Prairie Grass

by Joan Soggie

  “My family? Well, I don’t think they’d be any help, we’re newcomers to the province. My Dad was posted to the airbase in Moose Jaw just last year. My parents have made a lot of friends, but I doubt they would know anyone that old.”

  Diane jumped in, trying to be helpful. “Gabrielle switched from her college in New Brunswick to the U of S for her final year, when her family moved here from the Maritimes.”

  “Oh, your family is from down east?”

  “Well, actually, Mom’s a Saskatchewan girl, but she and Dad married when she was quite young and with all the moving around military families do, Mom didn’t keep up with contacts out west.”

  Monica gave me a cool, appraising look, narrowing her eyes as though she didn’t much like what she saw.

  “No aunts, uncles, cousins?”

  What was with this woman? Maybe we had better get back to the subject of my work.

  “Nope. Mom is an only child, and both her parents died in a car crash when I was a baby. I’m pretty sure I have no family who could help me with this job. But you must have some marvelous contacts, working on the reserve. Diane mentioned you might know someone?”

  Diane again intervened. “Gabby really needs to interview a centenarian with Indigenous ancestry. To get the whole picture, you know. And the parameters of the Project are pretty flexible. So long as the person is in at least their hundredth year of life, he or she qualifies to be included. The guidelines state that if death or dementia curtails personal interviews, the field worker may interview the surviving family. If they want to participate, that is.”

  Monica’s face remained expressionless as she listened to Diane babble. When she spoke, her eyes were appraising and her tone cool.

  “I know of someone, yes. A respected elder, in frail health. I can understand why you want to talk to her. But participation is voluntary, and why should she want to talk to you? It would help if you had a tribal connection. Some reason, other than your assignment, to care about her history.”

  I had the uncomfortable feeling Monica didn’t like the Centenarian Project any more than she liked me. I set my coffee cup down on a table, took a nibble of my donut, and glanced at my watch.

  Diane followed suit. Although she is a great boss, Diane tends to get so caught up in what she calls networking that sometimes our meetings start late and drag on forever. I was glad she wasn’t running this show.

  “Oops, looks like we might be late for the next session. You should hear this man, Gabby. Monica knows him and says that if he were a few years younger they would be urging him to run for head of the FSIN.”

  Federation of Sovereign Indian Nations. I didn’t know anything about that organization. Government? Or lobby group? Maybe activism of some sort? I guess I’d inherited my Dad distrust for demonstrators, letter-writers, that breed of change-the-world dreamers. He regarded them as lunatics, potential terrorists, deserving of the rubber bullets and tear gas they get when trying to disrupt legitimate business. I wasn’t quite as hard-core as he was, but I liked the notion of due process and going through the proper channels. And it seemed to me all the news reports I heard of aboriginal activity generally involved roadblocks and illegal camps.

  But I was here to learn. I followed Diane into the auditorium, chucked the rest of the bitter coffee into a garbage can along the way, found a seat, took my iPad out of my shoulder bag and balanced it on my knee. Now that I was here, wasting a beautiful Saturday, I hoped to get something worthwhile to show for it.

  I looked around the room, confirming my first impression that the audience was almost entirely Indigenous, except for half a dozen business-like individuals taking their places on the stage.

  One of the suits introduced Joseph, an elderly man in a faded denim shirt who took the mike and waited for scattered applause to die down. His voice was soft but clear as he spoke of being sent to residential school when he was seven — his mom had hidden him until then — and the sorrow of being separated from his sister, who was housed with the girls in another building. He said that some of the adults who were supposed to teach them were kind, others were not, and some were feared. But good, bad, or ugly they were all the same. Not his family. Not his people. And he always felt alone. Until he started playing hockey.

  “One teacher, Mr. Jacobs, he was a pretty good guy. He got us sticks, some second-hand skates. Flooded a place in the yard back of the big building where us boys lived.”

  He cleared his throat and looked down, then raised his head and continued.

  “Making that skating ice, that was a good thing he did. We kids loved that outdoor rink. We laced up those beat-up old skates as soon as we finished our chores after school and skated until dark. If they’d let us, we’d skate again after supper, by moonlight. It gave us something to do, you know.”

  “We didn’t know much about hockey, but he, Mr. Jacobs, tried to teach us the basics. He’d be out there with his red nose poking out of the wool scarf he wrapped around his face, skating around the ice yelling instructions and cheering us on when we did it right. We practiced all the time. Then one day he told us he had some big news.

  He’d entered us in a local hockey tournament.”

  “Somehow, he got his hands on an old bus and drove us to the games. We didn’t make much of a showing in that first tournament, but we kept getting better. Nobody was more determined than we were. Pretty soon people would come to the games just to watch these crazy little kids from the residential school win.”

  Joseph went on to tell how a scout for one of the provincial junior hockey teams heard about this rag-tag bunch and came to watch them play. The scout invited Joseph to a try-out, where he made the cut. He wound up playing for a junior hockey league team for two years, boarding with a white family in Weyburn. He was drafted by an NHL team, and played for ten years. He was a hero to everyone back on the reserve.

  I’d stopped taking notes after getting down his name. “Joseph.” It was a nice success story, maybe gave me a better understanding of the world in the previous century, but it was not the sort of material I could use. This guy couldn’t have been more than sixty. Old, but still way too young for my purposes.

  Joseph continued, his voice now slow and sad. He may have seemed like a hero to the folks back on the reserve, but he didn’t feel like one. Although he was on the roster, he wasn’t getting much ice time. He said, “My heart was not in it.”

  He had no close friends, no one who really cared what happened to him. Not surprisingly, he tried to drown his loneliness in drink.

  “I played hockey and that was all I did.” He looked around the room, his dark eyes searching. “To my folks back on the reserve, it looked like a great life. But in here,” he tapped his chest, “was the same residential school kid that used to pull the covers over his head and cry himself to sleep.”

  He continued his story, telling about his return to the reserve, reconnecting with his people, his culture, and eventually finding a full and meaningful life teaching, coaching and mentoring teenagers.

  As he left the platform a few people from the audience came forward to shake his hand. I watched a woman embrace him, then, still holding his arm, walk out with him.

  I began doing some calculations. Residential schools operated from the late 1800s until 1996. During that time, many First Nations children were forced to spend at least ten months of each year in these schools, often hundreds of miles from their homes.

  My dad graduated from high school and joined the armed forces in 1980. My mom graduated in ‘86. That meant that this guy was actually not much older than my own parents. How different would my own life have been, if Dad experienced what this man had? And Joseph’s story was a success story.

  The session ended, and I joined the throng moving out the side door and down the hallway. Suddenly, there was Monica walking beside me.

  “An informal session is due to start in the grandstand,” she said. “Why don’t we grab a sandwich and go listen to the stories of the
children of residential school survivors?” Her words might have been a question, but her tone was not. “The speakers are all young women like yourself,” she explained. “Some grew up on the rez, some in the city. And some of them are the first women in their families for three generations to get to raise their own children.”

  I fished in my shoulder bag for a few toonies to pay for my chicken salad sandwich and a carton of milk and followed her out into the blazing June sunshine.

  It was almost four when I shook hands with Monica and pocketed the paper on which she had neatly printed a name and a phone number. Not a First Nations centenarian, but the daughter of one. I would have to go through the proper channels, that is, her protective family, if I wanted to meet this hundred-year-old lady.

  The intensely personal stories of hope and despair percolated through my mind, leaving me disturbed and uncertain. And I thought I understood why Diane had been so insistent that I come. Truth and Reconciliation was for today. But the roots were all in the past.

  It suddenly made the Centenarian Project seem a whole lot more relevant.

  Once again, the long drive gave me much needed time to think. I had a lot of data to process. I tried to recall what Diane said about the tribal affiliation of the people we’d heard speak today. It seemed the preponderance of them were Cree, but there were also Assiniboine. Oops. No, Diane said I had to get that name, Assiniboine, out of my vocabulary, it was given those people by their enemies. Nakoda was the name they used for themselves. So many different tribes and names and customs and Nations. Going back who knows how far. Thousands of years.

  As the fields and scattered farms and small towns scrolled past, I tried to imagine what it must have been like for them. For newcomers, and for all those people whose ancestors roamed this land for thousands of years before they were “discovered.”

  Roamed. Maybe that’s the wrong word. Certainly, they didn’t wander around aimlessly, like tourists gawking at the flowers. They knew where they wanted to go, I supposed. But how did they find their way? Did they follow the stars? Use landmarks? The rivers, for sure, but what about here, in the wide-open prairie? Without a GPS or a map or even a trail, how could you find your way?

  Andy’s half-tom fishtailed in the gravel as I applied the brakes more vigorously than wisely. I’d almost missed my corner. Almost missed it, even though when I’d passed the village of Hillview, I’d reminded myself to watch for the correct country road. A road with no sign and no name, as far as I could tell. The locals might have a name for it … “the Harmoody grid, the Pleasant Hill grid.” But all I knew was that, according to my GPS, this was the grid road that would eventually disappear into a trail along a fence line and take me back to the pasture where I’d left my hiking boyfriend. Without those trails and fence-lines and landmarks like the Hutterite colony, and my GPS, how could I have found him?

  You’d have to know the hills and valleys as well as you know your mother’s face. Know the movement of sun and moon, be able to locate the pole star.

  Lucky for me, I had a trail to follow. And lucky for Andy, after hiking all day on a bag of Doritos and a can of coke, I’d made a fast-food run before leaving the city. The odour of fried chicken permeated the truck by the time I pulled onto the brow of the hill where I left him that morning. I could see Andy sitting way down the slope, on the hogsback (I’d heard him call it that, and the name tickled me), facing away from me towards the lake. He must have heard me coming for miles in this great silence, but he kept his nonchalant pose. True to his self-sufficient, almost arrogant, style.

  I slammed the truck door extra hard just to give him the option of pretending he’d just awoken from deep contemplation. And that he had not been sitting there for hours, stomach grumbling, wondering when on earth I would ever arrive.

  He turned and waved.

  Our plan was to sleep out under the stars and then hike the following day. As we wolfed down the chicken and potato salad, I tried to share some of my thoughts about the Truth and Reconciliation hearings with Andy. He was not particularly interested in the testimony of the speakers, or in my emotional reaction, but he did jump at the opportunity to enlighten me about tribal history, pausing frequently to chew.

  “Some Cree might tell you they’ve always been here in the prairies. And in fact, they, or their cultural ancestors, probably occupied parts of the west for at least a few thousand years. But archaeological evidence shows there have been other Indigenous groups who came and went, or were absorbed, or defeated, or assimilated. There’s no proof the same tribal people occupied this land for millennia.”

  Andy seemed to be rehashing an argument he had had with himself or his friends. He continued almost as though he had forgotten he was talking to me.

  “The archaeological record shows that some aspects of life on the prairies remained unchanged for thousands of years. Buffalo pounds, for instance. I’ve seen bone beds twenty feet deep, where bison were impounded in the same area year after year. But did the same people always make those pounds? We don’t know. They might have been ancestors of the Nakoda. Or Lakota. Or Atsina. Or some group we don’t even have a name for.”

  “But the Cree were already here when the first traders arrived, weren’t they?” I couldn’t let Andy think I knew almost nothing about Western history.

  “Well, maybe not in the prairies, but probably in the woodland north of here. You see, when seventeenth century traders first encountered them on the southern edge of Hudson Bay, the Cree already had their own trading network. Naturally, they slipped into the role of middlemen for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Good for them, good for the company. Or for any other trader who hooked up with them. So, maybe they pushed west just ahead of the free traders. In the seventeen-hundreds, and over the next hundred years, some Cree moved from the woodland into the prairies.”

  It seemed to me that Andy liked this version of history better than the traditional Cree version. Maybe because it put us all on equal footing, all being newcomers to the prairies, interlopers who supplanted whoever were the original inhabitants.

  But his innate sense of fairness couldn’t let him leave it there.

  “On the other hand, maybe the Cree have been here for ten thousand years. The only thing we know for certain is that those European and French-Canadian traders couldn’t have gotten anywhere without them. Or without their country wives.”

  Relaxing with his head in my lap, he leered up at me. “Girls with hazel eyes. And black hair. Irresistible.”

  I ignored the implied comparison. He was going to have to do better than that. “Hmph. They may have liked them, but they didn’t take very good care of those country wives, did they. Or their children!”

  “Maybe not.”

  Another legacy of our colonial past, I thought, surprised at the anger that stirred in me. It was all so long ago. And yet, after today, I wondered if any of it was ever really finished.

  He sat up beside me, both of us leaning back against the sun-warmed rock, our shadows stretching before us down the long steep slope of the hill. We looked out over descending tiers of river breaks that ended in the tranquil blue lake a mile distant. I could hear our breath. I could hear a loon call. How could sound travel that far? How could a land be so silent and yet so alive?

  Andy broke the stillness. He seemed to feel the need to defend the less-than-honourable behaviour of those young men of the honourable company

  “Life for the women was pretty rough, I admit, but probably no rougher for the girl who moved in with a trader than one who stayed with her tribe. And the kids sometimes had the best of both worlds. At least for those whose fathers kept the family with him. That was most common among French Canadian traders, but some Scots and Orkney boys did, too. Eventually, for some, they had a new language and culture as Metis. So, it wasn’t all bad.”

  “Is that really true, though?” I asked. “I never heard much about Metis, except for that rebellion? resistance? The Louis Riel thing. Back in the eighteen-hundreds
. Do Metis even still exist?”

  Andy laughed and got to his feet, pulling me after him.

  “Of course, they do! You probably met some today.”

  Tonight, we would sleep wrapped in our sleeping bags under the open sky. Tomorrow, we would hike the hills he explored today. Probably, I wouldn’t get to see any of the stone circles and cairns and petroglyphs Andy was so fond of bragging about. This area had never been subjected to an archaeological survey, Andy told me, because of the jealous guardianship of ranchers over the land. They didn’t want anyone intruding on, or exploiting, what they considered their own private world. But they were almost always generous to hikers who came without guns or quads, with no intention of taking trophies, who promised to light no fires and raid no nests. We would revel in the wide-open spaces for as many hours as the sun and wind and our own stamina allowed. And then we would go back, back to our everyday life, to our computers and highways and comfortable beds.

  But with the inexplicable feeling that these hills, with their rocks and cacti and wild creatures, also were home.

  Eric (1921)

  Pumped straight from the well, the cold metallic-tasting water makes his throat ache. Eric glowers over the dipper at his little brother. He knows Derwood doesn’t mean to irritate him, but that makes him no less annoyed. Derwood sits carefree and cool in the shade of the doorstep, oblivious to heat, dirt and chores. He sings as he stirs his mud-pie, a song his mother taught him, one Eric recalls from what seems a distant past. A time when he, too, was a child.

  “Now tell me mother meadowlark, what sorrow fills your breast,” Derwood’s high five-year-old voice quavers.

  His song ends abruptly in a shrill cry of dismay. Gerald, two years younger, but already as big as Derwood, clomps like a cheerful young elephant through the neatly arranged mud pies.