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From Prairie Fire, Autumn 1995:

Kohkominawak otacimowiniwawa / Our Grandmothers’ Lives as Told in Their Own Words: Told by Glecia Bear, Irene Calliou, Janet Feitz, Minnie Fraser, Alpha Lafond, Rosa Longneck, Mary Wells. Freda Ahenakew and H. C. Wolfart, eds. and trans. Saskatoon: Fifth House Publishers, 1992, 408 pp.

JENNIFER KELLY

OUR GRANDMOTHERS’ LIVES AS TOLD IN THEIR OWN WORDS IS A REMARKABLE COLLECTION. It is a crucial act of preservation, a valuable translation and record of seven northwestern Saskatchewan Cree women’s oral stories, memories, languages, and their personal and community histories. At the same time, and perhaps more importantly, it is a fascinating demonstration of defiance: the narratives, and the oral traditions, histories, and cultural practices from which they emerge, refuse containment–by print, by translation, by English-speaking readers, by such categories as “history,” “ethnography,” and “autobiography.” First Nations literary critic Kateri Damm has suggested that “[I]ndigenous literatures will resist the boundaries and boxes” of non-First Nations readers: “We can write our own stories and determine for ourselves who and what we are” (24-25). Our Grandmothers’ Lives as Told in Their Own Words is a valuable demonstration of this self- and community-determination, of storytelling as a culturally specific process by which First Nations individuals and communities define themselves, a process that extends far beyond the printed, and translated, word.

As a white, English-speaking reader, I find that the form and content of Our Grandmothers’ Lives as Told in Their Own Words function productively together as constant reminders of not only the value, and the limits, of translating oral texts into written form, but of the challenges, the very distance between a non-Cree/English-speaking reader of the published, translated texts and the cultural context, the location, the performative moment in which the stories were produced. The collection brings together, in translation (into English, Cree roman orthography, and Cree syllabic orthography), reminiscences, anecdotes, formalized stories, conversations, and memories of the women, aged from approximately 60 to 90 years, all but one belonging to the Plains Cree groups that traditionally hunted north of the North Saskatchewan River and eventually settled near Carlton House and Fort Pitt (Wolfart 30). (Janet Feitz is from La Ronge, part of the Churchill river system.) The women have lived all of their lives in small communities in this region. The stories originally were told in Plains Cree (with the exception of Feitz, who speaks Woods Cree), to co-editor and translator Freda Ahenakew, also from the region and known personally (and in some cases related) to each storyteller; the narratives are thus grounded in a specific community and location. The form in which the translation of each text is presented (English on right-hand pages, corresponding Cree roman orthography on the left, both followed by the syllabic version), I find, functions structurally to reinforce Wolfart’s caution that “it is essential–especially for the English-speaking reader–to keep in mind at all times that these reminiscences of Cree women were recorded in their own languages rather than English” (17).

The subject-matter of the narratives recorded in Our Grandmothers Lives as Told in Their Own Words, further, is location-, culture-, and gender-specific. By focusing on women’s perspectives, it proveds a particularly valuable history of Cree domestic technology and technological adaptation, the division of labour in the home and community, of gender relations, of practices specific to Cree women, and, crucially, the central role of grandmothers, of elders, in maintaining cultural values and traditions. Lived, material history is inseparable here from the complex of cultural and personal values. Alpha Lafond’s memory of her grandmother is a striking exapmle of this interrelatedness: “She told us sacred stories-, she would tell all kinds of stories to us. She taught us to pray, and would pick out our lice while we were kneeling” (241). The details on snaring, cooking, soap-making and sewing, and certainly Feitz’s stories of her life as a trapper, for example are interesting not only for their technical information but for their demonstration of how gender relations, material history, and personal and cultural values are connected through time and place. Glecia Bear’s account of how she asked the elder women in her community about earlier childbirth practices is striking not only for its information but for its structure, the traditional formality with which it recounts an elder’s words: “‘we did not have a midwife,’ she said, ‘we used to be midwife to ourselves,’ she said; ‘well, we would even simply go off into the bush, giving birth to the children there and the bringing them back from there,’ she said’” (73, 75). Rosa Longneck, in her conversation with Alpha Lafond and Freda Ahenakew, further recalls, with more than a hint of defiance, her arranged marriage: “Go on, I was given away, for I didn’t choose to go there” (267). Elsewhere, Glecia Bear recalls her own: “I did not even know the man whom it was arranged that I would marry. . . . I bawled my eyes out, since I did not know this person to whom I had been given, for me to be married to him” (211, 213).

The collection is divided roughly into two time frames: Part One, according to the editors, focuses on traditional life in the bush and on the northern prairie, a period “bearing the stamp of the fur-trade but not yet or at least by no means fully, that of the reserve system” (Wolfart 20). Parts II and III, the latter a conversation, “focus on a life that already shows the pervasive influence of a settled existence, with cows and agricultural implements, teachers and priests” (Wolfart 20). While this chronology is useful in tracing the material history of these women’s lives, the texts themselves, as oral and literary texts, merge and exceed these time frames. The speakers recall incident from their own childhoods, repeat stories from their elders, yet shift easily from a distant memory to a discussion of contemporary problems and events. Time frames and subject-matter, history and commentary, formal story and conversation, indeterminate memory and technological detail, converge and connect; it becomes clear that, in this context, no history, no individual, is separate, isolated.

While these women’s stories are personal, individual, they also evoke the history of their community, its intimate relationship with the land, and how these have changed through colonization and the introduction of Western technologies. The women tell of a way of life and of individual communal self-sufficiency that at one time was able to absorb and incorporate white culture: Irene Calliou’s “Household Chores” suggests how the introduction of the wage economy, briefly, co-existed with a traditional way of life; Bear’s “Lost and Found” suggests the commingling, however temporary, of Christian and traditional Cree spiritual values and traditions.

This way of life, however, as the stories also demonstrate, has undergone vast destructive changes as a result of accelerated white incursion. While some knowledges have been maintained through time, others are simply lost: “I wonder how she might of made the dyes,” comments Lafond, recalling her grandmother’s talent at making beaded moccasins (331). Each story-teller emphasises “how different things are today” and reinforces the value of traditional knowledges and values, modes of education and teaching, particularly as passed on by their own grandmothers. Mary Wells’s story, “Fun and Games,” in particular demonstrates the centrality of elders in resisting the incursion of white culture, its values and gender roles. (Mary recalls, for example, pretending to wear a red silk dress and high heels and being admonished as “a chicken with frozen feet” by her grandmother [177]). The women express a deep sadness and concern for their daughters’ and dranddaughters’ generations, faced with male violence, alcoholism, increasing dependence on government assistance, and the loss and fragmentation of cultural traditions. A pervasive tone of the stories is the women’s lament at the gulfs, the linguistic and spiritual divides, separating the elders from the generations that follow: “Like when I’m telling a sacred story, when I start telling a story, nobody listens to me, so then I stop talking. Because they don’t believe in how we used to live” (Longneck 345). Yet Our Grandmothers’ Lives as Told in Their Own Words is much more than history, far more than lament, for there is much humour, pride in resilience, and the sustaining of community here.

What I find particularly fascinating about this collection is not only the contents of the stories but the way in which, through the process of translating, annotating, “preserving,” them, the collection demonstrates the very power of oral literary traditions, their refusal to be contained by the printed word, by linear notions of “history,” by Western definitions of “autobiography.” Our Grandmothers’ Lives as Told in Their Own Words reinforces not only the importance of context in the storytelling event but emphasizes that a “life story” is at once individual and communal, a process and evnt as much as a literary product. And, interestingly, it si the very meticulousness of the translation process that brings this to the fore.

The English translations are accompanied by extensive endnotes and commentary. These are extremely informative, providing linguistic, geographical, historical, and contextual detail and functioning as a constant reminder that the stories are translations, are distanced from their performative context. Wolfart points out, for example, the curcial difference in gender categories between Cree and English, the linguistic and cultural patterns for reference to deceased family members (405), the observance in the telling of these stories of the formal and ritual transactions, including the presentation of tobacco to someone whose favour is being sought and the granting of informed consent, surrounding the storytelling act (402). Of particular interest is Wolfart’s commentary on how one story demonstrated the traditional injunction against mothers taking up, intervening for, their children in later life (365); this observation invaluably contextualizes the generational conflicts discussed throughout the collection.

The editors place much stress on the “authenticity” of the narratives and the translations: “Theirs [the storytellers'] is an authentic record: they were not forced to use a foreign language, nor were their texts shaped by an outside interviewer” (Wolfart 17). While I find this stress on “authenticity” an appropriate gesture, a counter to the myriad of misrepresentations of First Nations people by white Canadian writers, historians, ethnographers and anthropologists, I would suggest that the very “authenticity,” the power, of the stories does not lie so much in the translation process or in the origin of the interviewer, although these are crucial elements, as in the performance and unrepeatability, or the storytelling acts. The editors include precise information about the contexts in which the stories were told. The transcriptions/translations include the marking of the moments in which the tape recorder was turned on and off, as well as the interruptions, and the promptings and questions of the listeners. Ahenakew provides personal introductions to the storytellers, and the entire collection is framed, I would argue, by her general question about “the old times” and (despite the editors’ assertion to the contrary that “the discourse is not directed to an English-speaking public” [19]) by the speakers’ awareness that a goal of the project is to translate and publish, in English, Cree-language stories-”ah, I’m talking English,” says Rosa Longneck, in a moment of self-correction (263). Further, while Wolfart remarks with some surprise that “there is no discussion of spiritual matters even where (to the editors at least) it might have seemed appropriate” (28), I would suggest that this absence be read as resistance, as the speakers’ protective act of refusal to rpvide apecific forms of cultural knowledge, ultimately, to outsiders. I suggest this not to critique the editors’ claims to authenticity but in order to celebrate Our Grandmothers’ Lives as Told in Their Own Words as a work that productively demonstrates the specificity, the context, the fluidity and power, of the storytelling act as a cultural process that escapes, defies, containment by the written word.

Our Our Grandmothers’ Lives as Told in Their Own Words, in my view, would be a valuable addition to a number of areas of study-First Nations languages and literatures, history, cultural studies, life writing, women’s studies, anthropology, linguistics, among many others. While I would find it particularly useful in a classroom as an introduction to both the challenges and richness of cross-cultural study, in my view the collection is, especially in a period in which broad academic theorizing of cultural production has become prevalent, an excellent example of the value of attention to detail, to the local, the specific, the contextual, as part of a feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial politics.

Works Cited

Kateri Damm, “Says Who: Colonialism, Identity and Defining Indigenous Literature.” Looking at the Words of Our People: First Nations Analysis of Literature. Ed. Jeannette Armstrong. Penticton: Theytus Books, 1993. 9-26.

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