A Geography of Blood (15 page)

“It would indeed be difficult to exaggerate their extreme wretchedness and need or the urgent necessity which exists for some prompt and sufficient provision being made for them by the Government . . . I have no hesitation in declaring my belief that unless speedy and adequate measures are taken to provide these suffering people with the common necessaries of life the result will be disastrous and even appalling.”
11

Wretched. Disastrous. Appalling. Surely those were words to make a person reflect on the frailty of human life. But not the new lieutenant-governor, the Honourable Mr. Dewdney, who pooh-poohed the reports. “It must be recollected,” he advised the prime minister, “that Dr. Jukes has not had much experience with Indians.”
12
To the officer in charge at Fort Walsh, he wrote: “I hope you will impress upon the Indians that they have brought their present helpless condition on themselves.” His sole concession, assented to “with great reluctance,” was to authorize the payment of the annuities that were due to Little Pine, Lucky Man, Piapot, and the other treaty chiefs, so that they might purchase blankets and clothing.
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Big Bear and his people, as non-treaty, would continue to receive nothing.

As the winter deepened and another Blizzard Moon drew near, the agent at Fort Walsh sent an update to his boss. ”The Indians look very bad,” he told Dewdney. “I know they are not getting enough flour but I like to punish them a little. I will have to increase their rations, but not much.”
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No need for a cipher to keep this news under wraps: the cold heart of the Canadian government was no secret.

A few weeks later, on December 8, 1882, Big Bear entered Fort Walsh and, concerned as ever to do his best for his followers, signed an adhesion to Treaty 6. When the snow lifted the following spring, all the people who had wintered in the hills packed up their pitiful belongings and set out, under armed escort, to their appointed reserves. Piapot and The Man Who Took the Coat were sent back to the Qu'Appelle Valley. Little Pine, Lucky Man, and Big Bear were instructed to go north. By
opaskowi-pisîm,
July, when the ducks were molting and flightless, the people had been dispersed, and the land around Cypress Lake lay empty and silent.

{ten} Creation Stories

There really is no such thing as empty space.

CURLY BEAR WAGNER, Cody, WY, 2000

The small, dark-haired woman on the other side of the table looks up from her beadwork and sees the ripple of pain that tracks across my face. “It's not you,” she says consolingly, misreading my distress. “It's not you that got treated bad that time. It was them people, back then.”

Her name is Piyêso kâ-pêtowitak, Thunder Coming Sounds Good, also known as Jean Francis Oakes, and we are sitting in her bright, comfortable kitchen on a summit of the Cypress Hills, northeast of Eastend, southwest of Maple Creek, and about half an hour, as the crow flies, from whatever remains of the hunger camp at Cypress Lake. There must still be traces of that unhappy site—grave mounds or circles of stone—but I have never been able to convince myself to search them out. There are limits to my capacity for shame and sadness.

Shame? I wasn't the one who had withheld food from starving people to force them to submit. It wasn't me who pledged a friendship that was supposed to last forever—“so long as the rivers would flow, so long as the grass shall grow”—and almost immediately went back on my word.
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I'd never slaughtered a buffalo or shot a grizzly or poisoned a single wolf. My grandpa was only a glint in his father's eye when it had all happened. Yet no matter how I rail and squirm against the sins of the past, one unerodible truth still stands. As the descendant of incomers to the Canadian prairies, I am the intended beneficiary, however unwittingly, of an ecological and humanitarian atrocity.

No wonder settler-historians, including even bright sparks like Wallace Stegner, have insisted on an emphatic division between the Old West and the New, between the crude brutality of the frontier and the perceived civility of the modern world. If Old and New are defined as distinctly separate strata, then scholars can assign the meanness of Western history to a distant and semimythical past that seems to have no connection to the present. But sadly for our peace of mind, that's not the way things happened. Instead, as the Cypress Hills have been at some pains to teach me, the New West of our daily lives lies comformably, if uncomfortably, on a foundation of abuse and loss.

The grand narrative of prairie settlement is not just a collection of up-by-the-bootstraps stories told by people like Marie Nibus (who described her life in the Eastend history book), gallantly scrubbing the floorboards of a two-room tarpaper shack or driving a horse and buggy across the mural in Jack's Café. Even opening up the frame to admit failure, as embodied by people like Stegner's tumbleweed of a dad, doesn't tell the whole truth. To really acknowledge what happened, we also have to write in the tens of thousands of displaced people, refugees in their home and native lands, who were launched on a journey of desolation.

I had always known this, albeit hazily, in a through-a-glass-darkly kind of way. The trouble had lurked, like a disquieting shadow, around the edges of my upbringing. Why weren't there any Indians on the Indian Quarter, where my family went to swim in the dark, spruce-green waters of the Beaverlodge River? Why were the two women of my imaginings unable to move or raise a hand in greeting? Now here I was, decades later and hundreds of miles distant, face-to-face with the same old loneliness and isolation. Enough of this, I thought. Enough already.

And meanwhile, there was still that strange sensation, now stronger than ever before, that Keith and I had tripped over these hills for a reason. Something I couldn't name seemed to be urging me on, challenging me to pay attention and remember. The imperative seemed to emanate from the hills themselves, with their treasury of bones and stones and narratives. Something in me had decided to honor this land and its stories as best I could, and to do so, I was going to need help. It was time to get a move on and start making some new connections.

Interview with the late Chief Nekaneet, home office, Savage-Bell residence, Saskatoon,
SK
, April 4, 2011, 11:33
AM

C.S.: In English, they called you Front Man or Foremost Man, is that correct?

CHIEF N.: I am the one who walks ahead,
kani'kanit,
the leader. You can call me Nekaneet.

C.S.: I've read that you were born in the Cypress Hills.

CHIEF N.: Yes, I have been born and raised in this part of the country, and I came back here when it was my time to die. That was in the springtime, 1897.
2

C.S.: You came back here from Montana?

CHIEF N.: Yes, we went all over those days—Medicine Hat, Maple Creek, Swift Current. We hunted, we gathered up the buffalo bones from the prairie and sold them so we could eat. We polished the buffaloes' horns and took them to the station to sell when the train stopped and people got off. We worked for white men on ranches, haying, making fences. Canada, Montana, too. All over our old lands, where we used to hunt for buffalo and go to trade before.

One time, it was in
yiyîkopîwi-pîsim,
the Frost Moon, November [1881]. We were at Cypress Lake that time, and the buffalo were gone. The white men at Fort Walsh wouldn't feed us, and eight of us, we went to Fort Belknap in Montana to trade. We thought it would be good there. They said Piapot, my uncle, had paid the chief at Assinniboine to let us come. But the blue-coated soldiers took us to their brick house and put us in a dark room. They kept our guns, our knives, even some of our clothes, and then they took us to the boundary line. The weather was cold already. We had no horses, nothing, not even moccasins. They gave us food for one night and told us to walk to the camp at Cypress Lake. Two of our men died on the way, and we had to leave them lying and carry them in afterwards.

[He pauses and looks down at his hands. Folds and unfolds them. Takes a deep breath and goes on.]

After that, the white men at Fort Walsh said they would feed us if we went to the reserve at Qu'Appelle. But we knew they did not like to keep their promises.

C.S.: You did go to the Qu'Appelle, though, didn't you? Because you didn't have any choice?

CHIEF N.: [nods] Colonel Irvine, the big chief of the police, he came here with a government man, that Wadsworth.
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He said we could choose the best land for a reserve, here in the Cypress Hills. Piapot was there that time, and so was I and all the head men. We chose the valley [twelve miles south of the town of Maple Creek] because the grass was good, and there was not much snow or cold weather. Our horses could feed all winter on the prairie, and we could grow potatoes and grain and live like our white brothers. Colonel Irvine said the Great Mother had given this land to us and marked it with a pile of stones. It was to be for us and our children.

Three moons after, that Wadsworth told us we had to go to the reserve at Qu'Appelle where the snow was deep. The next summer, they took us down in wagons. But when we got there, there were no plows or hoes, and we came back here. That was another winter, 1882, when we stopped at Cypress Lake.
4

The next spring, they sent The Man Who Took the Coat and the Assiniboines down to the Qu'Appelle again on the iron road, and they made that wagon run off its rails. They tried to kill them all. But the Great Spirit watched over the children, and nobody was killed. Piapot was given a wagon and horses, because he was our chief, and we went with our horses. But still there were no plows on that reserve and not enough food. Forty-two of our people died [out of 550].
5
So my people and I came back to the hills in 1884, because this is a good country here.

C.S.: But you had no land. There was nothing for you here.

CHIEF N.: [squares his shoulders, raises his chin] We made our own survival. That time, we had one spade to plant our potatoes, and we dug the ground with axes. The government had forgotten the reserve it had promised to us. I wrote to them twice, but they only sent my letter from one place to another and did nothing to help. They kept saying we had to go to Qu'Appelle.

When I was dying, I told my people to stop here in the hills. I told them, “Don't you ever leave this land.” They listened to me; they still remember my words.

C.S.: How do you feel about those white men, back then, who—

CHIEF N.: [interrupts, with a wave of his hand] You want to know more, you go talk to my great-great-granddaughter-in-law, Piyêso kâ-pêtowitak, that Jean Oakes. She's a good one for knowing these old stories. Hai hai.

If the goal of the reserve system had been to get Aboriginal people out of the settlers' way and keep the two groups apart, the authorities have clearly succeeded beyond all expectation. Almost a century and a half after the signing of the treaties, we still live for the most part in weirdly separate worlds, with decades of mistrust, sharp as razor wire, in between us. The forced settlement of treaty people had signaled the beginning of a traumatic period of authoritarian misrule, marked by continuing hunger, the withholding of agricultural technology (on the pretext that Indians needed to start with hand tools and work their way up, through the ages and stages of human development), the criminalization of important ceremonies, virtual imprisonment under the pass system, and the confinement of Aboriginal children in residential-school hells. All these projects were initiated in the 1880s by our old friend Whitebeard and his crack team of bureaucrats and advisers.

How Aboriginal people must despise us, I thought, as I reviewed these events. How bitter must be their resentment. And here I was, about to ask for guidance and assistance.

The white man wants to give little and take much, Sitting Bull had once said, and I had no desire to follow in those well-worn footsteps. If it were ever possible to establish a connection with someone from the late Chief Nekaneet's community who was willing to teach me—someone who could offer me a glimpse of this eloquent landscape from a different point of view—then I was determined to give something of value in return. But what that something might look like (a family history? a video? an archive of interviews?) was impossible to predict, since there had to be a meeting of minds before anything could happen.

Through Keith's circle of acquaintances at the university, I'd recently been introduced to an Aboriginal scholar who is a respected authority on the preservation and sharing of indigenous knowledge. Her advice, though willing and gentle, did nothing to quell my fears. In the first place, she confirmed something I already suspected: I would need official permission from chief and council before conducting any “research.” What's more, given the history of exploitation—including the misappropriation of traditional knowledge by commercial interests, with no reciprocal benefits—she advised me to direct any and all proceeds from my project to the community as recompense. Finally, there was also a case to be made for shared authorship between me and my hoped-for teachers and collaborators.

This was honorable council but, ouch, it carried a sting. What about little old me? I found myself wondering. Assuming that I was able to produce a publishable manuscript out of my accumulation of scribbled notes and untidy files, didn't I also merit some kind of sufficiency? As for authorial credit, would anyone else choose to lend his or her name to a work-in-progress that was almost certain to be personal, bumbling, and eccentric? Perhaps the present was so deeply contaminated by the miseries of the past that it was no longer possible to create a connection based on respect and trust, with a sharing of benefits among equals.

Months passed, and my letter to the chief and council of the Nekaneet First Nation went unanswered. Phone calls were not returned, and I began to prepare myself for the inevitable. But then one afternoon, as Keith and I were driving out to visit our horses in their pasture west of town, I pulled out my cell phone to make a last-ditch attempt. And, bingo, there's the chief on the line, and, yes, she will be happy to meet with me in her office on the reserve a few days hence.

“You know how to get here?” she asks me.

“No problem,” I say, buoyed by this small success. “Thanks a lot, Chief Pahtayken. See you then.”

Yeah, sure. No problem. Turns out that Nekaneet First Nation is not marked on any standard road map, and even Google is uncharacteristically reticent about its whereabouts. Still, the first leg of the trip is familiar, so off I set: west from Eastend to Ravenscrag, then north and west and north again through tawny, late-summer hills. Spinning over Top of the World Hill with its magnificent blue distance. Plunging through the deep gully where great blue herons teeter on the tippy-tops of dying cottonwood trees. Pausing to watch as fifteen, sixteen, seventeen white-tailed deer levitate over fences and across the pavement. Then it's up and over the summit and down into Maple Creek.

That's where things get dicey. The only available guidance comes from a narrow slat tacked to a fencepost on the eastern outskirts of town, which carries the faint legend “Nekaneet, 37 km.” Unfortunately, the sign has lost its bearings and points listlessly to the ground. Still, the gravel road to the south and east looks promising, and the reserve has to be somewhere around here. A question mark hangs over every turning in the road, but for the next half hour or so, I cling to the main route, before literally coming to an impasse. The road has come to a stop at a T-junction. Turn to the right—but, no, that doesn't get me anywhere. What about this driveway? Edge past the cow in the middle of the track, don't mind the junk, ignore the yard of yapping dogs. Halloo, anyone home? A hand-lettered sign on the door of a trailer tells me all I need to know. It reads:
dangeras.