Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is also the
author of The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek, and
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Hom

Stolen Life is the result of a collaboration between Rudy Wiebe and
Yvonne Johnson, a Cree who in the early 1990s was indicted for
first-degree murder in a small town in Saskatchewan. Together, they have
produced a compelling story of sexual abuse, racism, alcohol addiction,
and human tragedy.

Johnson was born in 1962 in Butte, Montana, to a Native mother and an
American ex-Marine. She discovered Wiebe’s novel The Temptations of
Big Bear (1972) in a federal prison library. As she told Wiebe in her
first letter, their pasts had given each “a gift of understanding.”
Much of Stolen Life makes grim reading, yet the book is infused with
hope and spirituality. Wiebe organizes Johnson’s story—gathered from
prison notebooks, letters, five years of dialogue, and his own
research—and adds a layer of understanding, objective yet sympathetic.


In 1989, a drunken brawl erupted in Johnson’s house and a guest—a
convicted child molester—was killed. The original charge of
second-degree murder against two men and two women was gradually changed
to first-degree murder for Yvonne and aggravated assault for her cousin,
who brokered a deal with the prosecutor. The actual murder and the
events that led up to it are reconstructed by Wiebe in a chapter that
ranks with the best of his fiction. He leaves the last word to Johnson,
who has learned that the people who live the hardest lives have the
greatest understanding to share with others. Stolen Life deserves a wide
audience.