by Tim Querengesser Five years ago, Stephen Kakfwi was at the top of politics – and in the pit of despair. Now, guitar in hand, he’s rising from the ashes.
Visit Stephen's website or check out his audio gallery for samples of his music.
We rarely see people re-invent themselves. We see them before and after, but never during. George Foreman, the boxer, had an ego bigger than his uppercut but was knocked out by Muhammad Ali. Now he hawks meat-grills on late-night TV. Only he knows what that transformation looked like. We’re intrigued to peek behind the curtain, though, if only to understand how those who’ve fallen renew themselves. Do they pick who they become? Or does a new persona pick them?
Stephen Kakfwi is still re-inventing himself. In his Yellowknife home, where he isolates himself from the world, he picks up his guitar and starts singing. The security of the room eases him out of his shell, but he still can’t relax. Strumming and singing, he looks at me for approval, then looks away. He’s not quite confident about what his fingers are up to on the guitar. His voice falls. Then, in mid-song, as if he’s realized he’s giving a speech wearing a fig leaf, he puts the instrument down. This is why we don’t see re-inventions. They’re too painful to be shared, incongruously painted by embarrassment and soul-searching.
In 1950, Kakfwi was born in Fort Good Hope, NWT. In the electrifying days surrounding Justice Thomas Berger’s report on the Mackenzie Valley pipeline – a bombshell that gave NWT aboriginals a national voice – Kakfwi became an activist. By 1983, he was chief of the Dene Nation. Four years later, he became an MLA and a cabinet minister. He was named premier in 2000 and retired, abruptly, in 2003.
“After 25 years in politics, I felt like I’d been in a war,” Kakfwi says. “I was out there taking hits, fighting bullies, but there’s not much room for feelings. Then, all of a sudden, you’re sitting alone at home in your kitchen with the wrong attitude. You have to re-learn life. I did it by writing songs and lyrics.”
Kakfwi’s singing voice has a deep timbre. And he writes heartbreaking, metaphorical lyrics. He’s already recorded two albums – 2005’s Last Chance Hotel, which saw him nominated for male artist of the year in 2006 by the Canada Aboriginal Music Awards, and In the Walls of His Mind, released in 2006. Performing live may still be difficult, but using music, he’s trying to save himself from himself. “I always saw myself as a bit of an artist and wanted to write stories, poems and songs, but I think too many years at residential school made that difficult,” he says. “I needed to learn to live with myself and become a little more human. Maybe things needed to fall apart completely first.”
They did. In 2003, with an election on the horizon, Kakfwi saw Brutuses, real or imagined, lurking in the shadows. Two friends had been politically lynched for their loyalty to him, he says. Other former confidantes were turning “ugly” and “abusive.” “I couldn’t face another four years of working with people I couldn’t trust,” he says. He’d put in manic hours, antagonized colleagues and largely isolated himself. In most pictures between 1983 and 2003, he wears the same expression: metallic intensity. He’s been back to the legislature only twice since. “It could have been a warehouse,” he says. “I used it for what I needed.”
One year later, Kakfwi split with his wife, Marie Wilson, long the counterweight to his heaviness. He took self-imposed exile in an apartment in Yellowknife. He was asked to run in the 2004 federal election, he says, but chose not to. Then, in 2005, he suddenly re-appeared, representing several First Nations communities as a negotiator with oil companies over the Mackenzie Valley pipeline. He was his bellicose self. And he was fired. It was then that Kakfwi finally faced who he’d become. During this time, his daughter, one of his three children, visited his apartment and asked, “Do you see people here besides us?” His answer was no. He descended to bars for the first time in decades. But during his escape to the freedoms that failure provided, a strange thing happened. Words started coming out. Feelings. They landed on bar napkins, notebook paper and cassette tapes. The more he battled himself the more they flowed. Afraid to Feel, a ballad from his first album, captures pieces of the man that Kakfwi was discovering.
Are you afraid to feel? / Will you ever know what it’s like to heal?
At nine, Kakfwi was sent to a Catholic residential school in Fort Smith, NWT. There he was whipped, starved, isolated and abused sexually. Off and on, he spent seven years in residential schools. He blamed his father, who raised Kakfwi and his siblings in the absence of their mother (she’d fallen ill from an influenza outbreak and, like many First Nations people of the era, lived in a hospital). “I always had intense anger toward him. I saw him as the one who sent me away all those years,” he says. “My brothers and sisters and I all went to residential school. I love them but I don’t relate to them – that’s part of the pain I live with.”
He says there were warning signs something was destroying him, but he never clued in. In 1986, addictions counsellors asked him what grief was driving him to drink. “I literally didn’t know what they were talking about,” he says. A spiritual leader in Déli¿ne once told him he “needed to smile more.” And there were the chronic headaches. In 1996, a doctor said, “Now, you tell me what’s wrong with you.” Finally, at a party, when he related a story about being spanked at residential school, his wife looked at him and said, “Don’t belittle it. You weren’t spanked, a nun whipped you.”
“I couldn’t say it,” he says.
Here’s another thing about re-inventions. They’re never complete. Kakfwi’s former self is always lurking. To rebuild his broken family (he got back together with his wife last year), he’s put distance between himself and politics. “Some people say you never lose it, but I don’t believe that,” he says. There’s resignation but also bitterness in his eyes as he says this. “I’m not a populist. I know a lot of politicians who haven’t accomplished anything but are popular.” Probe too hard into this area and suddenly you’re in a cabinet office in 2001, as Kakfwi’s eyes narrow to incisive slits.
But today, at home, those eyes are bright and expressive – more those of a man who “likes people more now” than of a willful politician. His hands look timeless, like his ancestors have passed them down. From certain angles he looks like an owl, but from most, especially head on, he’s surprisingly youthful. He gives broad smiles, but pulls them back quickly. Rather than picking fights, he tends now to use words to indulge in therapy. “I found I hadn’t appreciated what was around me. My heart wasn’t open. It was too guarded, too wounded.” Playing his therapist, I ask: Who are you closest to? There’s a long pause. “I got married, which was to my surprise,” he says, deadpan. The biggest smile comes talking about his kids. His son and his wife have both started writing songs like him, he says. “If talent for music was $1, I’d have a penny. But look at what you can do if you believe in yourself.” He says it’s a belief others suffering the same pain can find.
Later, in his office, Kakfwi plays Afraid to Feel from a CD – a much more comfortable approach. “I was unable to let go,” he says over the music. “The whole song is a contradiction. I couldn’t do it. Throughout it I was like . . .” He chops his hands at the air. “It’s wooden, almost ironic.” We continue listening. He plays another song, which starts with a recording of his father singing a Dene love song. Then Kakfwi comes in, and for a moment, they sing together. “It’s more than just music,” he says. “Including him on the CD is my way of making peace with him.” A few more seconds go by. He asks, “Do you like it?” I smile. Then Kakfwi looks out the window. And for the first time, I feel him relax.
Tim Querengesser is Up Here’s associate editor.
