Where I Live Now

by Sharon Butala

  At the hay farm, sometimes with Sean, I wandered in the hills to the south across the Frenchman River and to the north climbing up to the cropped fields that belonged to the neighbours above the valley, roving through coulees and draws, picking up interesting small stones and — wonder of wonders — tiny seashells from hills a hundred feet above where the river now ran. I didn’t know land like this; whatever might be found in it or on it was of great interest to me, and the place seemed full of surprises that I assumed it was up to me to understand, as if I couldn’t belong there if I didn’t comprehend the ground under my feet.

  I was initially more interested in the lay of the land, in the plants, the animals, the birds flying overhead, the schools of fish I began to spot from a high bank as they made their way down the river. But soon the subject of dinosaur bones came up, and by asking questions and turning to books when no one knew the answers to my questions, I learned that the Eastend area had many places where the earth had been eroded down through the Ravenscrag, Cypress Hills, and Wood Mountain formations — that is, through the Tertiary period right down to the Cretaceous period, from about 150 million years ago to about 65 million years ago, when dinosaurs walked the earth. All of us were, in a sense, walking on dinosaurs. In the Eastend area, where I now lived, no mile-deep layer of rock and soil, no high-rises, no mountains or tonnes of desert sand or ocean water lay over the dinosaurs; here they were only a few feet deep, if not right on the surface. Thus, I might conceivably trip over a fossilized bone, or find a giant tooth or piece of bone eroded out of the pale, wet clay. It was — extraordinary thought — more as if here we were walking among dinosaurs.

  Early one spring as I walked in a particular field, skirting wet spots and places where patches of snow still lingered, I entered a wide-mouthed coulee, a place where the high valley wall had been eroded by rain, snow, and wind to form a winding V heading slightly uphill to the north off the east–west trajectory of the valley. There was little vegetation other than some sage and greasewood, though later in the year stands of prickly pear and pincushion cactus would open their brilliant, delicate, fuchsia or yellow flowers. In my meanderings I came to a place where I noticed an unusual formation that seemed to be sticking out of the earth at the base of the high wall. I went closer and examined it from all directions. Its colour was that dull ochre of the thin, poor soil of the area. It looked to me to be a hip bone of an animal, but one much bigger than a cow or a horse. Much, much bigger. I hardly dared to think it might be a dinosaur bone, but it was hard, rock-like; it hadn’t been there before, and I knew that melting snow in the spring and summer rains had been for many years dripping down the wall behind and washing away dirt that would end up on the valley floor. I knew that this was one of the ways in which dinosaurs were revealed.

  I nabbed an expert — this took weeks — he came out to see it, examined it, and then, hesitating, maybe saying a silent prayer, he struck it with his light hammer, breaking off a small piece and holding it up as he gazed carefully at it, and finally declared, “What you have here is a concretion.” He went on to say that if it had been bone, he would have seen fossilized marrow in the piece he had broken off. But sadly, the inside of the piece looked no different from the outside — all rock, through and through. That was the end of my dream that I had found a dinosaur, but in my disappointment, now more than ever aware of the possibility, I got myself a dinosaur by writing a short story called “The Prize,” in which the main character, who is a writer, finds one. (In fact, as far as I can remember, eventually “The Prize” won a prize itself.)

  Some years later, on August 16, 1991, when Peter and I had been married for fifteen years, and Sean was — I can’t believe it — in his late twenties and married, two paleontologists and the high school principal found the real thing: a T. rex skeleton, or most of one. Such a skeleton had never been found in Saskatchewan before — it was then only the twelfth such found in the world, and at the time, it was the most nearly complete. Because of the shortage of resources in the province to carry out the dig immediately, it was three years before it was announced to the world. So amazing a find was it that people came from as far away as China to take the bus trip out to the quarry and watch it being excavated in the intense summer heat and dryness, in an area that, although well-known to the scientific community, had been previously overlooked not just by Canadians, but by other Saskatchewan people as well.

  We all struggled with the truth that the land we stood on every day was the home of dinosaurs, but the unimaginable depth of time between when they had existed and 1994 was just too great for our minds to truly grasp. The paleontologist John Storer tried to explain to people what the world was like in the Cretaceous period by saying, “There was no there there then,” meaning you couldn’t superimpose today’s world map onto one of the world then and find anything that matched. The continents 65 million years ago had different shapes; some hadn’t yet come into existence, and they were all pretty much somewhere else on the globe from where they are today. When we gazed at the bullet holes in the church at Batoche, a result of the Riel Resistance in 1885, or fingered our dead grandmother’s locket on its broken chain, we had a sense of history, but the dinosaurs underfoot defied explanation.

  To attempt to deal with the fact of the dinosaurs, most of the community infantilized the creature, who was called Scotty, by marketing it in the form of cute cake pans, on coffee mugs with the picture of a plump, non-reptilian-looking dinosaur on the side, or in the form of cuddly stuffed toys, or candies, where it grinned with childish glee, square-dancing or diving into the swimming pool. Some, perhaps more conscious of what a true wonder the creature actually was, and adhering to Christian fundamentalist beliefs, invented a more manageable provenance for the creature than the one the scientists were proclaiming — that he couldn’t be older than 10,000 years, that there was no way to prove that it was 65 million years old. The scientists (nobody said this to me but what other conclusion could you reach?), therefore, must be liars, fools, godless, or all three. Further, they went on to argue, dinosaurs were smaller in the time of Noah’s Ark and were able to escape on it, although they died shortly afterward, the food supply having changed, and were fossilized by the weight of the floodwaters. This fairy tale was designed to remove the burden of incomprehensible wonders from the shoulders of its believers; the existence of dinosaurs shattered the myth of the personal, intimate God who speaks every day to the pastor and his friends. I hid my incredulity, knowing these people to be polite, mild, and as decent as the next person.

  One of the men working in paleontology who made the find actually said in conversation, much more gratifyingly, that he had been having dreams about “evolution and wonderful things happening.” An acquaintance who was a poet and, at the time, the United Church minister gave the matter some serious thought — no doubt he gave a sermon on the subject — and, after pointing out that the dragon is an ancient image in our literature occurring in the Book of Revelation, in Beowulf, the first poem extant in English, and in Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, observed that “the dragon is an image of who we are in the negative sense. It represents the reptilian in us, the dark side we tend to repress. But there’s also a nobility, something to respect about it. It’s ancient, alien, and dangerous, but it has a power that’s beyond us. It threatens our comfortable perspectives and throws us into a kind of chaos.” The minister went on to point out that in our struggle to grasp this creature and his or her world, we seem unable to avoid thinking about the T. rex as living among us, and this evokes such dread and terror that we can’t cope with it.

  Was there another community where everybody was contemplating the great mystery of Creation, not as a myth only, but as a myth come alive? (The 1912 Piltdown hoax in Britain, to name one, must have had, briefly, such an effect.) It seemed to me an extraordinary moment in the life of a village far from the great world capitals, and from the centres of learning: the Sorbonne, Oxford, Florence, or even those earlier vanished ones su
ch as the ancient library at Alexandria. The great gap of time between the building of the pyramids in Egypt (begun in 2560 BC) and the cave paintings at Lascaux, France (at least 20,000 years ago), collapsed into a more manageable period. But in trying to imagine the time of the dinosaurs, we faced an impenetrable shroud of nothingness. It was as if we needed a new way to measure time, a new map of time. This was, indeed, a kind of chaos, as each of us struggled to integrate this new-found creature in our midst into his or her map of the world.

  From then on, even though I never found even another concretion, never mind an actual dinosaur fossil, I was always conscious of the unimaginably vast length of time visibly represented in the mere hay field in which I strolled, hands in my jacket pockets, thinking. Somehow I had wound up in a place where from the settler’s shack I lived in I not only walked by the sunken cellar holes of missing pioneer houses, the rusted, abandoned implements, I also walked on the bones of animals that had died 65 million years ago. In the end, unless you were a scientist, the discovery of the dinosaur, the reality of it, raised more questions than it could ever answer.

  I had moved from a tight, foreordained world with clear boundaries and rules, governed by procedures, clocks, calendars, and ringing bells, with daily demands nobody could properly meet and so had to fudge or fail or obfuscate over, with constant tension and guilt the result, where simple successes were so rare as to cause disproportionate exultation. I had gone from that unhappy, tightly wound urban world to one governed by the seasons, by natural forces such as wind, rain, storms, blizzards, and weeks of dry relentless sunshine. In earlier days, the pioneers had planted and harvested and even butchered according to the phases of the moon. In the southwest, you could not ignore the moon and its phases. In so vast a physical space, with measured time retreating into the distance, as I slowly shed my urban, working, single-mother tensions, my brain began to open again. I began to dream the most wonderful dreams, primarily taking place outdoors in some unearthly light and containing the most astounding creatures. These creatures, as I would eventually understand, were insights about the nature of being. Then I remembered my beginnings in the deep forest, with water everywhere, streams, pools, ponds, lakes, rushing wide rivers, and I remembered other visions or dreams. Eventually, parts of my life would begin to link up, to point toward a coherent whole.

  I was always striving to know intimately my small world miles from friends and family, to understand the tiniest blossom, the early minute white flower of the moss phlox, the exquisite scent of the gumbo primrose, the way a wild deer gazed at me from across a field or a coyote paused on his meandering trail to nose a flea and consider me as I considered him, the way that I surmised by evidence left behind the unseen paths of the long-dead First Nations people who had camped and worked and prayed and carried out their ceremonies there. They also had lived among the bones of the dinosaurs. I thought initially that if I could know these things thoroughly, some larger, possibly deeper, calamitous understanding of the world would come to me (calamitous because too much for any human to endure). I strained to put all these pieces, these layers of time, together, as if this could be done, as if I could do it, as if it needed doing. I thought there was a place where such purely human responses of wonder, of knowledge of this kind of history, became trivial, fell away entirely if only for a brief period, that brief period being enough time for me to grasp the enormity of the true world.

  In my wanderings in the fields belonging to my husband, both at the ranch and at the hay farm, in my intense looking I began to locate items I couldn’t quite name. I knew that the stone circles were tipi rings, or so folklore said, and everyone knew, or thought they knew, that the piles of stones were so placed to keep wild animals away from the bones buried beneath, that they were placed over graves, and of course, everybody knew an arrowhead when he or she found one, or a stone hammer. Many were the households, including ours, where a stone hammer was being used as a doorstop, or that had an arrowhead collection (twice I saw Clovis points!) on display as some kind of mark of — what? I’m not sure. Probably that this was a measure of how well you knew your land, of how long you and your father and grandfather had been in the country. It was a kind of boast of your prowess and your authenticity in this place. But most people who displayed their collections and pointed them out to the visitor did so in a mildly puzzled way, as if by finding and collecting these artifacts they had still not managed to join themselves with them. These relics of the past were still, in some indefinable sense, a mystery. Long after Peter was gone, I visited a modern house out on the land that had on its front lawn two actual iron-bound wooden barrels full of such artifacts as I’ve listed, all washed and polished and sitting there, serving no purpose whatsoever.

  I think that digging out the past and preserving it is not merely an avocation for a few, whimsical and time-filling, but an authentic drive to know who we are. It also represents an authentic drive to honour and respect in particular the people who, whether they knew it or not, or meant to do it or not, contributed in some degree — small or great — to who we are today. Thus, when I hear of farmers or ranchers refusing to allow archaeologists on their land, who remove ancient stone features such as cairns and tipi rings in order to use the stones for other purposes, or in order to plow the land under the features, I am always angered. Even the fact of the precious Clovis points sitting in private houses when they should be in museum collections where all of us can see them seems to me selfish (not to mention illegal). Memory plays an enormous part in our ability to function each day, even to get dressed in the morning — think of a person with advanced dementia or Alzheimer’s disease who without memory is no longer the individual we knew and loved — but it also is a collective power. It magnifies us, gives us meaning in the scheme of things. This was, in part, what drove me to study the past of the southwest.

  One day during my first year as a resident it finally crystallized that I hadn’t seen any Indigenous people around on the streets or in the stores, and that none lived in the village or on the land surrounding it. In Saskatchewan, Aboriginal people were a part of daily life, even if there was a hard although unspoken boundary between us and them. In the bush where I was born they had sometimes worked for my father in the sawmill and pitched their tipis in the field behind our log house, where the women’s lives sometimes — rarely — crossed with ours; after that, in villages, they would come through in the summer, mostly in horse-drawn wagons, and the women would sell wild berries they had picked or rag rugs they had made. In Saskatoon, it was probably not until the sixties that they became a familiar part of city life, and in the years that followed, they began to be lawyers, doctors, teachers, social workers, and full-time artists and, occasionally, legislators and politicians.

  In a province where, according to the 2011 census, 10 percent of the population was First Nations (having grown from a lower number, perhaps 6 to 7 percent) and in which 11.3 percent of the total Canadian population of Aboriginal people (1.4 million) lived, to suddenly find myself in an area where there was almost never a single Aboriginal person anywhere I went seemed ominous. When I asked, I was told that they could be found in Maple Creek, to the north on the far side of the Cypress Hills, and then, that they had a small reserve up in the hills, which did not answer my question as to why they weren’t a part of our daily lives as they were in the places in the province from where I had come.

  In my 2005 non-fiction book, Lilac Moon: Dreaming of the Real West, I wrote about the long, sorrowful, and savage story of what we Euro-Canadians did to the First Peoples of this land, a story that ought by law to be taught in all schools. Earlier, in doing research for The Perfection of the Morning, I had located and drawn on a shocking article by Western historian John Tobias (1942–2009) of Red Deer College in Red Deer, Alberta, called “Canada’s Subjugation of the Plains Cree, 1879–1885” (first published in Canadian Historical Review in 1983). It tells the painful story of how the government of Canada rid itself of the Plains
Cree, or did its best to do so, by starving them into submission. This deliberate government policy was carried out by the North-West Mounted Police, now the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

  The plains peoples were weakened by the demise of the bison, but for thousands of years, until the contact era, the number of people was small enough and the habitual round of hunting such that the numbers of bison grew, rather than decreased. Once contact was established and the bison hide became valuable to whites as well as to Indigenous people, hunting was stepped up, until those millions of bison shrank to a handful. From the late 1870s up to about 1885, people began to starve, and searched in vain for herds, and when they were desperate enough, they turned to the usurpers of their lands for food, to be told they would be given rations only if they “took treaty.” Most of them did so, and any chiefs who held out, in their wisdom knowing well what lay ahead, were so pressured by their hungry band members that eventually they acquiesced. “Taking treaty” meant that (although this was negotiated doggedly by the Native leaders) they would leave southwest Saskatchewan and the Cypress Hills area, where at the height of the crisis thousands had congregated, and go to reserves to the north or to the east. According to historian Blair Stonechild, “Between 1880 and 1885 the Indian population dropped from 32,549 to 20,170.” As I have noted, only a small group of stubborn people refused to leave, led by a Cree man named Nekaneet. They survived in the Cypress Hills, where eventually they were given a reserve called Nekaneet. The First Nations leaders, not being fools, had done their best to be granted contiguous reserves, which would have meant that almost all of southwest Saskatchewan would have been one vast Indian land, but this the authorities would never allow. That explains why in 1975 or 1976 one could travel through southwest Saskatchewan, aside from Maple Creek, without seeing an Indigenous face. And yet, as terrible as this story is, that is also how I was able to find scrapers and flakes, circles and cairns everywhere on unplowed land. If I was starting to understand that we were walking on dinosaurs, I was also starting to comprehend that we were all living on First Nations land.