NOWADAYS, MANY WHITE PEOPLE COME to my home, but years ago this was not the case. For many years the only white person to come into my kitchen was the priest. I used to prepare break-fast for him after Mass. I felt so proud to have someone white eating at my table. I thought that was a real treat for me.
One other non-Native used to drop in regularly, and that was the writer, Rich Hobson, who wrote Grass Beyond the Mountain, Nothing’s Too Good for a Cowboy, and many other best sellers. He used to pass our place on his way into town from his ranch. He had a Native boy, a cousin of mine, who drove his vehicle for him. Rich would wash up at my house, I’d make him a cup of coffee, and then he’d be on his way into Vanderhoof. What a good and friendly man he was!
But for many years, except for Rich Hobson and the priest, we were a race apart. Even now, we sometimes feel like that. We begin to hope that racism is a thing of the past, and then we have an experience which shows us that not much has changed.
The worst experience I had with racism in recent years was when I became sick in 1984. A young friend of mine, Judy, took me to Outpatients in the hospital where I had worked for so many years—I was miserable, short of breath, and with bad chest pains. A new doctor, a surgeon, gave me a brief examination. When he was finished, a nurse I knew came to me and said, “Did you have any lunch, Mary?”
“I had a late breakfast,” I answered.
This new doctor was standing nearby and he said, “Oh, just give her lots of moosemeat!”
I thought that was really something, coming from a doctor. A true racial slur! It bothered me, but I was too sick to say anything. I was admitted with congestive heart failure and was a patient for quite a while. Finally, I was discharged.
Before long, I had a relapse, and when I was admitted to the hospital again, the same doctor appeared on the ward. He stopped by my bed.”
You must like this hotel,” he said. “Nice hotel, eh?”
I was angry. “I’m not here because I like it. I’m here because I’m sick!”
I complained to the head nurse and to two doctors I knew, Doctor Mooney and Doctor Jolly. “I think it’s rude the way that doctor talks to patients from the reserve,” I said. “You can’t talk to people like that, especially when they’re as sick as I am! I already feel sorry for myself and he makes it worse!”
Someone must have talked to him. The next time he came around, he said nothing. He just patted me on the back.
This sickness in 1984 stopped me from taking part in the survival camp and setting nets when the fish were running, but once I was out of the hospital for the second time and rested up, I found myself busier than ever with other things.
We have a Welfare Committee in our village which plans for Native children when families have a problem. Many of the meetings of this committee are held in my home. We call the parents to a conference and talk to them about their troubles, whether thek problems are financial or drinking or whatever. If it is better for the children to be apart from the parents until the problems are solved, we try to find a home for the little ones in our village; if this is not possible, we scrounge on other reserves for a foster home. Over the years, many Stoney Creek children have been placed in non-Native foster and adoption homes, often far away from Stoney Creek, and have lost their heritage forever. We want to make sure that this can never happen again to a child from our village.
When our son Charles drowned, we learned that the R.C.M.P. were not just there to throw a person in jail—we learned that they were there to help, too. The officer who looked for Charles’ body was just like one of us. Because we remember the help we had then, every year since that bad time, my family and I put on a dinner—bannock, smoked fish, and all the trimmings, for the Vanderhoof detachment of the R.C.M.P. And if we are ever late in having this get-together for one reason or another, the officers always manage to remind us that we have a date with them!
The biggest project I have now is the potlatch place and with it, the teaching of our young people about our culture. The elders and I teach many things—scraping and treating hides, bead-work, spinning wool, making baskets, drying and canning fish. They come to me, these young people, and say, “Mary, can you help me with this hide?” or “Mary, I waste a lot of this fish I’m dryingwhen I cut out the big bone in the back. Show me what I’m doing wrong.” I smile when I hear the young voices asking for help or instruction—they sound like me fifty years ago or more, when I would come to Bella or my mother with a hide or a piece of bead-work that I could not manage!
Lazare, now in his eighties, is like me—always on the go! He was very sick with pneumonia in the winter of 1985, and more recently, he had a cataract operation and a cornea transplant. The doctor told him after the transplant, “Stay very quiet; don’t bend down or exert yourself in any way.” The doctor light as well have saved his breath! Lazare paid no more attention to him than he does to the rain or the cold. He’s forever cleaning up the yard, raking leaves in the summer and shovelling snow in the winter. He can’t see to hunt or trap any more, but he still goes out into the bush with the boys, passing on to them the wisdom he has learned over the years. At those times, he tramps through the bush with the best of them and does his share in making camp with them overnight.
And perhaps, best of all, with seven children still living, with thirty-two grandchildren and eighteen great-grandchildren, most of them living close by, our log house near the lake is never lonely.