Florence

Florence has been Louie Norwegian's school janitor for the past 20 years. She is the daughter- in- law of Sara Hardisty, the eldest elder. She comes in at 4:00 each day wearing a big knit t shirt with no bra and a sweet yet confused crumpled little smile. When I first met her I was shocked that she was so determinedly working at such old age- she has long gray hair and limps around listlessly- but then i found out that she was only 56 years old. Her alcoholic, abusive husband has aged her considerably. She often walks in, pauses, sits down, waits and waits until someone gives in and takes the time to visit with her. A working day ends up being about 45 minutes for Florence, the rest of the 2 hours she is scheduled to work are occupied by conversation and blank stares. This bothered me at first but now I love Florence. She has a funny, quiet sense of humour and I have learned that if you start doing one of her clean up tasks she will finish it out, 60/40. She constantly forgets how many children she has but still insists on counting them on her fingers every time she brings up her family. Of course one died in the fire and the other killed himself with a hunting rifle, she tells me everyday. She has 14 brothers and sisters and only knows one of them. Her daughter was in a car accident and was nearly completely paralyzed so she is in a wheel chair. Florence lives with her and spends most of her time caring for her, cooking, chopping wood and trying to convince her to stop drinking. She gets pretty fed up some days. She says once the ice bridge is built she is going to push her across and hope she rolls all the way to civilization. 

Hot Dog Offering

Today we had a hot dog lunch for the community to mark addictions awareness week. The kids all made posters about the evils of addiction,s many of them with a little too detailed pictures of bottles, bongs and crack pipes, which I found scary considering they are 10-14 years old. There was a sense of great familiarity in these objects for them. We pinned the pictures up in the community for the elders and other members of the community to look a while eating. On the bulletin board where all the news goes up I noticed that they had written hot dog lunch celebrating national children's day, interesting. Sara, Jean Marie's eldest elder made an offering of a fully dressed hot dog to a small bonfire that was stationed right outside the band hall, and said a prayer in Slavey, kissing and clutching her rosary tight. She is sweet looking, she has a friendly turned in mouth, her lips form a cave around her teeth and her hair is fine and cut short. She looks like a first nations raggedy Anne doll but her hands tell you she was part of a generation of first nations whose salvation was the bush, hard work and struggle was a way of life. The other community members that attended mostly just stared me down when I introduced myself and had little  to say about recent affairs in the town. Big long tables of silent people. One man came up to me and offered to take me trapping in a few weeks. Could be days could be years. Or maybe that was a pick up line?

While I was cleaning up the smelly hot dog pots and carrying the bottles back to the cupboards in the gym's bathroom- sized canteen I noticed that a whole table of band members were watching me. I later found out that they were wondering if i am Canadian, employable and would I like to be the band's secretary treasurer??

Legends

The Whetagu

as told to Jackie Wanderspirit by her grandmother

This is a Cree story. A long time ago a family went to the bush for a while, there were parents and two children. One very clear day in the winter time, the children were playing, the mother was cooking and the father was out hunting. When the father came back he was empty handed.

 As it grew dark the wind grew stronger, then it started to snow. it was snowing so hard you couldn't see in front of you. The family hovered around the little wood stove while the wind whistled and the trees swished around their log cabin. They started to worry but their father told them not to worry and that the storm would end soon so they fell asleep. 

When they woke they were surprised to see the storm was still raging. The father could not see outside of the window because of the snow. They knew the storm was still wild because they could hear it outside. Three days passed and the family's food supply was running low. By the time the night came the food was all gone. They had to wait out the storm. The father could not handle it anymore. He ate his family to survive the storm. After this, his mind went out of control. When the storm was just settling down he made his way out of the cabin to look for more food. As soon as he got outside the storm picked up again. 

So my grandma said that when you are playing outside and it gets dark and it starts to get windy and snowing hard to go back in the house because the Whetagu is coming to look for his next meal. So when a storm comes at night just out of the blue, you'll know who it is.  

Memoirs

You know it's -20 when your nostrils stick together and you get a cold burning sensation up your throat  when you breathe through your mouth. The boots I brought from home are giving out to the cold and my fingers have started to freeze inside my gloves at recess. The moon is as bright when I walk to school as when I walk home. 

I read the "Jean Marie Memoirs," a book put together by some of the more literate members of the community. It is very engaging, it tells the life stories of some of the elders and traces their families back to the three sisters that founded the community. The founding family's names are Norwegian, Hardisty, Sanguez and Sake I believe. Jean Marie originally served as a camp area for men on fishing trips until one of the elders told the people to built a community where their kids could be educated on the land. It was a good place because of its proximity to Kelly Lake and other fertile waters where they could be certain jackfish would be found. 10 families lived here in the beginning and it was a very peaceful, isolated community. Everyone spoke Slavey and men did men's work- hunting, trapping, setting nets, chopping wood, and women did women's work- kids, preparing meat, cooking, preparing moose hides, sewing, beading etc. When men came home from hunting they shard their kill evenly with the rest of the families, the kids respected their elders and no one was lazy or drunk. The only time people could afford to charter the plane to Fort Simpson was for doctors check ups every three months. The school came to jean Marie in 1958 and was named after an elder of the community who died in a boating accident and fell through the ice of the Jean Marie River (Louie Norwegian). The elders in the book speak a lot about the value of hard work, how life is work and a native man's life should be work in nature. Meat was prepared daily by drying and smoking it and drinking water was drawn from the river after digging a hole through the ice, or big pales of snow where brought inside to melt. 

Hay River Saturday November 15th

We set out on the drive to Hay River at 5 am this morning. The skyline was amazing for the last hour and a half, it looked like the tips of the trees were aflame in fuchsia and magenta, gold and orange. The radio transmission went on and off, potions included CBC or a country station from Calgary and the trees went from being a metre high to 20 metres only a half a km down the road. You drive through so many different kinds of soil along the same road. We arrived around 8:30 and had breakfast in a motel surrounded by northern men wearing caps and light jeans and rubber boots. The food was surprising good. Terry got his winter tires and we did some scouting around for the presents the kids had asked for for Christmas. the owners of the general stores each want to provide you a better secret deal then the next one. Each greasy little man or elderly woman has a different sales pitch and talks in a quick clever whisper. We made some good finds. We have to go back and actually buy them because the school board has to provide the cash, which like everything else will take FOREVER. Hay River is about the size of grand forks, a little bit bigger actually and has all services, even french immersion. Although the libraries don't have colour photocopies like i had hoped and i saw a few drunk native men stumbling across the road. I me the principal of a school in Kinaska, which is about 3 hours from where I am. She is starting a dog team with her students. They have adopted five old huskies, although she told me two dogs would be more than enough power to pull the average person 100m/h. They often have to tie weights behind the sleds so the kids don't fall off. The power of twelve dogs in the big races must just be astounding. We drove to Great Slave lake which has the clearest water I have ever seen. It has a beautiful beach and looks almost tropical never mid the birch and spruce trees surrounding it and the cute little sail ships that are docked at the bank. There is a cannery and a little fishing community that consists of short wood shacks and bars with boarded up windows, the only buildings that survived the flood that overtook the area 25 years ago. Hay River is completely frozen with huge wave ridges all down the centre of it. very neat looking.I On the drive back i saw a brilliant red fox and a marten.I got to see the sun go down at 5:00, completing the day and giving the trees and snow this amazing clarity. Everything was glittering. The country music whined on into the evening and the conversation was easy.

Thursday November 13th

Today we got the kids to write their letters to Santa, i.e. Me. They get to choose a gift from one of the catalogues that is of 50 dollar value, which one of the 11 year old girls, the only academically inclined one, Alisha, called "cheap." They also complained that they had to write the letter because last year they did the entire thing online.  and then i vomited a little bit......

Apparently it takes the letters too long to go all the way to the Canada Post volunteers and back so we will just write the replies. I made the judging ballots for my karaoke nights, they are very cute, big coloured elementary looking numbers. Unfortunately it had to be cancelled this week because everyone was leaving for hay river Friday after school. including I. Even more unfortunate that no one told me, luckily I asked who was coming. The rec director will soon loose her job to a relative of a band member. She married into the reserve and is therefore considered a outsider no matter her involvement with the community and its children. Her daughter is in my school and is often mace to feel like an outsider by the other kids. She has stared hyphenating her name to have her mothers german name and her father's Slavey name on the end to up her status. Terry tells me that there is a scapegoat family in each community consisting of people that either married in or are of family lines that clash with the founding families of the community. The rec directors family is such and she will be kicked out at the bands convenience. The girl replacing her is the casual teaching assistant at the school who will soon be replaced by a permanent person and loose her job. It is especially unfortunate because she took the rec job as a favour to everyone because no one would or could fill the role. Blood lines are so binding. 

Wednesday November 12th

Well they shot the dog before I could decide so that's that. It was probably for the best anyways. All of the 6 puppies are gone from outside so I guess they took care of the whole litter in one go, what a waste. The social worker came to the school today and it turns out that more of the kids have learning disabilities and FAS then I had realized. And only one of the kids live with their birth parents. We are going to have some kind of addiction prevention activities because apparently some of the students are already struggling with the same addictions as their parents. I find this hard to believe, the oldest one in 14 and she is definetly not the one so it is very sad to think of who it could be. It was Terry and the 5 year old Esmerelda's birthday so I made a marble layer cake and some party hats. Good pictures for the newspaper:)