Big Bear (18 page)

The land belongs to the Queen. From whom had she received it? The question Big Bear had always asked, and never heard an answer. Clearly, Richardson did not know, or had totally forgotten, that the Royal Proclamation by George III in 1763 spelled out the principle that indigenous
people have an inalienable right to the lands they occupy, that the so-called “doctrine of right of discovery” in European international law was designed to control the competition among European nations themselves, and had no bearing on the relations those nations had with the Natives they “discovered” living on their land. As a free Cree man, Big Bear had always known he had an inalienable right to the land given him by the Great Spirit, but stating that fact with bitter irony in Richardson’s courtroom helped him nothing. Poorly translated—or remembered—it only provoked shallow laughter.

And the judge’s blithe statement that his People “would be looked after as though nothing had occurred,” proved to be as much a lie as Morris’s “you will still have the same mode of living as before.”

Throughout the summer, Horsechild had been a sustaining comfort to Big Bear in prison. Mary PeeMee recounts:

“The judge said to Big Bear, ‘I cannot sentence your son to prison, but I can sentence him to residential school.’ [The Battleford Industrial Residential School was organized in 1883 by Indian Affairs and the Anglican Church.] Then it was time to leave his father, and my man did not want to go. This was the first time he cried. Big
Bear talked to him for a long time. Then he took the medicine from around his neck and put it around the neck of Horsechild. Big Bear told him it would protect and guide him and he was never to take it off. Horsechild then left his father, and eventually came home.”

From the context, it seems that this story concerns a necklace but Horsechild, later named Joe PeeMee, also received from his father the bear paw power bundle called Chief’s Son’s Hand. He cared for it for forty-nine years, until 1934, when at Little Pine Reserve he held a pipe ceremony and ritually presented the bundle to American anthropologist David Mandelbaum. Mandelbaum accepted the bundle, likely gave a gift of fifty dollars in return, and swore to keep it safe. PeeMee explained that he had many children and “there was no place for the bundle … his main concern was finding a safe place for the medicine.”

On October 13, 1934, Mandelbaum found a “safe place”; he deposited Chief’s Son’s Hand in the American Museum of Natural History, New York, where it has remained for three-quarters of a century. In 1988–89, a group of young Cree, including Jim Thunder and Lewis Cardinal, ran a Big Bear centenary pilgrimage on foot, four thousand three hundred kilometres from Edmonton to New York, to try to
repatriate it. However, there was strong disagreement among Big Bear’s descendants, both in Canada and Montana, as to where Chief’s Son’s Hand should go, and so museum officials refused to release it. In September 1994, curator Stanley Fried told me: “The American Museum will do the right thing [by the bundle], once we know what the right thing is. As long as the Cree cannot agree, it will stay here.”

Today the bundle is no longer protected in PeeMee’s original canvas bag; in fact, it is no longer a bundle. And it is no longer in a small room surrounded by hundreds of other communal Cree artifacts, the way I first saw it in June 1972. In November 2007, I found that all the museum’s artifacts have been archived according to the materials of which they were made. Each of Chief’s Son’s Hand’s nine wrapping cloths has been unleafed, numbered, and laid out separately. And I saw the ancient clawed paw as it had always been, sewn unevenly with leather thongs onto its red stroud by the Cree boy. But it now lies, numbered and naked, in a separate antiseptic drawer in the processed air of the huge museum vaults, with nothing but a twist of tobacco and a short braid of sweetgrass for companionship.

The Inmate Admittance Records at Stony Mountain Penitentiary, Manitoba:

“Prisoner # 103: Big Bear

Term: 3 years

Received: Sept. 29, 1885, from Regina

Born: N.W.T.

Age: 60

Race: Native Canadian

Married: Yes

Religion: None

Trade: None

Height: 5' 5 1/4"

Complexion: Dark

Eyes and Hair: Black

Crime: Treason Felony”

There was even less sunlight and air in Stony Mountain than in the police prison at Where The Bones Lie. The cell was not wood, and smaller, cut as it seemed out of piled limestone with iron bars for a door that opened into a black tunnel without windows. The stinking yellow light of coal oil. A mattress and a pail, and bells ten times a day.

“A.M.

5:50 Bell rings. Prisoners rise, wash, dress, make beds etc.

6:00 Bell rings. Prisoners unlocked, tubs emptied, etc.

6:45 Bell rings. Breakfast ready on stands. Prisoners marched to cell.…

P.M.

6:00 Bell rings for locking up. Night Guard take charge of prison.…”

The bell ruled. The brightest sun made no difference: there was always night in his cell. Forty-three of one hundred and ten inmates were People. One Arrow had to work mending White shoes; Big Bear began with carpentry, helping enlarge the prison, but eventually was assigned to clean pigpens. Poundmaker had been in Stony Mountain since August 21, 1885, and by Christmas he could barely walk for
coughing. But once he and Big Bear met in the animal warmth of the barns.

Pigs stink, Big Bear said. If I’d known, I’d have eaten even less pork.

My young wife, liked bacon, Poundmaker whispered hoarsely. Some had good fat, to fry, potatoes.

Big Bear gestured to the guard, who nodded, and he touched Poundmaker’s arm. Slowly they walked together into the sunlight, through the snow to Warden Sam Bedson’s private zoo. His two bears were hidden in winter sleep, but his seven buffalo snuffled at hay in their wire pen.

Poundmaker whispered, Do you think, someday, they’ll milk, them like cows?

The buffalo lifted their shaggy, expressionless heads to his Cree words. Big Bear felt so destroyed in this hateful place that he could only laugh; to speak would be weeping.

Journalists from Toronto and France came to have their pictures taken with “regal” Poundmaker, the only prisoner whose waist-long hair, by special dispensation, remained uncut. But the handsome chief was extremely ill, and for fear he would die in prison, he was discharged March 4, 1886. At about the same time thirty-one other Cree were released, including One Arrow, who only managed to reach St. Boniface before he died and was buried near Louis Riel in the cathedral
cemetery. Poundmaker did reach home on the Battle River. Four months later he rode to his adoptive father Crowfoot at Blackfoot Crossing, and there he coughed his life out.

When Big Bear heard, he sought permission to visit the two bears. Their fur shone, they paced past each other inside their wire, rearing high like human beings at the corners and wheeling, dropping down to pace back again. Big Bear remembered his friend Poundmaker, only forty-four. He remembered his six Young Men hanged at the same instant in Battleford, every face, every laugh and cry of rage, every hand movement in warrior story: Iron Body; Little Bear; Bad Arrow; Round The Sky; Miserable Man; Wandering Spirit with his long hair white as snow. The rope torn into each broken neck.

Once, on Bull’s Forehead Hill, the Great Parent of Bear had given him his vision, his bundle, his name, and also his power as a Cree boy, man, father, and chief. Now, when he should have been a respected Elder surrounded by his life’s community, he stood alone, thrown away as a criminal. Watching two bears that were fed well enough—as he was—pacing the five steps of their White cage. Where had his life, his soul and spirit gone? Even in the open air, walls and wire multiplied around him. For a year he had not seen, unchained, the immense land he once rode over as easily as
breathing. These poor bears, endlessly fed and forever imprisoned: despair threatened the very light of the sun. What he had seen while facing Morris at Pitt had come to pass, even for bears.

And calm gradually grew in him. Like the confidence he found when he was given
Iniskim
and offered it to the medicine stones above the Bow River. Trust the Buffalo—even when they disappear. Trust the Bear—even when they are imprisoned. As his body sickened in the cell shrinking around him, his spirit grew firmer. When, in January 1887, Mista-wasis and Ahtah-kakoop wrote to Dewdney, he was grateful to them despite their language.

“We believe that Big Bear is the only Indian concerned in the rebellion remaining in prison … and it would be very gratifying to the Cree nation if Her Majesty’s Government would extend this criminal clemency.…”

The prison doctor added his judicious word:

“Prisoner 103 is very sick and rapidly getting worse … his fainting spells are growing more frequent … I would therefore urge most strongly that he be released as soon as possible.”

On February 4, 1887, he was deemed fit to travel, and more than a month later, after enduring wagons and trains and freight carts, he was unloaded on the Little Pine Reserve. He had, of course, no reserve to return to.

Both the Poundmaker (#114) and Little Pine (#116) side-by-side reserves had been declared “
DISLOYAL
” in Assistant Indian Commissioner Hayter Reed’s “List of Band Behaviour during Rebellion,” and therefore their horses, guns, and carts had been taken from them; their treaty annuities cancelled for five years; and no one was allowed to leave either reserve without written permission from their agent. Their People existed below poverty. When Chief Thunderchild—his reserve also declared “
DISLOYAL
”—visited Big Bear, the dying chief finally spoke. “My heart is broken .…[In jail] I did the dirtiest work. One night I was placed in a bad place, a dungeon … I hated it there, but I would not kill myself for I am not a coward. Now I will not last long.… My sons have gone to the States. I am alone.”

The hundreds of Plains People who had once followed him as chief had scattered to whatever reserve would accept them; they feared government reprisals for any association with him. Though discharged, he remained a criminal, and he would never be allowed to choose a Big Bear Reserve to gather them together. Humiliation reached into his closest
family: during his imprisonment his wife had begun to live with another man, and she refused to return. Horsechild, except for two months in summer, was locked in the industrial residential school at Battleford, and so Big Bear’s daughter Earth Woman came from Montana to care for him.

The summer light, the poplar leaves flickering to a breeze in the Battle River valley, the ravines of Cutknife Hill blossoming white, turning purple with saskatoons, were beautiful to see. He leaned against the log wall of his cabin in the sun, watched thunderheads gather, and as winter approached he lay inside on his blankets. His spirit roamed over the long rivers and plains and valleys of his life, the lakes and hills of memory. But always he returned to Treaty Six, which Morris had brought and Sweetgrass had signed before they could discuss it: it never was read to him in Cree, and in all the years he had tried to talk, watch, argue, he had not been able to change any bit of what the Whites said was in it. And he returned to the one great unified “land set aside” he had envisioned for all the prairie People, to the delegation they would send to negotiate its boundaries and its conditions with the biggest White boss, wherever he might be. And how Dumont and Crozier shooting each other at Duck Lake had tipped Imasees and Wandering Spirit out of their frozen hatred into violence that destroyed
all possibilities. Now Imasees and his families were trying to live in Montana on the garbage Whites threw away, and Wandering Spirit’s family had scattered into northern forests—perhaps there the government would forget about them. And he … what was he, here beside this carefully measured barbed-wire fence strung between Little Pine and Poundmaker land?

Whites were truly amazing. They had more ropes than he had imagined when he told Morris that, just by seeing him, he felt one around his neck. And suddenly he recognized that this, too, was Bear’s gift to him—an extremely sensitive neck! Big Bear laughed himself into a very nearly killing cough.

Ropes. To destroy a proud, independent people you made them sick, you wiped out their food, you took away their community, you made them afraid. Then you fenced them in on scattered bits of land, you didn’t let them visit one another, you took their children and penned them up in schools like the ones near Battleford and Calgary, and you never let them come home or speak their language so you could never again tell them the sacred stories, nor listen to theirs.

Looking at Morris he had not thought of all that; his apprehension then had circled around being forced to accept
the overwhelming White law. But now Whites had forced him to see “the rope” in their way, though there seemed no need for them to literally hang anyone. One Arrow and Poundmaker and very soon he himself would prove it: a three-year sentence in Stony Mountain was more than enough. The one difference: hanging was quicker.

Nevertheless, Horsechild had brought him the sacred bundle again,
That Which Is Kept In A Clean Place.
The mercy of The Great Spirit, the unfathomable goodness and power of the Great Parent of Bear remained. The buffalo and bear might be fenced in, like his People, but they would not die out. What he had done, what he had tried to do but failed to: the Creator’s world remained and People belonged in it. His beloved People would not vanish, no matter what Whites forced upon them. They knew the place given them by the Creator because they knew the stories of this place, and they would live, raise their beautiful children, and a hundred years from now the sun and the moon would still shine upon them, the rivers run.

The government had used written treaties against his People, but perhaps, once they could understand and read and write the White words, they would be able to negotiate the treaties better. And perhaps, a century from now, the highest courts in Canada would come to recognize their
magnificent traditions of oral memory, and they could begin talking about land and heritage and rights and living the way People talked. Talk, talk, they would keep on talking, make official apologies and act and talk some more. His insistence on talking to resolve conflict would become the Canadian way. They had, after all, named the whole country Canada, which sounded very much like the Cree word
kanâta
, meaning “the place that is clean.”