The midday sun was warm now. The leaves of some of the poplars fluttered in the light breeze. The pristine fragrance of the balsam mingled with the rich smell of the trout frying in bacon grease. Two gulls flew over to spy upon the source of the excitement. Some of the men, seduced by the aroma, became restless in their hunger. The meal was ready an hour after the party had landed on the rock.
Basil dished up a plate and handed it to the man who had been in his bow. Just as the man took the plate, there was a tap on his shoulder. The fellow looked around in surprise.
It was Angus, with a sly smile on his face. “Manadj kâpinaman âbwi nongom,” he said, handing him a beautifully crafted birch paddle.
“What did he say?” he asked Jocko.
“He says, ‘Be careful with the paddle this time,’” Jocko said.
They all ate with great satisfaction and to repletion. Someone remarked that it was lucky that the trout were so large. They sat quietly after they finished. The water in the tea pail, suspended from the cooking stick, was now boiling. Ted asked Jocko if he should put some tea in the water. This caused one of the other men to ask, “Didn’t Indians get tea from the woods years ago?”
“Anin gai ikitotc?” Angus asked Jocko. Jocko translated for him.
Angus put his fork on his plate, and then set the plate down. He turned to his right and with both hands plucked the leaves of the Labrador tea plant. He rose and put them in the boiling water before Ted could find the tea in the grub box.
They drank their tea in silence. Some of the men had already mentioned the wild profusion of blueberries. Now it was Ted who said, “If we only had a good blueberry pie.”
“Anin gai ikitotc?” Angus said to Jocko.
“Wi midjin minan tebate, gai ikito,” he told Angus.
Angus thought a moment. He said to Jocko, “Apic ot ickva minikwewatc, ta minikek.”
Now it was Ted’s turn to ask, “What did he say?”
“He says that when you finish your tea, you should all go pick some blueberries.”
In a few minutes, the three men walked off to the blueberries, one using the clean bean pot as a container, the other two employing two large hats.
“Ki ta andawabandan wîkwâs,” Angus said to Basil, and the latter dutifully walked off to the downed birch log to cut out a clean sheet of birch-bark.
Angus mixed flour and lard. Basil returned with the sheet of birch-bark. He laid it down on the ground in front of Angus, the clean, tawny interior surface facing up.
Angus had two big balls of dough, but then he stopped. “Obotei ni manesin,” he said to Jocko. Jocko called to one of the tourists in the blueberry patch, “He needs that whiskey bottle I saw you put in your little bag this morning.”
Angus rolled out the dough carefully with the bottle on the bark sheet. He placed one deftly in the greased bottom of the largest frying pan. When the men gave him their blueberries, he put their berries in the pan, sprinkled them with sugar, and then put the other dough on top. Alternately propping the pan against the fire and holding it over, the pie was soon done.
Chapter Two
I
“We have to find Shane, Edith,” the priest insisted.
The Cree woman said nothing. She looked uncomfortably at the floor.
The priest hesitated. He knew it was no use speaking long to the woman. He had already explained to her why her little six-year-old son had to go to residential school in North Bay. It was good for him to receive an education.
Edith Bearskin lived on the reservation in Moose Factory, an island in the mouth of the Moose River not far from James Bay. Her small house was government-constructed, plain, standardized, but with electricity. Now, as she listened to the priest, she repaired a large fish net in the kitchen and kept one eye on the pot on the stove. She had just put smoked moose meat in the pot to make stew.
“Where is he?” the priest asked.
“He went in the woods,” she said.
“Do you know where he went?” the priest asked.
The woman said nothing. The priest suspected that her silence meant that she had some idea of the little boy’s whereabouts.
“When did he go?”
“Last night, I think,” she said.
“Last night!” the priest exclaimed. “He’s only six years old.”
“He’s been in the woods by himself before.”
“I’m going to have to ask your brother to go find him. It’s nine o’clock. The train for North Bay leaves at four this afternoon.”
Edith’s brother found little Shane within two hours.
II
Shane was tall for his age, but he still had a baby face. His pudgy cheeks and high cheekbones crowded his eyes into slits. When he laughed, as he often did, the eyes virtually closed. His close-cropped black hair shone in the light from the railcar window as the car rumbled south from James Bay.
“What are they going to do with us?” a frightened little Shane asked his small friend seated next to him in the railcar. He spoke in Cree.
“I don’t know,” the other little boy said.
The car was full of Indian children, all about the same age, all going to residential school for Indian children in North Bay. The priest from Moose Factory accompanied them. An Indian woman came along as well.
The priest looked at the children, all of whom he knew. Then he spoke to the Indian woman, who did church work for him.
“You know,” he said, and there was a sadness in his voice, “I’m not happy about this.” The priest was speaking in Cree, though quietly, so the children would not overhear.
The woman nodded in agreement.
The priest went on in Cree. “These are happy children. At least, they’re happy in Moose Factory. They’re not happy here.” He looked at all the sad faces. In any other circumstances, any other place, doing any other thing, there would be happy Indian children before him.
The woman’s silence showed her sympathy with what he was saying.
“If you would have told me that I could wipe the smiles from the faces of thirty Indian children, all at the same time, I would not have believed it.”
The train chugged along the Abitibi River in the August twilight. Those gazing out of the railcar could see an endless azure carpet of blueberries along the tracks and into the woods.
The priest continued thinking aloud. “These kids get so excited when they’re visiting Moosonee and the train comes in. If they were on this train for any other reason than to spend nine months in North Bay at the school, they’d be bubbling.”
They rode in silence for a time. The priest went up and down the aisle, trying to raise some cheer in the children. He had no luck. He asked the woman whether she’d like a tea. When she said yes, he poured tea for both of them from his thermos bottle.
He had learned the Cree language at the seminary. He practiced it in years of hard study at Moose Factory. Now he preferred to speak in the language because of the beauty that he came to appreciate very much.
“Schooling is good for them. But they don’t see that at their age, and they don’t feel it. In my mind, I believe it is necessary. In my heart, I feel as sad as they do. Maybe more. Maybe more, when I look at their faces. The happiness that you see on their faces when they’re in Moose Factory has made that island a much happier place for me.”
The priest had some thoughts that he did not want to communicate to the Cree woman, for fear of making her more discouraged. He had misgivings about the school itself, but he did not want to undercut confidence in the school by voicing them.
The curriculum — a more appropriate word did not come to his mind — was lacking. It was not appropriate in some ways for Indian children, he felt. And then there was Father Earl. Father Earl was not the man to head the residential school. The priest from Moose Factory knew many priests who were good men and whom he respected. Father Earl was not one of those men.
Most of the children — not excited, not playing with each other — managed
to sleep through the night on the train to North Bay. The train pulled into the North Bay station in the early morning.
Father Earl met the group of children at the station.
III
“Don’t you dare speak Indian! Don’t you dare!” the nun shouted at six-year-old Shane. The little boy shrank in his desk just as the nun swung the leather strap. He did not pull his hands back quickly enough to keep the brutal strap from searing them.
“You’re the worst one in the class!” the nun exclaimed, nearly hysterical. “I tell you not to speak Indian and you continue to speak it! I’m going to make an example of you!” She stood for a moment trying to catch her breath. She wanted to tell the class that English was God’s language — perhaps that would help — but she wasn’t absolutely sure that it was, so she might have to go to confession to absolve herself if she said it. But this little Shane insisted on speaking his language, and she would have to make an example of him, or she’d lose the whole class to the Cree language.
There was no way for Shane to tell her that he did not continue to speak Indian only to provoke her. He felt alone at the school, very alone. He did not have his mother. The only ones he had were his little friends. In two months at the school, he knew very few words of English — not enough to speak to his friends. He did not feel so alone when he spoke to them in Indian.
“Now!” the nun said, looking at little Shane cowering in his seat, “Are you going to speak in English only from now on! Answer me! Answer me! Answer me, I tell you!”
Shane, very fearful, trembling, said nothing. In his fear, he felt as though he had lost the power of speech.
His terror mounted as the nun moved even closer to him and drew back the leather strap in wild anger. Now all the children in the room were cringing in fear at what was going to happen to their little friend. “Speak! Speak! Speak!” she shouted. “Tell me that you’re going to speak only in English!”
Little Shane looked fearfully at the nun towering above him, and he told her that he would speak English only. He told her in the only language he knew. “Ningat aganecam eta,” he said timidly.
The nun exploded, pulling Shane’s hands from his torso and whipping them as hard as she could with the leather strap. As the blood covered his little fingers, a flood of tears came to his eyes.
IV
The nun who put the little boys to bed in the same room each night was friendly.
“Now,” she said, “you must be quiet and not talk when you go to bed so you can get a good night’s sleep. You can visit with your chums in the morning. So you say your night-time prayers and think how much fun it will be to see your friends in the morning.”
The little boys dutifully tucked themselves under the covers of their beds after they had knelt by the beds for prayers.
Before the nun turned the lights off, she smiled and said, “Always remember what I told you about not drinking any water after supper. It’s no fun to have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.”
But Shane had drunk water after supper, and he did have to go to the bathroom in the dark, something he did not enjoy.
Late at night, Shane rose from his little bed and walked quietly to the large boys’ bathroom. He wasn’t afraid in the woods in the dark, but this big, old, sepulchral school building was something else. He’d heard of ghosts, doubted they were in the woods, but he wouldn’t be surprised if they haunted old, dark buildings like this one. He turned on the light in the bathroom and walked to a urinal. Just as he opened the fly to his pyjama bottoms, he heard footsteps on the other side of the door. Adult footsteps. The door opened slowly. It was Father Earl.
Shane was nervous; the urine would not come. He expected Father Earl to scold him, but it was just the opposite. “Well, Shane,” the priest said. “Got to go tinkle in the middle of the night, eh? Here, let me help you.” He walked towards Shane.
Shane, still unable to urinate, looked first to one side and then to the other. Just as the priest was about to touch him, he darted around him to the right, ran through the door back to his bed and pulled the covers over his head, his heart pounding rapidly.
After some minutes, when he felt his heart beating more slowly, he peeked with one eye out from the covers. Father Earl was standing, backlit, in the doorway to the dormitory. The priest turned and walked away.
Some days later, the boy in the next bed became distant and uncommunicative. Shane tried to speak to him. Even in Indian, the boy would not answer. Shane tried several times, gently, but he still could get no response from the boy. Shane did not know what had happened to him, nor did he know what to do about it. But he felt that it had something to do with Father Earl.
V
In June, Shane and the other children took the train back to Moose Factory. The priest from Moose Factory was at the North Bay station. Shane felt relieved to see him.
As he rode the train north towards James Bay, he thought about how happy he would be to get back home. His mother was warmth and every good thing he had known. Moose Factory was his home — not North Bay, not the residential school. There was only one cloud that hung over his journey back to his people.
He would have to return to the residential school in August.
Chapter Three
I
The small log cabin at Ottawa Lake was a rude one, though there was a neatness about it. It measured five paces on one side, seven paces on the other. The wall logs were not notched at the corners but were stacked horizontally in six-foot lengths and spiked to eight-foot uprights every six feet. The neat roof was made of second-hand boards over which tar paper had been laid. The windows were single panes of glass set in the window openings with small board frames. The cabin had not cost more than two hundred dollars, yet it gave the impression of having been built with skill.
The cabin was set in a small cove. Tall black spruce, their lower branches cut off, sheltered the cabin. The point that helped to form the cove hid from sight the Ottawa Lake lumber camp, two miles down the lake and on the opposite shore.
Angus Wawati was skinning a beaver inside the cabin. His tool was a short knife with a round, broad, very sharp tip. His skilful strokes sliced the fat and sinew from the pelt without cutting the skin. When he finished, the skin was so clean that it looked as though it had never had fat and sinew attached to it.
His daughter, five-year-old Theresa, was watching him. She was small, with fine little features that looked as though they were done in porcelain. She smiled frequently and when she jumped up and down, her straight, black hair seemed to do so too.
Theresa alternately smiled and talked to her father Angus as he strung the beaver pelt on the round stretching-rack made of alder branches. Occasionally she played with a little wooden toy that her father had made her. Her brother and sister were outside helping their mother tan the hide of a moose that Angus had shot the week before.
The inside of the cabin was simple. There was a wood stove in the middle. A sink under the window drained only to the outside. The water pail was next to it. They fetched the drinking water directly from Ottawa Lake. Angus and his wife had a bed in the corner of the cabin; Theresa and her brother and sister slept together in a smaller bed. Clothes hung on nails, fixed head-high in the wall logs.
It was late October, cool and overcast, with a sky that threatened rain. Theresa’s mother had lashed the moose hide out on the huge hardwood rack to stretch and dry as she beat it with a hardwood club. Now the rain started; she laughed at Theresa and said that she’d go no farther with her work today. Next time she was able to work the hide, she would once again have to wring it out and then begin the stretching, drying, and beating process. For the time being, it would soak in the October rain.
“Help me make supper,” Theresa’s mother said to her in Algonquin. “Will you go get the moose meat from the spring?”
And Theresa walked off, smiling proudly that her mother asked her to help with the supper. Her little brother and sister were playing by
the water’s edge, pretending that they were fishing. “Come in out of the rain!” their mother called to them and, laughing, they ran into the cabin.
Theresa’s mother used the large butcher knife to slice slabs of moose meat from the big chunk that Theresa had brought in from the spring. “Ki ta pakwejiganike,” her mother said to her. Theresa was thrilled that her mother would rely on her to make the bannock. Along with the woods and the animals, her mother and father were all of the world she knew. Her mother relied on her to do things, important things, like make bread, though Theresa was only six years old. When her mother finished tanning the hide, it was Theresa’s job to go into the woods alone to gather punk wood in a pack. Sometimes the punk wood had to be poplar; sometimes it had to be cedar, depending upon the colour Theresa’s mother wanted the hide to be. Theresa was responsible for knowing which was which because the smoking of the hide was very important. She took her brother and sister with her so they could learn, and the two little ones then thought they were grown up.
Angus Wawati was gone during the summer months to guide for white fishermen at Brascoupé Hunting and Fishing Club, far from Ottawa Lake. He hitched a ride with a lumber truck down the bush road more than a hundred miles to his guiding job. Because of the difficulty of coming and going, Angus remained guiding all summer, only to return to his cabin and family on Ottawa Lake for the fall trapping season and the winter.
“Is it today that the white man — the fur buyer — will come?” Angus’s wife asked him. She was beginning to fry the moose meat in a large pan; Theresa had the big bannock loaf frying in another large frying pan alongside.
Angus was stretching a beaver pelt on the small drying-frame. The fur buyer would take only the beaver pelts that had already been stretched and dried. “He said he would come today.”
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