MY VERY FIRST MEMORY is of the 1918 flu and of my young mother being very sick.
I was five years old. Like the other families on Stoney Creek Indian Reserve, we were living in a log cabin. I remember that people came in and out of our home, and that all of them talked about the 1918 flu that was sickening many Natives on the reserve, but what nineteen-eighteen meant or what kind of a terrible thing a flu might be, I did not know.
I remember that my eighteen-year-old mother, usually so busy with hides and fish, was very sick. To see her lying quietly on the homemade bed in the corner scared me.
One of the people who came to our home was the priest, Father Coccola. He talked to the mother of Agnes George, who was nursing my mother, and told her to make chicken soup.
My mother wouldn’t touch the chicken soup. All she wanted was a cup of warm water. As if she was speaking now, I can hear her say, “Mary, put a cup of water on the stove. I am very thirsty.”
That cup of water on the back of the stove and my mother asking for it—that is my first memory.
When a child is five years old, there is much that is confused and beyond understanding.
There was more than the 1918 flu which I did not understand. I didn’t know why I had been called Mary Quaw for what seemed to me a long time, and then—I felt that it happened all of a sudden—I became Mary Paul, and I had a father called Johnny Paul and a sister called Bella.
I was much older before I could sort out all the happenings which brought me, a five-year-old, to a log cabin on Stoney Creek Indian Reserve, with sick people all around me.
I suppose the real beginning was my great-grandmother, Mary Quaw, a widow. This was not the name by which most people knew her. She was called Six-Mile Mary because, al-though she belonged to the Fort George Indian Band, she had a cabin at Six-Mile Lake. This was some miles east of Fort George, the reservation just at the spot where the Nechako and Fraser Rivers meet in Central British Columbia.
I do not know why my great-grandmother set up her camp on the edge of Six-Mile Lake. No one knows what year she decided to build a cabin there, but I know that by the time I was born white men were filing claims for the land all around her. Maybe she found the village of Fort George too crowded for her liking. It might be that she spent many years of her life on the edge of Six-Mile Lake because there she found it easier to provide for her family with fishing and trapping and hunting.
When I was a little girl, I remember hearing the elders talking about Six-Mile Mary. They used to say that she was ’hard.’ To the elders, this meant not hard-hearted, but tough. She must have been hard, in their sense, and strong too. She brought up her sons and daughters through her own efforts. There was no welfare, no assistance from the Department of Indian Affairs—she raised her family by herself. She had a few cows, a boat, a gun, and a cabin, and with these things she fed and clothed her large family.
This Six-Mile Mary, my great-grandmother … who was she? What was her maiden name? What was the name of her husband, my great-grandfather? When was she born? When was she married?
I don’t know. It is only a guess that she was born around 1850 or even a few years before. The few pictures of her were taken when she was quite an old lady. People like my greatgrandparents, my grandparents, even my mother, couldn’t read or write. They weren’t born in hospitals, they didn’t register births or have land or houses in their own names. They didn’t go through immigration to come into Canada. They never dreamed of owning such a thing as a camera—roots are very hard to trace when only the spoken word records a family’s history.
How often I’ve wished that I had listened to the stories of the elders when I was a little girl! How often I’ve regretted the questions I never thought to ask my mother or my grand-mother! The elders I could have listened to, the mother and grandmother I could have questioned, all, all are gone, and with them have gone, almost as if they had never existed, most of the records of Six-Mile Mary and her husband, their parents, their children.
But still there are the pictures. One shows Six-Mile Mary and my mother, who was then about fourteen, with a white man. They are standing at her camp on the edge of the lake. Six-Mile Mary was well past middle age when this picture was taken. There she is with her bandana knotted over each ear, her white hair falling to her shoulders, her face weather-beaten, cheerful, her hands and her body those of a woman who has spent most of her life out-of-doors. In this same picture my mother stands rigidly, arms pressed into her body. On her face is a smile which looks ready to break into laughter. In another picture Six-Mile Mary is striding along the road, away from the lake, and following close behind her is my mother. As in the other picture, my mother is in a long dress, her shoulders covered in a shawl, and her hair, like the old woman’s, is tucked into a bandana.
I do know that one of Six-Mile Mary’s sons married my grandmother Ann. This son and Ann had one child, a daughter, Anzell, who was my mother, that same girl following Six-Mile Mary in the picture taken so long ago.
My Grandmother Ann told me what happened when my mother Anzell was two years old. The men were out on the trapline in McGregor, east of where Prince George is now. My grandfather was with them. Suddenly he took sick and died. No one ever told me what caused his death. My Grand-mother Ann said that Six-Mile Mary’s family came back to Fort George to get more people so that her husband’s body could be brought back to the village. This must have happened about the year 1902.
Many many years ago, long before the time of Six-Mile Mary and Ann and Anzell, a widow in our tribe carried the ashes of her dead husband on her back for a very long time. This is how we came to be called Carriers.
Even in my grandmother’s time, life could be hard for widows. Ann did not have to carry her husband’s ashes around with her, but something much harder happened to her. Six-Mile Mary sent her back to her own people in Fort George, and the old woman kept Ann’s child. She raised Anzell as her own and it was as if Ann had never had a daughter.
Six-Mile Mary brought up my mother Anzell as she had raised her own children in the cabin on the edge of the lake. Anzell did not go to school—the only school for Natives at that time was 150 miles away near Williams Lake—but the little girl was Six-Mile Mary’s companion, and she learned early to hunt and fish, to treat hides, to trap, and to smoke and dry food for the winter.
My mother was the quietest person I have ever known. The elders said that she was like that even as a little girl. She used to go about her chores silently, always in Six-Mile Mary’s shadow. These elders said the old woman was good to Anzell. “She’d do anything for that child!” they said.
White men used to come out to my great-grandmother’s camp and rent her dugout canoe for trout fishing. I’ve heard stories that her regular charge for the use of her boat was fifty cents and a fifteen cent packet of tobacco for her old pipe. They used to try to buy her off with seventy-five cents, but no—fifty cents and a packet of tobacco was the going rate and she would not settle for a different arrangement!
One of these white men was a man called Charlie Pinker, an Englishman. He and his brother Ernie had come into the Fort George area and had taken up land between the reserve at Fort George and Six-Mile Lake. Charlie Pinker got my mother in the family way with me when she was only thirteen years old.
My mother never mentioned Charlie Pinker’s name to me. Whether this man was often at Six-Mile Lake and waited for an opportunity to find Anzell alone, or whether he was there only once and raped her, I do not know. When I was already a grown woman, my Grandmother Ann spoke of Anzell’s pregnancy to me. She said, “Your mother was just a child. She was so innocent, always with her grandmother. She knew nothing about men, nothing!”
Whatever happened between Anzell and Charlie Pinker, there was my mother—thirteen years old, with a baby girl. Six-Mile Mary was an old woman who was too frail and tired to start raising another child. The only good thing which came out of it all was that my Grandmother Ann had her daughter back with her, along with a baby. From then until my mother married Johnny Paul in 1917—I was four years old in that year and my mother was seventeen—we lived with my Grandmother Ann, and it was in those first four years that I was called Mary Quaw.
To this day, I feel a grudge against Charlie Pinker. He died a rich old bachelor, but he never gave a single penny to my grandmother or my mother or me. Times were often so hard that a helping hand from this man who was my father, and who knew that he was my father, would have made all the difference. If he had any feeling of responsibility about seducing an innocent girl of thirteen, he never showed it—there was not a dollar bill from him, not a pair of shoes or a coat, nothing!
Old ladies on the reserve who knew my history used to say to me, when Charlie Pinker was still alive, “You’re going to be a rich woman when he dies!” Well, he must have taken his money with him—none of it ever came to me!
I never saw Charlie Pinker until after I was a married woman, although his brother Percy was good to me and we met often. Then one day I went to my father’s house with some of Percy’s family. What a strange meeting! Charlie Pinker talked to me as he would have talked to any young woman who visited in his home for the first time.
I’ve thought about that meeting often and when I remember it, one impression stays with me—a stranger sitting in that room with us would never have guessed that he was my father!