NOW CAME THE GOOD YEARS. Again there was summer in the village, fall at Cluculz Lake, winter in our cabin at Wedge-wood, with a return to Stoney Creek for Christmas. Once more I could rejoice in our seasonal wanderings. It was as if I was five or six years old again and I could watch the changing of the seasons without fear.
The long hot days of summer with my family seemed endless to me again. Only the time spent in Vanderhoof reminded me of the big world outside of Stoney Creek. Sometimes Johnny and my mother found jobs, clearing land or cutting firewood for sale, on the edge of Vanderhoof. At these times we would spend two or three weeks, surrounded by willows, living in a tent with our campfire burning all day and into the night. The trip to the hunting grounds, sometimes with a stopover on the way, the day-to-day routine of life and work on the edge of the lake, the move to our little cabin at Wedge-wood, and the date on the calendar at the beginning of December when Bella and I began to count the days until we travelled back to our village for the Christmas holidays—these things made me feel as if I had found Heaven again!
Once again I was the Little Mother, as Johnny called me.
My mother and Johnny had five children after the birth of my half-brother Mark. Three of them died as very young children, but Mark and Alec and Melanie, all younger than Bella and me, survived. When someone asks me what caused the deaths of my two half-brothers and one half-sister, I have to say, “I don’t know.” In those days and even later when I was having my own family, children travelled with their parents to the hunting grounds and traplines until they were old enough to go to school. Pneumonia or diptheria or any other infant disease could be fatal. There was no doctor for many many miles—there was only the child’s mother, and if she was fortunate, other and older women in the camp, to nurse a sick child.
There must have been sad times in those years after I left Lejac—such things as sickness and death must have occurred in my life. The hard work, the poverty, the isolation from the white world, and the feelings of inferiority this gave us, all these things were a part of my world. And yet, as long as I was with my family in the village or at Cluculz Lake or Wedge-wood, the bad moments seemed to pass. The happy moments are the ones I remember now.
One day towards the end of the summer after I left Lejac, I wandered away from the creek where my half-brothers were playing, and entered our log cabin. I was just in time to see my mother packing the kitchen box.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To Shelley,” said my mother.
I jumped with excitement. “Oh,” I said, “I love visiting.”
“We’re going to a potlatch,” said my mother. “Your grandmother’s sister is going to have a tombstone placed on her daughter’s grave.”
Now I was really excited. A potlatch was much better than just visiting. There would be food and presents and many many people would come to Shelley. I didn’t know how I could wait until the next day when our journey would start.
I knew quite a lot about potlatches because the villagers often talked about them. I knew that long ago the government had forbidden the Natives to hold potlatches. I often wondered why the government would do such a bad thing. The villagers said, “The government thought that the Natives were giving too much away and that they were making themselves poor. The Natives weren’t giving away—they were sharing. What they gave helped other Natives. We like to share. We like to give gifts. That is the way of our people.”
Years ago, said the villagers, because the police used to stop potlatches, many of the Native bands held the gatherings in great secrecy. Now the police didn’t seem to care whether potlatches were held or not.
I had often heard about the potlatch that had been held when my stepfather’s mother died. Each daughter and daughter-in-law had made four or five hides. The hides were put into the centre of the room when the feasting was done. The clan members cut the hides into moccasin-size squares, and these were given away, along with dried beaver meat. I would have liked to have been at that potlatch.
Shelley! That reserve was many miles away. The people in my village often talked about Shelley, and how the Fort George Band had moved there from the junction of the Fraser and Nechako Rivers, where they had lived for generations. Until my mother married Johnny Paul, the Fort George Band had been our band, and because of this, I liked to listen to the talk about it.
Early in my life I had heard about the move to Shelley. In 1913, the year when I was born, the Fort George Band had sold many hundreds of acres of what is now Prince George to the Grand Trunk Railway. Some of the younger band members were very bitter about this sale. They said that the people had not been paid enough and that they were still waiting for the full amount of the money. These younger people said they had traded valuable land for a few hundred acres out in the bush. They blamed the sale on the federal government in Ottawa and on Father Coccola.
The elders did not agree. They said that Father Coccola was right when he wanted the band moved away from the white man’s town, that the young girls were being corrupted and the young men were getting drunk.
But even the elders complained about one thing: they were angry that as soon as the band members were moved from their village to Shelley, the Grand Trunk Railway people had burned the houses in Fort George village to the ground. In doing this, they had desecrated the burial ground, the resting place of our forebears.
I couldn’t believe it when I saw five wagons and buggies lined up for the trip to Shelley. So many people going to the potlatch!
We stopped over one night between Stoney Creek and Prince George. I always loved stopovers, and on this trip, because there were so many of us, it was more exciting than usual. The tents were put up, campfires were started and the men went off with their guns and nets. They came back with a deer and many fish, and we feasted all together in a large group.
Another thing I liked about the trip was that, because it was late in August, there were very few insects. This meant that we did not have to set smudge pots inside the tents. I never knew which I hated more, the mosquitoes and black flies, or the smudge pots!
Bella and I were very excited when we came to the top of the hill overlooking Prince George and we could see the town spread out in the valley below us. This was our favorite town. Everyone knew that unlike Vanderhoof, in Prince George a Native could go into any restaurant or dining room without the Mounties being called to throw him out. I often heard the Stoney Creek people say that Prince George was a good town for Natives and Vanderhoof was a bad one. Often I found myself saying this.
Sometimes now, when I come to the top of the hill and see the city nestling between the two rivers, I remember how excited my step-sister and I were at our first sight of Prince George. At other times, I whisper to myself, “All that land down there once belonged to my people—Connaught Hill and the park where my ancestors are buried, the city centre where blocks of businesses now stand, the land where the trains run, the subdivisions—all this was ours before the government and the church and the railway told us ’Sell! Sell!’”
But on that day so many years ago, on our way to the potlatch in Shelley, I had no such bitter thoughts.
Our caravan of five buggies and wagons drove through town and across the railway tracks. When we reached the Island Cache on the other side of the tracks, we found many people from Shelley with their tents already in place. They had come to town for a visit, before the potlatch started.
The next two days in the Island Cache passed all too quickly. I went from one tent to another with my mother or my grandmother, visiting relatives and friends. Everyone seemed to be talking and eating and drinking tea. I thought to myself, “This is just like Christmas, except that we are in tents instead of cabins, and there is no snow on the ground.”
On the third day, the tents were taken down, the fires were dampened, and the buggies and wagons made the journey to Shelley, a few miles away on the Eraser River. The time in Shelley was even more exciting than the two days in the Island Cache. We stayed in Shelley for one week.
My grandmother and her friends made what seemed like mountains of doughnuts and cakes and cookies, and every night there was a dance. There were men playing violins and guitars, and everyone danced, even the very old and the very young.
On the last day, my grandmother’s clan served a big meal to all the people. When the feasting was done, my grandmother’s sister gave gifts and souvenirs of her dead daughter to each family that had come to the potlatch. The souvenirs were dishes and clothing and many things which had belonged to her daughter.
That last night, I stayed with a sister of my grandmother’s. People liked to tease me because I was so shy, and my grandmother’s sister was the biggest tease of them all. In front of many people, she said to me, “I have my trapline set and when you say your prayers tonight, Mary, pray that I will catch something good!”
The next morning she found a big lynx in one of her traps. A lynx pelt was worth a lot of money, money which my grandmother’s sister, a widow with two children, badly needed. She told everyone that she had caught the lynx because I had prayed that she would catch something good. Everyone laughed and called out to me, “Mary, will you pray for me?”; “Mary, don’t forget me in your prayers tonight!”
I stood there and hung my head. I wished the earth would open and swallow me!
I began to think that I must be growing up because some-times in those good years, I worked in white people’s homes for wages. One time in Wedgewood, I worked for the section foreman’s wife. She was an English bride; she wasn’t used to the lonely life in a house beside the railway tracks. She paid me to help her with her children, to wash clothes and clean her house. I remember once she wanted me to stay with her family at Wedgewood for Christmas, but my mother said, “No. Mary should come back to the village with us.”
I made enough money working for this lady to order a coat from the Army and Navy store. I still remember that coat, the first new coat I ever had. It cost fourteen dollars, and it was a rust colour with fur on the cuffs. That was the first really big thing I bought for myself.
And sometimes I worked for Mrs. Silver. Like the English lady at Wedgewood, Mrs. Silver’s husband worked for the railway. The family lived in a house beside the tracks in Vanderhoof, and I would leave our tent on the edge of town each day to go and clean and dust for her. I loved working for Mrs. Silver, partly because she was very kind to me, but also because her house was full of beautiful furniture which I used to shine until my face was reflected in it. I often heard her tell her friends, “Nobody can polish my stove like Mary.”
One day, Mrs. Silver said to her daughter Nellie, “Go and find your brother Ken. Mary will go with you.” Nellie and I walked along the tracks looking for her brother. We passed the store run by Mr. Smedley, a man with a large family. Some of his children looked out of the store window and saw Nellie and me.
They came running up beside us, yelling as they ran, “Nellie with an Indian! Nellie with an Indian!” I was sure that the whole town of Vanderhoof could hear their jeers. I wished that I could disappear. I felt sorry for Nellie—I could see that she was ashamed to be seen with a Native.
And that day I felt sorry for myself.