Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada's Past

by Tantoo Cardinal

  “In summer, all the flowers are swollen with sap and honey for the bees, the butterflies, and the hummingbirds,” little Anaië thinks. “The Moon of the Long Snows is the Mother of All Grasses.”

  “I feel cold in all my parts and I am beginning to wonder if I shall ever be warm again. We must go forward despite the frost nipping at our heels. I have got to move faster or I am going to fall into the snow and go to sleep like the earth. Kateri needs me … indeed, is counting on me,” Jérémie whispers very low.

  “Friends, when we come back again to the Blessing Path, we must be sure to bring seeds to scatter as a treat for the birds,” David says.

  Sniffing the air, Jérémie makes a sudden stop.

  “Someone has made a smoky fire, a fire of smoke!”

  The chapel has just appeared at the bend in the meadow, surrounded by great pines, heavy with snow, that bend over its roof. Silver birches make a shining border against a dark background of fir trees.

  “You can see footsteps in the snow,” observes Tobie. “Two people have passed this way.”

  “There is a light within,” murmurs David.

  Now forgetting the frosty chill, the children, the young people, drink deeply from a sudden wellspring of invisible warmth and dash toward the great door, a door that must weigh several hundred pounds … Amazingly, it weighs nothing at all: it is only a couple of planks held together by a few crosspieces, easy to open. Jérémie tugs with all his might but the door resists. David comes to lend a hand, but to no avail. Holding on with all the strength in its lintels, the door utters a kind of moan.

  “Listen!” says little Anaië, “the door is speaking!”

  Rooted in its resistance, the door emits a long, long shriek. Jérémie and David retreat, a bit afraid.

  “It is saying that we must not be too hasty … We must pause for a moment,” little Anaië adds.

  A second later, after a push that comes from within, the door finally opens.

  “Well, you’ve taken your own sweet time,” says Kateri, who is standing in the doorway.

  She spreads wide her arms to welcome them. The children, the young people, hesitate between outside and in, between winter and sanctuary, surprised and uneasy, all save David, who goes to church with his parents.

  Quite close to where the altar rises up and dominates the remainder of the space, someone has left a thick straw mattress on the ground, on the pine floorboards. On the altar steps themselves, placed at different heights, can be seen tall sure-footed candlesticks from which warmly coloured beeswax candles spring upward. Slender in form, they rise up in space to be transformed into a gentle light. Far above, their flames flicker.

  In the half-light surrounding the altar, several statues can be seen, endowed by the candlelight with a pulsating presence. A few feet from the statue of Saint Francis of Assisi, his arms filled with birds singing with him his canticle “Brother Sun,” a little pot-bellied stove pours forth a lovely warmth. The children, the young people, are sitting down. They have made a circle between the great candlesticks and the pot-bellied stove. Before beginning on her tale, which she tells with great effect, Kateri feeds the fire. Into its fiery maw she tosses sticks that she takes from a bundle made up of branches, slender pieces of wood, and twigs. The fire crackles, scented with the odours of the forest, and the flames leap up. As well, a light flows from the fire, and even if the air is still cold in the sanctuary, it seems easy enough to have a warm heart.

  They wait for Kateri to begin her tale. No one asks a question, not even Jérémie, who feigns a certain detachment. Kateri is almost twelve years old, and when she is calm, as she is tonight, when nothing appears to shadow her heart, she becomes brilliant and translucent. When she wants to, she can make of herself a mirror for those who look at her. She knows how to reflect back to you what it is that lies hidden even deeper than your own being, the profound reality of the world of your soul. If she trusts you, she may even allow you to dive to the bottom of her heart, but you may go no farther than she wishes you to. Her friends find the simple recollection of her name extraordinarily invigorating. There are times when Kateri’s energy runs so strong that you feel you are floating in her wake. She has hair as dark as a crow’s wing, a dusky complexion, and eyes the colour of obsidian. When you see her, you cannot but think that this little girl has, like the majestic black pines that ceaselessly thrust themselves toward the sky, the capacity to grow indefinitely. They rise and taper as they rise until they form a fine point in the sky.

  As Kateri continues her narrative, Tobie observes his friends. They are all hanging on her every word, especially David, whose face, at certain points in the tale, is crossed by shafts of light.

  Tobie thinks he can remember that David once told him that in his family there was a long tradition of storytelling. “The finest gift that you can make to friends or guests is the enchantment of a good story. You must take care always to have one ready.”

  “My friends,” muses Tobie, “are more alive than all the people I run across in the course of the day. I wonder sometimes if all those people have not come from the graveyard, dressed up in clothes that make them only look as though they were human.”

  Now that Kateri has finished her story, comments and questions explode.

  “Oh, yes, Jérémie, my father, the peacekeeper, raised his hand against me one too many times, that hand of his as large as a great snow shovel, but my mother held back his arm!”

  “The things you’ve told us have lodged themselves close to my heart,” stammers Jérémie, mist in his eyes.

  “This meeting in the middle of the woods when it was already growing dark is … miraculous!” David exclaims. “Especially since Brother Léon never goes out at night because of his failing sight.”

  “Never mind his failing sight! He was the one who spied me in the first place,” Kateri says with a laugh.

  “No one in the world is more practical than the invisible,” muses little Anaië aloud.

  “What did he say to you?”

  “David, he asked me why I was crying. I said that I never cried, even though I was a little girl. He smiled sweetly and told me, ‘My child, sometimes the heart’s clear vision is better than uncertain eyesight such as mine. And sometimes too such vision can even be enhanced by a kind of magnificent discernment that allows the recognition of all kinds of tears—tears of despair, tears of compassion, tears of love … and tears of repentance.’

  “Then I asked him, ‘Brother Léon, how do tears appear to you?’ He replied, ‘My dear child, they always look to me like sometimes shadowy, sometimes luminous rivers on their way to losing themselves, in what unnamed gulfs I do not know.’”

  “Do you see him every day?” Jérémie wants to know.

  “Since he offered me this shelter, I see him once or twice a day. He brings me a bit to eat—some bread, a boiled egg, cold water.”

  “And what do you give him in exchange?” Jérémie cannot stop himself from asking, his voice thick with jealousy.

  “I give him our medicine for his poor eyes,” Kateri replies, without letting herself be troubled by the question.

  Turning toward little Anaië, Kateri gives her a medicine bag filled with aspen bark shavings.

  “There is enough medicine in there to cure my grandmother’s cataracts. I’m entrusting you with this bag…. You will give it to her. Don’t be afraid; she won’t say anything to my father.”

  Then she turns toward Tobie and hands him two little parcels containing a fragrant substance wrapped in birchbark.

  “Brother Léon and I have gathered balsam gum and black pine resin … This is for your mother’s lungs.”

  As he takes the presents of Brother Léon and Kateri, Tobie is confused and deeply moved. He has the idea that he has witnessed something extremely good, as good as a fount of tenderness, like a flame … Tobie is discovering universal interconnectedness, so often hidden by social falsehood.

  “If one day I have lost everything else, I
hope that I will never be without friends like you,” Tobie says.

  Now it is his turn to have misty eyes.

  “It is already time to go,” David exclaims regretfully. “Day is about to break.”

  “Tonight is the night of the Solstice,” little Anaië recalls.

  “We should meet again in the clearing,” Tobie suggests.

  “At the moment that the Moon of the Long Snows rises,” Anaië insists.

  “I shall be there,” promises Kateri.

  The marvellous door breathes a melancholy sigh as the children, the young people, pass under its lintel to return to a world seething with war.

  “I am a night crow. I am alone of my kind,” Kateri thinks as she closes the door with the sense that she is solitude’s chosen one.

  Outside, the snow swirls in flurries and the wind harvests it and shapes it into dunes. The children, the young people, walk along at a quick and joyous pace; then, all of a sudden, Jérémie seems to falter at the first difficulty and his gait, despite the encouragement of the others, becomes slower and slower. When he gets to the point where the ground begins to rise, Jérémie falls down and says he can go no farther.

  Anaië believes she can see Jérémie’s own thoughts moving about him. He wants to return to Kateri, but his thoughts are clotting together so powerfully that they seem to present an insurmountable obstacle. Anaië trembles as though Jérémie were about to fall to pieces before her eyes.

  “This is a unique moment, a most mysterious instant,” she calls silently to him. “If you are not deaf, go back to the chapel.”

  Jérémie at last gets up and, shaking his head, turns his steps with a light heart in the direction of the chapel. After following him with their eyes, the children, the young people, press on once again.

  At last they reach the clearing, where the children, the young people, separate with the sense of having passed a night of exceptional sweetness bathed in moonlight.

  Tobie makes haste to find his mother. Every morning, he makes her a nice hot cup of tea and a piece of toast and, on good days, even a dish of stewed fruit. After washing herself, his mother goes back to bed, already exhausted by the effort. Tobie hopes she has not coughed in the night, that she was able to slip into the sweet slowness of sleep.

  David’s parents, Anaië’s mother, and Jérémie’s father are not yet back from work. They are mercenary hands working by night in a factory making bombs and munitions, operating around the clock. The work is stupefying, exhausting, and dangerous. Everything there is so mean that it would be a mistake to speak of wages; they earned a pittance.

  White people have invented a word of hellish harshness to describe a certain form of labour in commerce and industry: “sweatshop.” But what sweat is this? Sweating blood in accordance with the system? In order to make their way in such establishments, mercenaries have to be ready to rip their own flesh into tatters when necessary as they graft thorns on their finger ends. Such a thing would cause the hinges of the earth to groan. But the soul understands, the soul that knows more than we do.

  From dusk to dawn, through the streets of the village, in its various spaces, in the forest openings, Kateri’s mother and father have searched for their older daughter. This is their ordeal and it seems that, as far as they are concerned, everything except what belongs to Kateri’s world has disappeared. An odd silence reigns between this father and this mother, a silence louder than all the sounds of the whole village. However much they cry out, the silence, the interminable silence, keeps them enclosed within the walls of their grief.

  “My daughter has disappeared into the glacial night and my heart violently contracts when I think of her, and I think of her all the time. I am a peacekeeper and I know what goes on in the villages and on the reserves. Death waits everywhere in his own particular way. I know that in most cases, Death goes only where he is allowed to go. Strangest of all is that, when Death is kept waiting at the door until the dying person is ready to go, Kateri is obstinate enough to slam the door in Death’s face. Kateri’s disappearance has brought my wife and me closer together … When I speak to her, I speak more gently … She listens to me very attentively, then she starts to cry once again. Someday, that little scourge will find out how many tears she has cost her mother. Her mother, a woman so proud that she has never asked anything of anyone, is now following me about like a beggar, while asking all those she passes for the charity of a mere hope.

  “I’m looking for my daughter. Listen! Look! Here she is in a photo. It was taken on her eleventh birthday. If you’ve come across her, you’d surely recognize her. Wouldn’t you? But it’s got so cold, you might have forgotten already … I know that my head is confused, my memories are all mixed up because of the cold. I beg you, look again at her face so you can engrave it on your memory. I’m leaving now, it’s so cold …Heat is a treasure we must keep safe … When you see my daughter, the one called Kateri, tell her that my house contains an endless source of warmth.

  “My wife is begging someone to grant her the alms of a single hope for our future, she has told me. I wonder whether anyone can hear her as she is crying so hard. I am holding her by the hand because she cannot see very clearly, thanks to her tears.

  “Before my daughter disappeared, I rarely cried. So I had a vast storehouse of tears inside me and I didn’t even know it. I should have cried more, I should have cried ahead of time, before the sorrow that is to come.

  “My wife looks as though she has aged ten years overnight. When she bends over those children who are sleeping wrapped up in newspaper, with their tears frozen to their cheeks and icicles in their hair, she looks as though her whole life has passed in a single moment. When I look around, with a poor horrified glance at the world, I feel that hell itself is spilling across the earth.

  “Wherever the children are, there is a stench of putrefaction, and the walls of even slightly obscure places are covered with horrible stains and running with freezing drops that make me think of my own tears …”

  “Husband, what have we done to our children? What have we done to our children?”

  When Kateri opens her eyes, it is daylight and Jérémie is standing at the foot of her straw mattress, with a pale smile on his lips. Kateri immediately understands what has happened in his heart and asks in a most gentle voice: “Jérémie, where is Chamia?”

  Chamia was Jérémie’s little dog, a dog that ran far and near and came back tirelessly … a dog that would travel the road a hundred times to come back to you. Jérémie understands that his little dog never tired because to Chamia, the road was never the same. He also believes that, with the aid of the full moon’s light, the little dog could see at a single glance the great procession of all the roads of the immense earth. Even that did not discourage the little dog—on the contrary, it only gave renewed strength to its heart and legs.

  “Some day,” thinks Jérémie, “I too will be stronger than the road, stronger than exhaustion.”

  “Where is Chamia?” Kateri asks again. “We never see you together any more.”

  “My father killed him,” Jérémie answers in a muffled voice. “He said he was sick, that he was too old … He put a shot through his head. My father was lying! He’s a liar! Chamia was only seven years old, not old for a little dog who was never sick.”

  A shiver comes over Kateri, a shiver that looks like a shudder of dread.

  “Kateri, I’m afraid. When my father looks at me … I am thirteen years old and I can’t help wondering if he isn’t figuring my age like the age of a dog! I don’t understand any more. Everything he does or says, everything that bursts out of his mouth, seems cruel and dangerous.”

  “We have to feed the fire,” says Kateri. “Later, we’ll go collect branches and small logs. It should be a fine day.”

  In the house where Tobie lives, a woman has just spoken the same words.

  “It should be a fine day, a day newly washed by the moon and the sun, a radiant day. I hear Tobie in the kitchen … I
smell bread toasting … My son is good and he is brave. It is thanks to him that I can find the strength to grit my teeth and keep on going. I know that the sun will one day rise on a better day.”

  On the reserve, a man crazed with rage and grief has come to knock on the door of the house belonging to Kateri’s father. He is using the butt of his gun. It seems as though he wants to burst it into a million pieces. Just when it seems that it is on the verge of giving up the ghost, the door opens and there stands a man, also holding a gun.

  “You bastard, give me back my son!” Jérémie’s father bellows at the man standing in front of him.

  “I don’t know where your son is. I didn’t even know he too was gone,” Kateri’s father answers, pointing his gun at the father of his daughter’s best friend.

  “You’ve put Jérémie in jail in revenge for your daughter’s disappearance!”

  “I don’t put children in jail!”

  “You’re just lying! I want to beat you up!”

  “My sons, I have two objections,” says a voice from afar that is speaking as it comes closer. “In the first place, you are going to hurt yourselves; in the second, I don’t see what good will come of your putting a bullet in your bodies.”

  It is the voice of an Elder. The news has spread like wildfire through the reserve, and door after door opens as the Elders walk with solemn and deliberate steps toward the two men who are about to kill each other.

  “What are we going to do with you when you are dead?” one grandmother asks, her throat trembling. “You are neither hare nor rabbit.”

  “If you want to try out your guns, pick a target about the same size as you are … If you hit it, let the other guy know,” a grandfather says.

  “When our children disappear, our duty is to bring them back home, offering them peace and justice, love and beauty. And no quarrelling on their account,” says another grandmother.

  “I am searching for my daughter day and night …”