A Geography of Blood (18 page)

Now, scribble in the road that lurches from the outskirts of Maple Creek up to the Healing Lodge. Buzz yourself through the gate and again through the heavy front doors. Surrender your keys and your phone at the office. Fasten a panic button to your belt. Ask yourself what, in heaven's name, made you to agree to come back to prison again.

In a tiny room down a hallway, half a dozen “residents” are crowded around a table, waiting for class to begin. At the far end sits a friendly looking Aboriginal woman with a cheerful laugh, who extends her hand and introduces herself. On first acquaintance, you would never guess that she is a repeat drunk driver responsible for the deaths of six people in a horrific accident. The pretty girl beside her, with the perky updo and the star tattooed on her cheek, is serving time for armed robbery. Next, an incorrigible addict and drug dealer, as bright and chatty as they come, and then a soft-voiced, sad-eyed girl who is known on the street by the gangster name of Shady. And so it goes, all around the room. You could be forgiven for thinking that these women are nothing but trouble.

The purpose of the class is to teach these unlikely students to conduct and transcribe interviews, skills they may be able to use when they return to their home reserves. (With the publication of Jean's book, I have unexpectedly become the local go-to person on oral-history research.) And how better to encourage my protégées to practice these techniques than by encouraging them to tell one another their own life stories?

You might think that, given everything the hills had taught me, I would have known what to expect. But it is one thing to witness a catastrophe from a distance and quite another to sit with its aftermath in a crowded room, up close and personal. Although every woman's story is different, it quickly becomes clear that they are all heroic survivors, born into the same shattered world.

“Both my mother and grandmother were alcoholics.”

“She grabbed the wooden broom and started to hit me.”

“The age of eleven, I got sexually abused.”

“I was raped.”

“I never realized I had been stabbed.”

“He came into the house with an axe and was threatening my mother with it.”

“I wanted to numb all my pain that I was feeling inside.”

“I did just about anything to feed my addiction.”

“I am not making any excuses for what has happened in my life.”

“A lot of pain created me to end up here.”

And something else that almost made me cry. The girl with the star on her cheek had been born in the same city and the very same hospital where my own girl was born. Our stories were interwoven, all of us caught in the web of everything that had ever happened.

Sometimes, driving back through the hills after one of my visits to the Healing Lodge, I'd find myself thinking about those two women who, for going on fifty years, had been standing stock still on opposite sides of a different meadow. One of them, my grandmother, had a face and a name, Pauline Sherk née Jaque, but what about the anonymous figure in buckskin and braids on the far shore of the clearing? Was it too late to make some kind of connection with her? There was only one person I could think of who might be able to help, and that was my dad's cousin, Nora, up north in the Peace River Country. For one thing, I'd always adored her, with her friendly moon face and a voice that always seemed on the verge of bubbling over into laughter. For another, she had grown up on the Sherk Brothers homesteads, across the road from my dad and within walking distance of the Indian Quarter. Best of all, she is also the family historian.

“You know,” Nora says thoughtfully when I get her on the phone, “I've always wondered about those people, too. And do you remember, in the fall, how the coyotes would be howling down there, along the river?” Now that she mentions it, I can imagine them moving in the green shadows and hear their tremulous song. “It was always kind of—” she pauses for a beat—“kind of mysterious. Why don't you give me a few days and I'll see what I can come up with?”

Sure enough, a week later the phone rings and there is Nora, with quite a story to tell. Turns out that, long before the “pioneers” arrived, the Indian Quarter had been a favorite river crossing and campsite on a well-traveled trail to the south and west, from the region of the
grande prairie
to the mountains. By the 1890s, a small cluster of log homes had been established at the crossing—“I seem to remember the folks saying that, in the early days, there were ten or twelve cabins down there”—and at least one of them was a permanent residence. It belonged to a Cree-speaking man named Patrick Joachim and his wife, Marie Joachim née Tranquille, and it was there, on the flats of the Beaverlodge River, that four of their children were born: son Albert in 1907; then two daughters, Mary Jane and Marie; and finally another son, Joseph, in 1917. (My dad was born just up the road a couple of years later.)

But while the Joachims were busy with their young family, events had been closing in on them. The national ambitions that had steamrolled across the Great Plains on both sides of the Canada–U.S. border and that had sideswiped the Cypress Hills were now advancing farther north. The first move came at the turn of the twentieth century with the signing of Treaty 8, which extinguished Aboriginal claims to about 320,000 square miles of forest and forest-fringe from what is now north-central Saskatchewan across Alberta to north-central B.C. A decade later, in 1910, the Canadian government unilaterally set aside a chunk of the Treaty 8 area as the new Jasper National Park, thereby dispossessing a group called the Mountain Métis, which included members of the Joachims' extended family. Suddenly homeless, these people were compensated for the loss of their buildings but not for their land, a grievance that has never been settled. (This story was starting to sound unpleasantly familiar.)

Meanwhile, back at the Beaverlodge crossing, another shakeup was taking place. The first wave of incomers had arrived in the area the previous autumn—the real deal, with oxen and covered wagons—and had spent the winter in tents. With spring, they fanned out over the countryside and began the herculean task of proving up on their homesteads. My great-grandparents, grandfather, and great-uncle (Nora's dad) were among them.

Nora pauses, and I can hear her fingers rustling through her stack of documents. “Here's the part that kind of bothers me,” she says. In 1914, ringed in by incomers and perhaps chastened by the plight of his kinsfolk, Patrick Joachim had decided to apply for formal title to his home. His claim was made—Nora has found what she was looking for and is now reading from Joachim's text—“‘by virtue of the occupation of the land at the time of extinguishment of [Aboriginal] title.'

“And listen to this,” she continues. “It almost made me cry. ‘As I was in peaceful possession of this land at the time of the Treaty in 1899—'

“
As I was in peaceful possession
—” she begins again. “And you know, even after that, he had to wait three whole years to get the title to his land.” Once the paperwork was completed, Patrick Joachim almost immediately sold out to Leon Ferguson, who eventually sold on to the Sherks. The Joachims are said to have joined Métis communities elsewhere in Alberta or in B.C., but there is no trace of them in Beaverlodge pioneer histories.

“The Sherks and the Joachims lived right side by side for—what?—a good seven, eight years,” Nora says, her voice rising with surprise. “But all the time I was growing up, I never heard the folks mention them. Not even once. Doesn't that strike you as odd?”

My mind flashes back to the two vague, frozen figures who have haunted me for so long. But to my surprise, though the trail and the grass and the river remain, the ghosts have gone. Instead, I see two women at a table strewn with brightly colored beads. Two women at a table, talking.

There's one more place I want to take you before I bring this runaway steed to a halt. It goes by the unromantic name of the Stampede Site, and to find it, you simply let your mind wander straight west from Okimaw Ohci, past Fort Walsh and over the Alberta-Saskatchewan line, toward the highest height of the hills at what used to be called the Head of the Mountain. There, on land that was once home to the Niitsítapi, then promised to the Nakoda, and finally incorporated into Cypress Hills Interprovincial Park, you will find the picturesque resort town of Elkwater, Alberta, and a series of signposts that direct you to an event at the local rodeo grounds.

It's June, and the place is abuzz with school kids who have been bused in from near and far for a celebration called “History in the Hills.” The main attraction is an array of glowing white tipis, some painted and others plain, that are dotted across a grassy field. Off to one side, there's a portly little bell tent, of the kind once used by the North-West Mounted Police, and a couple of four-walled trappers' tents. One of them has a Red River cart parked beside it. Métis fiddle tunes alternate with the throb of powwow songs, and from inside several of the tipis, a low murmur of voices is heard, as the children (mostly the descendants of incomers) listen to speakers from the Cree, Nakoda, Siksika, and Métis nations. Meanwhile, on the edge of the clearing, a red-coated police officer bellows cheerful commands as he puts his intake of pint-sized recruits through their paces.

But we haven't come here for these festivities, as inviting as they are. Instead, our destination is a stand of aspens—a shimmer of tender spring green—that is just visible on the opposite side of the field. Here, in a dazzle of sunshine, we have an unusual chance to gaze directly into the depths of the past. At our feet lies an enormous sheer-sided pit, big enough to swallow a house. Almost thirty feet on a side and twenty feet deep, it was dug by archaeologists, trowel and dustpan in hand, over six summers in the early 2000s. Like the cliffs along the Ravenscrag road in miniature, the walls of this human-made crater are striated with light and dark, reminders that the earth is constantly inconstant. Light-colored layers represent wet spells, when a nearby creek flooded its banks and covered the ground with silt. Dark bands represent dry times, when soil accumulated. There is even a deposit of ash from a volcano far to the south that spewed debris across the plains thousands of years ago.

Yet no matter what happened, whether floods or droughts or tectonic ruptures, bands of buffalo-hunting people kept coming here to camp. They were here eight thousand years ago, when someone dropped a bone needle—as white as ivory and as delicate as a stem of grass—on ground that now lies twenty feet beneath the surface. They were here seven thousand years later, when someone else put down a stone awl, its surface polished smooth as glass, and forgot to pick it up again. In all, the site has yielded nearly a million artifacts, going back almost nine thousand years and documenting the repeated presence of people in this place over hundreds of generations.

Each generation followed in the footsteps of those who had gone before. In fact, new arrivals sometimes situated their camps on the very same spot their ancestors had used in the past, whether ten or a hundred or five hundred years before them. The Stampede Site has recorded this act of remembrance as a sequence of subtle basins, or hearths, filled with charcoal and bone, each one stacked directly on top of the one below. It appears that the buffalo people had a relationship with this place that they maintained by visiting it, almost as if it were a person.

It just so happens that on this particular June day in the twenty-first century, during “History in the Hills,” a group of thoroughly modern people has come here in the hope of renewing this ancient connection. A mixed party of students, instructors, and elders from the Niitsítapi Teacher Education Program, they cluster around one end of the excavation and listen as an archaeologist explains what this research has revealed. When the thousand-year-old awl is passed around, the guy standing beside me murmurs that he has seen that same ultra-smooth finish before, on objects in Káínai medicine bundles. Curious, I look up to see a tallish man with deep-set eyes, graying temples, and a ball cap perched on his head. He introduces himself as Narcisse.

I'm not sure who had originally told me about Narcisse Blood and his mission to reconnect with the sacred landscape of the Niitsítapi. But there's no doubt about it: here he is, in the flesh. Later that same day, I manage to distract him for a moment from his duties as co-leader of the teacher-training class to offer him tobacco and ask for help. I run through my usual routine about tow trucks and being called to attention. I tell him about the new version of the “pioneer” story that I've been required to learn, one that acknowledges the violence that was done both to the buffalo prairie and to its human inhabitants—to the people who were settled here long before “settlement” began. But what was I still missing? What were these hills trying to tell me that I still couldn't hear? Might he have time to clue me in?

For a long moment, Narcisse doesn't answer. Then, just as I'm about to break the silence—
“Of course, there's no reason
. . .
I perfectly understand—”
he tips his cap to the back of his head and surprises me with a yes. “How do you deal with the grief?” he says, his gaze fixed on something that I cannot see. “It is really a very short time since contact—a hundred years is a long time, but not in Blackfoot time, not in buffalo time . . .”

He pauses and looks at me. “The knowledge that was here in this land for thousands of years has been ignored,” he continues, his voice matter of fact. “You can't be sustained without knowledge of the land. What we're talking about here is survival.”

There's just one catch to Narcisse's offer of assistance. To understand the Cypress Hills, he says that it's not enough to know them in isolation, as an island apart. They have to be seen in relationship with other sacred places. I can feel my ears prick like a coyote's. What on earth is he talking about? “That's when you begin to understand that the renewal stopped for a reason,” he goes on, weaving a web of meanings I don't immediately grasp. “That's when you begin to see that a lot of knowledge can be recovered, from the Blackfoot language and from the land. Even though, yes, a lot has been lost, it's not too late for things to start again. We have to begin thinking about our nonhuman relations.”