by Ted Binnema, François Lanoë and Heinz W. Pyszczyk
University of Alberta Press
2025/$39.00/232 pP.

When it comes to navigating in unfamiliar terrain, today’s travellers have many options based on GPS systems. I’m a bit of a luddite with my boat anchor of an iPhone, but it does have the county map on it showing every quarter section of land, and landowner’s name, for miles around. If all else fails, I have topo maps for old school route finding, thanks to generations of cartographers who have plotted the entire country in a series of grids based on calculations of latitude and longitude. But in Cartographic Poetry we learn that Indigenous people, the Siksika and Gros Ventre, had a totally different way of navigating, based not on mathematical measurement but on landmarks, particularly rivers, that were, and are, of cultural, historical and spiritual significance. The authors note that “Poetry is language condensed: Siksika cartography is landscape distilled,” that is to say, not only landmarks but the history of a nation was distilled in the minds of the First Nations travellers and guides. Every river, every mountain, every buffalo jump was a living story in the mind of the people.

This was the mental cartography the early fur traders relied on, while exploring the west with Cree and other Indigenous guides. One notable explorer was Peter Fidler, a Hudson’s Bay Company surveyor and map maker. In 1792, guided by Sakatow and his band of Piikani, he made a winter journey from Buckingham House on the North Saskatchewan River south to the Oldman River gap. Nearly a decade later he established the short-lived HBC trading post of Chesterfield House, where he asked the Siksika leader Ac ko mak ki (Old Swan) to draw a map of the land south of the post, an area that at the time was a blank spot on European maps. Fidler, writes author Ted Binnema in one of his chapters, took great care in getting his guides to draw on paper the maps they held in their minds. Among explorers in that era, he “was unique in his systematic efforts to preserve and document Indigenous cartographic conventions.” Indeed, Cartographic Poetry contains a wealth of ethnographic detail on place names thanks to the meticulous care Fidler took with his Siksika and Gros Ventre informants.

The maps drawn for Fidler are very different from the European tradition of mapping. They are minimalist by necessity, since they would have been typically drawn in the snow, in sand or mud, or upon a piece of hide using charcoal or other medium. They show the Rockies, the “Back-Bone of the Earth” to the Piikani people, as a pair of double lines in Alberta bending east to the Musselshell River in Montana and then south again to the Big Horn Mountains. From it, the major rivers are drawn simply as lines leading out to the plains with the Indigenous names attached by Fidler. We are then shown their transition in Fidler’s hands to maps a fur trader might understand. Next, this Indigenous knowledge passes from the HBC to the famous British cartographer, Aaron Arrowsmith, for his 1802 map of North America. The authors point out that Fidler, if allowed, would have made a much better map than Arrowsmith. The latter, to “…make his depiction plausible to a western reader, invented sinuous river courses and confluences even though he had no evidence for them.” His map was relied on by Lewis and Clark for their much-ballyhooed continental transit in 1804 (which had already been done with zero fanfare by Alexander Mackenzie in 1793), but Arrowsmith’s map “…contributed nothing to the success of the Corps of Discovery.”

Today these maps “are priceless treasures,” write the authors. In publishing them they hope others will “become as fascinated by the maps, their authors and the territories they depict as we are.” With this respectful, evocative study, they have succeeded.

Sid Marty’s most recent book is Oldman’s River, which won the Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize in 2024.

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by Robert Cree, with Therese Greenwood,
ECW Press,
2025/$26.95/264 pp.

The post The Many Names of Robert Cree appeared first on Alberta Views.

Evidence in the surroundings shows that Palliser was correct, for a time. Patchy remnant shelterbelts of hardy caragana and feral crabapple trees and the unpainted, wind-tilted shacks and timber-gutted barns of old farms mark like gravesites the long-ghostly hopes of early-century dryland homesteaders, their dreams long-since blown away like dust by bad farming practice and countless chinooks.

But today, where the broken dreams and mostly unbroken prairie had been, there are now leafy greens, ochred seedheads and shiny golden stubble of a dozen kinds of cash crops. Leggy-wheeled, spray-fuzzed irrigation pivots spread in all directions like aluminum-and-rubber centipedes, each nearly half a kilometre long. And near and far, clutches of shiny galvanized steel bins rise—tonnes of grain in each.

Those early, failed homesteaders might be mystified at the prosperity of this remote corner of the province today. John Palliser would be stunned. The first answers to this mysterious reversal are in the landscape itself. The useless land Palliser referred to was actually an area of mixed sandy loam soils, well suited for growing high-value crops such as vegetables, but too porous to hold water. And whereas the great plains to the east are flat and largely featureless, the land here slopes in great ocean swells gently down toward the hidden valley of the South Saskatchewan River. After the dustbowls of extreme drought in the 1930s drove most farmers off this land, the province invested heavily in the 1950s in industrial-scale irrigation systems that brought water from the South Saskatchewan up onto the shortgrass prairie.

Adding water to sandy loam in a region that receives the highest number of sunshine hours per year in Canada wouldn’t have been enough for such a transformation, though. The other critical ingredient that would make this land flourish is here, in the din of a potato harvest operation run like a military campaign, with pop-up factories, fleets of trucks, and dawn-to-dusk frenzy: an army of temporary labourers as available, cheap and disposable as the water of the river below.

In the main farmyard where the potato factory is set up, the driver of a full spud truck performs a lumbering yet precise manoeuvre, slipping around an emptied outgoing truck and pirouetting into a waiting position. He looks for the signal to reverse from the backer, a Cree man of slight build, 64-year-old Elmer Crookedneck. Elmer is dressed in safety gear and giving signals like an aircraft marshal on a flight deck. When the truck is in position at the factory’s receiving conveyor under Elmer’s guidance, the driver—another Cree man, stocky, in jeans, rodeo buckle and cowboy boots, 58-year-old Dwayne Ernest—jumps from the high step of the truck to scoot back and help Elmer with the controls of the tipper bed. The two men shout to each other over the din while they work buttons and levers, and another five tonnes of large, dirt-clad golden potatoes begins to roll out of the tipper chute in a steady stream onto the conveyor.

Dwayne spends a few minutes helping Elmer with “grading,” the primary job at a potato harvesting factory. The two scan the stream of spuds rolling up the conveyor towards the first giant holding bin, and reach over the clattering belt to grab and throw into smaller loader bins behind them whatever they can of the rocks, damaged spuds, potato vines and lumps of clay the size of footballs: anything that is not a good potato.

The tipper empties, and Elmer directs the change-out of Dwayne’s truck for the next in under a minute. The river of potatoes rumbles up to the belt past two Mennonite boys working brooms under the conveyor and passes by the watchful eyes and quick hands of six Mennonite women in the wooden grading shack built over the conveyor behind the second holding bin. The stream of spuds will spill onto another conveyor and travel 80 feet or more past five more Mennonite women graders, then climb past two Mennonite men working at another conveyor that angles high into the mouth of the nearest of the two giant storage bins. The fully graded stream of potatoes will finally pile out where two more Mennonite women are moving high and deep in the shadows of the bin, directing the unloading end of the conveyor.

None of these workers nor most of the dozens of truck and tractor drivers and other workers are permanent employees of this farm. They are what economists call “reserve armies of labour,” underemployed populations available and ready to show up for a few weeks at harvest time when suddenly thousands of drivers and backers and graders and pilers and sweepers are needed on farms across southern Alberta, to work like mad until the fields are empty and the bins are full. And people like Elmer and Dwayne and a handful of others represent the last of the forgotten army of thousands of Cree workers—mostly from northern Saskatchewan—who for crucial decades were critical to farming operations like these and instrumental in building this corner of the province into the vast, wealthy agricultural empire it is today.

An army of temporary labourers is as available, cheap and disposable as the water of the river below.

Few Canadians know the legacy of Cree people from Saskatchewan working on southern Alberta farms. The Potato Growers of Alberta’s 50 Years of Working Together commemorative book at the old irrigation museum in Taber does not contain a single photo or word about Cree workers in any of its 400-plus pages. Even the Dutch-Canadian farmer I met a few kilometres from here didn’t seem to know much about Cree workers. “I used to use Dutch exchange students,” he says with a shrug. “Now I only use Mexican Mennonite workers.”

Yet many untold thousands of Cree people have worked on southern Alberta’s farms in the last half century, especially in sugar beet and potato production. Ron Laliberté—a Métis man and retired professor of sociology and indigenous studies—spent months interviewing Cree workers and beet farmers in southern Alberta in the early 1990s. He says the Canadian government began recruiting Cree labourers for sugar beet farmers after the latter lost easy access to labour by Japanese-Canadians “evacuated” from BC during the Second World War. The first buses in 1953 brought 120 Cree workers. By the 1980s the number had climbed to 3,000 Cree workers and at least 2,000 Metis and non-status Indians per year—the largest employment of First Nations people in Canada since the days of the fur trade. By the 1990s Cree workers made up 85 per cent of the labour force on sugar beet farms. During some seasons, up to 95 per cent of the men of some reserves in northern Saskatchewan were working on farms in southern Alberta.

Laliberté says that for those not willing to come of their own accord, the sugar beet industry pushed the government to cut social benefits during the months the Cree workers were needed down south. He says the Cree workers, always using humour to cope, started calling themselves “Grab-a-hoe Indians.”

The work at the factory pushes on under floodlights until nearly 9:00 p.m. The Mennonite boys and young women head straight for their family homes in the surrounding hamlets and farms. Elmer, Dwayne and two more Cree men—Dwayne’s brother Clem Ernest, 47, and their nephew, Jeremy Crookedneck, 27—make a quick supper in the shop kitchen, the same as they had for lunch: ham sandwiches with Velveeta slices and cans of Coca Cola. They take turns in the single shower and climb the stairs up to a storage room above the kitchen where they have four cots, a small living area for boots and gear carved out of a jumble of racks, boxes, desks and old computers. When I arrive, Dwayne is seated on a cot at the back of the room, pulling off his boots. “It’s his birthday today,” he says, pointing with his lips, Cree-fashion, toward the bed across from him, where Elmer is already asleep.

Left to right: Clem Ernest, Elmer Crookedneck, Dwayne Ernest and Jeremy Crookedneck.

I have known these men’s families since I was a boy and my preacher dad would take our family to the Little Island Lake reserve at Ministikwan, Saskatchewan, for camp meetings. Dwayne’s crews used to meet me at the racetrack in Lethbridge on a Sunday afternoon every harvest. After the races, we would have a kind of Thanksgiving dinner together at my house. Ten years ago my dining and living room would be full of Cree men and women around the table and at TV trays. Last visit, there were only five Cree men at our table, no women. This season Dwayne told me there would be only four in the crew, and they didn’t have gas money to make it to Lethbridge on the Sunday. I asked to come out to the farm at Bow Island to witness what might be one of the last crews, before their people’s legacy of work here fades away, unremembered.

Elmer wakes up, turns and sits on the edge of his cot. His T-shirt has the picture of a rodeo bronc rider and the words “Bucking Cancer!” on the front. He has been at the work for nearly a week already. He looks weary. He speaks to Dwayne in Cree for a few moments before turning to speak with me.

Elmer Crookedneck.

“One of my first memories is coming down here by bus from Meadow Lake,” he says. “We stayed at a house in Vauxhall, my whole family. I started hoeing sugar beets when I was 10 years old. A few years later, we started working potatoes, and have ever since. One of my sons was born here during a harvest 24 years ago.”

Elmer says this is his first job since he was diagnosed with prostate cancer five years ago. After surgery, the cancer was still there, so he had to do radiation therapy. He tried to work driving heavy equipment after the radiation but couldn’t last more than a few hours a day. He says he took this job because he has family to support, kids and grandkids, one living with him. “And I would rather work than get money for free.”

The next day I tag along with Dwayne in his spud truck to a harvest “circle” about 20 km from this farm, one of a conglomerate of five farms called Quattro Ventures Inc. Irrigation farmers use the term “circle” to mean the 130 acres that an irrigation pivot can cover out of the 160 acres of a typical quarter section. This conglomerate farms 162 circles, or about 23,000 acres, with 40 per cent of them dry, 60 per cent irrigated. The company agronomist, Emily Ford, says that because potato crops must be rotated to prevent scab and other diseases, they follow a “one-in-six” rule, only planting a circle with potatoes once every six years. So, to be a potato grower, you need access to a lot of land. In the off years the company will plant other high-value crops such as peppermint, beans, peas, seed canola and hemp. But potatoes remain king. (Estimated value in southern Alberta: $3-billion per year.) Ford says because of increasing water scarcity, the irrigation district allocates only 10 inches of water per year per acre for potatoes. She says a good crop requires 18 inches of water, about 1,800 cubic metres (nearly half a million gallons) per acre. Farmers cover any deficit by borrowing water allocations from their other, less water-intensive crops such as wheat.

Neighbouring farmer Tony Varekamp delivers meals to Corny Neufeld and other Mennonite workers.

Dwayne, like Elmer, has been working on southern Alberta farms since he was a boy and has spent the last 22 years working for this one. He says he can make more money in three days here than in three weeks of driving school bus back on the reserve. He also drives truck for the farm during spring planting and other harvests. In total, he works here about three months of the year. He says he keeps coming back because of his friendship with the farm owner, Lloyd Ypma. Each season, he tries to recruit other people from the reserve to come work with him. Fewer come each year.

At the field, Dwayne steers his large “tipper” truck into position at the end of a furrow and waits for the call to tag-in when the harvester has filled the truck ahead. The harvester pauses only moments for Dwayne’s truck to line up under the unloading spout, then the machine and truck move in tandem at pace, both harvesting and transferring the fresh spuds simultaneously. The moving transfer takes only five minutes. The harvester waves off the filled truck and calls in the next. Dwayne drives back to the main farm in the blinding dust of other trucks, artfully dodging trucks from other farms at gravelled intersections, no thought of slowing down.

The reason for the hurry is in the grey sky to the north. Farmers grow potatoes as late into the season as they can for maximum yields, but if they don’t get the crop off before the first freeze, an operation like this can lose millions of dollars in a single night. Drivers like Dwayne wake at 4:30 a.m. to be out to the circles by 5:15. The factory crew starts at 5:30 when the first loaded trucks are coming in, and everybody works until the last trucks come into the factory well after dark, unless the weather is too hot. Operations shut down for heat, not out of concern for the crews but because putting hot potatoes into cool storage bins could cause the whole lot to rot.

Because of the frenzied pace of the work and the exhaustion of the men at day’s end, it is hard to interview some of them during the week. But as most of the potato farms around Bow Island are owned by church-going Dutch Calvinists, the crews get Sundays off and sometimes a Saturday evening like this one. I find the Ministikwan crew sitting in camp chairs in the dark around the tailgate of Dwayne’s pickup parked in the farm shop—now eerily quiet—sharing a pack of Bud Lite.

The men tell me Elmer has already gone to bed. They call him “mushum,” the Cree word for “grandfather.” Dwayne and his brother Clem have been visiting quietly, nursing their beers, while nephew Jeremy plays a game on his phone, coping. When I take out my camera, Dwayne and Clem hide their beers. Even though it’s only a few hard-earned drinks at the end of a long week, they know the stigma about Native people and alcohol.

Jeremy puts his phone away for a few moments to tell me this is his first harvest and first real job. He says he wishes he had weighed himself before he came. He had trouble staying on his feet the first few days, backing trucks and chipping soil from the inner sides of their tipper beds, but has adapted and feels like he is getting into shape. He wants to get a permanent job when he gets home to the reserve. His uncles tell him they’re proud of him.

Clem is quiet, serious, a deep thinker with a strong jaw. Tonight is the first time he speaks to me. He asks if I know how many Native people have lived on these lands, how many languages they speak, how many thousands of years they have been here. And how many Cree people used to work on these farms.

He tells me about seeing old photos of his grandparents and parents hoeing sugar beets, thinning and weeding in the blazing heat, sometimes three times per field per season, through spring and long summer days. “It looked like the cotton fields down South,” he says. “The pay was something like that, too.”

Clem and Dwayne confirm what Laliberté says he heard when talking with Cree workers in the early 1990s. Cree people started to lose their place in the sugar beet fields in the 1970s when farmers started bringing in dual-nationality Mennonites from colonies in Mexico, who would work for less money, sometimes bidding for fields at half the rate that Cree people were paid. When farmers started using newly invented herbicides to get rid of weeds in the 1980s and 1990s, the “Grab-a-hoe” jobs disappeared altogether.

By the 1980s, 3,000 status Cree and at least 2,000 Métis harvested sugar beets in southern Alberta.

Meanwhile, Cree men and women had started working potato harvests in the late 1960s. Sugar beet farmers needed large amounts of labour during the growing months but just a few drivers at harvest. Potatoes needed little work in the growing season but massive reserve labour for harvest, especially for grading. The Cree first worked for the same Japanese-Canadians who had come as involuntary labour from BC for sugar beet farms in Alberta during the war. Many of those Japanese families had had market gardens in BC, and by the 1950s started to buy small plots to grow vegetables for market in southern Alberta. When the Japanese introduced methods of flood irrigation using now available water from the South Saskatchewan, they showed that money could be made in growing potatoes. And when they bought more land, and their machines could harvest four or eight or sixteen rows instead of two, and farms became too big to run with family labour, these early Japanese farmers had access to an army of reserve labour already available: the Cree workers from the sugar beet fields.

Japanese-Canadian farmer Mas Nishima, 88, of Taber, tells me that without the Cree workers, many farmers would have had to plow their crops under. “They saved my farm and a lot of other farms in southern Alberta,” he says.

With all the elements for success—the know-how, the sun, the soil, the water and the cheap, available temporary labour—the potato sector exploded. New processing plants followed. Then came Dutch-Canadian farmers from Ontario with money to buy land and equipment and go bigger. Many of them had no history working with Cree people, no memory of them, no special ties like friendship.

Clem explains that in the early days, there were only Cree people working sugar beets and potato harvests, on every farm. “What you see here today, the Mennonites, that was all us back in the day, men and women,” he says. “Then we got pushed out. The Mexican Mennonites worked cheaper.”

In the pre-dawn chill, Mennonite women grade potatoes on the conveyor

Just as importantly, according to Laliberté, after those Mennonite families settled permanently in southern Alberta, they became more immediately available than the Cree from northern Saskatchewan. Cree families would come back the next season and go farm-to-farm looking for work, only to find their old jobs had already been given away. And some farmers, and Cree people themselves, would say that Mennonite workers did not have the same problems with alcohol that made some Cree workers—most of them survivors of residential schools—“unreliable,” especially after a few weeks of hard labour, long hours, no rest and bad living quarters, often just abandoned chicken coops or cow sheds. Mark Miyanaga, co-owner of Triple M Farms near Taber, later tells me that despite any problems a small number of Cree workers did have with alcohol at times, they were as a whole as reliable and hard-working as anyone.

Laliberté says that remarkably, however, he never heard of any conflict between the Cree and the Mennonites or other people who replaced them. Clem confirms this: “Our people are good to get along with,” he says. “Whatever happens, happens.”

Elmer and Dwayne know of only two more crews of Cree men in the area. Cousin Emil is working on one nearer to Bow Island, and cousin Brian is working on a Japanese-owned farm near Taber. “Brian says that farm is going to be hiring ‘Mexican Mexicans,’ next year,” Dwayne says, using air-quotes. “Real Mexicans.”

“So, this might be the last year they hire any Cree people,” he says.

“Yeah, but we’ll still be around,” Clem says, jutting his jaw a little more. “Just maybe not here.”

I check in with Elmer throughout the following week. He never slacks off in the work. But on the next Thursday night, after nearly two weeks of standing on his feet backing trucks in, 15 hours a day, his ankles swell to the size of his knees. The pain keeps him awake all night. On the Friday morning, the swelling is too much for him to put his boots on. “I wanted to stay until the end,” he tells me. He will drive the 700 kilometres home alone that day, bringing the number of the last crew down to three.

Virgil Grandfield is grateful to Lloyd Ypma for letting him camp at his farm and document the work of Dwayne’s crew.

Text and photos by Virgil Grandfield

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by Conor Kerr
Strange Light
2024/$24.95/272 pp.

Conor Kerr, a Métis/Ukrainian prairie writer, imbues his texts with loving descriptions of the lands he calls home. One of the CBC’s 2022 Writers to Watch, and with his novel Avenue of Champions shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, longlisted for the Giller Prize, and winning the 2022 ReLit Award, he comes out strong in his second novel, Prairie Edge. The prologue sets the stage for a heartbreaking, humorous, and defiantly proud story of two young Métis cousins who hatch a plan to free bison from a nearby national park, bring them into downtown Edmonton and change the urban landscape into more of what it could look like if land truly were given back, not just to the Indigenous people, but also to the animals who called it home for centuries.

Humour threads through this book like music from a Métis fiddle, sweeping in and out, sometimes loud, thunderous like a herd of bison, and sometimes quiet and soft like the swish of prairie grass. “Being a bison rustler made me feel like I was living in an old-time western movie,” says one of the cousins. “The kind that hired Italians to play the Indians.” I found myself laughing out loud throughout and texting friends the funniest parts so they too could share a laugh about a white hunter who dons thousands of dollars’ worth of custom camo only to fail at catching even a single moose.

Embedded in the text are historical lessons on the role and place of bison in the prairies, from the birds that used them for survival, to the people who depended on them for sustenance, to the very grasses they would walk over. Showing the historical lives of the bison highlights both current efforts to revitalize their populations and the fact that they are now for the most part caged in small territories without the freedom to roam as they once did. Kerr contrasts this with the theme of Indigenous kids being taken from families, put into a cold and unfriendly foster system and, when aged out, living with the constant threat of jail. “It’s either do something monumental or just fade into an inevitable jail cell.” Both the bison and the people are caged. But what if there were no more cages?

Through his characters, Kerr looks at what it might truly take to live in a state of reclamation and reconciliation. Bringing back the bison and repopulating the land with all that’s been lost is one answer explored in this novel. Both funny and politically aware, Kerr also delivers a sharp-edged critique of modern activism—a realm in which posturing often overshadows bold action. Thought-provoking and a great read, Prairie Edge is a story of resistance and a love letter to bison and the people who survive alongside them and because of them.

Francine Cunningham is a Cree/Métis author and artist.

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Read more from the archive “Don’t Fence Me In” July 2018.

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by Darrel J. McLeod
DOUGLAS & MCINTYRE
2023/$24.95/320 pp.

While Darrel McLeod’s first novel is set primarily in the Indigenous Dakelh country close to Prince George, his central character, James, hearkens back to growing up in a part of Alberta with a distinct Cree presence—his people. The families and neighbours he writes about could easily have been my neighbours and schoolmates. I identified too with the familiar Vancouver scenes that open the novel—the market on Granville Island, the streets of Kitsilano.

But mainly the narrative focuses on the term that James, an experienced teacher, spends as principal of a rundown school in the Dakelh settlement of Chezgh’un. With promises the school will be rebuilt along with lodging for himself, he embraces the chance to bring in newer, effective teaching methods as well as helping a damaged community heal—as a staff member says, “Our natural and cultural way of raisin’ kids was completely broken up in four generations of residential school.”

The Dakelh language is quite different from Cree, but James responds to its Indigenous textures, appreciating connections to the natural and spiritual world. Communality too is an important aspect of Dakelh culture. McLeod brings humanity and humour to many scenes, including a “bullshitting” competition around a campfire. Especially touching are episodes featuring youngsters at a fishing camp, later presenting what they’ve learned at a concert with songs and drumming. McLeod is a master of sensory detail as he writes of the food and fun involved. A sex education session with teens involving bananas and condoms will leave you laughing.

As an educator and musician, James is someone we come to admire. But he’s not without rough edges. Although he has a partner in Vancouver, he isn’t above indulging in risky hook-ups on the road. “Attractive men… were his kryptonite.” Fair enough… but AIDS, in the context of the 1980s, comes across in the novel as more of an afterthought than the terrifying presence it was for gay men then.

A Governor-General’s Award winner for his memoir Mamaskatch: A Cree Coming of Age, McLeod experiences a few bumps in this transition into fiction. We access the narrative entirely through James except for an inexplicable lapse when it shifts into a secondary character’s point of view for four pages. No editorial catch there. And, while the story emerges as it is happening, there is one jarring slip into future reflective mode: “For years afterwards, James would dream about that day, wondering what was real and what he imagined.” Still, a worthy read from an author who knows first-hand of country roads, tribal politics, the wisdom of elders and the promise of youth.

Glen Huser is the author of Burning the Night (NeWest).

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I’m too hungry to give up. I unbutton my shirt, get my arms out, fling the make-believe net over one surprised fish.

“Aha. You’re one who didn’t get away.”

Beanie laughs, the first I’ve heard from her. She has a knife she stole from the dining room. Not very sharp, but I manage to slit the tender belly open below the gill like I watched my mother do before the School. I scrape the insides into the river.

“Yuck. That’s good enough.” We have to build a fire, keep it small. I climb along the riverbank and stumble on a small circle of ashes in the wall of rocks at the end of the bridge. Someone here before us.

“Beanie, look. Another runaway, you think?”

“Shush. Hush.”

I’m making too much noise. She is nervous, afraid of getting caught. She hasn’t told me what happened before she was returned to the School. She hasn’t talked about Mr. B, either. I don’t push it.

“Tonight we’ll move out.” Beanie sounds like that western story Sister read at school.

About once an hour a car rumbles over the bridge. I wait for silence after one passes, light the mini collection of dry leaves and sticks I’ve piled in the fire pit. The tiny flame catches. I thread the fish onto a stick and prop it over the fire on the rocks. Perfect, I breathe, quiet, waiting for Beanie’s approval.

Crackle, snap, splat. The stick burns through, dumping the fish into the fire. “Oh, shit.” It feels so good to swear. I scrape the fish clean on a rock, rebuild the fire.

This time the stick holds. Smoke flares, then dies. Only a little daytime exposure.

“Jeannie Squirt, you’re a genius.”

Beanie gawks at the smoky, fat slab of pink fish spread on green nettle leaves. The colours are majestic, almost like not real. Our miracle food is eaten in seconds, once we get over the shock. Beanie has called me my kid’s name—from back when.

“Tonight we’ll move out.” Beanie sounds like that western story Sister read at school. Outlaws, horses and cowboys chasing. The bad guys getting caught—or killed.

Geese are on the move. Honk, honk, honk. They fly in Vs over the bridge, one group swooping at the river, the next following. It’s that time of year. I watch their direction. South by southwest, my father always said; that’s where they go. Are we near home Somehow I feel home is very far away.

“Beanie?” She’s asleep in the middle of the day.

Resting up for tonight. I lie down next to her on the tarp. She doesn’t know I’m here until I squirm, move my legs. She pokes me in the ribs. Sleep, sleep. I’m back at the School, watching for Mr. B. He is the worst of the teachers, the most dreaded. Beanie won’t talk about him, what happens when he twists her arm and takes her away during the night. I hunch over my sketchbook, draw the dorm beds in endless rows. Miss Crosbie has taught me to use long strokes for distance and short ones for close up.

I dream about fat red pieces of fish sizzling on racks over a fire my mom is poking to stir up the heat. I want to catch another fish in the river, but Beanie is stuffing our packs, ready to leave. My shirt is crispy dry from the sun.

It’s a dark night. Clouds shadow the stars. Good cover for runaways. We walk from one farm road to the next, occasional dots of light in scattered buildings down a gravel track. Beanie says we have to get to a city before there’s a place to sleep proper. I don’t know how she knows this. Is it wishful thinking I’m too hungry to protest. Our fish feast was a long time ago.

“Shush. Listen. I think it’s a train.” Our village was on a train line. That’s how they took us to the School. Off to the right in the direction of the train sound, a light flickers low, between rows of corn. We crouch in the ditch by the road seconds before a pick-up careens past, belching black exhaust in our faces. No letup. No discovery of two runaways frozen in headlights.

We walk without making a sound towards the flickering glow on the ground, make out a smaller flame nearby. A train whooshes through, passenger cars, moving fast.

A deep voice comes from the bigger fire. “We’ll wait for the next one. It may slow for the switch coming up. If it does, put out your fire and run for the car with the open door.”

“I ain’t puttin’ out ’til I know,” says an answer from the almost invisible fire on the edge of the trampled grass where three men are squatting, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.

“Put it out before you run,” the deep voice says. “I’ll give you a couple of matches to restart if you need them.”

“You ain’t got all the answers, big man,” says the little-fire voice. In the distance a train whistles at a level crossing, slows. I feel familiar vibrations in the ground. It’s a long freight approaching.

The three tramps douse their fires, roll their belongings in seconds and take off for the tracks. We follow just out of sight. Beanie shows no sign of fear. I haven’t discovered her bravery, where she gets it or if she cares.

There’s an open space in a boxcar, directly in front of us. I give Beanie a leg up and she pulls me in beside her. The three tramps are as stunned as we are when we discover each other in the same place at the same time. Are we all runaways from school I want to ask, but my English isn’t up to it. The deep voice holds out a bag of peanuts in their shells. Beanie and I cup our hands to receive this gift from Manito.

“Thank you,” I say in Cree.

“You’re welcome,” the big voice answers in English. “Gotta cut the Indian crap. Gives you away, and you don’t want anyone to know you’re a runaway.”

“How did you know?” I blurt out with the peanut shells.

“Where do you think we all come from?” the voice in the corner mutters. “Here, have a drink of water. Don’t mind my used canteen. Only one I grabbed on my way out. Sure good to have. G’night.” I watch him slide into his bedroll, snug and warm.

Beanie and I scoot into the opposite corner and wrap our tarp around our shoulders. Big Voice slips into the shadows away from the sliding door. There is another figure, the third one at the camp It’s a boy, maybe younger than us. I think he’s asleep already. The empty boxcar sways, jerks, stops, rolls forward. Where are we going Does anyone know?

He says no Indian. English words, yes, but not my mother’s way of talking, so much of which I can’t remember. The School has done good.

The train motion puts everyone to sleep. I dream we are going home. Slowly, more slowly, then movement stops. Brakes screech. A wall of the boxcar slides open.

“Yep, they’re in here,” a man yells.

“Up, you guys. Better hurry.” He tells us what to do as if he’s a conductor.

We jump out of the boxcar onto the ground. I feel my ankle crunch and try to rise to run.

Beanie grabs my arm; the other three are already gone. The boxcar rolls back, erasing our escape.

There’s a maze of tracks in front, on the sides, in back. I test my ankle; decide it isn’t too bad.

Beanie pulls me over rows of steel rods. Finally, a grassy field.

We walk to a road. The lights of a town. A city Beanie and I have never seen either.

We rest in a ditch. My ankle is twice its normal size. Beanie moves it around a bit.

“Don’t. That hurts.” I’m careful not to scream with pain.

“Just trying to see if it’s broken,” Beanie says. We both agree it’s probably only sprained. Sunrise outlines a jagged collection of tall buildings with lower squares spreading from the centre like blocks of wood. We walk, hobble, into a new day.

A car slows behind us. Stops. A woman’s voice asks if we have a place to walk to.

Beanie tries to sound grownup, independent. “We’re going over there.” She points to the buildings in the distance. “My sister has sprained her ankle,” she adds.

“Please let me give you a ride. I’ll take you to the Catholic church. They have a shelter. Even a guest house if you have a little money.”

“No, thank you,” Beanie says. “We’re not Catholic.”

“You don’t have to be Catholic to go there. They will be serving breakfast to everyone by the time we arrive.” The lady moves toward her car, opens the rear door for us.

At the thought of breakfast, we get in.

It’s a nice place. We use the washroom, clean our filthy hands. Sit next to three other new arrivals. I recognize Deep Voice when he reminds me, “No Indian.”

“Promise,” I answer. Someone comes over my shoulder with more pancakes. It’s the lady with the car. How can I be so lucky I was in that damn school for 10 years. I’ve been out for less than 10 days and I’m eating pancakes in a Catholic church, the same thing that kept me in the School. Then I can’t swallow. Will they take me back?

“Whatsa matter?” Big Voice asks me.

“Back. Will they take us back?”

“Nah. Too much trouble. Besides, we’ve come a long way. At least I have. Prob’ly you too. We’ll need their shelter for a while, ’til we get jobs ’n’ everything.” Beanie is listening from my other side. She’s on her fourth pancake.

“My English. Not so good,” I sputter.

“You’ll get it. Just no Indian.” He sounds so sure, so old.

I watch the brown-skin girl across the table. She looks new too. I mutter under my breath thank you in Cree and she smiles.

When we finish breakfast, the lady with the car takes us down a hallway to a dorm room with 12 cots, six on each side facing each other. “This is where you can sleep,” she says in her cheery voice. Beanie and I look at each other and turn to leave, but my ankle stops me. It’s too sore to let me go on.

“Just for tonight,” I tell Beanie. “Until the pain is better.”

“Just one night,” Beanie says. “Too much like the School.” She shivers, tightens her sweater around her arms.

“I’ll get you some ice,” the car lady offers and goes back towards the kitchen. I don’t know what she means. Ice for what?

I sit on the cot, swing my swollen ankle up to rest. The car lady appears with ice wrapped in a towel and puts it around my ankle. It’s cold but feels good.

“My name’s Claire,” she smiles in my face, pinning me in my place on the cot. I look away, over at Beanie, who is lying on her back staring at the ceiling. “Lunch is at 12; supper at 5:00.”

My sister and I sleep. Sister Jolene chases a rat around the dorm beds; a giant toad jumps out and trips her. I wake up laughing. A bell rings. Lunch time. My ankle is way better after the magic ice.

Jeanne Louise. I print my name on the name tag by my plate. Beanie writes Minnie Mouse. She looks up, past my matted hair.

“Tomorrow we go.” It’s a statement, no maybe. There’s a fresh towel on my cot when I return and I don’t know when a hot shower has felt so good, especially as most of our showers at the School were cold. Beanie’s long hair is shining black after her shampoo. Beau Noir, the girls at the School called her. She has brushed it every night since I can remember.

It’s a dark night. Clouds shadow the stars. Good cover for runaways.

We leave after breakfast. My pants and shirt and underwear I rinsed in the shower are sticky dry, good enough, like my ankle that’s still swollen and sore.

A car stops on the road, offers a ride and Beanie accepts.

“Where to, pretty ladies?” a harsh voice asks.

“Downtown,” Beanie answers. Are we really pretty ladies?

The car moves forward, swerves around a tight corner, throws Beanie against the driver.

“Stop. This is our place.” She has seen an Indian sign for tobacco at a house near the road.

“Ain’t downtown yet.” He doesn’t stop.

At a red light, Beanie leans across me and flips the door handle. Good thing I’m holding on or I would have fallen out before Beanie pushes me. In a flash we are free.

“Gotta be careful of these guys,” she mutters.

How does she know I wonder again. What has she seen with Mr. B or when she ran away?

We walk on a sidewalk along a busy street. Stores, people, mostly white faces. Almost unconsciously we follow someone that looks like Big Man from the train and church. He turns a corner, away from the busy street, disappears behind a blank wall. We walk past the building, duck into an alley with a beaten path that leads to an open doorway. We know we need a shelter. We’ve heard stories about runaways at the School. So here’s a place to sleep at night, sort of.

When my eyes adjust to the dark, I see brown faces lying on pieces of mattress or tarps like we have. Someone is cooking and I feel faint from the thought of food. Beanie discards her pack on top of our tarp, eases mine off my shoulders, guides me to the soup line on the back wall of the huge open space. I can only think Cree, Manito. No Indian out loud. I remember.

I pick up litter around a school yard and someone—a teacher?—plants some dollars in my hand. Beanie goes out at night and returns with enough money to rent a room of our own. Two flights up, two beds, dirty toilet on the landing, a wisp of heat. Beans from a can, stale bread dumped behind the corner store. No Sisters with whips, no Mr. Bs. I figure the new ones pay. Beanie brushes her hair every night before she goes out.

During the day she sleeps. I walk, learn the city. There’s a river park where walkers, mostly brown-skinned, gather, drink from paper bags. I watch as pills and needles are passed around, hidden in the bushes. There’s a tension, everyone watches everyone, and themselves.

Alize, the Indian girl from the Catholic church sleeps—passed out—on a bench. No one pays attention. I draw the river curving around a bend, park benches, low buildings in the distance. By some miracle I still have my runaway bag and my exercise book of drawings I’ve kept since I was kidnapped from my home in Grade 1. I keep the bag in hiding, even from Beanie. I don’t want her to see herself on my pages. She might tear them up. Everything’s a bigger secret with my sister.

Whoop whoop. Lights flashing. Police swarming the park, behind the bushes. I am pushed into the back of what looks like the boxcar on the train.

I end up at what they tell me is an old prison; another school, I think, only no nuns, no Father LeBlanc. I am in a room with a metal bed and blanket, no mattress. Where is Beanie?

Someone leaves a bucket of water, a pile of rags. “If you do some work, you can eat. The washrooms are all yours. Get them clean the first time. Or you’ll have to do them again.”

They aren’t too bad. It actually feels good to do some work.

Beanie doesn’t come.

They let me stay three nights, four… hoping Beanie will show up A worker—someone like Claire—tells me to get a job.

I try at 7-Eleven; they say come back the next day. I return three times, three days in a row. “Come in clean clothes and you can sweep the grounds.”

I can’t find Beanie. I check the room we rented and there’s a drunk man sprzawled on my bed. I recognize him from the river park where I got arrested for doing nothing.

“She ain’t here. Go fuck yourself. Halfbreed.”

At the jail, Alize is lying on a cot next to mine when I return from my search for Beanie. “Where you from?” she whispers in Michif.

During the day she sleeps. I walk, learn the city. There’s a tension. Everyone watches everyone, and themselves.

“Don’t know,” I answer in English. “Beanie says she knows, but she’s missing. Can’t find her nowhere—anywhere.” I’m trying to speak good. I’m learning, but I need Beanie.

A V of geese invades the horizon. Honk, honk. I follow their formation, try to draw them, like I remember from close-up at home. Flying south, free.

I have four coloured pencils left. I make miniatures. Pale sky, pillow clouds, ripples for a river—in a three-inch square free as air. A tiny Beanie, two inches tall walking a cornfield, pack on her back. The train boxcar with three sets of tracks going nowhere in another corner of the paper. I’m saving the pencils, paper too.

I’ll keep the drawings for Beanie. The pictures will talk to her, get past her secrets. I have hope.

It’s a dark night. Something jars my shoulder. Maybe a rat I jump out of bed, stare into Beanie’s eyes.

“Get your stuff. Let’s go.” Where now I grab my pack, shove the pencils and exercise book in first.

Born in Chicago in 1938, Janice Kenyon emigrated to Victoria, BC, where she worked as a nurse. She moved to High River in the early 2000s to be near her daughter and grandchildren in Calgary. As a 66-year-old she took an epic cycling trip, which inspired Bike Ride with a Twist: 8,321 km Across Canada (Kachina Press/Sandhill, 2006). Janice’s other books include the biography Any Damn Thing (Gomer Press). Her fiction won honourable mention in the WGA 2020 Pandemic Postcards Contest. Janice passed away July 29, 2023. On the day before she died, she joked this would be the year she won Alberta Views’ fiction contest. She was prescient.

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Have you written a work of fiction all Albertans should read?
Learn more about our annual short story contest here.

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by Billy-Ray Belcourt
HAMISH HAMILTON
2022/$27.95/192 pp.

Can one write like a community Where the narrative voice isn’t individual but plural Is this the first-person plural?” These questions come to the narrator in a burst of inspiration midway through A Minor Chorus, and they represent both the hypothesis and the mission statement of Griffin Poetry Prize-winner Billy-Ray Belcourt’s first novel.

A young Cree man, disenchanted with his life in academia, puts his Ph.D. on hold and journeys back to his hometown in northern Alberta, determined to write a novel. He is full of ideas for what he wants his book to be: “a kind of literary ethnography of sadness and hope, of constraint and possibility”… “a body of water from which I frantically wanted to drink”… “a bomb… in the moral infrastructure of a corrupt nation.”

The narrator argues that academic theory and novelistic prose are not that different, and this belief infuses much of the book with a contemplative, analytical tone. Questions, musings and references to famous theorists sometimes crowd out tangible scenes that show us the narrator interacting with and reacting to his world, and the result is an at-times nebulous narrative that drifts from one thought to another without grounding.

The book digs into rich soil, however, when the narrator foregrounds the stories and voices of people in his community. We meet a beloved auntie who filled the role a mother could not;
a cousin celebrating her daughter’s first jingle dress performance at a pow wow. A hotel room hookup scene is intricately layered with the colliding forces of boredom, melancholy, horniness and history. An interview with a gay local news reporter from an older generation becomes a delicate dance of caginess and confession. A confrontation with a white woman in front of a residential school crackles with sinister energy, at once terribly tense and maddening in its mundaneness.

Humming under all of these testaments is the story that bookends the novel, which opens with his cousin’s direct and imaginative way of speaking—the most sharp and piercing note in the story of the community’s ongoing oppression. “The thesis behind my project was that people turned into musical instruments when encouraged to testify about the conditions of their lives,” says the narrator. “My success hinged on my ability to endure whatever song was sung, so I listened with both eyes, with my hands clasped tightly in front of me.”

It can be difficult to follow this book’s introspective narrator, who seems to get lost in his own thoughts, if not to revel in the deliberate obfuscation of academic language. But as a witness, as a scribe, he faithfully represents the complex harmonies of a dozen lives lived. And that’s where A Minor Chorus truly sings.

Bruce Cinnamon is the author of The Melting Queen.

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by Darrel J. McLeod
Douglas and McIntyre
2018/$29.95/240 pp.

Darrel McLeod starts his memoir Mamaskatch: A Cree Coming of Age with a quotation from Sartre: “Freedom is what we do with what is done to us.” In the following pages, McLeod—a retired land claims negotiator for the federal government and executive director of education and international affairs with the Assembly of First Nations—demonstrates resilience and strength as he works through abuse suffered in childhood to find his place in the world. In doing so, he also shows that belonging to some kind of community, no matter the size, is essential for all human beings.

Born in 1957 in northern Alberta after the death of his father, McLeod was the youngest of three children whom his mother Bertha struggled to raise on her own. As a widow and residential school survivor, she had a profound sense of loss; when she remarried and added more children to the family, the challenges simply grew. McLeod’s happiest childhood days were with his great-grandfather, a strong force in maintaining Cree culture—as was Bertha. But as his mother’s life grew more unstable, her natural exuberance and love of life diminished and she disappeared into alcoholism. McLeod lived with various family members, while his younger siblings went into foster care.

The word mamaskatch is Cree for a response to dreams shared, and it gives an organizing principle to the stories and memories in the book, including some McLeod was told about the awful experiences of Bertha and her sister in residential school. A sensitive boy who loved music and education, McLeod carried his own painful memories, including sexual abuse by his sister’s husband, which caused him horrendous guilt and confusion. The collision between Catholic and Cree beliefs, particularly regarding sexuality, terrified McLeod—he thought he was going to hell. With numerous moves around Alberta, it’s remarkable he was able to keep up attendance at school and work to earn money for himself and his siblings, including his sister Trina, a key figure in the memoir, who started life as Greggie and who underwent gender transition.

Mamaskatch does not adhere to a tight chronology, but it is emotionally lucid. McLeod tells his stories honestly and directly, without judgment: “I awake with an aching hollow in my chest. It’s not a dream—it’s just weeks before my tenth birthday, and Mother is gone.” The book shines a revealing light on appalling situations of discrimination, violence and need, and gives insight into a past that must be revealed so the collective future can be better. McLeod is apparently working on a follow-up memoir exploring his life after the events recounted here. I’m sure it will be as engaging, sensitive and thoughtful as this one.

—Candace Fertile teaches at Camosun College in Victoria.

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The resulting litigation’s complexity is overwhelming in many ways (that was in fact one of the grounds on which Canada and Alberta sought to have the case dismissed), but the outcome is likely to hinge on proving Lameman’s six simple words true. Are the animals starting to deplete And if so, is that a consequence of oil and gas development If the Beaver Lake Cree can establish those two facts, then, according to our constitution, they will be owed much more than damages; they will be owed a brake on new development in the oil sands.

The First Nation’s right to hunt and fish is spelled out in Treaty Six, which the Beaver Lake Cree signed in 1876. Treaties, of course, are the subject of no small acrimony. Translations were poor, and in some cases crucial terms such as the actual size of a square mile went unexplained. By signing Treaty Six, the Cree agreed to “cede, release, surrender and yield up to the Government of the Dominion of Canada” their ancestral territory (roughly 40,000 km² spanning present-day northeastern Alberta and a sliver of northwestern Saskatchewan); in exchange, the government promised that “they, the said Indians, shall have the right to pursue their avocations of hunting and fishing throughout the tract surrendered… saving and excepting such tracts as may from time to time be required or taken up for settlement, mining, lumbering or other purposes by Her said Government…”.

To read the entire article, from the June 2014 issue, click here.

Kopecky revisits “Game Changer”:

The Beaver Lake Cree Nation’s current chief, Germaine Anderson, says, “We have to keep going. We will not stop.” That resolve will be needed, as their day in court is still years away. The BLCN’s legal team is amassing evidence. Money remains a major obstacle—the Beaver Lake Cree, whose on-reserve population is less than 500, relies heavily on contributions to cover its legal fees. RAVEN trust has raised $250,000 for this fight since 2014; their goal is another $1.5-million before this case reaches trial.

Of course, the Beaver Lake Cree aren’t the only ones with a new government. The leaders of Alberta and Canada now give every indication of believing in ecological stewardship and Indigenous rights. Among Rachel Notley’s earliest moves was the creation of a 100-megatonne cap on oil sands emissions, a carbon tax and an Oilsands Climate Advisory Panel whose members include prominent Aboriginal and environmental activists as well as senior executives from the oil industry. Justin Trudeau has given Canada its first Indigenous justice minister, made climate change a policy priority and imposed a moratorium on oil tanker traffic along BC’s northern coast, killing the Northern Gateway Pipeline.

But both leaders inherited an economy that relies on oil and gas. Both remain committed to developing the oil sands “responsibly.” And neither of their governments has reached out directly to the Beaver Lake Cree Nation.

The biggest change comes not from government or the courts but from cold economics: The price of oil and natural gas is roughly half what it was in mid-2014. Oil sands expansion in Treaty Six territory has, with few exceptions, ground to a halt.

For some of Alberta’s iconic species to survive, however, industry will have to do more than stop expanding. It will have to retreat. The caribou in Treaty Six territory, for instance, continue their steady march to extirpation.

In the meantime the Beaver Lake Cree are trying to take fate in their own hands. Since that winter day when Crystal Lameman drove me through her reservation, an ambitious food and energy sovereignty program has been started, with 84 apple trees and 14 cherry trees planted and a 24.65 kW solar farm placed atop Beaver Lake’s Amisk community school.

“We’re here and we’re exercising self determination,” says Lameman, who is now the band’s Treaty coordinator. “We’re shaping the economic and political ideologies of and for our children to be in line with sovereignty and traditional land use.”

Arno Kopecky is an environmental journalist.

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