David started visiting Oppenheimer Park in the spring of 2000 on an assignment from Windspeaker Newspaper to document the social conditions of aboriginal people living in Canada’s poorest urban area. The next summer, he joined some of the people he had come to know in a four-day fast held in the park.

The following story was published in Geist Magazine #43. The project has also appeared in Windspeaker Newspaper, The Georgia Straight, and Maclean's Magazine.

TUESDAY
WHEN THE FAST BEGINS, the four guys trying to raise the teepee are taking it down for the second time in an hour, untwining the long poles and lowering them to the ground. A group of drinkers watch with interest from a nearby picnic table.

Only a few of the fasters have arrived and it seems like the event might not happen at all. The organizers are longtime residents of the Downtown Eastside, survivors who have made it through trauma and addiction. Right now they are arguing about whether the door of the teepee should face east or west.

"East," one of the women elders says, "because that is where the morning comes, and it is death that comes from the West."

"West," Bill says, "because then the door will face the field and our brothers and sisters who are sitting out there in Oppenheimer Park need to be invited in for healing." He gestures towards the people hanging out on the grassy field: some are sitting in clusters sharing bottles or joints or crack pipes; others are sleeping. One man is snoring, flat on his back, his hand inside the open fly of his jeans. Under a tree, out of the hot sun, a man in a black baseball cap sits singing quietly. He’s fifty, looks forty, and comes from Saskatchewan, where he was taken in hand by his grandfather and taught the songs, the stories, the modes of doing and being that so few people know anymore.

Vancouver is in the middle of a heat wave but here in the park a cool breeze blows. "It’s the updrafts," Eddie Eagle says. "This is where the updrafts are. The eagles come in and circle on them."

Down on the ground, the dealers, junkies and drinkers are circling, checking out the little cluster of tents. Two years ago, David watched Eagle, who is in his sixties, jab a needle full of heroin into his neck. Eagle is clean now. He learned about the fast this morning when he stopped by the park on his daily rounds and decided to abandon his room in a cheap hotel nearby to sleep in the park and eat nothing for the next four days.

More fasters arrive. The teepee goes up and then comes down again. One guy gets angry and heads off across the field. The long poles keep refusing to twine themselves together in the proper manner. The teepee continues to rise and fall, rise and fall again, until the man in the black ball cap goes over to help. The angry guy returns, a joint is passed around, and they try again. The first three poles are critical. It takes a while but once they get them in place, the rest follow and the men cover the poles with canvas that is painted with spirit animals.

WEDNESDAY
THE TEEPEE STANDS beside a totem pole raised several years ago to commemorate those who have died on the Downtown Eastside. They say the park is the aboriginal United Nations.

The women’s camp, a cluster of little dome tents, is separated from the men’s camp by a grassy hill and a concrete footpath. Arguments over the alignment of the teepee have given way to new disagreements about how the fast should be run, and have widened into a visible divide that runs along gender lines. The traffic between the two camps is a bit thin and there are rumblings on either side.

At dusk, David and I walk the perimeter of the park, passing under the big old trees lining the edge of the field. At one corner, women are seated in a circle, praying and singing and burning sage in the hollow of a large seashell. Down along Powell Street, we pass figures in the shadows and then the quiet soliciting starts, voices speaking in flat tones like maybe they’re not really talking to us at all. "Rock, rock, high-powered rock," says an aging white guy with bulging eyes. Farther along a man lies on the grass in the fetal position with his hands between his legs, grimacing with pain, making the low sounds of a private hell. The sun is down, the sky is darkening. It is beautiful under the trees with that minutes-away-from-nighttime light playing in soft browns around pools of black. A woman who looks like a librarian with a shoulder-length bob, glasses and a pretty tailored dress, is taking something from a white guy in tear-away athletic pants. The narrow strip of fence is busy with guys who have that sleazy jock look. I can feel their eyes scanning us as we walk, low voices like nocturnal bird calls. A tall black man, shirtless, with dreads to his nipples. An Asian woman, young and confident, expensively dressed in a white sweater and John Lennon glasses. "White ice," she says. "I’ll chop it for you right now."

THURSDAY
THEY SAY THE SECOND DAY is the hardest. Today the fasters are feeling strong. Eagle has perched on a rock that overlooks the park from the top of a small rise. David’s tent, a blue tarp strung over a spare teepee pole, faces Eagle’s perch. They walk around the park together and Eagle begins to tell David about his childhood, the twenty-five years he spent on the tundra up past Yellowknife, living the traditional hunting and fishing life of a Dene.

The stories come out against the backdrop of the park: crack addicts scratch the ground in search of a final hit, a young prostitute camps on the hill with her boyfriend-pusher-pimp. She was up at 8 a.m., headed for the hooking strip just beyond the south end of the park, across the street from where the women fasters are welcoming the day with cups of herbal tea and the smoke of burning sage. Half an hour later she is back, to disappear under the blankets with her man and one of those thin glass pipes.

When I return at nightfall, the fasters have been in Oppenheimer Park for sixty hours without eating. In the teepee beside us, the women are holding a healing circle except that one woman, long braids down her back, is not in the teepee; she is outside with the men, a striped blanket pulled around her shoulders.

Earlier, on the bench behind the teepee, she told the story of how her father murdered her mother. Tonight she has been told she cannot join the healing circle because she has her period: one of the older women insisted it wouldn’t be right. She is devastated. A quiet Inuit man is sitting with her talking. Pain comes off her hunched shoulders in waves.

FRIDAY
THE AIR IS TAUT. The exclusion of the woman from the healing circle has heightened tensions and the fasters have awakened to a spreading unease. The twenty-something daughter of one of the women fasters comes to visit and she is high on crack, circling around, all jittery and nervous. Her own daughter, a beautiful, high-spirited girl of ten, has been staying here with the women, pushing the video camera into everyone’s face, spreading her happy energy between the divided camps.

Sitting along the wall of the park just beyond the teepee is Elvis, a man who was fine an hour ago when he woke up on the grass after a night’s sleep. Now he’s loud and lilting thanks to a bottle of hairspray passed from hand to hand.

Bill is smudging a few people in front of his tent when a handsome man wearing little round glasses comes up to him. The conversation turns to the drinkers, the other Natives in the park. The man in glasses is disdainful. "They’re responsible for themselves," he says. "We are in a different world now. It’s survival of the fittest."

Bill leans forward in his lawn chair. "You’re just like a white man," he says. Bill was taken from his grandmother’s home at the age of five and sent to a Catholic boarding school where he spent hours kneeling on wooden floors repeating Hail Marys. Earlier he had said, "We learned to hate ourselves in residential school." He spent his youth drinking, hitchhiking around Western Canada, sleeping in snowdrifts. After two heroin overdoses, a long battle with alcohol and three near-fatal beatings, he found his way back to the respect for self and nature that his grandmother had taught him. It’s been two decades since he took a drink. He’s over sixty now, an inner-city elder.

"You have nothing," Bill tells the man in the glasses. "You have no land. You have no medicines. You have no idea of where you come from. That’s what they did to us, with their schools and their science and their religion."

No one speaks. The man in the glasses looks edgy. When another man who has just arrived in the park comes over to say hi and gives Bill a fist-on-fist handshake, the man in glasses explodes. "What kind of Indian are you?" he screams at the new arrival. "I saw you ratting out to the cops on the brothers." The man with glasses punches the new arrival in the face, kicks him as he falls and is then pulled down himself. Feet and fists fly until others manage to pull the men off one another.

Everyone feels things falling apart. Some of the women want to strike their tents and give up the fast altogether. They say fasting should be done in the bush where you can be at peace. The park is full of sirens and addictions.

The day stumbles on until late afternoon when Bill reaches out to rally the group. "We need a photo of all of us," he says and begins the task of getting the two encampments to assemble themselves together in the same space, something that hasn’t happened since the first night. David sets up the camera. Several visitors from a nearby reserve have come in their regalia, which brightens up the group of just over twenty people. A community worker from the park comes over to push the shutter so David can be in the picture too. She shoots a few frames as everyone smiles into the camera, and then Louis says, "Wait, there’s a woman over there all by herself."

Everyone looks across the park to where the woman with the long braids sits alone, avoiding the group. Her bags are next to her, packed and ready to go. "What are we doing here?" Louis asks. "Aren’t we supposed to be healing one another?" The group breaks apart and people begin to move towards the woman. Singing starts, low but strong. Drums beat. Feet cross the grass. The crowd reaches the woman with braids and encircles her, a hand touches her shoulder. She is crying. The elder who forbade her to join the women’s circle last night stands at the back of the group. The singing goes on and on. Long minutes pass and then the elder moves to the front. She embraces the woman. Both of them are weeping.
Later one of the women says, "We’re all learning here. Many of us are learning our traditions for the first time. Maybe we need to have different rules for different events."

As night falls, people gather in the women’s camp. Some of the men come into the circle. One of them picks up a drum and starts to chant. The young girl gets up and dances, feet hitting earth, hair whirling. The mood has turned over to reconciliation.

A man in a wheelchair breaks away from a group of drinkers on a nearby bench and moves closer to the circle to join the singing. "I know I’m not supposed to be here with alcohol on my breath," he says, "but I’m lonely for my own people."

The woman with braids and her new elder friend light sweetgrass for a woman from the park who has been flitting around the edge of the group and who has finally asked, shy and nervous, if she can join in. She has been drinking but is still steady on her feet, hanging on to her cigarette for support.

SATURDAY
THE CAMP WAKES to the quiet constant drumming of the morning song. Down at the far end of the field the night’s drug takers are stumbling around. The sun has just begun to throw strong light over the park. In the little camp under the totem pole, people begin to get up and bathe themselves in sage smoke. They start to take down their tents, put on fresh clothes and get ready for a celebratory feast of salmon and halibut.
The fish arrived yesterday. A guy had been trying to sell it to Eagle. "I’m fasting," Eagle told him. "I don’t need any food right now." The man wound up donating enough fish to feed a hundred people, and now a grill is being set up, lines of tables made ready, and the fasters are starting to talk about eating again. As the smell of grilled salmon fills the air, a line forms and soon stretches back to the fence, and then along the sidewalk. Hundreds of people are here, every color, every age, families and singles, some tidy, some disheveled.

Somebody’s nephew shows up, a funky looking teenager belonging to the Native Youth Movement. A drum is put in his hands and he walks up onto the hill. "This is a contemporary version of a vision quest," he says to the people in the line. "In Oppenheimer Park on a regular day, you can see lots of aboriginal people hanging out here. This is an ideal spot for these elders, these residential school survivors, to do their vision quest. I want to thank them for bringing their medicine into this community because there is a lot of need for healing here. I want to thank them for the courage and the strength to fast for the past four days."

He lifts the drum and beats out a rhythm. His voice chants a traditional song that is picked up in murmurs and echoes by some of the fasters, some of their supporters, some of the people in line. When the singing stops, the food is served and Oppenheimer Park becomes a banquet hall.