OFTEN WHEN I GO TO BED AT NIGHT I think about all the people who lived in our village and are now gone—my daughter Helen, my son Charles, my half-brother Mark, my stepsister Bella, my mother and Johnny Paul, Lazare’s mother and father, and many, many others—all gone from us.
And sometimes, as I remember them, I wonder what they would think if they could see Stoney Creek now.
The creek itself is the same, maybe a little lazier than it used to be, and the hillocks that, I loved as a child are still there. But the log cabins are gone, and every year, a few more old houses disappear, to be replaced by modern bungalows, brightly painted and as modern as any home in the city.
I’ll bet that my mother and Johnny Paul would be surprised at all the labour-saving devices on the reserve today. In the old days, everyone worked so hard. There were no tools, often nothing more than an axe, a sharp knife and bare hands. Many people in the white community had it hard too, but on the reserves, everybody, every single person, had it hard. Now we have power tools of all kinds. Imagine! I have a little tractor that I sit on and cut the grass right down to the edge of the lake! In the night I wonder what my mother and Johnny would think of that and I smile to myself in the dark.
And I remember our trips to Vanderhoof with a wagon and horses and Johnny holding the reins, pulling the horses up tight when we descended the hill into Vanderhoof. What would he think now if he could see the number of cars and trucks in the village? Wouldn’t he and my mother be surprised if they saw me or one of my children get into a car and drive to Vancouver or Edmonton with less fuss than we used to have going to Vanderhoof or Lejac? Maybe the speed we have now is better, but many times I think that I’d give anything for just one more trip behind the horses in Johnny Paul’s wagon!
In the night I think of the pension cheques Lazare and I get every month, and I remember that when our forefathers reached our age, there was no government help for them—the Band or their families looked after them. Later, when the old age pension started, I remember my mother-in-law, Lazare’s mother, getting a pension cheque for eight dollars. How happy she was! Now our children don’t have to worry about us. We get our cheques, we do what we want to do, and still the money comes in every month. We look forward to that, to being able to pay our bills. That is one change we really like.
And there are some things that I know Lazare’s parents and my parents would not like—the drugs, the alcohol, the young people who will not listen to their elders. They would miss the closeness that there used to be in our village. Years ago we spent a lot of time visiting one another, drinking tea at homemade tables in each other’s cabin. There isn’t much of that anymore. Now, everyone seems to be busy doing their own thing, and when they are finished, they sit at home and watch television. I sigh when I remember how many years it is since a house was cleared of its furniture, the fiddles were tuned up and we danced the night away!
Someone asked me once, “If you had three wishes for your people, what would they be?”
I have often thought about that question. My answer is always the same—I would wish for better living conditions on the reserves, more education for our young people, and a chance for them to find employment on the reservations. Yes, my three wishes never change.
Gradually, living conditions in my own village are getting better. Many of the things that we talked about as late as 1976 when Coreen Thomas was killed have improved—we now have plumbing and sewage, and people are not crowded ten and twelve into a shack the way that they were even ten years ago. Every year, a few new homes go up in the village. So living conditions in Stoney Creek have improved, but sometimes I feel as if the improvements are coming too slowly. And I know that while a few houses may be going up in our village each year, there are other reserves where living conditions are still terrible. Lots of young couples in our province and in Canada are forced to give up reserve life be cause there isn’t decent housing. They want something better for their children than they had when they were growing up.
Often when I think about education and employment for our young people, I feel bitter. It seems that young people have to get off the reserve in order to get an education or to find a job. They cannot get either if they stay on the reservations. We are kind of fenced in. It is very hard to get anywhere on the reserve, or so it seems to have been in my lifetime. In my own case, when I was working, I had to move to town in order to be sure that I could get to work.
What upsets me most is that on the reserve, so many young people have nothing to live for. People like Lazare and me, we do our daily round of chores as we have always done, but we no longer have to think about making a living. With our young people it is different. I know that when they have no employment, they have no reason to get up in the morning. As I get older it worries me that the young people, without jobs, without hope, have no future in our Native villages.
I feel as if the reserves are both a kind of a trap and a protection for us. More and more I see our young people moving to the city, and who can blame them for that? But when they leave their villages, many of them lose contact with their own people and the old way of life.
Our culture is very important to us. I believe that if we lose our language, our dances, our music, our tales handed down from generation to generation by our elders, we lose what is our country to us. It is good to live well like white people, but we must hang on to what was ours and what was good in the old ways.
We must keep our language, our culture, and our land so that, even in Canada, we can still feel that we have our own country. And while we preserve these things, it is my hope that some day we will also have reserves where the young can be educated, where there is employment for all and where my people will choose to live, and work, and finally, to die and rest in peace.
BRIDGET MORAN was born in Northern Ireland in 1923, and came to Success, Saskatchewan with her family as a child. She served in the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service between 1944 and 1946, graduated from the University of Toronto in 1950, and in 1951, after one year’s graduate studies, went to British Columbia to work as a social worker for the provincial social welfare department. She was suspended by W.AC. Bennett’s government in 1964 for public criticisms of welfare servces, especially as they related to children. Although she won reinstatement, she was told there would be no job for her nor did it appear that there ever would be.
From 1977 to 1989, she was a social worker with the Prince George School District. In addition, she worked as a freelance journalist, her work appearing frequently on CBC and in the Vancouver Sun. She retired in 1989, but not before starting her new career as a writer with the publication of Stoney Creek Woman in 1988. She went on to write three other books also published by Arsenal Pulp Press: Judgement at Stoney Creek (1990), the account of the inquest into the hit-and-run death of a young pregnant Carrier Native, Coreen Thomas; A Little Rebellion (1992), Bridget’s own story about her experiences as a provincial social worker; and Justa: A First Nations Leader (1994), the biography of Carrier tribal chief Justa Monk. She is also the author of Prince George Remembered, a chapbook she self-published in 1996.
In 1992, Bridget and Mary John received the Governor General’s Medal commemorating Canada’s 125th anniversary as a confederation. In 1995, Bridget was awarded an honorary law degree from the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George, and in 1996 received another honorary law degree from the University of Victoria. She served on the boards of the College of New Caledonia in Prince George, and the Legal Services Society of B.C. In addition, she is the mother of two sons and two daughters, and is also a grandmother.
Bridget passed away in 1999.