In 2014, I flew to Timmins in northern Ontario, then took a bus to the town of Cochrane, then a rickety train through boreal forest and muskeg to Moosonee, and then a boat to Moose Factory, a Cree village resting so low in the lowlands of Hudson Bay that parts of it are periodically flooded.
A spring flood once carried away the St. Thomas Anglican Church—where the Belcher Inuit prayed—and it had to be towed back. Due to ongoing water-damage, the church is now condemned.
“At first we were afraid of them,” a Cree elder named John Trapper told me, referring to the Belcher Inuit. “We walked past their tents [at the RCMP compound] each morning on the way to school, and we thought, Will they kill us? Soon we realized they were just the same as us.”
Another elder, a man named Jimmy Wesley, remembered the Belcher Inuit. “They were always smiling,” he told me, “except the tall one.”
“The tall one” would have been Peter Sala.
Peter was immediately put to work chopping wood for the Mounties, carrying stones for the roads, and winching the Fort Charles and other ships in and out of the Moose River.
“I want to show you something,” Jimmy said. Whereupon we walked over to the Moose River, then bushwhacked through ferns, horsetails, purple vetch, and especially giant hogweed (Heracleum mantegazzianum).
Originally from the Caucasus Mountains, giant hogweed is an alien plant that has outcompeted local plants in many parts of Canada … just as the Christian God, an alien deity in the Canadian North, has outcompeted local deities.
Now Jimmy pointed to a badly rusted winch a few feet away from the giant hogweed and directly above the Moose River. The tall one was always working with it, he said. Always, he repeated.
Might Peter have thought of this sort of continuous work as an antidote to grief?
Jimmy’s family name used to be Wabajun, which means “Whitewater,” since one of his ancestors delighted in paddling his canoe in frothy, roaring rivers. A perfectly sensible name …
… but the newly arrived Anglican missionaries in the nineteenth century did not have an easy time pronouncing Cree names, so they renamed Jimmy’s grandfather—along with many of the other local Cree—Wesley, after the Anglican divine John Wesley.
Since it was lunch time, we sat down beside the Moose River, and Jimmy brought out a tin of Klik and some bannock to go with the apples and oranges I had bought at Moose Factory’s Northern Store.
I was familiar with bannock, a type of unleavened bread quite common in Canadian outposts like Moose Factory.
Bannock is the substrate (so to speak) for this oft-told Cree joke: What did the trapper who’d spent his whole life in the bush say when he saw his first pizza? Answer: Who barfed on the bannock?
But I had never heard of Klik. Later I googled it, and rather than tell me that it was the Canadian version of Spam, Wikipedia provided me with this tidbit of information: “In computer programming, Klik or Click is a game development RAD tool using visual programming.”
Question: Can you spread a RAD tool on bannock?
A Canadian version of Spam doesn’t sound very tasty, but I’ve often thought that the flavor of food depends on the physical setting where it’s eaten, and so it was that with the gray-blue Moose River eagerly rushing past us, and Canada jays and ravens perched in the nearby trees, my Klik tasted just fine.…