DE BIG-SHOT TRAIN: A Northern Love Affair with Algoma Central Country
A Rough and Ribald Story of a Lifetime in the Bush ~ Robert Cuerrier
Chapter 10
IN THE BLOOD
Early in my childhood I got the idea that being Indian was not considered a good thing. My grandmother “Ma Mere” we called her, lived with us in an extended family on the farm. Whenever she disapproved of my father’s misdeeds she would pointedly remind him that it was because he was part “sauvage” and that he would have to be wary of his natural instincts. She even turned him in at one point, and Leonard found himself, remorsefully, on the Indian List where he couldn’t buy any booze.
For years he denied his heritage and tried to hide behind his French surname. Sometimes when there was a party and the bottles and fiddles came out, he would forget and take his turn step-dancing like any other proud Métis. It wasn’t until time passed, his mother died, he’d moved to the city, society accepted natives a little more, and his behaviour modified that he embraced his ancestry again.
When I started school back in the early fifties, the school history texts always referred to the Indians as the sauvages. Knowing our mixed heritage I asked my mother if I was a sauvage. She said yes with a certainty, but even as a kid I looked at her with a cocked eyebrow, knowing that she, too, was alluding as much to behaviour as ancestry.
Now a Métis person living along the track here, I’m thinkin’. As a nation we have historically always been the bridge between he whites and the Indians. Our contributions to the country have been acknowledged, and we are recognized in the constitution as a founding people.
Well, white folks don’t make it easy. A hundred years ago government insisted we prove that we had some white blood to be considered Métis. Today it’s the same botheration, only this time they want documentation of native blood to determine if a person is Métis. Who else in the country has to research their ancestry to determine citizenship?
Yet Louis Riel, the father of the Métis Nation, was one sixty-fourth native, and his secretary, Honore Jaxon, was a reconstructed Ontario English Orangeman and considered a Métis leader too. We know who we are, and genealogical studies and percentages don’t mean much. Our identity is singular, not a composite. How much Celt and how much Norman constitute an Englishman anyway?
Sometimes the way government treats aboriginals is really funny. Just a few years ago the Ontario government, in a classic case of stereotyping, sent enclosed a bingo dauber as an incentive. It would be kind of like sending an Irishman a bottle of whiskey or a Newfoundlander a codfish.
Even more recently the leader of the opposition in our Federal Parliament got his Indians mixed up and sent out letters of congratulations on India Day to Canadian Natives instead of the ones who’d come from across the ocean.
The last time a white man, Columbus, got lost like that, it cost the Indians all their land.
LETTING GO
“You gotta forget things, there’s no point in plowing the same furrow.” ~ Leonard St. Jean Baptiste
METIS SPEAK
Much of the colourful daily language of the Métis will have allusions to Catholicism, devout folk that they are. To instruct a man on a new task, to introduce him to a new territory, or to hang a new nickname on him is to “baptize him.” A serious misunderstanding that leads to blows is termed being forced to “give him a blessing.”
HOLLYWOOD’S CANADA
Hollywood came up with the woodsman’s pose in the hundreds of Mountie movies made back in the 30’s, 40’s and early 50’s. This unnatural posture has the bucheron standing hands clasped behind the back, feet spread apart, head erect and back straight.
The stance became a cliché, and I’ve seen it many times in old photos of real people posing in the outdoors. You don’t see that posture any more but I do know how to stand before older out-of-country folks with particular expectations of those who live in “le pays d’en haut.”
The same genre had quite a stereotype of the seedy, dirty disheveled half-breed living in the wild. I have no quarrel with that one because that’s pretty much how it is if you’re living rough in the bush. Except unlike the typecast I don’t have a French accent and I’m not evil or sneaky, don’t pack a hide-out knife, nor do I attempt abductions of my unrequited loves.
MY BRUDDER SHONEY
As a teenager I spent a couple of summers working construction in Yellowknife, North West Territories. It was a very small town then, with two distinct villages: Old Town and New Town. The Indians lived in Old Town. It was here that I started to understand the great divide.
Johnny was one of the boys on the crew. He was taciturn, given to long silences. He spoke only to herald an occasion- and at the same time he would revel a philosophy. I was driving him back to Old Town one night in the company truck and he looked over and said, “I got enough money to buy an old truck.” Knowing how it was with him, I didn’t reply. He wasn’t about to open up a dialogue here. A few minutes later he spoke again, “Imagine that, a fuckin’ Indian wit’ a truck.”
The other Indians on the crew couldn’t pronounce his name: when they said it came out as “Shoney”. Shoney had a Saturday Night theory of what would be a good time. On pay day he’d say to me, “Hey brudder, let’s buy a case of wine, get drunk, see snakes and beat up on some fuckin’ white guys.” I would decline lest he should look at me late in the night and see me as not quite being “pur laine.” Moods are always shifting in this sort of thing.
Later on I went to school with a guy just like him in some ways. I baptized him “Shoney.” We went on to build a log cabin together up the line. The name held. His big town Toronto business is called “Shoney’s Clothing” today and it’s for sure only his wife and mother are likely to know him by any other moniker.
THE MIDNIGHT BUS
I was a kid working up north in Yellowknife in ’63 and it was early September. I had to get home to the Soo fast or be late for the start of the high school year. Now this wasn’t tugging on my conscience in any way: I wondered if I should go back at all. But I was flush and decided to take the bus to Edmonton and get part way home in a hurry. It was easier than hitchhiking and only twelve bucks for 1,000 miles.
The bus left at midnight, the passengers almost all men, most well-lubricated against the night, the boredom and the monotony of a rough ride on a gravel road they’d seen a few times before. The rain was driving and the bus yard muddy. The passengers tracked it all in until the floor of the bus was covered in a slick greasy slime. Every seat on the bus was filled.
When more riders boarded I came to understand racism close up and ugly. The bus driver walked down the aisle and pointed at five or six husky young Indian men. “You, you, you, you and you will have to stand. These people need a seat.” These people were white.
Nobody raised an objection, not even the men who wordlessly gave up their seats. Indian cultural pride and revivalism hadn’t yet begun. They stood stoically through the night hanging onto the edge of the seats and the overhead bar until so exhausted they lay down on the floor in the mud to get some rest.
I sat there, sullen, seething but sixteen and to say or do anything in rough company would have been a mistake that I wasn’t dumb enough to make. I kept my mouth shut.
It was a hell of a party in the early going. If a couple of white guys were ripping it up to the nuisance level the driver would stop the bus, confiscate that bottle and put it in the baggage compartment so they could retrieve it at the end of the trip. If it were Indians misbehaving he’d expropriate the bottle and fling it out the open bus door all the while threatening to turf them next if they didn’t settle down.
Riding along I began chewing on the merits of fundamentalist justice – the satisfying righteousness of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I could see how it would be so easy to make that kind of thinking a part of yourself.
Back in school we often talked about the civil rights movement is history class, everyone smug that it was something peculiar to the States and that that kind of thinking never happened in Canada. Still ashamed of the midnight bus and my own acquiescence I didn’t tell my story to anyone except the friend I walked to school with every day, Brian Latham. Oddly enough, today Brian is a retired civil servant living in Yellowknife in the North West Territories.
GUILTY
Whenever they nailed a politician or a big shot with a crime old Leonard would chant gleefully “Ya, dey caught him white handed!” ~ Leonard St. Jean Baptiste
THE MACKENZIE HIGHWAY
When I had hitchhiked into Yellowknife, the road had been opened no more than a year or two. The scenery en route was about as exciting as running a treadmill. The country is flat and endless, the only change in topography was that the trees get smaller the further north you go. You get a good idea of what infinity really means.
The trip was, however, like thumbing through some of the back pages of Canadian history. Service centres were hundreds of miles apart, and there were signs along the highway warning travellers to gas up at each one. The code of the north still held. Most of the gas bars were Ma and Pa operations, and traffic didn’t warrant a night shift, yet they were still open around the clock. You gassed up and went in and cooked for yourself and could pay and make your own change in an open till. You didn’t even have to do the dishes.
I hitched a ride with a trucker and he made a side trip to Hay River. I walked through town as he made his drop and was astounded to see a deserted storefront with a sign on it saying “Barbershop and Bath.”
PHILOSOPHY
“An Indian reservation is a place where old cars go to die.” ~ Robert Big Track, rez car of the year award winner, Sault Powwow, 1999
A RANDOM THOUGH
I’ve come to think that if native people had a national anthem it would surely be Hank William’s “Jumbalaya.” Indian people seemed to really identify with old Han’s music and the maudlin pain, sadness and despair along with a few intermittent good times expressed in it. It was always a favourite of theirs in the bars, the feeling for it, a palpable thing I’ve witnessed many times.
HOT ROCKIN’
The Indians believe that stones have been around so long that they’ve seen it all. They represent everything that man knows. There’s a spiritual element to them. They are used to call upon the spirits, to invoke divine direction, intervention and to seek the knowledge of the ancestors. Stones are Big Medicine.
Of course everyone uses them to ring a campfire to control the wind and hold the heat in. You can also heat up a few nice flat ones and cover them in the dirt under your bough bed when rough camping. Or wrap one up and take it into your sleeping bag on a winter campout. On the moose hunt I like to warm up a big one in the tea fire and use it for a footrest on the stand. They hold the heat for hours.
In fly time you’re forced to use a tent when camping and often in rainy weather it gets cold, damp and clammy. You can heat up a bunch of stones and take them inside in the frypan and pots and you’ll soon have the chill and dampness off and your spirits revived.
If you feel the need to clean up and it’s too cold to jump in the water, the tent can be made into a sauna allowing a person to heat up enough so as to be able to rinse off outside. For spiritual renewal at the same time call it a sweat lodge, sing your songs, drift into a trance and move to a higher plane. Burn some tobacco on the campfire to honour Mother Earth, the Grandmothers and Grandfathers. Tradition calls for no strong drink before or after this ceremony.
WHEN THINGS GO WRONG
As idyllic as the bush may be, it may sometimes turn into a devil’s dream. The Métis were traditional woodsmen and Catholics. As such they could stoop no lower than blasphemy to show displeasure. This was their usual curse. The first two lines are standard, the next two to be made into your own situational rhyme. Say I fell into freezing water in late fall. I would fall sanctimoniously to my knees, head tilted towards the heavens and utter fervently.
Our Lord of Hosts and Holy Ghosts,
And our sweet Redeeming Jesus
Save the old man, right away,
Before the bastard freezes.
It was all done in a good humour and meant to make light of some very dangerous episodes. I’m sure the Good Lord loves bush folk and sees it that way too.
DONAT WINE
Donat Wine was our drink and we used it anytime we felt the need to recalibrate ourselves- maybe after a few hard days at labour, to steel ourselves up to discomfort, to induce a creative flush, or just for pure entertainment.
We named it after m’oncle Donat, a man who lived to see the north side of eighty in spite of all the while a being a fellow with a low opinion of water as drinking material. He was a dirt farmer, lived in a rough-hewn square timbered home and made a strong drink home brew as hard as the country and as tough as himself.
He’d start in the spring and make his hooch with maple syrup and then follow the seasons and the rhythms of nature through the dandelion, rhubarb, clover, strawberry, raspberry, beet then onto gooseberry, chokecherry, apple and plum, and then in winter, wheat and barley. There was nothing that grew that Donat couldn’t brew.
We admired his ingenuity and his work ethic. He had a keg on either side of the back door- one that he was cooking and one that he was drinking. Nothing was let to age, and he never bothered straining his wine. There was a big ladle hanging over the one he was drinking and after dinner (that what today is called lunch) and after supper before going back to work he’d take a drink of a quart or so- drank it right down and ate the fruit. He homesteaded till the day he died. His hands were a sight, all beny, stiffened and gnarled from a lifetime of pulling stumps and picking rocks, building a life and a farm from a stubborn land. Never saw a man work like he did.
So naturally when I took to the land I started to brew up some pop scull for occasions. I refined it a little more than m’oncle, but it still had an edge to it. It wasn’t a temporary girlie drink. You’d never have to bother getting drunk twice in the same day because even a few drinks would stay right with you through the week.
All of my family, the Cuerrier’s, took to it since it was within our values, hell it was likely within our DNA and many others enjoyed it too. Folk’s would tell me that after a sip or two they’d be able to restructure their palate and it was just fine.
