"I think the world is there for us to live. That's what I'm trying to do, is live," he declares during the film shoot of a documentary on his life, titled Soop on Wheels. "I'm not sick. I'm disabled. There's a difference." He has agreed to do this film because he hopes his story can help people understand the adversities faced by people who have disabilities, as well as people on Indian reserves. Everett, who carries both identities, believes such individuals share the human aspirations to be self-determining and to enjoy a life with dignity.

Everett is in the advanced stage of muscular dystrophy. He continues to do public speaking on behalf of Aboriginal people with disabilities, and also in regard to Indian reserves and the need to restore broken cultural values.

In his professional work, he was a pioneer in Native journalism, as a political cartoonist and writer beginning in the late '60s. His work was published in the former Blood Indian newspaper Kainai News and other publications for more than 15 years, and he has been sought out over the years by other Alberta reporters and broadcasters to speak out on many sensitive issues.

In the late '80s, Everett was instrumental in preparing a task force report, "Removing Barriers: An Action Plan for Aboriginal Issues and Disability," as a member of the Alberta Premier's Council on the Status of Persons with Disabilities.

Everett lives on the Blood Indian Reserve in southern Alberta, a community which is part of historic Blackfoot territory on the western plains. He shares a tiny house with his mother, Josephine, who uses a wheelchair after a car accident four years ago. She is fondly called "The Colonel" by Everett and his three brothers and sister. The mother and son chuckle, sharing a private joke in the Blackfoot language, before Everett explains traditional Indian humour.

"I was influenced by my uncles who were great humourists, and visiting my grandmother. They were always telling stories." His mother's clan were known as the Akaksimaks or "Many Roasters." Roasting or teasing was a traditional type of social control mechanism, exercised publicly to inform individuals about inappropriate behaviour instead of using direct criticism.

This vehicle of humour became Everett's survival tool, yet also the source of a controversial reputation he earned among his own people. Everett's truth-telling about social problems -- which he believes Aboriginal people must name and turn around -- have marginalized him to this day in his home community. Yet his political cartoon work is represented in the National Archives, as the only Aboriginal art in the permanent collection of the Museum of Caricatures.

The tragedy of Everett's isolation is that he speaks out because he cares about his people and is saddened by what is being lost culturally. Furthermore, he himself has experienced many of the problems to which he speaks -- attempting suicide, fighting alcoholism, trying to come to terms with being sexually abused as a preschool lad. He once stated: "Laughing at cartoons is done with tears of blood."

Hence, for Everett, life is not about who you are or what you have but, instead, what you are doing now and how to make peace with yourself before you die. With unflinching honesty, he continues to speak at schools, universities, health agencies and conference workshops on provocative subjects, from the misdeeds of the federal government and Indian politicians to suicide and alcoholism, or the indignities faced by people with disabilities.

Everett also talks about the loneliness he has faced because of other people's fears. Fear, for example, evident in the way other people avoid him has been very hurtful for Everett. Many times he has experienced individuals who jump back and rub their hands when they accidentally touch him. In recent years, even most friends avoid him, Everett says, because they believe he is dying since he is losing so much weight.

Indignant at these friends, Everett expresses his distinctive style of outrageous humour regarding even his funeral: "I wish I could moon them if I had the chance, you know, stick my butt out from my coffin, 'cause that's what they deserve."

Everett is outspoken on any subject, even life after death. "I don't want to go to the happy hunting grounds, because the damn white people will be there trying to claim it." He enjoys playing on his persona as a curmudgeon. "I come from a long line of grouchy, mean, miserable people and I want to maintain that tradition," he tells a history class at the University of Lethbridge last October. The occasional twinkle in his eye and glimmer of a smile belie the image as a grouch and also his other persona as the poker-faced clown, as he mentions his lack of education at residential school, where he instead developed cartooning skills.

When first diagnosed at age 16 with muscular dystrophy, Everett's already damaged self-image -- because of a hearing loss -- was shattered. He saw himself as an "elephant man" and, moreover, believed his life would end in a few short years. The effects of his disability on his body progressed quickly to brittle bones, which broke in various mishaps, followed by muscle loss. Today, his upper body strength is severely diminished, and breathing is becoming increasingly difficult.

As an adolescent faced with the fear of dying he almost took his life and, for much of the next 20 years, Everett fought depression and alcoholism. Regardless, he produced an amazing body of political cartoons which Professor Beverly Rasporich at the University of Calgary identifies as a significant contribution to Canada's cultural history.

Everett refuses to be regarded as either a victim or a role model. He simply tries to live by his maternal grandmother's example of strength, not physically -- although she was still chopping wood in her 90s -- but, instead, exercising the inner strength of the spirit. Throughout his life as well, he created an intellectual and emotional world, with a library of books on philosophy, anthropology, art, literature, world religions, and his greatest passions, opera and classical music.

"I've always been the observer, not the observed," says Everett. He feels more comfortable speaking about issues such as inadequate services on Indian reserves for people with disabilities, and how nepotism and petty antagonisms are holding back cultural recovery.

Being among people to share his knowledge and to make them laugh is what gives Everett the greatest happiness, yet to experience so much isolation, his deepest sadness.

Indeed, what Everett wants more than anything, for himself and for other folks who have disabilities, is to be welcomed and involved in the world. His story, however, is as much about the tenacity of the human spirit to give meaning to one's own life creatively in the unwanted, and unfair, reality of loneliness.

More reflective in recent years, Everett writes poetry and keeps a journal in which he documents his prayers and a line of gratitude for something each day. "Spirituality, to me, is nothing more than trying to understand God in my daily life, not in my holy moments� I don't need ceremonies," says Everett. He burns incense, for example, not for religious reasons, but rather as a soothing reminder of his grandmother, who burned pine on the wood stove.

Everett's spiritual journey has taken him on a long road, from the young man who tore up his bible out of anger at God for "making me like this," to a changed man today who says: "People ridicule me. I say, don't laugh at me for looking like the way I do. Laugh at God. He made it, not me. So I don't mind. I've accepted what I am."

-- Sandy Greer

From Abilities Magazine, Issue 36