Prairie Grass

by Joan Soggie

  I am glad you are enjoying your music lessons. I guess you do not have much free time, what with studying, practice, and working for Mrs. Booth in exchange for the piano lessons. Catherine and I hope you can get the day off to come to our wedding, but if not, we will meet you for dinner in Saskatoon the next day.

  Your loving brother,

  Eric

  PS

  If the cheque is not enough to cover these commissions, write me immediately.

  Chapter Eleven

  Prickly Rose. Shrub with red-brown branches densely covered with bristles. Alternate leaves with coarse irregular teeth. Five-petal flowers pale to deep pink, yellow stamens. Blooms in late spring, early summer. Red-orange pear-shaped seed-packed fruit. Grows in thickets, woods, roadsides, along streams. Rose hips traditionally valued as food. Gabriellas’ Prairie Notes

  Gabby (2012)

  It had been a very long day. By the time I got back to my apartment, had a quick shower and changed into t-shirt and shorts for the drive to Moose Jaw, the sun was already dipping into the west. Two hours later dusk had settled on the land, but light still lingered in the sky. These long summer evenings are an aspect of prairie life that I think I could get used to.

  I didn’t recognize the vehicle parked at the curb when I pulled into my parent’s driveway. Madeline Hirondelle must have already arrived. I felt a little disappointed that I wouldn’t have Mom and Dad to myself this evening but reminded myself again how lucky I was to have parents willing to welcome, or at least tolerate, whomever I brought into their lives.

  I could hear voices coming from the back patio as I let myself in the front door. Leaving my bag by the stairway, I went into the kitchen, poured myself a drink from the pitcher on the counter, and pushed open the screen door.

  “Gabby! How’s my girl!”

  Dad lunged out of his lawn chair and gave me his usual bearhug/whisker-rub. Mom was right behind him.

  “Have you eaten, Honey? Can I get you something?”

  I assured them that I had snacked on the way and held up my glass. “Real lemonade, Mom, you’re the best!”

  An elderly woman remained seated, studying us. I smiled and extended my hand. “Hi! I’m Gabrielle. And you must be Madeline?”

  Madeline stood up. If I had to use only one word to describe my first impression of her, it would be strong. From her thick steel gray hair, braided and coiled in an old-fashioned chignon, to her relaxed yet erect stance, she exuded strength and poise. I felt that if she once made up her mind she didn’t like me, if she decided I was not worthy of the information she had, there would be no budging her.

  Mom hurried to play the role of hostess. “We’ve been enjoying getting acquainted with Madeline. She went to Normal School about the same time as my mother, in the nineteen-fifties.”

  My mom’s parents had been killed in a car accident in 1988, the year before I was born. They had never been more real to me than a photo in an album.

  “Did you happen to know my grandma?” I asked Madeline. She shook her head.

  “No, we were not at Normal School the same year. And since basic teacher training consisted of only one year back in those days, there was no opportunity to get acquainted with anyone not in our own small class. I don’t believe we ever taught in the same school division, either.”

  “Your grandmother taught only for a year or two, before I came along,” Mom explained for my benefit.

  “And I had a fulltime teaching career in the north. For almost thirty years.” Madeline interjected.

  Well. So much for drawing a connection there. We all settled back into our patio chairs. I tried another tack. Maybe I could appeal to her teacher instinct to elucidate history for an uninformed millennial such as myself.

  “I didn’t know anything about the residential schools before I went to the Truth and Reconciliation Hearing in Saskatoon,” I confessed. “Did you ever teach at a residential school?”

  Madeline nodded, yes.

  “You must have a lot more to tell me, having seen it from the other side, as a teacher,” I continued.

  I might have known it. Dad could not keep quiet. “Every newscast carries reports on those hearings. Such a waste of time and money. After all, most kids going to those schools at least got an education. More than they’d have had without the dedication of teachers like you, Madeline.”

  “Yes indeed,” she responded crisply. “They all learned something. The first thing they learned was who they were. Nobody. And what they were worth. Nothing. After that, not much else matters. Learning to read and write does not make up for being malnourished, abused and taken from your family.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but Madeline continued. Calmly, she recited statistics. Children getting sick, children suffering loneliness, children committing suicide. Children returned to parents alienated from a community they had been taught to despise. Mom and Dad listened, shaking their heads, whether in disbelief or horror, I couldn’t tell. I sipped my drink, miserably aware that this might be my first and last meeting with Ms. Hirondelle.

  “But how could that happen?” Mom protested. “How could that go on and nobody do anything about it?”

  “Oh, some tried,” said Madeline. “You’re right, there were good teachers, and doctors, too, who tried to make changes, even tried to get some residential schools closed. But the basic premise behind colonial government Indian policy was to take the Indian out of the child. If the child did not thrive, it was regarded as evidence of his inferiority, not the fault of the school. There was very little an individual teacher could do against that mentality.”

  “But you said you yourself taught at a residential school,” I blurted. Realizing as I spoke that it sounded very much like an accusation.

  She shrugged, as though re-adjusting a burden. “I only lasted a year. I will never forget the dining hall, the staff seated at tables being served a decent meal by student helpers. The kids were never given the same food, always something cheaper. And not too much of it either. I hated everything about that place.”

  “After that, where did you teach?” Mom asked.

  “Oh, in country schools at first. There were still quite a few one room schools in the province in the nineteen-fifties. And then up north for several years. My husband belonged to the Montreal Lake Band and was one of the first of that community to go to college. He and I taught in various northern communities. After my husband died, I went back to Big Bear Lake, where I’d grown up. My mother was getting on in years but insisted on staying in her own home. I bought a place near hers and taught in Big Bear Lake for several more years.”

  I took it as a good sign that she had finally mentioned her mother. This was the woman that Monica had referred to, the woman who had memories and connections with my sector of the province. Possibly my Metis Centenarian, if this formidable daughter of hers agreed.

  “It was your mother that Monica suggested I contact for the Centenarian Project,” I said. “Her name is Annabelle Dubois, isn’t it? And she turns a hundred and two this year?”

  Madeline nodded. “And, as I told you when you called me, she has been in a nursing home for the past six months. I doubt if she will last the summer. I do not want her bothered by strangers.”

  I looked at her blankly. Why had she bothered to agree to this meeting if she had already decided to refuse me an interview with her mother?

  Madeline finished the last of the lemonade in her glass.

  “However, Monica and I go way back. She called to inform me about you and the project. She said you seemed open to learning about the role of the Metis people in pre-settlement time and asked me to give you any help I could. For that reason, I am willing to share some papers with you. Some genealogy that may be interesting, possibly helpful.”

  I tried to look more enthusiastic than I felt. Genealogy? How boring was that?

  Madeline continued, “Since my retirement I have been tracing my family’s roots. Have only been able to go back a few hundred
years, but it will be worthwhile if it helps the younger generation know where they come from and who they are. So much of our heritage has been stolen away or just discarded. The main value I see in digging up the past is to restore that connection between our people and the land.”

  Well, that did sound a little more interesting. I gratefully accepted her offer to drop off some of her genealogical material for me to look at. And that ended my first meeting with Madeline Hirondelle, living representative of the Metis people who once resided where I now make my temporary home.

  The next morning, I woke hearing Mom on the phone. “That was Madeline,” she said, poking her head into my bedroom. “She’ll be here in a quarter hour.”

  Mom had coffee and fresh muffins ready, and suggested we take our breakfast out to the gazebo in the backyard where Dad was having his morning smoke. He claimed to be quitting, as he had been since I was nine and dumped his cigarettes into the garburator. I gave him my usual scowl, and as usual, he pretended not to notice.

  Madeline arrived with a manila folder which she plunked on the table. “Monica told me your major was sociology. As a sociologist, this will be enough to get you started. At least to get an idea of how drastically the world changed for the people who lived here.”

  “Do you mind me asking, Madeline? You talked about the residential schools last night, but not about your family’s personal experience with the schools, outside of your time teaching there. Can you tell me more about that?”

  Madeline nodded. “That’s all part of why I’m here today, doing what I’m doing. My immediate family was spared being sent to those schools because, a hundred or more years ago, our ancestors chose independence over kinship. It was a heavy price to pay. They gained a sort of freedom but became outsiders. Because they lived outside the Metis and Indian community, they didn’t suffer the same restrictions that held back those who lived on reservations. But that doesn’t mean they were welcomed by the settlers, either. My mother grew up near Swift Current, where her parents were well known but not totally accepted. And there was no well-established Metis community there. When she married my father, who was also Metis, and moved to Big Bear Lake, she embraced her Metis roots, in defiance of the mood of the time. Many of our contemporaries were kept in ignorance of their ancestry, as their parents believed it would be detrimental to their future success to have ties with the Indigenous community. My sister and I grew up knowing our ancestry, French and First Nations. This will show you,” she patted the manila folder, “that my mother’s ancestry was at least three-quarters Cree.”

  I promised to email Madeline with any questions I might have after perusing her documents, and she left for her alumni reunion. Dad had to leave for his usual Saturday morning round of golf. Mom could see I was itching to see what these papers of Madeline’s might reveal, and she disappeared inside mumbling something about setting up a cot in the den for “your boyfriend.”

  I opened the manila folder, expecting genealogy charts, photocopies of birth, death and marriage certificates. But it seemed that the records of aboriginal births, deaths, and marriages were almost non-existent before the 1880s, and pretty sketchy after that. From the earliest census records, it appeared Madeline’s mother Annabelle had older half-brothers as well as younger siblings. And there were records of scrip, another aspect of western Canadian history that had been neglected in my education. It seemed scrip was pre-settlement land assignment designed to squelch Metis claim to large connecting tracts of land. I could see that scrip had been awarded to some of Madeline’s family who showed up on the census record.

  The real shocker was that I recognized one of the names.

  The other papers were copied from Hudson Bay Company archives, accounts of hunters hired, purchases and contracts. A few were first person accounts of incidents that occurred over 160 years ago. As I skimmed through the confusing mixture, I realized that Madeline had highlighted a few of the names. I spread out the papers, rearranging them chronologically, and set out to discover the person whose story they held.

  Jean-Jacques (1841)

  The screeching of wooden-wheeled Red River carts. The clatter and excitement of activity all around him. Those were among his first memories.

  Jean-Jacques was born to the people of the buffalo. When he was three years old, his dark-eyed mother rolled their necessary personal belongings into a leather-bound bundle, boosted him into his father’s wagon, and launched him into his first hunt.

  The Metis carts numbered in the hundreds. Gophers and jackrabbits twenty miles away dived for cover at the screech of their wheels. In that 1841 hunt, a thousand buffalo were killed in one day. After two months of alternating intense excitement with monotonous labour, hectic activity by day, and nights filled with campfire conversation and laughter, the main body of the camp turned their laden wagons onto the long trail home. Red River. They took with them their hard-earned bounty of hides, dried meat and pemmican. They left behind piles of fly-covered buffalo bones, and stone cairns marking the graves of five Metis who had been killed by a lightning strike on the open plain. One of them was Jean-Jacques’s father.

  His mother, her face and hands smeared with mourning ashes, gathered her bundle and prepared to return with her son to her first people. She determined to seek refuge with her brother’s band, despite warnings from Metis hunters that the Cree encampments along the Saskatchewan River’s North Branch had recently been targeted by Blackfoot attacks. But at the last minute, a leather-faced Metis bachelor, desire overcoming his immense taciturnity and his own grief at the death of his dear friend and comrade, approached this woman whom he had observed with an approving eye for her clever way with leather work and her neat, lithe shape, and presented himself as an alternative. The small boy Jean-Jacques may also have played a part in this marriage of delayed longing and practical necessity. While Pierre had kept a carefully nonchalant demeanour in the presence of the young woman the Metis called Virginie, his laughter always flowed like a warm river around the small bright-eyed boy who already showed a calculated audacity of spirit.

  So, although Jean-Jacques could dimly recall in later years the heavy smell and the thrumming noise of his first great summer hunt, the most vivid sensations conjured by his memory were confusion and excitement, then a feeling of loss quickly swallowed up by the comforting reassurance of another solid presence. That presence became the foundation which lent security to all his childhood adventures. In later years his awareness of the support of a knowing and wise being never left him. If he had tried to explain that feeling he might have given it different names at different times in his life. But in those early years, he would have named it Pierre.

  Pierre at first fell in with Virginie’s plan to visit her people along the Saskatchewan. But a small group of the Metis, led by Dumont, who had no desire to return to the Red River colony, were also heading north to winter in the woodland camp along the river, below the Forks. Pierre, his now-wife Virginie and the child Jean-Jacques would join them at le camp d’hiver. Pierre hoped for good luck on his trap-line and looked forward to evenings of laughter and music. Virginie welcomed the return to cabin life and the comfort of sharing beadwork patterns with other women. For small Jean-Jacques, every day was an adventure and an opportunity to grow taller in the esteem of the man he learned to adore. The seasons passed, each filled with the occupation seemingly ordained for it.

  So it was that the boy became familiar with his mother’s kin in the Cree camp and his adopted father’s friends in the Metis’. His first language was a mixture of Plains-Cree dialect and the Woodland-Cree/Canadien-French spoken around Metis fires. He readily picked up scraps of English spoken by the Hudson’s Bay men at the nearer trading posts, Fort Carlton, Fort Ellice, or Qu’Appelle, where they sometimes brought in the furs trapped by his stepfather or the hides, scraped and prepared by his mother.

  And life was good.

  Chapter Twelve

  Skeleton Weed. Alternate scale-like stem leaves and linear
low leaves. Stiff branched stem contains milky juice. Flowers late summer. Pink to white terminal flowers. Deep, tough, sticky root. Grows in light sandy soil and dry prairie. Gabriellas’ Prairie Notes

  Gabby (2012)

  Andy’s truck pulled up at the curb just as Dad returned, relaxed and happy after his round of golf. It turned out Dad was more interested in Andy’s beefed-up half-ton than in Andy. In fact, both my parents seemed remarkably casual about meeting this new man in my life. Which baffled me, since they had always been super protective. I guess they were finally accepting the fact that I was an adult, totally responsible for my own life.

  Anyway. My clean-shaven, tobacco-addicted Dad did not bat an eye at my bearded, nature-addicted boyfriend. I suspected they might have more in common than a weakness for nice trucks. Which was, as Mom might have said, a mixed blessing.

  However, they didn’t have much time to get to know each other, beyond those few minutes Saturday afternoon and our typical leisurely Sunday brunch. As I watched Andy’s truck pull away from my parent’s place late Sunday afternoon, I reflected that the weekend had, in a few ways, been memorable. The stress-free introduction of my boyfriend to my parents, a full Saturday afternoon and evening of cold beer, hot sunshine, and music ranging from mellow to ear-pounding. What more could a girl want?