In the wave of this political change, Beck was sent to the rural town of Suffield, Alberta. Until recently, the region’s part-time patrol group had been mostly manned by Indigenous officers, who facilitated evacuations from wildfires. Those soldiers were quietly dismissed in favour of people like Beck who would not question the disciplinary actions against a local First Nation that was protesting the construction of yet another oil pipeline through their reservation.
Beck found himself part of the newly formed full-time Suffield Infantry, which was responsible for guarding the construction site and controlling large groups of protesters—Indigenous and non-Indigenous—who gathered from across the country and from around the world to try to block the pipeline. Still, in the cool of the spring thaw, the rolling landscape became dense with tents and trucks. Independent media crews dotted the perimeter. The instructions were to stand ground at the site of the new construction. Some days passed with Beck and his fellow officers in full riot gear while the protesters sang and prayed in their faces. Some days erupted in rubber bullets and tear gas. Some days were spent cutting off clean-water supply and electricity and deactivating telecommunications towers. Still, the protesters refused to back down. Months passed. Media attention dwindled to a few select units. When the media released videos of protesters being beaten, being hosed down, the world watched and did nothing. By the time the heat of the summer approached, Beck wondered if the wildfire evacuations would become priority once again and his unit would finally be free of this place.
In his collective thinking, this one-animal thinking, which honoured and protected his infantry at all times, he was suddenly struck by the individuality of the protesters. He was like a lion confronting a pack of zebras, confused as to whether he was viewing one large mess of stripes or a series of beasts trying to fool him. To the hum of cicadas in the nearby brush, Beck would waver, closing one eye and then the other, seeing them all as a united power in his right eye, then as individual voices in his left.
“Charity. Hold Mama’s hand, please,” a mother said to her toddler one day as they moved about the encampment. The mother held a white lump in one hand, most likely a dirty diaper. Charity delighted in the fresh change of clothes and danced about to a song only she could hear. When the mother sensed Beck was looking in her direction, she scooped up her daughter and quickly entered their tent.
A group of teens took turns standing at the front line screaming their spoken-word poetry to the soldiers. An Indigenous teen stepped forward. He adjusted his dusty ball cap and began.
“MIC CHECK!”
The protesters within twenty feet repeated after him. “MIC CHECK!” The phrase was repeated farther and farther away among the crowd.
“THIS IS A HUMAN MICROPHONE!” Again, the phrase travelled in ripples along the protesters. “WE AMPLIFY EACH OTHER’S VOICES! SO THAT WE CAN HEAR ONE ANOTHER! SO THAT THESE SOLDIERS CAN HEAR US!” Waves of sound as the protesters repeated his phrases all the way to the horizon of the massive assembly. He continued, with pauses in between to allow the human microphone to share his words.
He flattened the pages of his leather-bound notebook and read his poem.
We have been occupied
Papered
Carded
Listed
Interned
Torn
Ripped
Shorn
Walked
Blanketed
We have been occupied
Internalized
Assimilated
Bordered
Fenced
Reserved
Unrecognized
Colonized
Halved
Quartered
We have been occupied
Policed
Stripped
Searched
Patted down
Spotlighted
Assassinated
Imprisoned
Sentenced
Executed
We have been occupied
Whitewashed
Dyed
Bleached
Shaved
Starved
Sterilized
Stolen
Sold
Discarded
We have been occupied
Indebted
Unforgiven
Schemed
Played
Traded
Exported
Imported
Outsourced
Foreclosed
These are names they gave us
These are the ways they took from us
These are the ways they tried
But we are like the waters on this land
Slicing mountains in half
We have our own names
We did not lose everything
We survived them
We are more powerful than what hurt us
We will remember our ancestors
We will drum
We will sing
We will feed each other truth
We will look out for each other
We will come together
We will protect mother earth
We will speak for those who cannot
We will make way for our elders
We will listen to our youth
We will remember
We are memory
We will decolonize
There was no applause. Some snapped in agreement. Some nodded solemnly. Without any pomp or circumstance, other poets stepped up, one at a time, to recite their work, the human microphone amplifying their words.
Beck easily tuned out the protesters’ songs and chants. But the poets stirred something in a place so deep within his body he could not locate it, so elusive he could not name it. One poet compared the image of the pipeline to her own tongue cut in half after losing her language. One poet spoke of wading knee-deep in the blood of his ancestors, trying to follow the current back to his own heart. Another poet spoke of building false bridges made of bones arching over water filled with mercury, and the bodies of missing women acting as chevrons along the highway. No matter how hard Beck tried to hum or talk to himself, he was helplessly immersed in images of cut tongues, blood rivers and bone bridges. He shook his head and coughed so hard he had to spit the bile gathered in the back of his throat. Then their names, their many names, began seeping into the spaces between his teeth, beyond the reach of his eager tongue to dislodge them. They would call out to each other during conversations that did not include him. Vera. Hope. Ronnie. Wayne. Then their faces, their many faces, bored holes into the hollows of his tear ducts. Jayme, the one who adjusts her glasses. Peter, the one with the cut on his lip. Tanja, the one with the starfish tattoo on her neck. He could not escape their faces.
When the media released videos of protesters and their poetic resistance, the world watched and did nothing.
Another day, Beck met eyes with a middle-aged Indigenous war veteran who served bottles of water to a row of elders sitting in camping chairs. The group began to break down into smaller recognizable molecules that Beck could not digest, could not swallow.
“I see you, son,” said the veteran to Beck. “I know you see me. I know you’re starting to see us.” At the sound of his voice, Beck willed his vision to become soft and unfocused.
One evening, Prime Minister Alan Dunphy delivered a moving speech. To the flash of cameras, he said, “Canada has completed consultations with rights holders on this major project. And working with our Indigenous partners has been paramount. To date, forty First Nations have negotiated benefit agreements simply because the benefits are clear: jobs, housing and financial gain,” claiming the First Nation near Suffield was one of them. It was not. And due to the newly imposed media blackout at the site of the protests and disconnected telecommunications towers, no one could report on this false statement.