Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada's Past (17 page)

When Canada entered the war against Germany on September 10, 1939, Tobie's father became part of the Devils Scouts, the Twenty-second Canadian Regiment. One evening, after reading one of his father's infrequent letters, Tobie asks his mother: “What do they use scouts for?”

“They are used to look hell in the eye, to be the only one to hear the tragic cry of a poor soldier dying in the gloom as he roars out his despair. A scout is a poor exhausted body, a freezing soul living in the mud, one who burrows out tunnels and undergoes the worst of hardships.”

“My father is a scout for pain and grief,” Tobie concludes after a silence.

“One day he will show you a beautiful, shining road known to no one else,” his mother adds, turning over and lying down, her breath coming short.

Even in this time of war and rumour, of depression and illness, Tobie's mother views everything with eyes that transform the colour of things, especially whatever Tobie most fears. She never uses a low human word for a thing from above. She tries to give to everything both its human value and its divine weight. She is Native, a descendant of the Métis of western Canada. Her ancestors were both Indian and French, while those of her husband were Lakotas who had lived in every latitude of the Canadian and American west, in a condition of permanent war with the Cree and the Ojibwas, who were amply supplied with firearms by the French. For almost a century, the Lakotas went from one bloody war to another even more bloody one, culminating in 1890 in the massacre of two hundred Natives, including women and children, at Wounded Knee.

But the Métis and the Lakotas of the old days were familiar with an unforgettable epoch during which they still could stand full of wonder before the grassy ocean of the Great Plains. The winds that blew from the four quarters, the clouds, the beams of sunlight, all drew pictures in the tall grass, which bent and sprang back hypnotically and without end.

“On second thought,” Tobie says to himself, “that isn't my fathers voice I hear on moonlit nights. His voice is so vast that it could almost make the leaves fall from the trees in autumn. Nor is it my mother's voice. When she speaks, she often uses a haunted tone, a voice filled with the conviction that death is nigh or … that a miraculous cure is about to occur. My mother carries with her a bottomless fund of hope.”

The mere thought of this inexhaustible fund, which is of course related to the paradise of the braves or the heaven of all the saints in the White people's calendar, fills him with a surge of sweetness and peace for a brief moment. But as a barrier it is too frail to hold back that wall of silence which would crush him and make him give in to despair.

When his father went off of his own free will, Tobie felt abandoned and betrayed. Even if he does know, in the depths of his soul, that his father has never ceased loving him and his mother, he does not know how to forgive him for racing off as if nothing else mattered to this warrior but the war. He left his family with pitifully little on which to live, and what he left was dwindling away. He writes them the occasional letter in which it seems that the war is a source of satisfaction that is lost on Tobie. In order to help himself forgive, Tobie has decided to watch over his father's vacant place at table, his spot at the window, his boots, his tools, and his turquoise necklace. In the depths of his memory, and without knowing exactly why, Tobie stands guard over his father and learns how to forgive him. In his father's absence, it is Tobie who takes care of his mother, trying to ease her pain. In return, she gives him that smile of hers which is so necessary to those who care for dying souls.

As if he expects an even greater sorrow, he raises his face toward the moon shining high in the sky and murmurs in a voice that hardly can be heard, an infinitely humble voice, “Spotless moon, snowy moon, do not desert me. Without you, my heart would be crushed and my head would throb like a drum.” Tobie is a child. He is barely twelve years old.

As answer to his prayer, a joy-filled child's voice makes a dazzling breach in his black and evil sadness. It is little Anaië coming toward him. She is running through the woods and she is out of breath. The very first
time that Tobie laid eyes on this little girl, he swore to himself that he would be her protector. He saw in her eyes a shimmering flash of blue, and he thought that no one, no one should ever have the right to dim that ray. It is a terrible responsibility to take on the task of protecting another, especially if that person is a child … But mysterious arrangements are made in the deeps of time and heaven. From that moment on, who can say who is protecting whom?

Little Anaië is a Cree. Her parents, like Tobie's, no longer live on the reserve. They are not status Indians and so to a certain degree they do not exist. But if they were to live on the reserve, they would not have a much greater existence. After they left the reserve, they still continued to live within the sacred circle, the circle of life and death. “Within the sacred circle, the earth is not ordinary soil; it is dust compounded of the blood, the flesh, and the bones of our ancestors,” say members of the Crow tribe. The earth of the sacred circle is an enormous ossuary in which are neatly piled the bones of millions of those who have died. When you chant the death threnody, accompanied by the sound of the drums, you can hear the full song of the dead, their tireless voices of silence, rising from the centre of the earth.

Little Anaië has recovered her breath enough to carol, “It's going to snow! It's going to snow in flakes as big as your nose, your eyes, and your ears! The snowflakes will whirl and dance in the white wind!”

Taking her hands out from under her cape, she catches flakes of snow and Tobie thinks, with a shiver, that she is also grasping his heart. Little Anaië is a devotee of snow, which she thinks is the most extraordinary, most beautiful thing in all the world. She claims that the first time snow fell on her, it enveloped her forever. It settled over her, like a halo.

Because of this and for other reasons, the little girl is not a well-liked child. This dense, profound shade hovers over her—she is useless! Everything seems to present difficulties to her. She fumbles, hesitates, and makes mistakes about even the simplest of things. She has trouble passing her exams at school and at home, she cannot pick up a plate without breaking it, nor can she make bannock or decorate the moccasins of her
two brothers or her father's tobacco pouch with beads. Her mother worries that she will never make a good wife.

If her natural inabilities loom large in the eyes of all, her preoccupation with the supernatural escapes them. She is absorbed by the invisible, a presence so near to her that almost without wishing to, she can place her steps inside the tracks it leaves. Her natural forgetfulness, her moments of supernatural absorption provide her with a phenomenal life that seems ridiculous to wary, petty adults. When she is out of doors, she always seems to be wasting time, to be forever retracing her steps, but she is patience itself, as if she senses that the unfathomable paths over which she is drawn are of extraordinary length.

Before he left for the front, her father said in a troubled voice, “My daughter's moccasins must cease circling the camp. If she wishes to, she can go to the ends of the earth, all the way to the mountains, to the far waters.”

These were his final words before travelling to Quebec City to board a great ship that would take him overseas. From this moment on, he would experience other things, undergo different emotions. He is a soldier and, like every true soldier, he will sacrifice himself completely and remain faithful to his country right to the end. He will give unstintingly until there is nothing left to give. And since he has never received anything from that country of his, he does not have to add it all up, as if he were afraid of giving too much. He would be ashamed to do the arithmetic; his spirit is too lofty for that.

Several seasons later, little Anaië dreamed she saw him in a great square where hundreds of corpses were laid out on the planks and the cobblestones. Her father was among these bodies, his eyes bloody, his chest split open. Feeling suddenly invulnerable, she ventured, trembling, right to that terrible threshold where he lay. A chaplain had just arrived to offer a last blessing.

“Oh, I feel much better,” said her father, who was already dead. “If you will bless my battalion, Father, we can then return to the battle.”

But the chaplain, who could not hear the voices of those who had died, went on his way without stopping.

That night, without knowing it, going forward across the vastness of the worlds, Anaië had crossed the gigantic boundary line that divides the living from the dead. And after having been present at her father's struggle to win back his life, she thought she could make out the creeping forms that slowly stole up upon the cadavers—repulsive forms with neither flesh nor meat, like demons trying to enshroud each dead man in a shadowy scarf.

It was a feeling of glacial cold accompanied by a violent shaking that woke her in the middle of the night to throw herself at the foot of her bed. On her knees, her teeth chattering, she prayed until dawn, imploring the Ancients to grant repose to the souls of her father and all the soldiers. Anaië was certain that no moment of human forgetfulness, no snowfall yet to come, would ever be capable of eradicating this dream.

“The Milky Way is falling down,” chants Tobie, dancing with the snowflakes. Then, stopping still, troubled, he asked, “Why are you crying?”

Throwing herself with both abandon and trust toward Tobie, crying into his shoulder, the little girl tells him the dream that haunts her still.

“When I cry,” she says, blowing her nose in Tobie's handkerchief, “it's as if I am lending a little of my own spirit to my father.

“Oh! See how the Snow Moon shines. I think she looks brighter and brighter,” she adds. “It's a moon in bud. She seems to be full but it is in fact a swelling.”

“She will be in blossom for the night of the Solstice,” says Tobie, sticking out his tongue to swallow a snowflake.

“Do you believe she will speak? Do you think she will sing?” asks Anaië, sounding concerned.

“When she is in flower, she will grant everything! But that's a secret, Anaië.” Tobie sinks his gaze into the immense and starry night, as if he wants to exhaust all speculation, and Anaië whispers in his ear, “She surrounds the earth with her bounty. She will help you.”

“It has stopped snowing. It was only a passing cloud that came by to give my friend Anaië some pleasure.”

“Listen, Tobie! Listen!” she says, suddenly alert. “What is that?”

It seems to be a sound coming from the outside, at once very close and very far away. A sound the children hear within themselves, like a thought, but so clear and musical that it gives the impression of beating on the air. In the silence of the night, this voice accompanied by music passes with an extraordinary swiftness, and the mark that it leaves on Tobie and Anaië gives no sign of effort. The children, the young people, listen without saying a word.

“Kateri! Kateri!”

This time, it is the voice of a young boy calling for help for what he believes he has lost.

“Jérémie …,” Anaië says to herself.

Breathing hard, a young Mohawk appears inside the circle of the clearing, his face creased with fatigue and distorted from worry. It is Jérémie. He is thirteen years old and lives with his father, a widower who left the reserve after his wife died.

“Kateri disappeared two days ago. No one knows where she has hidden herself. Even I have lost all trace of her. I did know that she wanted to go away.”

Jérémie is speaking from within a kind of utter stillness, a stillness of the air and of time. Deeply moved, they allow themselves to be filled with the inflections of Jérémie's voice. These inflections they recognize well, as they are those that are the most comforting. They are those that are the best guide to your interior transformation. This is love.

“I was supposed to meet her at Aspen Point. She was looking for aspen bark for her grandmother's cataracts … I got there too late. When I got back home, there was her father. He was talking to my father. Kateri was nowhere … nowhere … Her father seemed to think it was my fault. He came back again that evening to question me. He was wearing his peacekeeper's uniform. As he was leaving, he said, ‘When the whole world is tossing and turning in the nightmare of war, deaths come quickly.'”

Lacking words, he turns to gestures. With his face streaming with tears, Jérémie beats his chest in inconsolable sorrow and with surges of harrowing affection, as if he has lost Kateri forever.

“I was a coward,”Jérémie goes on after swallowing a great gulp of air. “I told her father that I didn't know a thing and that anyway, this girl was not my type. If something horrible has happened to her, there will have to be an investigation, and her father will find out in the end that I did know something. I myself will be an accomplice, the one who stood by and did nothing. That's worse than anything else, because it is so cowardly a way to behave.”

Jérémie weeps burning tears and Anaië wants to throw herself down on her knees without any false shame to comfort him and promise him that they will find Kateri.

All of a sudden, a clear and joyful voice cries, “What kind of Indians are you? You never even heard me coming!”

Parting the branches of a fir tree that were hiding him from view, David, Tobie's best friend, appears. He is fourteen years old and from a family that has been White for a number of generations. But David often takes pride in his distant ancestors, the Ojibwas, whose sad and marvellous history he knows by heart.

“Kateri has disappeared,” cries Jérémie inconsolably.

“I know she has disappeared. Her father came to our house. My friends, I know no more about it than you who are standing here in a circle beneath the falling snow, but I would like to say what I think.”