Hello,
Matilda
Chantyman (b June 3, 1916), Carla's dad's aunt on his dad's side, died. Matilda was living in Quesnel, where Dad was born
in 1919, three years after Matilda, who I think was born in Anaham.
In
2004 and 2006, when I taught in her village of Kluskus, off the road in
the bush about 100 km west of Quesnel, Matilda still lived there, with
her daughter Bella, over 60 then. During winter trips, in a
high-clearance truck for the bush trail, toand from Quesnel, Matilda got
to sit in the front with the little children, but Bella, I, and the
bigger children rumbled along snuggled under blankets in the box. One
winter night, stuck in the bush, Bella had a fire going fast. We
gathered round, waiting for morning and someone to bring a U-joint to
fix the truck. The temperature was only about -10.
"When
I was younger, we used to walk to Ulkatcho," Bella told me. That's
about 140 km west of Kluskus, along the Dakelh-Nuxalt Grease Trail, the
route that Alexander Mackenzie followed westward to Pacific Ocean
tidewater at Bella Coola in 1793. A Bella Coola monument says so. At
Kluskus, I saw little metal signs on trees along the trail, a protected
historic route sometimes traveled still, by foot or horse. "An Indian
is pointing a white man in the wrong direction," Kluskus resident
George Jimmie, one of the high-clearance truck drivers, quipped.
I
met Matilda and Bella in February, 2004 in Bella's house at Kluskus,
which had a 3 x 8-foot table covered in dried moose meat.
In
2016, Carla, Chelsea, and I attended Matilda's 100th birthday party in
the Quesnel friendship centre. I shook a 100-year-old hand. Matilda
asked one of Carla's sisters for a chew of tobacco. Prime Minister
Trudeau's letter to Matilda for turning 100 was on he hall wall.
Perhaps her land, stolen by colonialism, is in the mail.
Williams Lake, The Land Called Canada
No comments:
Post a Comment