“‘MY NAME IS Mary Canadien,’” Raymond read aloud. “‘I am a nurse at the hospital here in Yellowknife, N.W.T. I am a Dene from Fort Providence. My patient, Johnny Raven, has asked me to write down his testament for him in English as he tells it to me in Slavey. I regret that the English words that follow will only be an approximation of his thoughts in Slavey.’”
Johnny Raven is my name. My last name comes from my original Dene name, which meant Raven’s Eye. I was born not far below the great falls of the Nahanni. I was born of the mountain people who lived on the Yukon side of the mountains in the winter and built long boats out of moose skins to come down the Keele River or the Ross or the Nahanni in the spring to trade at the forts. At the end of the summer we would pack our dogs and return on foot to the mountains, where we made our fall hunt, mostly sheep back then.
We made as much dry meat as we could for the winter. We were never many, and the new diseases that were coming into the country took many lives, including my mother’s. After that we had to stay in the low country. My father took me to the mission, but I didn’t stay there very long. He came back for my little brother and me and we lived in the bush. Sometimes I wish I had stayed longer at the mission, only because I would have learned English there.
As it is, today, I cannot speak with my grandchildren and the other young people, and that is the worst thing. If they understood Slavey, I could tell them the stories and what we learned. Sometimes when I think about their future, I am overwhelmed with sadness. Is it true that what the elders know, the young people no longer need to know? I am leaving my thoughts in hopes that some young person will read them and maybe think about them. I will not live much longer. So this is my message to you.
When we lived in the bush, the land was beautiful and felt just like it was new. We always had to be working to try to survive. We lived in lean-tos and stick teepees covered with branches or hides. Most times there was enough to eat, and there was joking and laughter and dances. We wore rabbit skins, beaver or caribou jackets if we were lucky. But sometimes there was no game, not even rabbits. When I was eleven, my father starved to death.
In 1928 that’s when all the people came together to get the treaty payments. They were all in one place when the steamboat came down the Deh Cho and the influenza arrived with it. Many of the elders died, and many of the young, including my first wife, my baby son, and baby daughter.
More and more white men came into the country. They built houses for us if we would stay in the villages instead of living out in the bush. It was necessary, they said, so that the children could go to school. So we accepted our payments and the houses that they built for us so that we would live like them, and our children went to school so they would talk like them and think like them.
I have lived in the village for many years now. I am not cold unless I go camping out on the land. I don’t ever have to be hungry. I see everyone sitting and watching TV all the time. Some of the best hunters these days have gotten so good at loading up their VCRs they’ve forgotten how to load their rifles. There are so many useless pursuits now that can’t make anyone happy. My mind always goes back to living in the bush and watching the ways of the animals, the sun and the moon and the rivers, and I think that the life we lived on the land was much more interesting.
Outside the village the land is changing. It is not so beautiful as it was. Fewer and fewer animals can live on it. First it was gold and then it was oil, then it was uranium and gold again, then the forests themselves, now it is diamonds. Only a few people benefit, almost never the Dene.
The Dene have never been a greedy people. Just as the bear shares its den with the porcupine, we have shared with others who have come. Now our young people will have to say, “Enough is enough,” but unless they know the land they won’t fight for it. Unless they think like real Dene people, they won’t even have the land to go to anymore when they need it.
There is so much unhappiness among the young people now. Anger…drinking…fighting…They say they are bored, and I believe they are. If I didn’t stay busy, always making something, I would be bored, too. We Dene used to roam over the land; there was always something new. The land is all around us, the land has the answers, but many of us don’t even go there anymore.
The young people now have it much harder than we ever did. Because who would want to go back to a time when you could starve to death? Yet if they stay in the village and do nothing, they will die inside. They have to go away and get a school education, but away from home they don’t have any idea who they are. So they come back to the village, and then they are angrier than before.
They have it much harder. They need education to get good jobs, like this nurse at the hospital. They need to become the carpenters and the mechanics and the teachers. But I believe this, too: they also need a bush education. Otherwise, they won’t be happy even if they are successful. They need to get both educations just like they need to learn both languages.
In the old times, when the elders passed on what they had learned to the next generation, it wasn’t so we could go back to the past. It was to ensure that the people would know what they needed to continue to survive. That’s the way the elders still feel today. We want to help our young people face the future. If they lose their knowledge of the land and the knowledge of their own language, the real Dene will disappear forever.
I hope the old stories will not die. They are beautiful. They help us to pass the wisdom down from all the elders who are gone. The elders had strong medicine that was gained from the land and the spirits of the land, and it could be passed down. Myself, I have always had strong raven medicine. I wish I had someone to give it to.
The nurse asks how it’s been in the hospital. I say, I miss the taste of moose tongue and beaver tail. I don’t know if I will ever taste them again. The doctor wants me to stay here, but as I told him, it’s time to go back to Nahanni now.
And so I say to you: take care of the land, take care of yourself, take care of each other.
Johnny Raven