A Geography of Blood (17 page)

“‘Go check how big the country is now.' And I guess that Coyote was just old when he came back.”

She pauses, her round face alight with contentment. “Oh, it makes me happy to hear those good stories,” she says.

“Wesa'kaca made the world here, you know that? That's why there are all the hills here. He used to point like this,”—she stretches out a hand—“‘You, I'm going to make you.'”

And when his world was finished, “that hill is where Wesa'kaca was sitting, the one they call the meadow where the Healing Lodge is now. You know, where they had that Horse Dance?”

Do I know it? I was there; I stood on that holy ground. I can feel my eyes go wide as saucers.

“That Wesa'kaca, he was sitting there singing, and he was telling people, ‘I'm going to leave you guys now, my brothers and my sisters. I'm going to go now.' Wesa'kaca was telling us, ‘I'm going to go now. But I'll still watch you guys when you are here.'

“Here,” she says, with a gesture that extends beyond the walls of her house to sweep over the hills and the plains beyond, “there is something that pulls you, something that makes you want to stay. I always think maybe it's that Wesa'kaca. He's still got the power; he's still watching us, not to be lonely. You never hear anyone say here, ‘I am lonely.'”

{eleven} Home Truth

Wisdom sits in places.

It's like water that never dries up.

You need to drink water to stay alive, don't you?

Well, you also need to drink from places.

You must remember everything about them.

You must learn their names.

You must remember what happened at them long ago.

You must think about it and keep on thinking about it.

Then your mind will become smoother and smoother.

Then you will see danger before it happens.

DUDLEY PATTERSON, Apache elder, 1996

In all the
times I've told the story of Keith's and my arrival in Eastend, there was one essential detail that, for the longest time, I completely forgot. Like an unconformity in the geological strata, it was simply gone, as absent as if it had never happened. Then one day, some time after my conversations with Jean had begun, the lost memory reappeared in full definition.

Before our first trip to Eastend, Keith and I had spent time in Cody, Wyoming, and it wasn't the legend of Buffalo Bill that had drawn us in. Instead, we had gone there to attend an educational program, one of a now lamentably discontinued series of seminars on “Plains Indian” cultures, this one on the theme of the sacred landscapes of the Great Plains. For three intense days, we'd sat in a basement room at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center and listened as a roster of scholars and activists from the American West spoke about the struggle of traditional people to live in relationship with the land, as an act of renewal and remembrance.

“Hills are very mysterious places,” a Piikáni elder named Curly Bear Wagner had said. “That's what we mean by sacred. Mysterious.”

Now, leafing through my notes from the conference, I am astonished to see that they read like a how-to manual for the encounter that lay ahead, with a town I had never been to, a house I had no thought to buy, and a range of hills that until then had scarcely caught my eye. If I had set out purposefully to develop a curriculum for my travels in the Cypress Hills, I could not have done any better than this. (“How do you know places,” one speaker had asked, “unless you know the names and the stories they have to tell?”) And then I erased these insights from my conscious thoughts as if they had nothing to do with me or with the unknown future I was entering.

Funny the things we remember, the things we choose to forget. Funny the way we keep finding ourselves at the beginning again.

It's ten years and counting since Keith and I blew into town for what was supposed to be a two-week stay, an end-of-summer flourish of fun and frolic. Surely no one could have predicted that this lyrical country would, gradually, patiently, over time, begin to reveal its secrets to me, an accidental pilgrim who didn't even know what she was seeking.

“Not to be lonely,” Jean had said. That is what has always drawn people to the Cypress Hills. And as I reflect on what she has told me, I can't help but wonder if, long before Keith and I arrived here, we might have been suffering unwittingly from a species of loneliness. If there are varieties of religious experience, à la William James, might there not also be varieties of disconnection? I'm not thinking of an aloneness that can be soothed by intimacy—and Keith so alive and so well—or even of the lost-in-the-crowd-ness that we sometimes felt in the city and that yielded so readily to the easy, open-hearted friendliness of a rural community.

But what if, beyond our need for one another, we humans also have an urgent, inarticulate need for the more-than-human world? Whether or not that world has a spiritual dimension is a subject I'll have to leave to you. What I can talk about with more assurance are the everyday mysteries of wind and rain, fish and fowl, winter-spring-summer-and-fall, all things wild and wonderful. Clearly, there are many people who don't get in a flutter, as Keith and I always do, about every little living thing that comes into view—the lilting flight of a kingfisher along the river behind our house or a shiny new bee in the bergamot beside our back door.

But I defy you to find anyone so deadened that he or she could glimpse the honey-slow movements of a cougar just up ahead on the path, not five minutes' walk from the T.rex Centre and only fifteen minutes from our house, without standing tingling and breathless as it soft-foots it through the snow and, with many a backward glance, flows out of sight in the underbrush. And surely no one could lie on the rim of the Frenchman Valley with a night chill in the air and gaze out into that great swirling river of stars without finding him- or herself a fallen star in the grass, alight with satisfaction and wonderment.

Way back when tyrannosaurs ruled this valley, which wasn't a valley yet, the starlight that fell on their retinas was already ancient. And when the brontotheres squinted up through their piggy eyes, many millions of years afterwards, the minute hand of the cosmic clock had barely ticked forward. The universe is unfathomably old, and life on earth is young, the creative exuberance of a split second. On the time scale of the cosmos, human beings have existed for an eye blink, and here on the plains, in particular, all of our storied history—from the moment of creation, through the long reign of the buffalo prairie, to the trauma of colonization—press in upon the present. The past is as close as a circle of stones on the prairie, the fractured skull of a buffalo protruding from a creek, a friend sitting in her kitchen with her beadwork and telling good old stories about creation and a meadow just up the way.

All of
our storied history.
In April of 1885, not long after the Cree and Nakoda had been deported from the Cypress Hills, a reporter with the
Toronto Daily Mail
arrived at the Maple Creek train station. The racial tension that had crackled around the Cypress Hills for the preceding decade had been dispersed by the ethnic clearance, but it had never been defused. Now, it had ignited into violence. That spring, the firepower of the Canadian state would be marshaled against an ad hoc militia of Métis civilians, fighting for land rights and recognition, and against scattered resistance by treaty people—including members of Big Bear's still-homeless band—who remained on the verge of despair and starvation.

Despite a few early reversals, the outcome would never be seriously in doubt. By autumn, the Macdonald government would celebrate its victory with a row of eight Aboriginal corpses dangling from gallows on a hill at Battleford, the last and one of the largest public executions ever conducted on Canadian soil. (As Prime Minister Macdonald explained in a private note to Dewdney, “The executions . . . ought to convince the Red Man that the White Man governs.”
1
) Métis leader Louis Riel was executed privately in Regina, and several prominent treaty chiefs, including the peace-talking Big Bear, were convicted of treason and locked up in Stony Mountain Penitentiary, the closest thing to a death sentence. If the incomer and Aboriginal communities ever do begin to talk sincerely about how the West was won, we are going to have a lot of painful ground to cover.

But to get back to our reporter, last seen disembarking from Sir John A.'s railroad onto the platform at Maple Creek. He's made the five-hour journey from Swift Current—through a landscape deeply etched with buffalo trails and strewn with their “numberless skeletons”—with the mundane objective of purchasing a saddle horse. By the time we catch up with him, he has completed this transaction (a small triumph, since the military had snapped up most of the serviceable horseflesh in the country and put it to urgent use) and is on the lookout for people to interview. The next day finds him riding out ten miles east of town, with a translator, toward a cluster of canvas tipis on the banks of Piapot Creek.

At the approach of the visitors, someone runs for the chief—out planting potatoes, we're told. He's an impressive sight, “fully six feet two . . . [and] straight as an arrow,” clad in a blue blanket, with brass rings in his earlobes, brass beads on his long braids, and the remains of a top hat, ringed with feathers, crowning his head. His name is Nekaneet.

“I have come from the home of my people beyond the great lakes to see the Indians and to talk with them,” the reporter says. “I want to know about the grievances of the Indians and half-breeds, so that I can tell all the people about them.” As if anyone really cared. As if the population of Ontario weren't already crying for vengeance against the traitors.

But Nekaneet accepts the offer at face value and, accompanied by members of his council, invites the visitor into a tipi, smokes the pipe with him, and recalls the painful story of the displacement of his people. His words are familiar. “Colonel Irvine said the Great Mother had given this land to us and marked it with a pile of stones. It was to be for us and our children.

“But already the white men have come in,” he continues, with a sweeping gesture. “Their tipis are there now, on the place that was to be for us. You can see them.” He pauses for translation and to let his emotions settle.

“We are hungry,” he says quietly. “Where are the buffalo? Where are our horses? They are gone, and we must soon follow them. Your people have our land. These prairies were ours once, and the buffalo were given us by the Great Spirit. They kept us warm; they kept us from being hungry; they kept us in fuel. But all are gone.

“Surely the rich white people, who are as numberless as the blades of grass upon the prairie or the leaves upon the trees in the Cypress Hills, can help their red brothers. When a white man came amongst us when I was a boy we fed him, warmed him, and gave him horses for his journey. Why don't they do the same for us now?

“Perhaps they would if they knew. But the [Indian] agents have two tongues, and our white brothers far away think we are not hungry. They think we are happy. But look at me, look at those round me, and say, do we look happy? Are these blankets warm enough for the winter? Are they like the buffalo robes we used to have?

“Let them take back the blankets and return the buffalo robes. Let them send the buffalo back, and take their own people to the reserve where they came from. Give us the prairies again and we won't ask for food.” The chief looks down at his calloused hands, his worn-out moccasins.

“It is too late,” he says finally. “The iron road has frightened the game away, and the talking wire stretches from sunrise to sunset. It is too late.” He pauses, and there is no mistaking the pain in his eyes. “It is too late,” he says again. But then he picks up his axe and, still daring to hope, goes back to planting potatoes.
2

It is Hard Time Moon, January 2010, and Keith (who has remained an ever-present if increasingly silent partner in this adventure since I became overwhelmed by the past) stands shivering on the edge of our snow-banked driveway in Eastend, engulfed in clouds of breath as he runs through his standard list of cautions. Drive carefully. Full tank of gas? Watch out for slippery roads. But really, he needn't worry. If there's one thing these hills have taught us, it is to stay alert. And it's not just the seasonal round of road hazards—whether black ice or potholes or slithery muck—that one has to watch out for. There are also the unsigned distractions of the past. This country is filled with ghosts that leap out of the coulees, fleshy and unexpected as deer, and almost as likely, in their own way, to cause a derailment.

Today's journey, from our house in the Frenchman Valley to the Healing Lodge on the Nekaneet First Nation's land, will take less than two hours but will span hundreds of thousands of years. As I nose our new pickup down the street (the longer we spend in Eastend, the more country we become), my thoughts are already running up and over the rim of the valley—north, south, east, and west—to map a route through this landscape of remembrance. First, an X to mark this silent street asleep under drifts of snow.
Voici les neiges d'antan,
the snows of my childhood. A block to the south, there's the Stegner House and the memories it holds of people who thought they were Adam and Eve in a new and unstoried world. And overlooking the town and its follies, more dots appear on the map. The bones of long-extinct monsters in the T.rex Centre just above our house. A fossilized seashell half-buried in the dust. A cluster of tipi rings, shoulder-deep in the grass, that tell their story with stony eloquence.

Draw a conflagration at Chimney Coulee. Place a question mark over the site of the purported Crazy Horse refugee camp. And as the highway leads us west and north, let the map spool out beyond the reach of today's travel toward Fort Walsh—with a cannon at each gate—and the field of slaughter at Whitemud Coulee. Watch as the Nakoda bid farewell to their murdered kinsfolk and begin the painful trek toward the Skull Mountainettes. Mark the starvation camp at Cypress Lake with a death's head. “It is too late,” Nekaneet had said. He knew there was trouble ahead.