Speak to Me in Indian

by David Gidmark

  He put the axe head at the centre of the top end of the log. He hit it hard with the wooden mallet. The log began to split. He put one of the wooden wedges in the split. Then he hit it with the wooden mallet. The log split easily. He continued splitting the log into quarters and then into eighths.

  Shane stopped working suddenly and stood up. Theresa heard the faraway squealing at the same instant he did. “It’s coming from over there,” she said, pointing along the flank of the hill that they were on.

  They walked through the trees and underbrush, over a small rise, and then into a shallow ravine. “A beaver’s been caught in a trap,” Shane said, even before they were upon the animal.

  The year-old beaver was emitting excruciating squeals. “His paw has been ripped in the trap,” Shane said as they approached. They sensed the wariness of other animals at the beaver’s showing its formidable pain. “It will chew its paw off if we don’t get it out.”

  He started speaking soothingly to the beaver so that he could approach. “Now, little fellow, you quiet down, and I’ll be able to open the trap and let you go.”

  But the beaver, already in great pain, became ever more anxious at the presence of the big animal that was Shane. “We won’t hurt you,” Shane said. “Take it easy and calm down, and I’ll take the trap off your leg.”

  Despite Shane’s soothing talk, the beaver was still squealing. Shane approached and bent down towards the beaver. He extended his hand slowly in the little beaver’s direction. The beaver leapt up toward Shane’s hand, snapping his teeth together. His teeth would have taken off one or more of Shane’s fingers had not the trap held the beaver back. More than one trapper in Moose Factory had lost a finger to a beaver.

  Theresa came up to Shane’s side and began speaking quietly to the little beaver. “Kwe, amikons. Onzsm ki maw. Kiga mino pimatis; wibate kiga pimose wewenint.” As she continued speaking in Indian, the little beaver began to calm down. Soon he was quiet, and Shane pried the trap open, releasing the beaver and allowing him to amble down the stream bed.

  They returned to the yellow birch that had to be split. “I’ll go make tea,” Theresa announced, and she walked back to the truck and left Shane to finish splitting the log.

  She cut a fresh six-foot stick with her axe. She propped it up in the air diagonally with large stones at one end. The end that was up in the air was over the fireplace. She went to a nearby stream and filled a large tin can with water. This she hung on the high end of the cooking stick and over the fireplace. She made the fire and boiled the tea in this.

  Shane walked up and sat next to the fire and waited for the tea and lunch.

  With a small one-hand bucksaw, Theresa sawed a small dead spruce into two-foot lengths. She laid several side to side in the small fire, and these became the cooking grate that would support her large frying pan. Into the pan, she put cut-up potatoes and onions and sliced bologna.

  “How would you like to be one of those fancy lawyers who has lunch every day in the Ritz-Carlton?” Shane asked.

  Theresa laughed heartily and then the joyous laugh evolved into a broad smile. “This is fine.” And she brushed her long braids back over her shoulders and took a bite of the bologna and sipped her tea. Her gaze slowly panned the leafless woods, as if trying to spot a partridge, a deer or a moose, or whatever would turn up.

  “Are there moose or deer here?” she asked Shane.

  “Both,” he said. “I saw moose scat and a rubbing made by a deer. And you see here…” he snapped the top off a two-foot maple shoot, “… see how the deer have browsed on the new growth.”

  She took the twig in her hand. Shane always delighted in her curiosity when he pointed something out to her.

  “This must be the northern limit of the deer and the southern limit of the moose. You don’t often see them together.”

  They sat for a while, quietly drinking tea and looking at the bush.

  “When is your law school examination?” Shane asked.

  “Two weeks.”

  “Are you going to pass?”

  And Theresa laughed that happy, abandoned laugh that was part of her way of looking at the world — but that told Shane neither whether she was laughing at the examination because she felt it would be ridiculously easy, nor whether she believed she had no chance whatsoever of passing it.

  “Delores said there’s going to be another demonstration at Barrière Lake in a few days,” Theresa said. “They can’t get them to stop clear-cutting and to stop spraying herbicides on wild blueberries. So they’re going to put some more pressure on the government.”

  “What did Delores say they were going to do?”

  “She didn’t say. She said she couldn’t let out information ahead of time, but she said it would help if we were there.”

  “Are we going?” Shane asked.

  “Yes.”

  When they finished lunch, Shane took a whetstone and honed the axe to a razor edge. Then he returned to the yellow birch log.

  Gripping the axe handle next to the head, he held one end of the split yellow birch pieces on his shoulder, the other end on the ground. He shaped each piece with the axe until it was square and about the size of the long stick he would eventually bend to form the snowshoe frame. He partially finished each piece in the woods so that it would be less weight to carry back to the truck and haul back to Montreal.

  When he finished forming the pieces, and Theresa had packed up the grub box and axes and wedges, they returned to the truck and started off for Montreal.

  Chapter Nine

  I

  “Something tells me this is going to get ugly,” Shane said.

  Theresa looked worried.

  Shane pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the road behind a line of parked cars, Indians’ cars from the looks of them.

  “What happened?” Theresa asked.

  Shane stood on the front hood of the truck and looked ahead. “This is the bridge at Camatose. I see a backhoe. The Indians must have brought it up from Barrière Lake. They took the dirt from the side of the bank and piled it on the bridge in the middle of the highway. This is going to be interesting — the only highway going north.”

  Shane and Theresa arrived after the last scoopful of dirt had been dumped on the middle of the road at the bridge. The bridge was the only way to cross the river; there was no ditch. Three or four cars were now stopped on the roadway at the pile, and the stream of traffic assured that scores of cars and trucks would be backed up fast.

  It was an unusually hot day for late April.

  “The white people are going to love this,” Shane said, “There’s usually a strong wind blowing over the bridge. There’s no air moving now.”

  “And the mosquitoes are starting to come out,” Theresa said. “Let’s walk up and see if we can find Delores.”

  They walked along the line of Indian cars and trucks parked on the shoulder of the road. The line of vehicles backed up on the highway was growing longer by the minute.

  “There’s Delores!” Theresa exclaimed happily.

  Delores was three cars ahead in the line. Just then she turned, saw Theresa and Shane and ran to Theresa and held her.

  “Hi!” she said, smiling broadly. She and Theresa smiled happily at each other.

  Delores was in her late twenties, had a very pretty face and extremely beautiful black hair. However, the whole effect was much diminished by the fact that she was at least fifty pounds overweight, and her face was severely pockmarked.

  “How have you been?” Delores went on happily.

  Shane, who some people accused of not smiling enough, could not get over how much Indian women smiled, especially at each other. He was eager to find out what was going on, but the two women continued to stand there and smile at each other.

  Finally Theresa asked, “What is happening?”

  Delores leaned against the car. “Well, we went down to Ottawa and camped out on Parliament Hill. We had some canvas tents and teepees and stayed ther
e for a few days. We got lots of publicity, hut no results from Parliament or anybody else. But we had a lot of white people on our side when they put pictures in the paper of the RCMP hauling away old Indian women in scarves and long dresses. The minister of Indian Affairs finally came down but he couldn’t do anything either. Or maybe he wouldn’t do anything.”

  “Is that why you came here?” Theresa asked.

  “Yeah,” Delores said. “Maurice said he wanted to increase the pressure.”

  “Why did he pick the Camatose bridge?” Shane asked.

  “Well,” began Delores, “because it’s convenient; it’s close to Barrière Lake; it’s easy to shut off the road — they can’t get around into any ditch — and Maurice thinks he can put pressure on the government.”

  Shane looked around and in an instant agreed with Maurice Papati, the chief. The line on the south side of the bridge was now more than half a mile long. As he looked at the end of the file in the distance, he could see six or seven cars and trucks pulling to a stop. Pressure there would be, it was obvious; he just hoped that it did not create a violent reaction. Occasionally, cars honked but when they saw what the situation was, or heard what it was from motorists that had been stopped before them, they stopped honking, left their cars to talk to the other people, and swatted away the mosquitoes to the best of their ability.

  “How long does Maurice want to keep the road blocked?” Shane asked.

  “He said at least all day,” Delores recalled. “It depends a little on what happens. He wants the Indians to hand out flyers to the people telling them what we want. Then they will know what is going on, and the police will hear about it, and the government will know that we can go even further.”

  Shane saw an Indian passing by with flyers he was handing out to the cars. He motioned for one. He and Theresa read it together silently.

  The Barrière Lake Algonquin Band apologized for the great inconvenience that their blocking the bridge caused. They did it because it was necessary that some forceful action be taken quickly — they would do it if the government would not — to protect the natural environment and food resources of the band. They were a band that depended upon the immediate natural environment for sustenance, unlike bands further south who were surrounded by a white culture that had directly appropriated the resources and had even supplanted the Indian culture in those areas.

  The flyer went on — one version was in English, the other in French — in simple language to explain exactly what the Barrière Lake band wanted in La Vérendrye Wildlife Reserve.

  It explained that the reserve was about one hundred and twenty miles north to south, fifty miles east to west, and that there were no year-long white inhabitants in this area.

  The government gave the lumber company cutting rights in this area and then exercised no intelligent supervision over the cutting. The company made vast clear-cuts which the company and the government worked hard to keep from the eyes of the public. Motorists travelling along the main highway in the reserve never saw them. They were at all times hidden by a belt of trees. An offer was made in the flyer to drive any interested motorist one and a half miles from the Camatose Bridge to a place where a clear-cut was at least several miles across.

  As part of a rather strange program to plant new trees, the government sprayed strong herbicides on large areas of blueberries in the bush on the reserve. The idea was that these areas were planted with seedlings, and the herbicides were designed to kill competing growth and favour the seedlings. But the herbicides were sprayed on the blueberries (which grew best in cut-over areas) and thereby jeopardized an Indian food source. The blueberries ware also a source of income, as the Barrière Algonquin sold large quantities of them to wholesalers in season.

  The wood that sold best on the market was softwood — black spruce, the other spruces, and the various pines. The market was the ravenous appetite the American newspapers seemed to have for newsprint. What that meant, in short, for the area was that some good stands of maple and birch that grew in La Vérendrye were actually unprofitable. Incredulous lumberjacks who couldn’t actually believe what they were called to do were told to go into the bush, only three miles from Camatose, and cut healthy birch and maple trees. Whence they would be bulldozed into piles and burned. No firewood from them. No boards. Nothing. The idea was simply to clear the land so softwood seedlings could be planted.

  The flyer went on to explain how the government had opened up moose hunting in La Vérendrye to white hunters twenty years before, on the promise that it would be made obligatory for these same hunters to hire Barrière Lake guides, and how after a number of years the government succumbed to the pressure of the white hunters who said that they now knew the territory, and it was not right to require the extra expense of Indian guides. The government gave in. And this meant that the Barrière Lake Algonquin were now competing for meat with white hunters from Pennsylvania, Montreal, and Ottawa. The latter were people who could conveniently supply themselves with meat from the IGA.

  The flyer then called for a number of clear objectives: consultation with the Indians over clear-cutting and the spraying of herbicides on wild-blueberry areas, and return of La Vérendrye to the exclusive use of the Indians for the purposes of trapping and hunting, though the white people would still be allowed to fish.

  Chapter Ten

  I

  “Hello,” Shane said, as Maurice Papati walked past him in the line of vehicles.

  “Hello,” the young chief said to Shane. They had met only once, briefly.

  Theresa also smiled at the chief. “He’s a big man,” Shane observed, as Papati walked through the crowd and everyone turned to look at him. More than one took a few steps back. “People think I’m big,” said Shane, who was six feet one inch tall and one hundred ninety-five pounds. “That man’s a giant.”

  Though Maurice Papati was only six feet three inches tall and two hundred thirty-five pounds, his big-boned structure and visible strength made him tower over the other men.

  “Salut, Jean-Pierre!” Papati called, as he walked up to the man rising from the driver’s seat of a Sûreté du Québec car.

  “Oui. Maurice. Qu’est-ce qui se passe?”

  “Une petite démonstration, Jean-Pierre. Ni plus ni moins,” Papati answered. Maurice Papati spoke with great familiarity with Jean-Pierre Boyer because he knew the Sûreté du Québec sergeant well. Whenever the provincial police had business in the Indian village, they stopped to see Chief Papati first. No sooner did they come to the door than Maurice would ask his wife to put the tea on and to bring out some bannock. Then he’d invite Jean-Pierre and his partner in and, over tea and bannock, they’d discuss whatever business it was that brought them to the village. And if the hour were late, Maurice would ask his wife if she would fry some moose steak. On more than one occasion, when Maurice made this request of his wife in Indian, he noticed the two law officers smile broadly as they recognized the only two words of Alqonquin they knew — monz wiias, moose meat. And it also had happened that Maurice Papati had gifted Jean-Pierre Boyer more than once with a rather large portion of moose meat to take home. Which in turn gave rise to Boyer’s habit of bringing a large turkey to the village on his visits.

  “These people,” said Boyer, and indicated what was by now a tremendously long line of cars. “are going to want to kill somebody.”

  “Je sais, Jean-Pierre,” Maurice averred, “I guess I would too if I was in the same position.”

  Jean-Pierre Boyer peered around at the vehicles, then north across the bridge where there was an equally long line. He was secretly amused that the Indians had so successfully fouled up the north-south traffic flow on Highway 117, the only highway through La Vérendrye.

  “We’re going to have to do something,” Boyer said.

  “What?”

  “Clear the road, first of all, and then make some arrests,” the policeman said. “How long had you people originally figured on blocking the highway?”

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sp; Maurice Papati explained, “Long enough to get some results. Long enough for Québec and Ottawa to understand that we mean business and that we can do this and more the next time.”

  “How long did you think that would be?”

  “A day should be enough,” Papati said. “After all, there’s a lot of traffic on the highway, and we didn’t think you’d sit around and let it back up.”

  “You thought right,” said Boyer.

  “We need a long enough time to hand out flyers to all these people so they can see our side of the situation, and we need time for the people from the newspapers to get here.”

  “Who do you expect?” Boyer asked.

  “The Montreal and Ottawa papers, UPI, AP, Reuters, Agence France-Presse. Some of them are here already and the rest will be arriving soon,” Papati said.

  “You people do your homework. The Val d’Or paper wasn’t good enough for you?” Boyer asked.

  “If you haven’t noticed, your government responds only to pressure, not reason or somebody’s bad situation. So we will have a little pressure come from outside the country and see what it does. People are sympathetic to Indians in other countries, you know.”

  Boyer began, “A lot of us are here too. But this is not the way to go about something,” he said, and his gaze panned the many scores of vehicles lined up on both sides of the bridge.

  “I don’t think this will take too long, and I don’t mean to make it more painful for everyone than it has to be,” Papati said.

  “By the way, Maurice,” Boyer began, in great clarity so that the chief would get the message, “it’s not my job to come here and keep these people quiet while you hand out flyers. It’s my job to get this highway opened again.”

  “I’m not asking you not to do your job,” said Maurice.

  “No, I know you’re not. And I’d like you to help me. I need your backhoe.”

  “I’d be glad to let you have it. But I’ve just come from the backhoe. The driver lost the key.”

  “Christ!” Boyer swore, “It might take me five hours to find one and get it down here from Val d’Or.”