THINGS SEEMED TO GO FLAT AFTER Richard Redekop’s trial. There were meetings with Vanderhoof residents and with groups like the Human Rights Commission about a Friend-ship House, where whites and Natives could get together. Nothing came of the hours my daughter Helen and I, Archie Patrick, Sophie Thomas, and many others spent talking about where such a place would be, how it should be run, where the funding would come from. In the end, like so many other good things, the idea was just talked to death.
For a couple of years, things jogged along as usual in Stoney Creek. We worked as we had always done, generation after generation. All the headlines of 1976 didn’t seem to bring any changes to our village—we were still one of the poorest reserves in British Columbia. Our young people were still unemployed, our living conditions were still bad. The statements that Sophie Thomas and Archie Patrick and Kitty Bell had made to reporters in 1976 could have been made again, two years after Coreen Thomas’ death.
Then in 1978, tragedy struck my family and within days, death came to other families on the reserve as well. On a hot summer day, July 6, 1978, my son Ernie phoned me from Prince George. His truck had broken down. He asked my daughter Helen and I to come to Prince George and pick him up. This was not as simple as it sounded; Helen’s car was in a garage in Vanderhoof, having some repair work done. We stopped in at my son Charles’ home to see if we could catch a ride into Vanderhoof to get Helen’s car. At the time, Charles was thirty-six, married to Gracie. They had three children. Gracie drove us into Vanderhoof. We picked up Helen’s car and went on our way. Unknown to us, that was the last time Helen and I would see Charles alive.
On our return to the village, there was a big commotion going on. Charles and some of his friends had gone swimming in Nulki Lake. The other swimmers had returned to the beach after their swim, but Charles had disappeared in the bay. Already, on our return from Prince George, a search party had been formed by some of the men in the village and the R.C.M.P.
For one night and one day, the search for his body went on. On the shore, my daughters and I set up a camp to serve food and coffee to the searchers. Before many hours passed, we found that we weren’t the only camp on the shore. Three hundred yards down the beach from us, another fire was burning and here other villagers and friends were gathered, not to help, but to party. Hour after hour, as police and band members searched the bay, I saw drunk people staggering around, I heard their loud voices talking and singing.
To lose Charles, and not to know where his body was, was almost more than we could bear. But to watch that other party and to have to listen to them—oh, that was terrible!
Finally, Charles’ body was found, but by then another tragedy had stunned our village. Just before Charles’ body was taken from the lake, a twenty-year-old boy who had been drinking on the shore staggered up to the village. In his home, he took a gun and shot himself. Within days, another young lad shot himself, and shortly after that, a fourth boy over-dosed with drugs and died.
The village was in shock.
In less than four weeks, we had lost four of our young men, one by drowning, two with bullets and one through drugs. At first, stunned with grief, we could only shake our heads and say to each other, “What next?”
It was my daughter Helen and Archie Patrick from the Vanderhoof School District who decided to do something about the bad things which were happening in our village—they contacted other reserves and Victoria, and when that was done, it was decided that an Elders Society should be started in Stoney Creek.
When we started our Homemakers Club back in the for-ties, the purpose was to make us better wives and mothers. We learned crafts, we informed ourselves about child care and about anything else that would make our families healthier and happier. Little by little, as the years went by, we had fewer and fewer meetings of the Homemakers Club, until, by 1978, we hadn’t had a meeting for nearly two years.
The Elders Society was different. For one thing, the Home-makers were all women, but our Elders Society has always had both men and women in it. And you don’t have to be a certain age to belong to the Elders. There are about thirty of us who are active in the society. Some, like Lazare and I and my sister-in-law Celena, are getting old, but there are many of the members who are much younger than we are.
When we started, we thought that if we could revive our culture, maybe our young people would have more pride, and the bad things which had been happening, especially to our young men, might not happen any more. We started inviting people from other reserves in Alberta and the United States, to speak on aboriginal culture, and to talk about how drugs and alcohol had almost destroyed the Native people. These people from Alberta and the United States had gone through bad things in their own villages and they came to help us by telling us of their experiences.
One of the first things our Elders Society took on was the problem of school dropouts. We had so many young people in the village who had quit school and who were getting into trouble because they were hanging around the village with nothing to do. We started an alternate school in the basement of the kindergarten school on the reserve. We had the help of teachers from a religious group in Vanderhoof who sent people out to teach regular classes in the morning. In the afternoon elders like myself taught Indian crafts and Indian culture. We showed the young people how to treat hides, how to make snowshoes—oh, we taught them many things. The first year we had twelve students. Many of them returned to the regular school after a few months in our alternate classes.
Unfortunately for us, the teacher upstairs in the school complained that the hides had a bad smell which filled her room. We knew the school basement wasn’t the right place for our alternate school, but what could we do? It was the only place we had.
It was at this time that we began to talk about a building which would belong to the Elders Society and in which we could do our own thing. Out of that talk came the Potlatch House which we have today.
The first step was to get land. Fortunately, the Elders had a good chief behind them, Gerald Casimer. He helped to pass a Band Council Resolution in 1980, giving our society the land, fifty acres in all. Twice we had to clear that land—we would clear it, but before we could get the money and logs to start building, the land needed clearing again!
Finally, we received $93,000 from the Agricultural Rural Development Agency (ARDA), which provides government funding for Native economic development. The Department of Manpower funded workers who began to put up the building. Members of the Elders Society cut and peeled the logs themselves, but even with this help, the building of our Pot-latch House seemed to take forever!
The Potlatch House is up now; there is also a caretaker’s house and an outside cookhouse where all the cooking and eating can be done. We had our first assembly in the Potlatch House in 1985. Since then, it has been used for weddings, potlatches, and gatherings of all kinds. The Elders hope before too long to have ten cabins and a recreational vehicle camp on the land along the shore of Nulki Lake. We want to make this project self-sufficient, to build it up so that in the future the young people can run it as a business. And when that is finished we want to start building an old Indian village on the other side of the road as a tourist attraction.
The Elders have great plans, all of them directed at building for the future. It is our hope that the young people will have a business to run and that this business will give them pride in their heritage and culture.
The Elders Society assists the Band Council whenever help is needed, and we support many activities in the village such as the Tigers, our village ball team.
We try to revive some of the traditional Native games as well. One that Lazare teaches is called the snow snake. This snow snake is a stick about seven feet long. It is narrow and it has a head like a snake. The stick is waxed until it is smooth and shiny. In the old days, each person had a snow snake—the snake was thrown, and whoever threw it the greatest distance won the game. This was a very popular traditional winter sport which Lazare taught the young people of our village.
Until two years ago, I was very active in what we called our survival camp. This camp was held in Wedgewood, the same spot where my parents fished and hunted and trapped so many years ago. It is passed down from generation to generation and in this way, has come to me.
The idea of the survival camp was to teach our young people how to survive if things got worse. We taught them that as long as they had a canoe and a net and a gun, they could go into the bush and survive. We taught them all kinds of ways to cook fish—boiling, barbecuing, smoking—and we showed them how to use the head and the backbone of the fish. We never wasted anything. We showed them how to cook bannock, to set a net, to can or dry fish, to strip and tan hides, to pick roots and make birch bark baskets, where to look for berries, how to bake bread in a cast iron pan buried in hot ashes. We would take only the necessities to the survival camp with us—for the rest, we depended on the river and the land around us to provide us with food.
The survival camp was very popular. I would invite anyone who wanted to come with me, and that too is an old tradition. Besides some of the elders and the young people from the village, we would have police officers, and many times other white people would join us. During one of the last years of the survival camp—we had to stop because of my health problems, my friend Veronica George was getting too old to handle it, and no one else turned up to take it over—we had four elders, five other adults from the village, and over twenty children. That year the survival camp went on for three weeks. We had the cabin that Lazare had built so long ago, and tents. I stayed in the cabin but everyone else wanted to stay in a tent. We had a cook shack, just poles and a roof, where there were tables and an old cook stove and a campfire that was kept going.
Of course, one of the problems we had with our camp at Wedgewood was vandalism. I had my canoe stolen one year, and another year, people who might have been from Prince George—we found penny matches with markings—wrecked our camp. They put a tree over the cabin and scattered our dishes all through the bush. The problem is that the cabin is up on the hill and it can be seen when people are going down the river.
Even so, until my health caused problems, we didn’t let theft or vandalism get us down—we knew that we had so much to learn from each other that a stolen canoe or a tree over the cabin wasn’t going to stop us from sharing our skills with anyone who wanted to learn them.