“That should be enough time,” Maurice observed.
“And then there is the matter of arrests. As soon as I can get some help here, some of you people are going to go to jail.”
“Will you do me a favour?” Maurice asked.
“Maurice, if you try to bribe or influence a provincial policeman in the course of his duty, you’re going to face a charge a lot more serious than the disturbing-the-peace charge that this is going to bring you. You’ve been nice to me personally, but I can’t let that influence things.”
“I know you can’t leave here without making an arrest,” the chief allowed. “Arrest me. I’m the most visible one here, and the newspapers are going to focus on me. Arrest me and let the others go; and your supervisors will be happy. It will serve no purpose to arrest the others — especially the women and children.”
“I can’t promise that, Maurice.”
The two separated and, given the fact that there was no backhoe or bulldozer to clear the bridge or any other officers to help him with arrests, Jean-Pierre walked up and down the line of traffic, trying to calm passions and reassuring people that equipment was on the way to open up the bridge.
Maurice Papati walked off in the other direction.
Delores was talking and laughing with Theresa. They were standing on the shoulder by the driver’s side of Delores’s truck, a three-quarter-ton pick-up. A new sports car was parked at the place alongside on the highway. In the sports car were two men dressed in expensive clothes. The driver started up the car and, with several feet of room in front of and behind the vehicle to manoeuver, he backed and advanced until he had taken the car sideways and within three feet of Delores’s pick-up.
“Excuse me,” the man on the passenger side began, “can you tell me what this demonstration is about?”
“Indians want to have a say in what happens to La Vérendrye,” Delores said.
“I gathered that from the flyer,” the man said sarcastically. “At first we got kind of mad when we saw how long we were going to be here, but then we got to thinking that maybe we could find a better way to spend our time waiting than just twiddling our thumbs in the car.”
Delores and Theresa just looked at the men and wondered what the man had in mind.
“Maybe you’d want to come in the woods with us for a while,” the man suggested. “There’s a bottle of whiskey in the trunk we could get out.”
At this, anything close to a smile vanished from the faces of Delores and Theresa. They turned their backs to the man on the passenger side, though there was little room between the sports car and the big pick-up.
The man put his hand on Theresa and continued, “We could all kind of wander off in the woods for a little while. There’s fifty dollars in it for each of you — half now, half later.”
Theresa was about to tear herself away from the man’s grasp when, over Theresa’s shoulder, Delores caught sight of Maurice Papati approaching.
Maurice could not hear what was being said, but he sized up the situation visually. The man on the passenger’s side saw, peripherally, an Indian walking up from behind his car and stiffened.
Maurice walked up to the girls and then looked at the truck and the car. He addressed the man on the passenger’s side of the sports car. “I think these girls might have some trouble opening the truck door. Excuse me.”
He lowered himself between the two vehicles so that his back was braced against the sports car and his boots against the pick-up. He gave a great shove, and the sports car fairly jumped over two feet on the roadway.
The startled man quickly rolled up his window and locked the door as Maurice walked off.
II
Shane and Theresa walked about among the Barrière Lake Indians, seeing people that Theresa knew.
“There are lots of people here,” Shane observed.
“They’re here for their grandchildren,” Theresa said, smiling again as she had before the motorists in the sports car had become obnoxious. She beamed when she saw any of the Barrière Lake Indians she knew.
Shane remembered from Cree mythology the gifts Kitci Manito had bestowed upon his people, and from Christian teachings the gifts God had bestowed upon man, but he thought that the most generous gift that had been bestowed on his people was the gift of laughter, the gift Theresa so freely shared with him and others.
III
The Indians were making almost a festive occasion of it. Grub boxes were open. Fires had been built and tea made.
“Voulez-vous du thé?” an old Indian woman asked a few of the motorists who were milling around close to her. A number of them happily accepted the proffered cups of tea. As it was near lunchtime, the woman took out moose meat and started to fry it. Others made bannock. Soon the smell of frying moose meat wafted over the makeshift camp and the line of cars.
A white man approached the Indian women who were cooking by the fire. A woman gave him a cup of tea.
“You people are doing the right thing,” he said, smiling and nodding his head in encouragement.
The old Indian woman, in a long dress and with a kerchief on her head, acknowledged his comment with a little nod while still looking at her cooking.
The man glanced at the savoury moose meat in the large pan, now frying in its own juices. He went on smiling. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t like to be on my way to Val d’Or, but if I was in your position, I’d be doing the same thing.” He glanced at the moose meat again.
“You from Val d’Or?” the old woman asked in heavily accented English.
“No. Montreal,” the man answered quickly. “My brother’s in Val d’Or; I’m on my way to see him.” He was looking at the moose meat.
“The road will be open soon,” the old woman said, as she stirred the moose meat in the large frying pan.
The man sipped his tea as he looked at the Indians standing around — and then he looked again at the big frying pan.
The old woman took a large tin plate, filled it with moose meat, and then fetched a big piece of bannock and handed it to the man.
He beamed with enormous pleasure.
IV
Maurice Papati had a piece of moose meat and bannock. He held an empty margarine container full of hot tea. He was sitting on a log not far from the fire. Shane took a plate of food and a cup and went to sit beside him.
“Hello,” he said as he sat down by the young chief.
Maurice only nodded in greeting.
Shane became a little uncomfortable. He wanted to speak to Papati, but he did not quite know how to begin the conversation.
It was Maurice who began, “You’re Theresa Wawati’s boyfriend.”
“Yes. I’m from Moose Factory. My name is Shane Bearskin.”
“I know some Bearskins from Rupert House and Great Whale River.”
“They’re cousins of mine,” Shane said.
“Theresa’s studying law, isn’t she?”
“She wants to. She’s going to take the entrance examination soon.”
“She’ll be valuable to the Indians when she gets out of law school.” Maurice said. “What are you studying?”
“Psychology. I’m finishing university this spring,” Shane said.
“What are you going to do with that?”
“I’m not sure yet. Going back to Moose Factory anyway.”
“How do you like our little political-discussion group?” Maurice smiled.
“It seems to be going all right. Do you think it will be effective?”
Maurice went to the fire and picked some more moose meat out of a large frying pan. He poured some more tea and took another piece of bannock. “Nothing is going to change because of today,” he said, sitting down on the log again. “But we got people together.”
“Is that difficult to do?”
“Yes. Our people were only docile trappers, so the church and the Hudson’s Bay Company and Indian Affairs could pretty much tell the Barrière Lake people where to go and what to do and the Indians wen
t along with it. It was hard to get them organized.”
“Why are they easier to organize now?” Shane asked.
“It isn’t easy,” Papati shrugged. “But they can now see that things have to be turned around. The white people passing on the highway don’t see the clear-cuts. Our people do because they’re in the bush all the time. You don’t have to say much to them about what’s happening to the moose because they see there are fewer moose here than a few years ago. I don’t know how many times I’ve gone down a bush road and seen some white hunters cutting up a moose. That really affects some of the old Indians, because that means that they may not have enough to eat — at least not enough of the food that they’re used to.”
“Do you think you can change that?” Shane asked.
“There’s a lot we can do,” Papati began, taking a sip of his tea. Without the wind, the smoke from the fires was rising and the mosquitoes were eagerly attacking the people. In response, old women were making smudge pots, one of which was set not too far from Maurice Papati for his comfort.
The young chief went on. “We’ve got the people moving in the same direction. There’s even some sympathy outside of the band, which we can mobilize. Now that we’re gaining some strength, the government is going to see that.”
Just then a few irate motorists began honking their horns. It was as if they thought that if the Indians were forcing them to wait in the heat and mosquitoes, they were not going to allow the Indians to lunch and drink tea in comfort under the shade of trees. The uninterrupted din, which showed no signs of abating, forced Maurice Papati and Shane to stop conversing.
Looking out over the file of cars with their horns blaring, Papati’s gaze stopped on a car with four young white men in it. They were wildly making obscene gestures in the direction of the Indians. Maurice set his plate and tea bowl on the log and walked over towards the car.
He stuck his head and shoulders through the window on the driver’s side of the car so that the driver had to lean his head back. Then he began politely, “You know, men, I think that if I was in your position, I would get madder than hell too. And I have to tell you that I really don’t mind those gestures you’re making, under the circumstances, but, ah, I think our women might.”
The four men looked at Maurice Papati. They saw his shoulders so broad that they barely fit through the window and his neck so heavily muscled that it actually seemed to be wider than his head. They agreed with him.
As Papati walked back to the log, he saw Jean-Pierre Boyer striding down the line of cars and trucks on the south side of the bridge trying to get the drivers to stop honking.
Just before sitting down, Maurice Papati saw police car lights flashing on the north side of the bridge.
“Come with me,” he said to Shane.
They climbed the pile of dirt on the south end of the bridge, walked across and climbed the pile of dirt on the north end. Three Sûreté du Québec cars had pulled up and were flashing their lights. One of the lawmen, the biggest, had jumped out of the lead car and was aggressively addressing the Indians near him. “What the hell do you people think you’re doing? My radio’s been going nonstop! I’m going to see that all you people go to jail; do you hear that?”
All the Indians were so struck by the officer’s tirade that no one answered.
“Who’s the goddam head of this powwow anyhow!” he barked.
Maurice Papati then walked up. “I am, officer.”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing here?” the officer yelled. It was as if he thought he had to yell loud in order to be understood.
“We need this land to live, and we need the meat of the moose to feed us,” Maurice Papati said to the provincial policeman.
“Do you have a paper that says that?” the officer asked.
Papati didn’t answer, and a highly charged silence followed.
“What’s your name!” the SQ man barked finally.
Maurice put out his hand quickly to shake hands, and the officer grabbed it in reflex.
“Maurice Papati. I’m the chief,” he said as he shook the officer’s hand, and squeezed so hard the big policeman winced. As he continued speaking, Maurice pointed with his left arm south across the bridge, and pulled the big officer around in a semi-circle in the same direction, still shaking his hand. The man was desperately trying to remove his hand from Maurice Papati’s vise-like grip.
The young chief continued, “Jean-Pierre Boyer has been here for a couple of hours. Maybe you should go talk to him.”
Maurice released the man’s hand finally, and the provincial policeman walked across the bridge towards Boyer, flexing his right hand with his left as he did so.
Papati followed the man. As he walked up to where Boyer was talking with the leader of the new contingent, he heard the latter say, “The bulldozer will be here in a few hours, but why don’t we start hauling some of these people away? I brought a van, and we have plenty of cars.”
Boyer, the senior officer, thought a minute. “You’re right,” he said. “We can get a little work done while we’re waiting for the bulldozer.”
He went to his car and took out a pair of handcuffs, then motioned to a patrolman. Then he said to those present, “Papati is responsible for all this. He’s the only one we need. We’ll lock him up in Val d’Or. Papati, come here,” he said, to the surprise and visible disappointment of some of the officers present who would have liked to lock up as many of the Indians as possible.
Maurice Papati stepped up to him and held out his arms. Boyer clamped the handcuffs around his wrists. Then he leaned slightly forward and mumbled quietly to the Algonquin chief, “Pretend these will hold.”
Chapter Eleven
I
“Do you have any orders for snowshoes?” Jim Gull asked.
“Three,” Shane said, as he worked away with his crooked knife on an eight-foot piece of yellow birch in the small living room of the apartment they shared. The clean yellow birch shavings were starting to pile up on the floor.
“I bet you won’t be able to keep up,” Jim observed. “Lots of people down here want Cree snowshoes. They are a lot more beautiful than those cowhide contraptions they sell in the sporting goods stores.”
“Thanks for the advertisement,” Shane said.
“Where are you going to get the babiche?”
“My mother is going to scrape a moose hide in Moose Factory and then send it down to me. I’ll cut it up here because I need different thicknesses for the toe, heel, and foot. I’ll do that in the basement of the building as I spare you and the landlord the smell.”
“Would you teach me how to make the real Cree snowshoes?” Jim asked.
“Sure,” Shane said, as he got up to go to his room to get his other crooked knife.
While he was getting set up with another yellow birch stick and a stool for his friend, Jim made a large pot of tea that was intended to last them for a long time.
Jim sat on a stool, facing Shane and carving on the yellow birch piece with his crooked knife. Shane indicated from time to time that Jim should change his grip slightly on the crooked knife for more efficient cutting or hold the yellow birch a little differently for the same reason.
“The crooked knife is not easy on the hand,” observed Jim.
“No, but it’s a precise tool.”
Changing the subject, Jim said, “Do you think Theresa will pass her law school examination?”
“I don’t know; I don’t know anything about the examination.”
“Is it important to her?” Jim asked.
“Yes,” Shane said with emphasis. “It’s very important to her.”
“I thought you two wanted to live in the bush after you’re married.”
“We do and we will. But Theresa wants to be a lawyer and wants to work for Indians, and she doesn’t think she can do that in the bush; she has to be in a city for a while. She thinks the power is in Ottawa or Montreal.”
“Maybe she’s right,” said
Jim. “I can’t quite see her hanging up a shingle at Ottawa Lake.”
“That’s the bad part,” Shane agreed.
“So how do you go to the bush then?” Jim asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe we can build a cabin a hundred miles up in the bush, beyond Sainte-Agathe, and then go there on the weekends. I don’t think I’ll have any trouble convincing her to take a long vacation once she becomes a lawyer. They’ve always got a lot of paperwork, and she can just as well do that in a bush cabin and then come back to town. She doesn’t want to be around Montreal more than she has to.”
II
Theresa had made a supper of fried potatoes with onions, fried moose meat — a gift from friends in Barrière Lake — and carrots and bannock. Shane was eagerly anticipating the meal.
“How long did Maurice Papati stay in jail?” he asked her.
“Delores said he was in jail two weeks,” Theresa said.
“Any fine?”
“Five thousand dollars.”
“They don’t want their roads blocked, do they?” Shane said. “Did they get any concessions from the government on that?”
“Delores said that the government is going to sit down and negotiate all the points.”
“Is Maurice happy with that?” Shane asked.
“Delores says that he thinks it’s a start, but they are going to keep up the protests while the negotiating is going on.”
“Isn’t Maurice going to be spending more and more time in jail and paying bigger fines if they continue to block the highway?”
“It looks like they’re not going to block the highway any more. They’re going to take the problems one by one, work on them individually. For the clear-cutting, they are going to blockade the bush roads so they stop only the loggers and the logging trucks. To get them to stop spraying herbicides on wild blueberries, they are going to find out who the bosses high up in the ministries are and go to Ottawa, Quebec, and Montreal and spray their lawns with manure-based fertilizer.
Speak to Me in Indian Page 7