As Long as the Rivers Flow - Softcover

Bartleman, James

 
9780307398758: As Long as the Rivers Flow
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307398757 ISBN 13: 9780307398758
Verlag: Knopf Canada, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

From the accomplished memoirist and former Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario comes a first novel of incredible heart and spirit for every Canadian.

The novel follows one girl, Martha, from the Cat Lake First Nation in Northern Ontario who is "stolen" from her family at the age of six and flown far away to residential school. She doesn't speak English but is punished for speaking her native language; most terrifying and bewildering, she is also "fed" to the school's attendant priest with an attraction to little girls.

Ten long years later, Martha finds her way home again, barely able to speak her native tongue. The memories of abuse at the residential school are so strong that she tries to drown her feelings in drink, and when she gives birth to her beloved son, Spider, he is taken away by Children's Aid to Toronto. In time, she has a baby girl, Raven, whom she decides to leave in the care of her mother while she braves the bewildering strangeness of the big city to find her son and bring him home.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JAMES BARTLEMAN rose from humble circumstances in Port Carling, Ontario, to become Foreign Policy Advisor to the right PM Chrétien in 1994. After a distinguished career of more than thirty-five years in the Canadian foreign service, in 2002 he became the first Native Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario. He is the author of the prize-winning memoir Out of Muskoka.

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First Memories

“IKWESENS, GEEYAWAAN! I KWESENS GEEYAWAAN! It’s a little girl! It’s a little girl!”

As the midwife held up the newborn baby for the happy mother, Mary Whiteduck, to see, the infant began to howl. That was the signal for Isaac, Mary’s husband, who had been nervously waiting outside the family cabin throughout the night, to push open the door and enter.

“A strong and healthy child,” the midwife told him. The beloved Anishinabe elder had been delivering babies at Cat Lake Indian Reserve in northern Ontario for as long as anyone could remember. “Someone to take care of you and Mary when you reach my age.”

The news travelled fast in the tiny settlement that spring morning in 1956 on the shore of Cat Lake, some one hundred and fifty miles upstream from the Albany river. Within minutes, relatives, friends and neighbours came to offer their congratulations, the men standing around outside the cabin to smoke their pipes and gossip and the women going in to drop off small gifts and admire the baby.

That evening, in honour of the addition to their community, everyone gathered around a campfire to laugh, tell stories, drink tea and eat country food—fish, game and berries harvested from the land. Several days later, a respected elder and long-standing friend of the family came to their home and, in a ceremony involving much meditation and prayer, named the baby Martha.

Four months later, the sky was filled with the cries of geese departing for the south, and Mary and Isaac prepared to join the annual fall exodus of families leaving for their traplines. Isaac finetuned the ancient, temperamental Johnson outboard motor, made some last-minute repairs to the family’s eighteen-foot square-stern freighter canoe, and loaded it with guns, axes, saws, traps, clothing and provisions. The couple closed the cabin where they spent their summers and said goodbye to the handful of people remaining behind, mainly the sick and elderly who would not be able to survive a hard winter on the land. They tucked their infant daughter into the beaded deerskin cradle bag of her tikinagan, the cradleboard that would serve her as baby carriage and crib for the first two years of her life, and took her on her first trip across Cat Lake and downstream to the small lake and trapping cabin that had been in Isaac’s family for generations.
 
Martha’s earliest years passed in a blur. Her first distinct memory was of playing on the shore in front of the family’s cabin in the bush when she was five. The wind changed direction, the sky grew black and great cracking sounds blasted out of the clouds followed by stunning flashes of light. She burst into tears and her laughing mother ran to pick her up and carry her inside just as the storm burst over their heads and giant raindrops swept across the water to soak them.

“Don’t be afraid, my daughter,” her mother said, as she removed her wet clothes and dried her off. “That was just the Thunderbird flapping his wings and shooting lightning bolts from his eyes. He does that when he is fighting his enemy, the giant water snake. Never forget that he’s a friend of the Anishinabe people, for he provides the rain for Mother Earth and all her creatures to drink.”

To cheer up her up, she added, “Now I’m going to tell you a story about Nanabush.”

Martha immediately stopped crying, for her mother had told her tales before about the exploits of this part-human, part-spirit son of the West Wind and grandson of Gitche Manitou, and she loved them. Some of them were serious, about how he helped the Anishinabe people by creating animals and plants for them to eat, and others made her laugh. Martha preferred the comical ones and her mother launched into a long, involved tale about the time he once invited the animals to a feast, and didn’t tell them until they arrived that they were the feast!
The little girl wasn’t sure the story was all that funny, especially if you were an animal, but she laughed just the same. In a visit some months later that would remain forever etched in her memory, friends of her parents came to their cabin at the time of the Great Moon, when the fiercest and coldest winter winds blow upon the land. After snowshoeing through the bush and across the frozen lakes from their home on a nearby trapline, they pushed open the door and entered, smiling broadly.

“Bojo! Bojo! Hello! Hello! We’ve come to visit. We were going crazy over at our place, with our kids away at residential school and never seeing anyone from one moon to another, and we decided to come see you!”

“Ahaaw! Ahaaw! Welcome! Welcome! What a pleasant surprise!” said Mary. “Take off your things and make yourselves comfortable. I’ll have some hot tea ready for you in a minute.”

The guests took off their parkas, unlaced and removed their moosehide boots, and settled down to relax on the bed. Isaac dug out his can of Old Chum pipe tobacco, and soon the two couples were sipping hot tea, smoking their pipes and gossiping.

As soon as she could, Mary excused herself and set about making supper.

“You’re in luck. I’ve got a rabbit stew already warming up on the back of the stove. We’ll have that with some bannock and fried fish.” With her kerchief holding her hair in place, she cheerfully mixed Robin Hood flour, Maple Leaf Tenderflake lard, Royal baking powder, Sifto salt and ice-cold lake water in a tin bowl to make fried bannock in a heavy, fire-blackened, cast iron frying pan. The first course prepared, she handed it around, encouraging everyone to eat it while it was still hot and greasy, and started work preparing a large, fresh pickerel she had caught that morning while ice-fishing.

“Let me help you,” the visiting wife said. “You shouldn’t have to do all that work yourself.”

“No, no, please sit down, you’re my guest,” Mary told her. “I can’t tell you how happy I am you’re here. The winter is so long and we never see anyone.”

Mary scaled, gutted and cleaned the fish, cut it into fillets and used the same pan to fry them in bubbling lard. When it was golden brown and crispy, she called everyone to the rough, handmade table and served a meal that Martha would never forget: rabbit stew, fried fish and more bannock on tin plates with mugs of sweetened tea and Carnation evaporated milk in a room lit by the soft yellow light of a coal oil lamp and smelling of freshly scraped and curing hides, wood smoke and pipe tobacco.

It was time to get down to some serious visiting and Martha climbed up on the always welcoming and comfortable lap of her father and listened attentively and quietly as the grown-ups talked. Beginning with the subject that interested them the most, the men engaged in some low-key bragging about how many beaver, marten, mink and muskrat they had trapped that winter. They moved on to talk about blizzards that had blown up when they were far from home, about shelters they had thrown together to ride out storms, about waking up in the mornings to dig themselves out into brilliant sunshine, and about fierce wolverines, pound for pound the most powerful animals in the bush, raiding their traplines, stealing bait, springing traps and never being caught.

“But no matter how tough things are for us now,” Isaac said, “things were worse for the ancestors before the arrival of the Hudson’s Bay Company. They had no market for their furs and no guns and axes and all the things we take for granted today. The summers when everyone got together would have been the best time of the year since there was fish to eat...

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Verlag
Knopf Canada
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307398757
ISBN 13 
9780307398758
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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