Laughter cuts through pain

Page 10

Everett Soop's body is frail and weak, but his heart and soul are as strong as the Rocky Mountains that watch over him and the land that he loves.

He's lived with the muscular dystrophy that has confined him to a wheelchair for 40 years, with diabetes further ravaging his body.

Despite all the physical adversity he's faced in life, his great spiritual strength has allowed him to look back with few regrets and little bitterness.

Born on the Blood Reserve in southwestern Alberta in 1943, Everett was raised in an area of the reserve known as Bull Horn. His childhood was typical for the children of the Blackfoot-speaking Bloods, or Ahkainah (Many Chiefs), as they call themselves, carefree with no concern for the world outside the reserve. Time was spent playing with his friends, riding horses and getting into mischief.

His mother got a job as a janitor at St. Paul's, the Indian Affairs-funded residential school administered by Protestant missionaries. It was one of two residential schools on the reserve; the other, St. Mary's, was administered by Catholic priests and nuns.

Everett moved with his mother and his brothers into one half of a duplex built next to the school for teachers. At five years old, Everett was allowed to attend the school two years before the mandatory age, to help the school meet its quota of students.

"Whenever somebody was missing I would replace that number until I was seven, then I went to school full-time."

Everett left St. Paul's in 1956 at 12 years old and transferred to a school in Cardston, a town adjacent to the reserve settled by Mormon immigrants in 1887. He soon realized the education he received at St. Paul's was far below the standard that other Canadians took for granted.

He remembers that the only instruction the residential school offered was spelling in the morning and mathematics in the afternoon. In fact, he said he was strapped when he was caught reading.

"So when I went into town, I was asked questions about Robert Frost or Robert W. Service's Cremation of Sam McGee, I'd never heard of such things. Throughout my school I realized what I should have been learning. Here [at St. Paul's] we never did. Most of the time I was like a dog at obedience school. We didn't learn anything."

He blames the poor level of education at the residential school on the fact that good teachers willing to teach in residential schools were hard to find."

"In them days you could tell which kids went to the Catholic schools. They all spoke English with a French accent because all their teachers were French. [Soop's friend] Layton Goodstriker used to laugh at it. We had a workshop in a nurse's retirement home and there was one nun who could barely get across with her English. He turns around to me and says, 'Now you know why my English is terrible. There's my English teacher.'"

Despite being years behind in his education, Everett's hunger for knowledge gave him the drive to continue on at the Cardston schools until he eventually graduated from Grade 12 in 1963, unlike many who had followed him into town. He was one of only three Ahkainah students to graduate.

"In Grade 7, there must have been about 40 or 50 of us, but they all quit."

In addition to his tenacity, he had his strong-willed mother, Josephine, to push him and support him through all the adversities. He said she began cracking her whip to drive him to work hard at achieving his goals when he was a child and, now that she's 85 years old, she's still cracking that whip over his head. But he knows the whip was wielded by a gentle, loving hand.

"I don't think any one of us could have made it on our own. She worked at three jobs and worked almost 24 hours a day for awhile there."

It was during his time at the Cardston schools that he first displayed his talent for cartooning; combining his acerbic wit and artistic talents to satirize his teachers, fellow students and family members.

After his high school graduation, Everett sought to enhance hisartistic qualities by enrolling at art schools in Banff and Calgary. At the Alberta College of Art in Calgary, Everett encountered racism. An instructor told Everett that he didn't expect too much from him because he was Native and Natives were not known for their success.

"He said we've only had two and they didn't amount to anything. One of them was Gerald Tailfeathers and the other one was Alex Janvier. Those were really good examples to fail and I wanted to become a failure like them."

Tailfeathers received commissions for his work from the Canadian Pavilion at Expo 67, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary and Canada Post. Janvier was advisor at the Expo 67 Indians of Canada Pavilion,a member of the Professional Native Indian Artists Incorporated, he represented Canada in a Canadian/Chinese cultural exchange in 1985 and was commissioned to create murals at the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

Unfortunately, since the provincial government sponsored his education, Soop had to abide by its rules. One rule was he could not miss more than 10 per cent of total class time; Everett missed 14 per cent so he was suspended for a year. Undeterred, he enrolled in the arts program at Brigham Young University in Utah. It was at the university that he discovered journalism could be the perfect medium to express his artistic abilities and his satirical wit.

"In the back of my mind I've always enjoyed editorial cartooning. It never occurred to me 'til I was down there... that [editorial cartooning] was my real interest."

He returned to Calgary to enroll in the journalism program at the Mount Royal College and to be closer to home and family. Unfortunately, social conditions prevalent in Calgary's newsrooms and the rest of the country did not favor Native journalists.

At the end of his first year of studies in 1968, Everett got a summer job drawing cartoons for the Blood Reserve's Kainai News. The newspaper, one of Canada's first, albeit government-funded, Native newspapers, was just eginning its inaugural year of publication.

"My first day on the job they were having their editorial meeting and they were talking about the dog situation in Cardston. I started coming up with outrageous ideas like maybe the dogs were showing us the way. The Mormons in Cardston and the Bloods will not mix, but if the dogs can mix, maybe we can mix. The sarcasm went right to work and I felt right at home."

He didn't return to Mount Royal and the summer job turned into a career. Kainai News became his home for the next 13 years.

Everett's political cartoons soon gained him fame and notoriety in Native communities across Canada and the United States. With each issue his cartoons became more and more outrageous and satirical until the editorial staff had to rein him in. Everett denies full responsibility for his stinging observations but, humbly, shares the credit with everyone at the newspaper.

Everett's cartoons became so popular in the community that the paper allowed him to express his views in his own column. He continued to tickle the funny bones of his friends and admirers while ruffling the feathers of his victims.

Scorn and even threats of bodily harm from those that he offended did little to discourage him; instead, he developed a thick skin. Although, his favorite targets were the politicians he considered pompous and who considered themselves infallible, he addressed all social injustices and issues.

"Humor really has nothing to do with being funny. It's about being angry. Seeing all these things that are corrupt, that are destroying us, the injustices."

While most of his opinions were formed by his empathy for the victims of injustice, the underdogs as he calls them, he received encouragement from the more socially aware in the upper strata of reserve society.

The late Senator James Gladstone, Canada's first Aboriginal senator, saw the need for Everett's brand of humor and his criticism of politicians. The senator was there to give Everett emotional supprt when he felt like quitting.

"He talked to me for awhile and I was all perked up and ready to go again. With that kind of encouragement I got meaner and it got more fun."

Everett believes his cartoons and columns did create social and political change, although he said changes have been gradual and it's difficult to point out anything specific.

With his satirizing of politicians, it was ironic that he ran for and won a seat on the Blood Band council in 1982. He claims government cutbacks that resulted in his losing his position at Kainai News forced him into the political arena.

His stay in Utah had proven that it was too expensive for him to attend art school in the United States.

"So I thought, 'why not go into council?' That would be equal to a Ph.D. in cartooning. Besides that, I had been calling them jackasses for 15 years. I wanted to know what it's like being a jackass."

During his time in office, Everett continued to champion the underdog and the disadvantaged, in particular, the physically disabled. He was appointed to chair the council's health committee in 1985 and was instrumental in the opening of the reserve's health centre. Although many in his community give him the credit for the health centre, his humility will not allow him to accept it.

"It was started a good 20 years before then. A lot of people worked towards it and it didn't happen until they were long gone."

It helped him to understand that the rewards of hard work don't become immediately apparent, unlike most politicians who he says claim the results of years of hard work by their predecessors as their own accomplishments.

Everett left office in 1986 but he continued to contribute his time and services to various Aboriginal groups dealing with disabled and mental health issues. He hopes that he has helped to improve conditions for the disabled and promote mental health. He had no control over muscular dystrophy but he knows that diabetes was his own fault and he feels that, just by peop