Prairie Grass

by Joan Soggie

  I stopped at the turnoff to Big Bear Lake to re-read Madeline’s directions. The air carried a delicious odour of spruce, and sunshine filtering through the boughs dappled the forest floor with gold. No wonder there was this mass exodus heading here from the dusty towns and cities further south.

  The gravel road wound through aspen woods interspersed with marshy ponds ringed with willows, what Dad would call| “moose pastures”. I passed two or three cabins before I came to another turn-off, this one marked with a rustic sign. “Hirondelle’s Roost.” A short lane ended in a large clearing, a homestead carved out of the wilderness, a long low house with veranda, a few outbuildings. A page-wire fence encircled what appeared to be an enormous vegetable garden.

  The tall gray-haired woman came down the steps to greet me.

  Madeline Hirondelle had already impressed me with her poise and confidence. Here, in her own setting, she exuded total self-reliance and positive energy. She did not suggest, she declared. By the time we had settled ourselves in the Adirondack chairs on her shady front porch, I had resolved to ask few questions, listen attentively, and avoid expressing any opinion more controversial than my preference in a proffered beverage.

  But even that was not without pitfalls. “Sorry, I don’t have coffee,” she said in a tone that was anything but apologetic. “Terrible stuff, coffee, full of chemicals. Grown on land that has been stolen from Indigenous people. You can have steeped bush tea,” she did not explain what that was, “or iced mint tea. Or water.”

  I asked for the iced tea, which she produced on a tray with two glasses and a plate of ginger cookies which were surprisingly good.

  “Now. I’ve drawn up a family tree for you, so that you won’t lose your way in the journals I will show you.” She laid out a sheet of paper on the wooden table and anchored the corners with stones from the basket on the floor beside her.

  She tapped the paper.

  “See, here is my mother Annabelle. She married Guy Dubois, my father, named here in blue ink. All who are in the blood-line I am tracing are printed in black.”

  She pointed to another pair of names, directly above Annabelle: Jean-Jacques (black ink) and Marie (blue). “These are my maternal grandparents.”

  “And the First Nation’s connection?” I asked. “Does that come only through Jean-Jacques?”

  “No, that thread is consistent throughout both sides of my ancestry,” explained Madeline. “Jean-Jacques and Marie are both listed as Metis in the earliest census, as are Jean-Jacques’s children from both his first and his second marriage. My mother Annabelle was a daughter of that second marriage, born in 1910 when Jean-Jacques was over 70. I suspect he doted on her, and she grew up feeling proud of her heritage. She married Metis, maintained traditions of music and language that might have been lost without people of their generation and their connection to the land. Did her best to pass that on to her children. Me and my sister. With limited success.”

  She paused and looked toward the woodland surrounding her yard. Aspen leaves shivered silver in the breeze, the darkness of spruce interspersed among them. “My generation had a difficult choice to make. We could identify with our Indian roots, be called half-breed, or deny that ancestry and fight for a place in white society. There was nothing in our outward appearance to give away our First Nations ancestry. Some of us were intimidated by the prospect of discrimination. Being limited by other people’s perceptions. That was why, when I left here to become a teacher, I left my Metis identity behind. My name was French, it was easy enough to become just another daughter of immigrant pioneers from French Canada.”

  “And what made you change your mind?” I blurted out.

  “Oh, it was that awful year teaching at a residential school. The oppression of those innocent children made me ashamed. I felt as though by denying my roots I was adding to their pain. And then I met Tony Hirondelle.”

  I waited for her to continue. But it seemed she had no intention of telling me about her husband just now.

  She stood and gathered up our glasses. “In the end, I chose both. That’s what Metis is, a mixture. The best of two worlds. But I was luckier than most. My parents thought it was important that their girls have a good education.”

  “Tell me more about your parents,” I asked. I regretted that I had not dared to ask her if I could record our conversation.

  “My father had a sort of general store; one his father had begun. Anything people needed, he brought in. Flour, tea, traps, guns. I suspect there had been lots of traders in his family tree. Making deals was as natural for him as breathing. We were never rich, but we didn’t lack for anything either. My mother had a brother — half-brother, actually, but more like an uncle, he was so much older than she was — who had these few acres just outside of town. I guess she and my dad met when she came to visit her half-brother Jacques. Jacques was much older than my mother, old enough to have been her father. When he died in the early 1940s, he left this land to her, and my parents built this home. Close enough to town for them to manage the store, far enough into the country to be an escape from the store. It was my home when I was a child. After Dad died, I worried about Mom living here alone, so I applied at the composite school here in Big Bear Lake. And taught there until I retired.”

  “Didn’t you say that your mom was still growing her own vegetables when she was in her mid-90s?” I asked.

  Madeline grinned. “Yes, she liked — likes — to be independent. She was happy to live alone, with me next door. She sometimes needed a helping hand, but this is a small community, I always knew that if something happened while I was at work one of the neighbours would call or lend a hand. And I was here to chop wood or dig potatoes. I took her berry picking for the last time when she was 99. And in the winters, I helped her organize her stories, notebooks she’d kept since she was a girl.”

  My ears were on fire. “Notebooks?” I asked.

  “Yes. My mother wrote down everything, shopping lists, to do lists for the store, anything she wanted to remember. My Dad used to tease her about it, tell her that when she wrote it down, she was just giving herself permission to forget it. And most of those notes were of course discarded. But the notebooks that she kept were accounts she wrote of events she thought were too important to be forgotten. Not diaries, although a few of the entries were purely personal. Most were stories she remembered from her childhood, some written when she was quite young, and then filled in later with facts she learned long after her father’s death. Her dad, my Grandpa Jean-Jacques, was a great storyteller. She was born in 1910. Back then, story-telling and music were the main entertainments for a Metis family.”

  “So, did you, like, edit her stories for her? To publish?” My own story-telling genes had just been activated.

  Madeline shook her head emphatically. “No, they are her stories and always will be her stories. For her family. So that her father Jean-Jacques will not be forgotten. I transcribed them, corrected some spelling and grammar, then organized them in a binder, so that we could move them into chronological order and try to set dates for them. Maybe find historical context.”

  “Yes, I get it,” I interjected. “I try to do the same thing with Mr. Tollerud’s stories.”

  Madeline nodded. “Yes. Well, then, you will understand how difficult that can be. When you do find an historical connection, it is often an almost unbelievable coincidence. One of the earliest stories from his childhood was pretty exciting, as I recalled having read a similar account from another source.”

  She had my full attention. “You see, I have always been fascinated by the unwritten history of my people. So besides tracking down personal accounts, oral histories, I have spent many happy hours reading books written in the 1800s by people travelling in this part of the country. Of course, there are the official records that everyone thinks they know, by the likes of Palliser, but there are as well a fair number of accounts written by adventurers. People who were here without a specific agenda. One of them was Paul
Kane. An artist who travelled on foot, by dogsled, or whatever way he could, writing about his experiences along the way. His book, Wanderings of an Artist, contains an incident that agrees with my grandfather’s story.”

  If Madeline had been wishing for someone to share her enthusiasm for family history, I did not disappoint her. “Please, may I see these notebooks? These stories?”

  Madeline put on a teacher-ishly stern face. “You may look at my mother’s notebooks, but only look. You cannot take them out of this house.”

  She paused.

  “But I have transcribed her notebooks and added historical notes. For my own use.” Madeline grinned. “And for yours. I made a copy for you, too, Gabriella.”

  We continued talking until long after my usual lunchtime, continued while we ate the moose burgers Madeline prepared and broiled on her old charcoal barbecue, and on through the afternoon as we sipped bush tea in the shade of the same high bushes Madeline had used to make the tea.

  My heart raced at the realization that I might have not only a firm connection between Madeline’s mother and my assigned area of the province, but stories linking her grandfather Jean-Jacques to Eric Tollerud. Remembering my earlier decision to avoid saying anything that might cause Madeline to change her mind about helping me, I kept mum. If her Jean-Jacques La Prairie was also Eric’s Jean-Jacques Laprairie, there would be time enough to confirm that link with the past. The last thing I wanted was for Madeline to get the impression that her stories would simply be an appendage to the homesteader story. I promised myself that whatever she permitted me to do with the material she shared, it would be done with honesty and care. But I knew I had a lot to learn, first.

  Back in my tent that night, I stretched an extension cord outside to the electrical outlet and plugged in my laptop. Memories are fragile things, and I, like Annabelle, wanted to record what I could before they were lost.

  What Metis means today is not what it meant in other times. Names are fluid. In the past, many Metis chose to identify as either Indian (Cree, Nakoda) or European (Scot, French), but not both. But perceptions change over time, and the number of self-identified Metis in Saskatchewan has increased by about 30% in the past ten years.

  Some say that Metis means you are part Indian. Others might choose to say it proves you are NOT Indian, because your First Nations blood has been so diluted. Madeline says that the Dept. of Indian Affairs loves this definition. By requiring proof of your ancestors’ status, and intermarriage with non-Indians, the Indian Status formula would ensure that, eventually, there would be no more status Indians.

  And then there are the Red River Metis. They say only they are true Metis, that it should be all or nothing, the whole bag of language and culture and family attachment to the land of their ancestors, or else you are just a person who happens to have a few Indians in your family tree. Madeline happens to fit their technical definition, which is having an ancestor listed as Metis or half-breed in the 1901 census.

  But I think it is even more equivocal than that. I tried to recall Madeline’s exact words.

  “Very few — maybe no one — can claim racial purity. That is a Nazi concept. Whether you claim your European ancestry, or your Cree ancestry, is entirely your choice. But you must never forget that you owe something to both.”

  I turned off my laptop and curled up in my sleeping bag, my flashlight propped on my backpack serving as a reading light and opened the fat loose-leaf binder Madeline had given me. She had read aloud the passage from Wanderings of an Artist that she believed matched her grandfather’s description of a childhood adventure, and his first meeting with an individual whose influence shaped his own life. Madeline had described it in language slightly more vivid than her detailed but matter-of-fact notes, but now, alone and uninterrupted, I needed to read through the story for myself. My over-tired brain willingly surrendered to the magic of storytelling.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Thorny Buffaloberry. Silvery to brown branches with dense strong spines. Oval-shaped leaves covered with silver hairs. Yellow blossoms, orange-red berries. Grows 1-5 m. tall along streams and riverbanks, sloughs, coulees, open woods. Important food source and nesting cover for many songbirds. Valued as a nitrogen fixer. Gabriellas’ Prairie Notes

  Jean-Jacques (1848)

  The winter of 1848 came early. A hard frost followed by days of heavy snow created ideal sledding.

  Jean-Jacques delighted in the freedom winter brought him. His mother left winter camp only to gather firewood or find clean snow for cooking. Jean-Jacques could count on her to be there with food, dry moccasins and encouragement whenever he ran back to their cabin. As for Pierre, well, his solid presence seemed to follow Jean-Jacques’s adventures, wherever they took him. His stepfather might be miles away, tending his trap line or hunting, but the mere thought of his smile or frown was enough to guide the boy’s actions. So, throughout the first months of winter, Jean-Jacques’s confidence grew. The frozen river became his highway, luring him farther each day.

  Pierre built him his own sled and helped Jean-Jacques choose the best pups from last year’s litters. Jean-Jacques and his friend Gabriel already saw themselves as mushers. Older boys ran their own light dog sleds, as their fathers had, and their fathers before them. No amount of instruction could take the place of experience. Learn early or die young.

  Daylight was short, but crisp snow and a clear sky promised good sledding. The plan was simple. Follow the river to Gabriel’s father’s old camp, where he sometimes spent the night when out on the trapline. “Me, I know the way pretty good.” It would be the longest trip the boys had dared on their own. Jean-Jacques had spent weeks coaching his pair of shaggy pups in the commands every sled dog needed to know and obey. Gabriel already had his own team of four dogs. They had run their six dogs together on short training runs, with many upsets and much yelling, frequent laughter and occasional blows, almost daily since the snow came. Now was time for a real run, to test their skills as dog-mushers.

  The dogs yipped in excited chorus as they strained and leaped in their traces. The boys loaded the anchored sled as they had seen their fathers do, with a small bag holding smoked meat and a pouch of tea for themselves and a few frozen fish for their dogs, all fastened under the heavy elk-hide robe. Gabriel cast off the anchoring line and the sled was airborne as the dogs leaped into action, yanking the traces tight, yipping in joyous chorus.

  Sundogs stalked across the light-filled sky. The snow glare stung the boys’ squinting eyes and filled them with tears. Their cheeks glazed over with rime. The cold air bit their nostrils. Only the wolverine fur trimming their hoods made the cold bearable.

  There was no holding the dogs until they had run off their first excitement. Gabriel perched on the sleigh while Jean-Jacques straddled the runners behind him. After the first wild dash the dogs settled down to trail stride, and the boys took turns riding and running. The silence was complete except for the swishing of sleigh runners, the panting of the dogs, and the boys’ occasional shouted commands to alert the lead dog. The dogs were happy to run, to follow the hard-packed trail, easy running even for this half-trained team. Through the curving path of the riverbed, sheltered by willow thickets along the banks, they had only to watch for occasional patches of ice bared by the wind.

  Two hours passed, then three. The dogs had slowed their pace now, no longer keen on following the trail merely for the joy of running but still eager to travel. The boys were further from the camp than they had ever gone before. Jean-Jacques imagined himself running like this forever, through frozen land and intense cold, discovering adventure. Their team had never run so well.

  But the dogs needed a break and so did the boys. They stopped, made a small fire, broke off chunks of frozen fish for each of their animals. The dogs, curled at ease in the snow, lay panting in their harness while the boys ate a quick lunch of cold bannock and dried meat, washed down with tea. They debated briefly about whether to go on or turn back, but quickly agreed that t
hey should go a little farther.

  Jean-Jacques burrowed under the elk hide for his turn riding on the sled. It was almost warm beneath the robe. Gabriel’s voice, encouraging or correcting the dogs, blended with the hiss of the runners. Jean-Jacques’s eyes closed.

  A sudden lurch of the sled awoke him, Gabriel’s frantic shout coming at the same instant. “On by! On by! Devil dog, stop!”

  Jean-Jacques struggled to free his head from the heavy robe. A hare startled up by the approaching team had caught the attention of one of the dogs. Maybe an alert driver, or an experienced lead dog, could have pulled the team back. But not now, not with this team. Too late for anything but to hold on and hope. If the dogs got themselves tangled in brush and pulled to a stop, the boys might still get out of this debacle before the harness was ruined and the sled destroyed.

  The jackrabbit bounded desperately over rock-hard snowbanks, heading up a long coulee stretching out from the river valley. The hare was fueled by terror, the dogs by bloodlust. Nothing could stop the chase now. Jean-Jacques realized he was in for a spine-tingling ride, and hampered by the robe, could do nothing but hold on, icy pellets stinging his eyes, thin, thorny branches slapping his cheeks. Gabriel’s shouts were fainter, farther away.

  The sled jerked over a hard-packed drift, turned in mid-air, and came down on its side with a bone-jarring thump. Jean-Jacques flew free from his elk-hide cocoon a split second before his head made contact with the rock.

  He opened his eyes, then squeezed them shut against pain that stabbed through his brain. Cold outdoor air had been replaced by a warmth that smelled of wood smoke, tanned leather and roasting meat. He became aware of low voices. At first, he imagined it was his mother speaking, the cadence and tone had a lulling familiarity. But as his head cleared, he realized that the voices came from strangers, a couple of women chatting by the fire. He struggled to sit up. Around him, firelight flickered on tipi walls.