We couldn't believe it — we were walking on a road! And there were trees! We had never seen them before, and they were every bit as beautiful as we had imagined them to be.

We were walking on Indian land. As our eyes searched the forest, we could easily tell that the Indians must have been very skilled, must have known this peculiar environment well, in order to live here.

It was surprisingly difficult for us to walk among the roots and branches, over the uneven forest floor, with twigs and moss occasionally falling on us from above. We were used to the hard, often frozen ground of our home. It was a good thing that we Inuit kids, who had been flown over a thousand miles to Inuvik, were young and flexible enough to evade crippling culture shock.

To us Qarmaaliit (as we were derogatorily known by the other groups of Native peoples), our exile from home was at once a horrible odyssey and a grand adventure, on the scale of Alice in Wonderland. And what a wondrous land it was, if you could overcome the situational drawbacks inherent to it.

We came to know her as Mrs. Knoxley, but as we emerged from the needle brush that day, she appeared as a strange apparition hunched over a small garden patch — a garden, we knew, that was an anomaly even in these sub-Arctic climes. Almost as in a story, like the mythical Kiviuq stumbling across the Spider Woman, we approached her with caution.

She beckoned to us, indicating where to step among the plants she had carefully placed in scant, soft dark earth. She immediately seemed like a sweet old lady – an impression later proven to be true – totally engrossed in what she was doing, almost as if, in her garden, she were recreating her own part of the universe. Over here, she chatted away, were the something-somethings. And over there were dah-dah-dahs. She spouted off the names of the plants as if we were already familiar with them.

We responded with, “Wow, that’s great!” and truly meant it (despite the fact that Inuit often simply referred to plants as nuna, or “dirt”). We had never seen anything like it before. Her garden was amazing, with cold-stunted cabbages and carrots and herbs defying the harsh environment. In the world from which we’d been stolen, summer was a brief, blessed time, when flowers and sedges cast their hues in desperate waves across the land, advantaging themselves of only fleeting warmth. Here, however, Mrs. Knoxley seemed to have recreated a patch of summer’s best, a fragile rectangle kept alive by will alone; by care.

Nearby, we found a beautiful patch of moss, with tiny flowers sticking out of it in clumps. I took some, later keeping the treasure in a little plastic bag in my locker. Every day, I’d take it out and wonder at the fact that the thing was still alive. That is, until the day one of the older, bullying girls in my dorm tore its tops off. She was pretending to play airplane with her hand, and with each pass, she would swoop down and tear away yet one more piece of the plant. It survived for only a little while afterward. Even after it had become dry and lifeless, I hung onto it, hoping. In time, it was cast away.

On some level, the kindnesses of Mrs. Knoxley, juxtaposed with the cruelties of day-to-day institutional life, seemed to epitomize my time at residential school. With all the stresses we had to endure under that system, dealing with conflicting cultural values and the absence of family, we had to take kindness and caring wherever we could find it. Mrs. Knoxley was one of only a few people who treated us with any warmth and humanity at a very critical time in our personal growth.

Small mercies will make or break a life.

I’ve noticed that plants, however grand or tiny, seem to mould themselves to whatever environment they are given. A flower will wriggle out from a crack in concrete, and the very trunk of a tree will flow through and around a fence in its path. Some plants have a harder time than others, but they persevere — insisting upon life.

While willows grow tall and mighty in the South, they nevertheless thrive in the North as well, altering themselves to creep low and out of the wind, to hug the rocks and terrain that allow them life. They will turn any opportunity, no matter how minute, toward another day of existence. I admire their way, simple survivability without complaint, as I recall how we ourselves played the willows against the storm of social change; the harshness of our situation.

Though, briefly, blessedly, it sometimes seemed as though we were instead part of that garden; tortured, beleaguered by our environment, yet never quite stamped out – thanks to one soul’s caring ministrations.

To a little kindness.

Pijariiqpunga.

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