Where I Live Now

by Sharon Butala

  One day Peter told me to draw my eye along the top line of the hills until I came to the place where the valley wall turned north, and there, at the very top of that point, was a bump. Eventually we went to see what the “bump” actually was. It was an Indigenous cairn, a large one, in the highest corner of a farmer’s field, with a long view out over the valley in three directions. We did not know ourselves what the cairn represented, but we did know that one just like it on the same side of the valley, but twenty or more miles away, had been excavated by a couple of kids, I think in the thirties, and that eventually archaeologists had come and done a proper job and had found the arranged bones of five individuals beneath it that they dated to about twenty-five hundred years ago. We thus could assume that this cairn was actually a grave.

  These strange hillsides dotted with rocks of all kinds and sizes — not really hills for the most part, but the sloping valley walls — had once been covered with as much as a two-mile-thick coating of glacial ice. The melting back of glaciers in this area had begun as long as ten to fourteen thousand years ago. Thus, the artifacts and features couldn’t be any older than when the land was first bared after the retreat of the glaciers. As everybody knows, glaciers scrape and gouge in one place while dropping deposits in another, and they carry material from one place and may well drop it a thousand miles or more away. The field I walked in contained a surprising, almost amusing mixture of all kinds of rocks side by side or on top of each other and from sometimes faraway places, resting beside rocks formed on the very place they sat. I remembered: igneous, metamorphic, sedimentary. I knew granite when I saw it (or I thought I did), and many of the rocks in the field looked as if they were made of compressed mud or earth; I was sure they had to be sedimentary. I bought an elementary-level book on rocks, but once I had mastered the most rudimentary information, I gave up, never having developed a deep interest in the subject.

  A lot more interesting to me were the tracks, trails, and evidence of Indigenous life in the field. If I could not fully grasp the distance between my current self and the dinosaurs, and found rocks themselves barely interesting, it was much more within my comprehension to accept the lives of Indigenous peoples, on the land around us.

  I walked the field, year after year, for thirty years. I even wrote a book, Wild Stone Heart: An Apprentice in the Fields, about it. I began learning things about the more recent past, the past since the retreat of the glaciers. I bolstered what I saw with my own eyes by a search for books that would answer questions such as one of my first pressing queries: Who were the people who left these traces of their civilization behind? And Why are there no First Nations people in the area where I live when it is covered with the features and artifacts of their ancestors? Toward the last of my years on the land, I was appointed to the arm’s-length board that manages money the provincial government provides to support professional people as well as civic-minded amateur committees working in the heritage area. Not only did I learn a multitude of things about my province both pre- and post-contact, but I began to be acquainted with archaeologists, some of them specializing in the area where I lived.

  Whether they meant to or not, they began to teach me. They pointed me to books I might read, or even sent me fascinating papers they had written: I remember in particular David Meyer’s The Red Earth Crees, 1860–1960, which concerns the Indigenous people in the area where I was born and spent my early childhood. One of the archaeologists, Margaret Hanna, after visiting with an elder and a First Nations man who acted as liaison in such matters between First Nations interests and (I presume) government and private interests, would later bring a crew who set to work photographing and mapping one of the most fascinating features in the field.

  Besides the most obvious features, which were the cairns and the stone circles we thought might be tipi rings, there were rocks from which it was clear chunks had been broken off to make tools. The flakes lay scattered below them. As well, there was a possible bison drive line, and a circle not more than a foot in diameter at another high point with a flat stone buried in its centre. Other clearly man-made features, including the largest circle that on examination I, at least, believed to be a turtle effigy, were harder to name. This was the one mapped one hot summer afternoon by Dr. Hanna’s crew. I owe the archaeologists a debt too large to ever be repaid.

  One day I thought that it would be possibly informative to pretend that I was a First Nations woman from pre-contact times and that the season was not winter, and that we were not at war. What if I came into this field planning to stay a few days? Suppose I entered from the east? I went to the east edge of the field, considered, and decided that I would not walk at the top of the field, where my silhouette could be seen from a long distance; that, travelling on foot and quite likely with a child on my back, I wouldn’t be climbing each hill but would negotiate the easiest path — that is, the middling-height draws between the hills. I set out, picking my way carefully, and at the first draw — I could hardly believe it — I saw a couple of small tipi rings, off to one side of the invisible path I’d chosen. They were the size my reading had told me “the People” used when they were travelling. This was a past that I could grasp, and I felt in some way that I had connected to the people of the past.

  After I had begun to try to see patterns in the things I was finding and where I was finding them, I understood that the women, who were the ones who prepared the hides and also the foods and the sage and sweetgrass for ceremonies, liked to sit on these low hills to work. This was where I found scrapers. I knew very soon that to pick these artifacts up and take them home was not only against the law but pointless. Out of their milieu they lost their story, became more and more meaningless. Sometimes I even wondered if, when I took them home, I was committing a crime against those ancestors who had passed through, lived for brief periods, fought and died there and whose remains were buried all around me. So I left them where they were.

  My research told me the complex story of people who had crossed this country and camped in it long before there were any national or international boundaries on the continent, had stayed to hunt and fish and gather the edible plants with which they were so familiar. First Nations groups each had, of course, their own territory and their own agreements about who could go in safety on the other’s land and under what circumstances. External factors post-contact were very important. Smallpox epidemics were devastating to a people who lived far from the crowded, unsanitary cities of Europe and North America. One had so weakened the Gros Ventre and the Shoshone as to drive them farther south into the United States. But the major factor was the slaughter of the bison. It is reported that the last bison was seen in the Cypress Hills area in the late 1870s, but prior to that, the bulk of the remaining animals had escaped farther and farther west out of Cree territory and into Blackfoot lands. When the Cree had run out of them in their own lands for food (and the dozens of other purposes for which they were used), they began to make dangerous forays farther west into Blackfoot territory.

  Not long after I had read about this historical period, my sister brought her coastal First Nations friend, an elder and fluent speaker of her own language, with her to visit. Never one to miss an opportunity to find out anything I could about the field, I told the woman about it, and we made a foray through it where nothing much was said. That evening the three of us walked down the dirt trail that follows the river between the house yard, the hay fields, and the hills beyond. We talked about nothing much as we strolled, and darkness began to fall, and then, suddenly she turned, went into the hay field, and scrambled up to the top of a big round bale, a feat in itself, but she did it as if it had stairs attached to its side.

  She called out to the field in her own language. A moment later she called to us, asking couldn’t we see the people moving fast about the field, which we could not, but both my sister and I heard the eerie, wailing call that came back to us from deep, deep in the darkness of the hillside. Later, we came to believe that the
cairns must be graves. The field was more or less along the boundary between the Blackfoot and Cree territories, and we knew from historical accounts that as food dried up in Cree territory, the Cree moved west to encroach on the Blackfoot territory, and battles were fought. These battles culminated in a famous one in 1870 at the junction of the Oldman River and the St. Mary River in what is now near Lethbridge, Alberta, where many were killed, especially Cree, who lost more than two hundred warriors. After that, the Blackfoot and the Cree reached an accord that allowed all to hunt for food on Blackfoot land. I hasten to point out that this is the historians’ account of what happened. I do not know the Cree stories, nor the Blackfoot version of events.

  And yet, one suspects an uneasy truce. Recently when a distant relative of mine by marriage, whose father is Cree, married a Blackfoot man and reported, laughing, that all the Blackfoot women who met her declared at once, cheerfully, to her husband-to-be, “Oh! You are marrying a Cree woman!” I could imagine their eyes — those of the husband-to-be and the women of his reserve — meeting, and in their gazes the knowledge of the old history of alliances and wars, of acrimony and death, and, finally, truce. I envision a day when our schools begin teaching history that includes what is known of the movements and belief systems of the Indigenous people of this country, accepting this as real history, and as vital as that of the nations and continents from which the settlers came.

  The elder who came to the field said softly to us, gazing up to the cairns on a nearby hill, “Lot of people died here.” And another First Nations woman I met said she knew all the stories about where I lived and would come and tell them to me, but she never did, and I was not able to find her again. I accepted ruefully that it had been decided that I was not to know. Yet, with our continuing history of appalling racism toward the Indigenous peoples, I cannot blame her (or others) for this. Slowly, over the years, I came to know by these ways recounted above that the field was not just stones and hardpan, wide patches of creeping juniper, greasewood, sage, and cactus: the field was a repository of Canadian history.

  I had learned about the cairns and what they probably represented; I had found scrapers and flakes and rocks where I could see the stone had been broken off to make points and other tools. One day I even found a cylindrical stick about six inches long with a diameter of about an inch (or more), carved out of white quartz, and a small white sphere beside it of the same material. As had become my practice, I left them there on the hillside. When I went back to find them again, I could not, even though I had marked mentally with great care where they were. I did eventually find both a white quartz stick and sphere, but they had been so damaged by age and the elements that I wasn’t sure they were the ones I saw the first time. This is just a mystery and it has no explanation. An archaeologist friend suggested that the stick and the sphere might have been used for gaming or in spiritual practices.

  There was another layer to the field that I have touched upon in this chapter, and that is the layer where Spirit ruled, where the world of Spirit opened to allow a faithful, respectful observer in. It existed, whatever it was, for me as did the stone cairns and the rings of stones we identified as tipi rings, which some undoubtedly were.

  One of these odd circles was on the top of a long, flat hill that ran east–west, at the outer edge of the field and well above the flatland, but far below the highest point. This was a large circle, much larger than the average tipi ring, and it had, at four points around it (or maybe there were five, I’ve forgotten), small gatherings of stones that might once have been outlines of circles attached to it. (In time I would realize, or come to believe, that the structure was, or had been, a depiction of a turtle, a symbol of great power and meaning in the First Nations world.) It took me a very long time to see this last, but on the short westerly end of the hill, there was a pathway marked out in stones that led to the circle above.

  Once, when I knew a good deal more about the practices of the ancient peoples, on a summer solstice evening, a time I knew by then to be of utmost importance to the plains people, a cloudless evening when the light was as pure as I’ve seen it in my life so that one might feel it was palpable and filled with force, I dared to climb up into the field and to go to the base of this hill with the path leading up it to the circle on top. The sun threw glowing red light from along the western horizon behind me, across the fields to where I stood at the bottom of the hill. I was beginning to understand. I thought this was a religious site, that at the appropriate moment the sun’s rays would strike perfectly up the path toward the hill, and so I waited, moments only. The sun’s rays at the moment of the sun’s setting didn’t quite match the trajectory of the path running up the hillside, and I would learn that over the centuries those rays would have altered slightly in their direction so that one might reasonably think that maybe several hundred or more years earlier, the path had been marked so that the rays went straight up it. Up I went, slowly, with much trepidation, aware I was never alone in that place, no matter that no flesh-and-blood humans accompanied me, and when I got to the top at the place where the path ended, I stopped dead in my tracks.

  Before me, a vertical wall — it has always seemed to me a translucent wall, although perhaps veil is a better word — of red light was thrown up between me and the stone circle I had come to see on the other side of it. I was disoriented, thought I must have made a mistake, wondered for a second if I was on the wrong hill. In my astonishment, I thought to look along the ground in front of me from where the red wall of light seemed to emanate and saw something that in all my trips there I had never before noticed. There was a rough line of rocks that ran north to south, half-buried by time and the blowing, dirt-filled winds, by earth and sparse grass, and that partially misaligned and misshapen line seemed indeed to be so designed that the most powerful red light coming from the sun behind it just before it sank below the horizon on the summer solstice struck it, and threw up the wall of glowing orange-red light.

  I didn’t tell the story this way in Wild Stone Heart: I was afraid then to tell too much for fear that people would just write me off as an unhinged person, so I left out that wall of red light. But since I wrote that book more than fifteen years ago, I have grown braver. On that evening so many years ago I stepped through the veil of light and into the middle of the circle, where I stood in silence for only a few seconds until the light began to die, and darkness was filling the hollows and creeping up the hillsides. Then I stepped out of the circle and ran across the hay fields to where Peter was running a tractor.

  He stopped for me, I climbed up the tractor’s narrow ladder, he leaning over to grasp my hand to pull me up the last step, and I leaned against him, grateful for his warmth and solidity as he drove us back into the yard. I didn’t tell him what I’d seen; he didn’t know that I was in awe, my awe tempered by fear and a powerful sense that I — we — lived in the heart of mystery, surrounded by the past of people we did not know, but who seemed to know us.

  There is one more layer of history present and visible to a careful observer on that one hundred acres I have been referring to as “the field.” It also has what was surely a cellar depression, and other signs that somebody once tried to homestead, if not in that field where he built his house, then just below it on the valley bottom. Whoever he was, he couldn’t have survived more than a year there. The presence of that cellar depression is another reminder of the next layer of civilization to occupy the land of the southwest: the settlers.

  In 1872 the government of Canada passed the Dominion Lands Act, whose purpose was to populate the prairie provinces by opening them for farming. This was also deemed necessary in order to secure the prairies from the American conviction called “manifest destiny,” which held that settlers were destined to claim their territory and establish institutions far and wide across the North American continent. If the land was already occupied by Canadians, the American desire to fill it would be stymied. Part of the national policy of the period was the build
ing of a cross-country railway. This was completed in 1885, but further branch lines had to be built in order to reach into all the newly settled areas and to help settlers transport themselves and their goods. Any village not close enough to a railway branch line soon faded and died.

  Under the act, for a fee of $10, and by fulfilling certain other conditions such as breaking so much land per year, building a dwelling on it, and remaining in residence for a minimum of six months of the year, any adult male could acquire 160 acres, with a provision to acquire another 160, called a pre-emption, roughly when the conditions on the first 160 acres were met. At first settlement was slow, but when Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier appointed Clifford Sifton in 1896 as the federal minster of the interior, Sifton began to vigorously promote the settlement of Western Canada in the United States, Britain, and especially in east-central Europe. Unfortunately, the agents spreading out through Europe exaggerated (or simply didn’t tell the truth about) conditions, insisting that “the rain follows the plow” (patently untrue), and that the weather on the prairies was balmy all year round and the soil miraculously fertile (these last two, for the most part, worse than not true). In some places the soil was indeed abundantly fertile, but in others it certainly was not, and as for the insistence on balmy weather — well, one forty-below winter day would clear up any misapprehensions on that score.