by Anne Wheeler
Then I hear a shuffle of footsteps, a bang and a slam, and I realize that someone is pushing against the closed door from inside. Between the two of us, we pry it open enough for Augusta to peek out at me and smile.
“Hello! Have you come for coffee?” She says this with such warmth and delight, I feel like an old friend who was expected.
“Of course! Coffee would be wonderful!”
The humble interior is neat and swept, and surprisingly warm. Pop bottles and plastic containers are cleaned and stacked on makeshift shelves along the walls. She masterfully throws a lump of coal onto the fire that glows smokelessly in her open stove. A line of hand-rolled cigarettes lies neatly on her cedar plank table beside a small transistor radio — the one extravagance in the place.
Ladling water into an enamelled coffee pot, now black with use, she asks my name and how I managed to find her hiding place. I tell her hello from Edna and Tommy, whom I met at the station, and she is pleased. “Ah!” she exclaims. “That boy was a rascal — I delivered that boy ... and his two sisters, ya....”
“Really?” I exclaim. No wonder he wept when he spoke of her.
“Ya, I watched him grow up. He has a job?”
“I think so — he was driving a big truck.”
That pleases her. Humming, she opens a cupboard and pulls out some soda biscuits and a jar of peanut butter. Chuckling, she admits, “I love peanut butter!”
So do I, which is good, because it may be all she has to eat. I pull out an Eat-More chocolate bar from my bag, and she lights up. “I love those!”
It doesn’t seem to matter that I am blonde, young, and a stranger. She talks to me like I am her granddaughter, her confidante, her best friend, or her neighbour. When the coffee is poured, she automatically starts to tell her stories, as she has done, it seems, countless times. Each one has been crafted with the telling, starting simply, drawing you in, and ending with a strong conclusion. Every story leaves you wanting another story.
“I was born in the forest. Ya. Near here. The forest provided everything for my people. I will show you sometime — in the spring is best. We would gather everything we needed — food, medicine, moss. We did everything together. We ate together, slept together, had babies, died ... all together.”
Every once in a while, she stops and pulls out her harmonica to play a tune. “Do you know this one?” she asks with a twinkle in her eye, then starts to sing. Some are songs from school, and others hinge on the blues. I know most of them and add a little percussion, drumming on the table, adding a harmony, which pleases her.
By four o’clock, it’s dark; there is no question that I’m here for the night. She hands me a blanket. “I will tell you the story of the first men who came for gold — they were lost. My grandfather found them and brought them to our place near here. They stayed the winter. Ya. And in the spring, my uncles went with them, hunted for them, provided them with meat. Ya. My uncles showed them the way to the shining waters where they ‘found’ gold. That’s what they said, ‘Found!’ Like we didn’t know it was there. Of course, we knew it was there! It was beautiful.
“Then more men came; our people traded with them. Year after year, they would come looking. We’d tell them how to live here in the forest, sharing everything. Most of them didn’t stay long.”
“Did they thank you?” I ask.
“No, they did not thank us.” She laughs — what a joke. “They only wished it was easier and warmer. Some of them complained, oh ya, especially if they had to stay the whole winter. Many of our women had children from these men. Like my auntie. She thought the man would stay, but he left in the spring as soon as he could. Never came back. No.”
“And the baby?” I ask. “What became of the baby?”
“Oh,” she says, without any judgement, “she was a strong girl, a good girl. We all loved her.”
“We lived under the ground in the winter, ya. We’d dig down and make a big round room, with a place for the fire in the centre. Then we made a roof with wood and hides. Against the wall, we put a big tree trunk that was cut like stairs so we could go up and down. That was our home in the wintertime, ya. These were big places — sometimes ten, fifteen, twenty people would live there.”
I can imagine the trappers or gold-seekers, clutching their bounty, hunkered down amongst these people, cooped up for months, crazy to leave.
“Before the gold diggers, the men came for fur, and my father was happy to trade them for blankets, guns, and alcohol. But soon there was trouble, sickness, and fights.”
She likes that I want to know more. “I had three children, ya. Three from my own body. And ten more were given to me. Ten. Of thirteen children, only one is alive. And all but one died of alcohol. I don’t drink. I never drank. No. I knew what it would do to me.”
This truth brings tears to her eyes. “Only one boy wanted to learn — the stories, the plants in the forest, the food, the chants — the only one who wanted to know how to smoke the fish and make the medicines. He was given to me when I was sixty-nine years old. He died. He had an accident.”
That is as much as she can say about him, for now. She mourns as she has done a thousand times, sitting alone at this table, smoking and remembering. Tears roll down her wrinkled face and she stays silent, thinking about her loss.
She insists that I sleep on the cot, but I refuse. We pull the mattress off the bedframe and make two comfortable beds. She has a spare toothbrush that she found in a ditch when she was walking to town. It’s still new in its plastic package. She gives it to me proudly. Finally someone who will appreciate it! A nun taught her to brush her teeth and she still has most of her own. “It is why I have lived so long,” she declares. “I can eat anything!”
The place is warm and dark as we crawl under our blankets, fully clothed. She continues to tell story after story, each one presented like a precious gift.
In the morning, we have more crackers with peanut butter, and she pulls out a special jar of jam she has been saving.
“I wish to tell you the story of my mother. Her father fought with Louis Riel. Do you know that name?”
“Yes, he was the much-loved leader of the Métis.”
“Good.” Impressed that I know this, she continues, “They lost their farms and had no place to go, so they wandered west and north. My mother’s family came here ... they didn’t want to come, no, but they lost the rebellion. And she married the Chief — my father was the Chief. She had to learn to live in the forest. Everything, so different. When I was four I was sent to the school, at the mission. I stayed there for nine years. Then I went to live with my grandmother until I met George Evans. His mother was Shuswap but his father was Welsh. So he had no status. We couldn’t live on the reserve. We didn’t belong. George didn’t know what he was, half Welsh, half Indian. He drank too much, but he was good with horses. He got a job on a ranch, and I did too. I cooked, cleaned, did the laundry. It was lots of work. Long days. They gave us a one-room cabin to live in.”
In the morning, Augusta and I go outside and gather some wood — there’s lots of it under the snow. Though she’s fit and willing, the logs are heavy, and I can see that she must struggle to keep her cabin heated. There is no hint of self-pity or concern about what might happen to her in the future when she cannot do the work. For now, she rummages down into the heap, digging to where the wood and coal has stayed dry. “Here’s a good one!” She shows me a big log. “It’s dry and cracked, and the bark is falling away.”
“Where do you live?” she asks.
“Alberta. East of here, over the mountains ... on the flatlands.”
“Oh, I see.” This makes sense to her and she sings, “Oh give me a home, where the buffalo roam....”
I sing along. “And the deer and the antelope play.” We giggle — and harmonize to the end. “Where seldom is heard, a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day.”
“That’s how it is for sure,” I say, “but the buffalo don’t roam anymore.�
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“No,” she admits, “they are gone. That was a long time ago. In the old days, we traded fish and berries for buffalo.”
I avoid saying much about myself. My life is void of adversity or privation. What is there to say? She has lived through so much and has emerged with such dignity and purpose. She delights in telling me what she has learned.
“We used to trade with the men who built the railroad. They came from Alberta. When I was a young woman, my family walked to the place where they were working — near Jasper. It was a big camp.”
“That’s far away! Hundreds of miles!” I am amazed.
“Ya, it was a long walk. But I was young and excited to see somewhere new. There was a man,” she says, disappearing into her memory for a moment, “who cooked for the others. He had long, thick, black hair tied back. There were others like him, but he was the one who wanted our food. He was willing to trade. We brought him wild vegetables he’d never seen. And berries, he loved the berries. He welcomed us and gave us tea. At first, we thought he was from a distant tribe, and I thought he was a good-looking man.” She grins mischievously, like the young girl she was. “I liked him, and he liked me.”
I can imagine the flirtation during the berry exchange.
“But then he told me that he was from China. Ya. From beyond the sunset. Across a great water. He could not come with us. He had family. A big family, and he missed them. But he looked like us. He laughed like us. Ya.” She smiles, still holding the prize wood in her arms. “I couldn’t go with him. My father would not let me go with him. My father was strong, and strict.”
“Yes.” I can relate. “Mine was too.”
“What did he do?” she asks.
“He was a doctor.”
“A doctor?” she asks.
I nod proudly. “Apparently he wanted to be a doctor from the time he was a young man.”
“Ah. He had a calling.”
“I guess. He was a good doctor — he and my mother met when they were children.”
“That’s a nice story. I have never been to one of your doctors. I don’t like the idea of it. Cutting pieces out. I want to die with all my parts still together!” She chuckles at the thought. “I’m old-fashioned, I guess. I’m lucky to live so long.”
I stay a second night, giving us time to stack up a good amount of wood and coal next to her stove. I worry that she’s low on food, but she insists that she has enough. Her niece will come next week on a snowmobile with everything she likes.
Clasping my hands in hers, she sends me on my way. Whether or not I make this film, I will visit her in the spring and share the pictures I have taken.
I RETURN HOME to a household in transition. Sylvie is moving out. Lorna and Linda have determined they don’t want to live with each other anymore. I decide to paint the house in case I need to sell it soon.
After months of writing and rewriting proposals, and endless committee meetings and telephone debates, Taylor calls me to tell me the good news. “Augusta” has been programmed; we have been given the green light.
The bad news is that I only have four days to shoot it, with a three-person crew. I’d better know what I want and how I am going to get it, because the money is finite.
This is my first solo flight as a filmmaker. Up to now, I have worked within a group of guys, who’d been at it longer than me and knew things I didn’t. I relied on them. I’d never gone to film school; neither had they. We figured it out as we went along. The crew on this show are all film school graduates, I think — talented professionals. I don’t know them at all but will have to take the lead. There will be no one to blame but myself if I fail.
Six months after meeting Augusta, I return to Williams Lake ahead of the others to discover that Augusta is not at her cabin. She is living in a shack beside the highway, close to her only surviving son and his family. She’s happy to see me and anxious to show me around. “I thought you’d never come back!” she laughs.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know how to get in touch with you. I have three friends who want to meet you too. We want to put your stories on film.”
“Oh ya? You want to hear my stories again? And again?” She chuckles.
I have decided not to direct anything, to just trust my instincts. It will be more authentic if I just let her do whatever she does, and follow her without interfering. I’ll stay as much out of the way with the crew as I can, and just watch. She wants to go see her friend, Edna, so that’s what we’ll do first.
Augusta and Edna are two of the few among their people who still speak Shuswap. Every summer, they smoke salmon together in the old way, in a lodge by the river, close to where Augusta’s boy drowned. “He was given to me by a niece — and we used to walk everywhere, all over is valley together. I taught him everything I knew. I took care of him, then he took care of me, you see. But he went fishing. None of his friends wanted to go with him, so he went alone. Ya. No one should fish alone, but he couldn’t find anybody to go with him that day. And he fell in. Ya. He fell in, I guess, and the river took him. That was the last I saw of my boy. Ya. I never saw him again.”
She goes to the reserve whenever she can, so that she can visit the graveyard where some of her children, the ones who have status, are buried, including this boy.
Dozens of wooden crosses, which were once painted white and planted in neat rows, are now rotting and leaning awkwardly, this way and that.
“That’s not the way we used to bury our people,” she explains, “but after the sisters came, everything changed, ya. My people were put in the ground, in boxes, up there, in rows. We were forest people; we left our people in the forest.”
Using her walking stick as she walks up the hill, she talks to herself, to her loved ones long gone. The crew and I wait at the bottom of the hill outside the dilapidated fence that surrounds the cemetery, so she can have her time alone.
My soundman, Ralph, has a quizzical look on his face. I have forgotten that she is wearing a new invention — a wireless microphone, which allows us to record her from a distance. He hands me his headphones so I can listen. Her voice is so present. I hear her muttering to herself as she moves through the overgrown grass and wild flowers.
“Hello, my people, Augusta has come to be with you. It’s been a long time, but I had no one to drive me.” She snaps off some wild daisies as she heads toward a broken marble headstone, the top lying awkwardly on the ground. “Oh no, what has happened here? How did this happen? My boy? Who did this?”
This is one of the few stone markers in the yard. I ask Ron, the cameraman, to zoom in on her with our long lens as she struggles to upright the broken piece. I want to rush up and help her, but the act is too personal, too intimate.
She continues to talk to her boy. “Your name is in two pieces — but I’ll rest the top part here.” With all of her strength, she raises the fallen marker and rests the bigger half upright against the base. “There you are, my dear boy. I’m going to put some fresh flowers here too — the ones you like. I’m sorry I haven’t been up here lately. It’s so far. Ya. But these people, I don’t know who they are, drove me here. Ya. Nice people. They like my stories. They listen. I told them about you.”
She cleans up around the stone, then stands and chants in Shuswap. Her voice is amazingly strong and we can hear her as it echoes through the valley.
“Mmm ... you always liked that one, ya?” she says to her boy.
If a Native man marries a non-Native woman, she gains legal Native status and reaps the benefits given to the treaty members by the Canadian government. There are women as white as I am, living here on the reserve who, along with their children, are eligible for free education, medical coverage, and other forms of assistance. Augusta, on the other hand, lives on a minimum old-age pension, which is less than a hundred dollars a month.
“At one time, I had eleven mouths to feed! Ya. All on welfare and some sewing I did, some work here and there. Most of the children were status but —” she sto
ps for a moment, as though she can see them all “— but, we had a good time. I have no regrets.”
At the age of five, she was sent to a Catholic residential school on the reserve. The building still stands in the valley, close to the church. “They taught me how to read and write, that was good. And how to plant seeds, ya, to grow my own food. I have always had a garden full of vegetables and berries. Different from the ones you find in the forest. Sweeter. I learned lots of good things from the sisters.”
She still likes to go to church, mostly because of the music, but now she sings in Shuswap. “They didn’t used to let us talk or sing in Shuswap. But I do it now. When I was just a child, I had to write on the blackboard, so many times, ‘I will not speak Shuswap anymore.’ Even though God knew this was unkind. He didn’t care if I spoke Shuswap! The nuns just wanted to know what we were saying. They always thought we were doing something bad when we spoke our language. But God didn’t care. God has more important things to worry about! And besides, he understands Shuswap. He was here before the nuns came; he was here long before that! He has always been here. He is not a person like the nuns said ... no ... he is much more than that. Not a man, not a woman. God is the spirit that gives life to all living things.”
She takes us back to the forest, where she patiently describes how they once made good use of every living thing — the plants, the bugs, the bark, the fungi, and the animals they hunted, of course. Everything had a purpose. Some plants cure, while others kill, she tells us. Each is precious and each has its place. Everything depends on everything. Buddha could not have said it better, or lived with more awareness, I think to myself.
“This is the moss we use to pack the newborn baby. It is soft and keeps the skin dry. But this other moss is for dressing wounds. This willow will cure the headache, or sore joints. Chew on it, find a nice juicy branch, and suck out the bitter water. It will take away your pain and it will give you energy when you are tired. This berry we use to keep the meat from going bad. We pound it into the flesh, then dry it in the sun. It is very tasty and will last for months.” She stops to snack on the salmon berries and gathers enough to fill the two discarded containers she rescued from the roadside, where we parked.