LIKE MOST WOMEN, I DATE MANY of the happenings in my life from the times when my children were born. I will say, “We must have built our second house in 1943 because Bernice was just a year old when we moved into it,” or, “Our ball team won that year. I remember that I was pregnant with Florence.”
Over the years, between 1930, when I was seventeen, and 1949, when I was thirty-six, I had twelve children, six girls and six boys. Some were born in the village, some on the trapline or at our hunting grounds. Not one of my children was born in a hospital. My mother acted as a midwife for me; when I lost her, my aunts or other relatives were with me when I gave birth.
Some of the midwives practised the old ways of Native medicine. We call it the laying on of hands. We believe that some Native women have a gift of healing in their hands. When I was seventeen and having Winnie, my first child, there was an elderly midwife who put her hands across my back and stroked me. I can still remember how that stroking made the pain less. The labour pains did not stop, but they were greatly eased.
And oh, that cup of tea that was brought to me after each child was born tasted so good! All through the labour, a person could say to herself, “I’ll have a nice cup of hot tea when this is over.” There was something very comforting about the thought of that cup of tea.
One birth I remember well. Ernie, my fourth son, was born in Wedgewood in 1945. It was September, and the baby was due at any time. I thought that I would go into the hospital in Vanderhoof and deliver my baby in comfort for once. Wedge-wood was only four train stops from Vanderhoof. The train came through at midnight. I thought that when my labour pains started, I would just hop on the train and for the first time in my life, enjoy the luxury of hospital care. Things didn’t work out quite as I had planned.
We had two tents set up in Wedgewood with a campfire between the two. In one was Lazare, me, and our daughter Winnie who had stayed home from school to help me. In the other was Aunt Monica and her husband. He had just re-turned from the Second World War. My aunt and I had been working very hard, slicing up meat and scraping hides. The men had killed many moose that fall. It was heavy heavy work. Lazare intended to build a cabin so that we could spend the winter there.
Suddenly, one evening after working hard all day, my labour pains started. I dressed myself and packed a few things to take with me on the train. The pains became worse.
I said to my aunt, “I’ll never be able to get on the train,” and I took my clothes off. Once I was undressed, I said to Aunt Monica, “I’m afraid! What if I should start bleeding or something?”
Sick as I was, I dressed myself again—and again I realized that I would not be able to get on the train. Finally Aunt Monica said to me, “Give up the notion of going to the hospital—you’ll never make it! Have the baby here. Don’t worry—we’ll manage!”
The men built a big fire between the two tents, and with the light of the campfire making my tent as bright as day, Ernie was born after a long hard labour.
“It’s a boy! It’s a boy!” shouted Aunt Monica. “Oh, he’s going to be the king of the cowboys!” Isn’t it strange? To this day, Ernie would like to be a cowboy! After the birth, Aunt Monica brought me a cup of tea, and oh, it was good!
I rested in the tent for a week.
Lazare had a contract that winter to cut railway ties for a man in Prince George, and it was our intention to spend the winter in Wedgewood, where he was close to a good supply of trees. He used the week when I was resting in the tent to build a log cabin. He felled the trees, cleaned the logs, and within the week he had a good-sized cabin built, with two single windows and a lean-to at the front. He built wooden beds for the kids, and for us, a homemade table and benches. We had a good supply of food, our B.C. camp stove for heat and cooking, just like the one my parents had had in their cabin, and a coal oil lamp for light in the long winter nights.
We had a home.
In those early years, death claimed three of our children. In 1936 I gave birth to a little girl we called Shirley. Like all my older children she went to Lejac when she was six years old. How I hated sending my children off to that school!
It was terrible when the children went away. There was a loneliness in me for the whole year. A truck came each September and cleared the reserve of children. And suddenly after a summer of shouts and childish laughter, the village was silent.
Our children never came home for weekends or holidays, not even for Christmas. They left in September and they returned in July. I could feel their homesickness at Christ-mas—I had experienced it myself. Lazare and I went to see them as often as we could but it was a long trip with a wagon and horses, with many stopovers on the way to Lejac and back.
I think I felt worse than Lazare when my kids left for school. He had never attended Lejac, but I had been a student there for five long years, and I knew that it had not changed. It still had whippings and porridge and hard hard work.
But what could we do? We had no choice but to send our children there. The public school in Vanderhoof would only accept Native children whose parents were enfranchised—those who had waived their rights as Native people and thus were, for example, entitled to vote. And another thing . . . with the attitude that the white people in Vander-hoof had towards Natives, we knew that, even if the school authorities accepted them, our children would be harassed by some of the white children. Lejac was terrible, but at least all the students in attendance had the same heritage, they were from the same race.
Our little Shirley—when she was seven and had been in Lejac for one year, she developed a septic throat. She was taken to St. John’s Hospital in Vanderhoof, but nothing could be done for her. Maybe she should have been taken to the hospital sooner. She died there in 1943.
Another little girl, Doris, died in 1945 when she was five years old. She had tuberculosis of the stomach. We had no idea how to treat such a sickness. When her stomach became very big, we took her to the hospital in Burns Lake. It was a small hospital, with very few beds. Dr. Stone examined her and wanted to keep her in the hospital, but there were no empty beds. We could do nothing but take her home again. She died a few weeks later.
In 1947, two years after I had Ernie in Wedgewood, I gave birth to a little boy whom we called Arthur. Shortly after his birth, Lazare had a chance to cut mine props at Pinchi, some miles out of Fort St. James. I took the little ones, including the new baby, to Pinchi so that the family could be together. We lived in a tent. The weather was terrible that year. Day after day the rain came down, and even the stove we kept going in the tent could not keep the dampness out. Arthur caught a cold which developed into pneumonia. He died when he was four months old.
Like most women, I date many of the the happenings in my life from the times when my children were born. And like most women, I do not forget the dates when my children were lost to me.