Castel’s English-Cree Dictionary and Memoirs of the Elders
Memoir 1
Wild Food, Childcare, Canoes and Guns
By Rosie Colomb ~ 1912-
Pukatawagan, January 4, 1998
Interviewer: Lorna BighettyRosie: The first thing I want to talk about is how we did not have many
store-bought things when I was growing up. Most of the food came from
the wild. Every fall, my father was given some money to buy me
clothing. All our clothes had to last a year. Then the next fall, we
had new clothes again. We always used to eat wild food. My father
hunted moose and beaver, and he brought in fish, rabbits and ducks.
That’s how he provided for us. We never went hungry. My father was a
good hunter. I learned from him. We had no store-bought diapers in
those days. We just dug up moss and used it as diaper lining. Whenever
we ran out, we just went out and dug up more moss from under the snow.
We cut out strips of this diaper moss and dried them. That’s how we
changed diapers. Never did we use Pampers. Once a year we took ten feet
of diaper moss, used it with diaper cloth, and it lasted us a year. We
laundered it and kept using the moss. When we ran out of moss, we just
dug up some more. And birch bark was used, too. There was also a
special snow shovel, used for the digging. This is how we looked after
our children, and we just fed them food from the wild.
All the women breast-fed. There was no store-bought milk. Maybe
this was a divine gift, and all the women were so blessed. There was no
substitute for real mother’s milk. Every woman breast-fed her child for
a year, and then he took solid food. All women had the gift, and none
used store-bought milk. There wasn’t any, and we knew how to care for
our children. We were blessed with the wisdom to look after our
children properly. That’s my story, the one I wanted to tell.Lorna: What kind of a canoe did they use?
Rosie: Well, you know, I saw canoes in the past, the
traditional ones that were made with canvas. There were those, I
recall, but very long ago, it is said, people had birch-bark canoes. My
father saw those, and so did my mother. Myself, I never saw those
birch-bark canoes in use, though. I saw only the ones made with canvas.
My father and mother saw and used birch-bark canoes, but that was
before my time. They made a living using them.Lorna: When you butchered a moose, how did you preserve the
meat in the summer?Rosie: We cut it into strips, of course, dried it, pounded it, and
prepared the fat. It was frozen and did not spoil. We made birch-bark,
what’s that called? I even forget the word myself, although I used it.
Ah, birch-bark baskets, of course, that were like bowls and served as
dried-meat containers. Yes, we put the pounded dried meats (pemmican)
into them. The pemmican never spoiled before winter, when we
constructed a food cache, where we stashed our supply of food. We took
from it only what we would eat, for example, the moose meat. The meats
always remained frozen there, even our pemmicans, these dried meats,
you know. They never spoiled before we used them up.Lorna: Did you do the same thing with the fish?
Rosie: Yes, we used to do it with fish, too. We used to freeze the fish,
and we used to dry fish, too. People used to hang up the fish, heads
down and ten in a row. They were skewered with a long willow wand like
this. So, that’s how they were hung.Lorna: Yeah, is that the way you cooked them?
Rosie: Not, not these. Let’s see! Dogs.
Lorna: Oh.
Rosie: They had these for the dogs for whenever it started to get cold.
They stored these for the dogs, and there used to be lots of them. They
prepared them for the dogs, because that’s what they used for
travelling. They treated their dogs really well, so they would be goodnatured.Lorna: How did you catch a rabbit before the introduction of
the snare wire?Rosie: With a small rope, of course. We used a small rope, and a small
stripped tree like this. Or I placed a stick here, standing up like
this, with the branches cut off. When I was there, that’s the way we
set up a snare. Then, this snared rabbit would fly up and kill himself.
He never got clear of the snare.Lorna: How did your snare wire, how was it ....? [A word, sounding like
“rusted,” is misspoken.]Rosie: When it, what? There’s no such thing as ‘akwakotitîk’.
[laughter]Lorna: So that it would not, you know, not collapse.
Rosie: No. We constructed it well so that it would not fall down.
Lorna: Ah, I see. What did you use?
Rosie: You know, these small jack pines. We used them for tying up our
snares. We tied a rope there, hung it there, and we tightened this on
one side, right? And like this, we coiled it around to form a little
door. This is where we put our snares. Whenever a rabbit would run by
there, it would be caught. Then it went up, and that’s where it would
die. It would not try to break loose.Lorna: Yeah.
Rosie: And that’s how we used to snare. But now, today, there are these
snare wires. Back then, though, that’s how we always used to snare.
These snare wires existed, too, you know, for rabbits only. However, a
small rope is what we used. And if we didn’t have any rope, we would
use natural ropes, made from the wild. We used to coil these up to make
a snare.Lorna: Let’s see, guns. What was used before there were guns? What did
the people use?Rosie: I don’t know, but there were already guns as far back as I can
remember. Maybe my father saw what was used before... I wonder if they—
but he mentioned that guns had already been in use before his time.
Once there was this king who sailed across the ocean. He came across to
join the people, and that’s when this Hudson’s Bay Company sailed
across, too. Even today, it gives us a hard time. It is what brought us
all the goods that the people use today, but they did not look like all
these things today, according to my father. In olden times, people had
to stuff gunpowder into the guns, and birdshot and a firing cap. That’s
when it fired, so he said. But I did not see those guns. When I was
young, we already had these well-made guns, and they were in use.Lorna: Talk about that time. Let’s see, about somebody who
sailed here.Rosie: That somebody. Let’s see.
Lorna: The one who came and gave us the guns?
Rosie: Yeah... yes. This one person who lived here all of a sudden had
a dream. He had a dream, and then he told his wife, “Hey, I had a
dream!” Some people live like that. “I dreamed that I saw something,
something on top of the water. It will go across the water,” he said.
A long time passed, many years, and all of a sudden they saw
something come into view. Maybe a month passed by, but by and by it
drew near. “Don’t, don’t be afraid. Don’t be scared! They don’t know
us. We live here, and they came looking for us,” he said to his
children and his wife. Then this person landed on the shore. “Okay,
stay where you are, and I will go down alone to meet him.” He went down
the bank, and sure enough, he talked English, although he never
attended school. He really understood this person when he spoke
English. And he, too, he had a dream over there, a dream about this.
Then he understood him, too, when he spoke Cree. He understood
everything that he said to him. They were gifted that way. They found
each other, when he sailed across, you know, with the goods they
brought.
That’s when it started, and then our grandfather—I don’t know
where he came from, maybe from the trickster Wisahkechahk in this area,
because he was the only one being talked about as being here—
Wisahkechahk. Maybe that’s who we are descended from, and that’s why we
do not act sensible. He came from the Wisakechahk who... [laughter]
Your forefather, that’s how...Lorna: Okay, what I was going to ask you, too, is to tell about [the
time] when they did not write their names on paper,Rosie: Yeah...
Lorna: For the land, do you remember?
Rosie: Yeah.... Yes, yes.
Lorna: Tell that one, too?
Rosie: Yeah. Let’s see, they did not have to... Let’s see, like this
hunting licence everyone has to have, right? Long ago, nobody had to
have one. A treaty Indian can kill anything here, but a white man was
told to have this document. But a treaty Indian was told that he would
not need a licence to kill game. Or even the land that was given us
long ago. But they paid for it by land allotments. But it was never
signed for by us. These papers that these people drafted, you know,
they just invented this law here that all of us have to have a licence
to hunt. The treaty Indians were told that they don’t need it. This
guy, when he talked to the people that he came across, said, “Not your
animals, only your land. If I sell it to you, how much do you calculate
its worth? Five dollars, and you have a very good deal...” So that’s
what he got paid per year. Five dollars! “And you are the boss of all
the animals, and you can hunt whenever you feel like it. You will not
be accountable,” he was told. “Those are your animals in this land.”
But that’s simply not at all what happened. Instead, everybody
pays for everything, even the sewer. A treaty Indian was not to concern
himself with it; rather, he was told he was not to pay anything. He
sold this land for petty cash. A lot of money accumulates. It makes a
lot of money, this land. There are so many mines. Many were found, and
maybe that is why he was not to pay anything, or so he was told.
However, now nobody was paying anything. But before, nobody ever paid
for anything. It was just suddenly that people started paying. Even
these who were given land, these traplines, you know. Everybody paid
for them. That’s the time people started to pay. That’s when it
started, although your grandfathers wrote protest letters. But their
letters were never passed on. This is probably how it happened that
everybody was to pay for a licence in order to have it. I remember
everything I heard from them. All of the stories I got from them. What
I knew I heard from them. They used to tell about them.
Okay, that’s enough.Lorna: Okay.
[End of recording]
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