The next day I would need to start ordering books and poring over résumés. I would have to recruit an entirely new team of teachers, and that wouldn’t be easy. What would we do for phys ed? There was no gym or even a playground. I would have to get rid of everything but the furniture and start anew. I thought about the contrast between my well-equipped and neatly organized classroom, tastefully decorated with student art, and what I had seen at the Portage School. I pictured my classroom at Trafalgar Elementary, on the west side of Vancouver, and wondered how my students would have reacted had they seen Yekooche, the school building and the students-the beauty, the starkness, the unkemptness and the abject poverty. Was I really going to do this-move north on my own, leaving my teaching job and friends in Vancouver? More importantly, was I going to leave Milan? When the emptiness didn’t recede, I lay in the dark, thinking. I asked them to accept me, to protect me and guide me to do the best I could to help their descendants.Īt two in the morning in a cabin along the shores of Stuart Lake, I woke with a sucking hollowness in my chest. I looked toward Shass Mountain and began to pray-not to Jesus or to God, but to the ancestors of this place. That afternoon, I strolled to the cemetery at the edge of town and paused beside the white picket fence around one grave. Classes had been organized, clean and strict at our school, but the crows outside were identical.Ĭould they accept me as a fellow Indian, even though I was a mixed-blood Cree who had an expensive haircut and fancy clothes and who spoke eloquent English? I thought of home-Spurfield, and the dozens of cousins I grew up with in Smith, Alberta. Did they see me as I hoped, as another Indian who wanted to help them get out of the rut of poverty, dysfunction and sorrow, or were they even aware of their situation? Did they care in the slightest way who I was? Through the bank of windows I could see large crows flitting between tall spruce trees and alders, cawing over each other impatiently and making guttural clicking noises. Many curious glances in my direction, but everyone was too shy to say anything. Torn textbooks and tattered paperbacks lay on the floor and countertop as if they had been flung there. Others were at their desks doing arithmetic worksheets. About 15 kids with thick black hair were scattered around in one cluster on the floor by a cluttered bookshelf, a few cutting something out at a table covered with junk. A woman with long, matted grey hair, a wrinkled face, missing teeth and chipped and gritty fingernails was perched behind her desk fidgeting with some papers. I -ee wah na … hol…yor… ha-a-a… wah na…hol… your ha-a… A warped 45 vinyl record of a Beatles song played on the small school-issue turntable, the melody wafting in and out. I was the only visitor to venture in-the Indian Affairs director, Juanita Tupper, and my boss, Louise, waited outside. That was the only word to describe what was going on in the classroom I visited in the dilapidated schoolhouse the next morning right after recess. I thought about how Catherine had confronted me the day before on the steps of the school district offices in front of my new boss, Louise Burgart, the assistant superintendent.Ĭhaos. What would these people think of me? Could they accept me as a fellow Indian, even though I was a mixed-blood Cree who had an expensive haircut and fancy clothes and who spoke eloquent English? Fitting in was critical, though I wasn’t sure why. I had forgotten how fine dust clogs the sinuses. I didn’t dare take time to admire the new leaves that shimmered on stands of alder trees filtering the spring sun. Why was Catherine in such a rush? Was she testing me-curious to see if a Cree boy turned city slicker, now a rural school principal driving a new cherry-red Suzuki Sidekick, could keep up with her older crimson Dodge pickup? We hydroplaned over vast puddles, shimmied over uneven washboards and plowed through a layer of fresh gravel before slowing to cross the tiny wooden bridge that spanned a moat around the village. It was June 1990, and the local school district had been asked by Tl’azt’en First Nation to take over the community school in Yekooche from the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs the next fall. I could barely keep up with elder Catherine Bird as she sped through the now dense, now clear-cut forest to get to Yekooche, a Dakelh village 80 kilometers north of Fort St.
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