in the right place at the right time. If that hadn't happened, I wouldn't be here now, alive and sober and on track."

This is the memoir of a man who used his months in jail to excavate the past, digging down into his years of chaotic alcoholic turmoil, until he found his own integrity. That awakening eventually brought him to another long-buried reality: The devastating impacts of depraved residential schools and misguided federal policies on himself and other First Nations/Native American people. And then he found an answer, a way to survive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joe Medicine
• Release date: Feb 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005491413

Book preview

Good Medicine:

The Unusual Journey of Just a Drunk Indian -

[- and residential school survivor]

by Joe Medicine as told to Susan Stanich

Copyright 2021 Joe Medicine

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved

Cover design 2021 by Lisa Mik onini.

Front cover photo by reporter Patrick Minelli, 1985

Used with permission of the International Falls Journal.

All rights reserved to the Journal.

This book is dedicated to

Herman Yoder (1926-2008), who saved my spiritual life; and

Calvin Bombay (1937-2007), who saved my physical life

- Joe Medicine

We must tell the stories of residential school so that the survivors can give them to another person who can help carry the burden. In this way we make connections with others, and we also build the community around us. The survivors came out of residential school alienated from everyone. They are alienated from their families, often from themselves. By telling their stories, their truth will help them build a community and a family around them.

- Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler

Nishnawbe Aske Nation

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: The Beginning of the Road Back

Chapter 2: The Bottle

Chapter 3: Murder

Chapter 4: Jail

Chapter 5: Trying to Keep Straight on a Bumpy Curving Road

Chapter 6: The Sixth Thing

Chapter 7: Childhood: Between Home and the Loneliest Place in the World

Chapter 8: Soul Wound

Chapter 9: Coming to Terms: Doing My Best My Can

Acknowledgements

Appendix

Medicinal Musings

The Bell by Brian Tuesday

Endnotes

Preface

In 1985, I was charged with murder in Koochiching County, Minnesota. When I first got arrested, I was still so drunk I didn't even know whether I had done it.

Twenty-two years later I decided to tell my story, which I thought then was about recovery from alcoholism. I asked a former chief at our First Nations reserve, Albert Hunter, if he knew a writer who could help me. He named a journalist friend of his in Duluth who might be willing. Her last name rang a bell: It was the same as the name of the state prosecutor that the county had called in from St. Paul to help them with the case.

Now I realize that my alcoholism was only a symptom of a much bigger problem. That problem was what happened to me and to other First Nations kids, after we were taken by force from our parents to Ste. Marguerite's Indian Residential School in Fort Frances, Ontario.

I hope my story will help other survivors get past the shame and anguish of that school experience, and also that it will help non-Native readers understand the damage done to First Nations families at the residential schools.

Joe Medicine

Rainy River Reserve

Emo, Ontario

I first heard of Joe through my brother, Bob Stanich, who called me several times from Koochiching County during the course of Joe's trial. Despite being the prosecutor, Bob rather liked Joe. He considered it a tragedy that the entire life of this intelligent, apparently kindly man had been squandered, consumed by alcohol, and taken a murderous turn.

The next time I heard of Joe was in 2007, when a mutual friend brought me Joe's jail diaries, ceremonial tobacco, and his request to help him with his story.

Like all life stories, Joe's is evolving. During the first several years of our meetings, he progressed from utter silence about the boarding school experiences, to barely-sketched descriptions of them (I-wouldn’t-want-you-to-write this-but…), to a willingness to make them public. Since then, he has been freeing himself from the quagmire of shame that controlled his life, and now is emerging not only as a guide who tries to help others who endured similar experiences, but as a man of wisdom who can guide all of us.

Susan Stanich

Old Fond du Lac

Duluth, Minnesota

Explanatory notes:

1) A local judge used the term just a drunk Indian on purpose to illustrate a stereotype. I know that, and I know the judge. I decided to use it in this book's title because it's the truth. - Joe

2) We have presented this story as a conventional biography, so Joe is referred to in the third person. - Susan

Chapter 1

The Beginning of the Road Back

Unstoppable flow, toxic as old car oil, clinging as grease, reaching into every part of him; nauseating, dizzying, terrifying...

Clenching teeth and fists, Joe Medicine closed his eyes against the photo hanging in the church basement. The images, he knew, arose from within, demanding acknowledgement, remembrance. But they seemed rather to be emerging from the photo itself, like claws reaching for his vitals, robbing him of breath.

Oh Great Spirit help me Jesus where were you then

He broke away and stumbled out of the building; the fresh air gagged rather than revived him; he fell into his car and crouched huddled and unmoving, fighting the images back into the oblivion of his frozen self.

The photo propelling Joe’s flight was of a somber industrial-style building: Ste. Marguerite’s Indian Residential School in Fort Frances, Ontario. There Joe, a member of the Rainy River Ojibway First Nation, spent eight years of his childhood. It wasn’t until after seeing the photo at age 62 that he began to come to terms with the life he endured there.

They destroyed my life, my feelings - everything.

He isn’t alone. Across Canada, about 150,000 Aboriginal children were wrenched from their parents and spent much of their childhoods in boarding schools, often far from home. The tall stony institutions and the harsh practices within those bleak walls were intended to drain all Native ways and affections from the children, and infuse them instead with European values, religion, and language.¹

The Canadian government and various religious organizations jointly sponsored the schools all across the country, from Quebec to British Columbia. Labrador to the Northwest Territories. Between 1861 and 1997, 162 schools had been in operation.²

One was Ste. Marguerite's, also known as St. Margaret's and Fort Frances. The school was 42 kilometers from the Medicine home at Manitou Rapids on the reserve. It was operated by the Roman Catholic men's order Oblate Fathers and the women's order The Sisters of Charity of Montreal, also known as the Grey Nuns. It was named for that order's founder,