Kayās Nōhcīn

Kayās Nōhcīn, I Come from a Long Time Back
by Marie Louise Rockthunder
Edited by Jean L. Okimasis and Arok Wolvengrey
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Madonna Hamel
$24.95 (pb)ISBN 9780880778368

Collected over a quarter of a century, Mary Louise Rockthunder’s oral history put to paper is a national treasure. It is also a journey through space and time. And languages. A testament to the power of fidelity to timeless truths embedded in oral history, the editors of these stories write that “Mary Louise’s memory for her past is so detailed and precise that it was as if she stored her diaries in her mind.”

Mary Louise Rockthunder (nee Bangs) was an Elder of Cree, Saulteaux and Nakoda descent, born in 1913 and raised and married at Piapot First Nation. Her stories, filled with humour and told with humility, are a testament to her rootedness, to her kinship with the land over time.

She speaks in Cree, despite how some people tell her her English is fine. “Some don’t understand it right when English is spoken” she says, when relating her way of being in the world. “These white people, “she says, “what they really like is money.” But, she says, advising her grandchildren, “relate as much as you can with others. “The more you relate, the more people will treat you as a relative. That’s what ‘making relations’ means in the those high words the English speak. In Cree,” she explains, “we mean we take you as kin”.

Having lived and grown up on the land Mary Louise tells stories of catching rabbits in snares, cooking duck, living off the land. Her family made pemmican and stored it in the snow and could eat it months later and “we ate like that and we never had the cancer, the tuberculosis, the whooping cough. We simply grew up.” She is saddened that she cannot hunt and so many wild animals now are “sprayed.”

At the same time as she misses the simpler life, she jokes about things like cosmetics and accessories. How strange the idea of a purse “you wear like a saddle.” How easy it is to mistake house spray for hair spray. In the midst of recalling her fondness for going to church and praying with her mother, she reflects that, unfortunately, marrying in a church means you took a vow to obey your husband “which made you afraid of him because you had to do what he said.”

I Come from a Long Time Back is the first of series of books called “In Our Own Words” which is printed in Cree syllabics, standard roman orthography and in English. The Cree-English glossary in the back is an added bonus. The meticulous work done by the translators gives the reader a timely and deeper understanding of how, in Cree, language, land and people are all kin.

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