Perfection of the Morning (13 page)

My fear—earlier of the women, and then of the boys—was grounded in nothing rational; nothing had ever happened to me to justify it. There was no place where we met Native people as equals in those days, not at school, not at play, or on the streets of the town, yet they were always there, like the forests, like the lakes and the prairie, always a part of what it was to live in Saskatchewan. Their constant presence on the fringes of our society was a dark shadow made up of equal parts guilt, which too often transmuted itself into scorn and even hatred, fear, curiosity, sympathy and shame. All of us walked in the gloom of that shadow believing, I suppose, if we thought about it at all, that one day we would be free of our guilt for what we did to them, not realizing, as I do now, that no matter how good our intentions or, indeed, our actions, many centuries and generations will have to pass before that sad history becomes no longer relevant.

In my new home, looking at the faces of the people passing by on the streets of the few towns, I was aware of a puzzling gap. One day it dawned on me what it was I was missing. When I asked why there were no Native people around, nobody had an answer beyond an uncertain shrug of the shoulders. Some I asked pointed out that there is a reserve near Maple Creek and that one might see Native people on the streets of that town, which wasn’t an answer and in fact only increased the mystery.

Peter and his father had occasionally bought fence posts from the men of the reserve and had a passing acquaintance with a few of them.
Since my marriage I had seen some of the young men competing in the rodeo held every July in the Cypress Hills adjacent to their land, but I knew about the reserve to the north only that it was Cree, or so I thought, and that it was very small. Because I believed the reserve to be Cree, my initial impression was that our corner of southwest Saskatchewan must once have been Cree territory.

It is plain to any inhabitant that nobody could live on land away from coulees for any length of time during much of the year, as out of them there is no shelter from wind, blizzards, thunderstorms or from the relentless summer sun, no wood for fires, and almost every summer by July nearly all the naturally collected surface water has evaporated in the intense heat. And, as has been amply documented, winters out on the open plains can be so appalling as to frighten the most intrepid westerner.

Bitter experience says it is most likely that centuries had passed without these endless miles of grass having seen any humans at all during winter. It was the mid-eighteenth century before Plains tribes, many of whom had had guns for a hundred years, acquired horses, which made it possible to go some distance from camp to obtain water or firewood. Yet I have found, as have other residents of the drier areas, stone circles and cairns, tools and points far from creeks or reliable water sources such as natural springs, which surely indicate that despite the drawbacks, people came and stayed long enough to leave behind traces, some not merely utilitarian, but whose true purpose is unknown, at least to non-Natives.

We do know that Plains people hunted buffalo, great herds of which grazed on the open plains most of the year, probably trekking south and into wooded territory for the winter months. With their guns and horses, buffalo jumps and occasional buffalo pounds, Plains people mastered the art of hunting and buffalo
became not only their primary food source but were sought for their hides and put to numerous other uses. Every inch of this area must have been ridden over by buffalo-hunting Plains people, and it must have been very familiar to any number of Native hunting bands who camped here.

Although in the years since I was a student more and more scholars have begun the difficult study of the movements, alliances, life—the history—of pre-treaty Amerindian Nations, I found that the information being published is still in a form that is more than a little confusing to any but the most determined scholar. Never one to do more research than I could avoid, and four hundred kilometers from the nearest university library, I wanted nonetheless to know badly enough why there were no Native people here beyond that one small reserve in the Hills to pursue the answer. Somewhere I had heard this was Blackfoot land which, given the evidence of the reserve, puzzled me. I wanted to know what was correct, thinking that there would be one simple answer.

The first place I looked was to the great period of exploration of what is today the Prairie provinces. I found that no Europeans—at least none who left a record—traveled through the true southwest corner of this province before the mid-nineteenth century. For the most part, the early explorers followed the river systems and there was no major river south of the Saskatchewan, or the Bad River, as Peter Fidler, the first European trader-explorer to follow the South Saskatchewan in 1800 all the way west into what would become Alberta, sometimes refers to it. Henry Kelsey in 1690 and Anthony Henday in 1754, both traveling for the British Hudson’s Bay Company, came the farthest south of the North Saskatchewan River, but neither came as far as the south branch. Even Peter Fidler hadn’t
dipped down south of the Cypress Hills. But there were other reasons besides the lack of river systems for the lack of exploration.

I had thought the Cree and Blackfoot were enemies, but John Milloy in
The Plains Cree: Trade, Diplomacy and War, 1790 to 1870
cites evidence that there was a peaceful collaboration between them from about 1730 to about 1806 during which time they succeeded in driving south the Snake or Shoshoni people. After that there were short periods of truce, none of which lasted.

Peter Fidler’s “Chesterfield House Journal,” an account of the two winters (1800–02) he spent trading at the junction of the Red Deer and South Saskatchewan just north of the present-day town of Leader, about 175 kilometers northwest of Eastend, indicate no Cree presence, a friendly Blackfoot presence, and a danger so omnipresent from the Fall or Gros Ventre people that Fidler and his men abandoned their post in the spring of 1802, never having dared to go south of the Cypress Hills. According to Milloy, by circa 1850 the Gros Ventre had been pushed south of the Milk River into Montana too, and presumably were no longer a factor within the Palliser Triangle.

John Bennett of Washington University, in the 1960s, began a longitudinal socioeconomic study of the area centered on Maple Creek, which he calls “Jasper”, a town seventy kilometers northwest of Eastend. In
Northern Plainsmen
, he offers what was the standard interpretation of the situation in the Cypress Hills area leading up to and just before the arrival of settlers:

As this happened [as some of the Woodland Crees moved out onto the plains in search of furs for trading], a kind of no-man’s land developed between the Plains Cree and the other tribes to the east and south; the Cypress Hills and the Jasper
region were in the heart of this zone. The Blackfoot eventually dominated the area, maintaining garrisons in or near the Hills in order to keep other Indians from permanent habitation. The presence of grizzly bears in the Hills also discouraged Indian occupance. The Hudson’s Bay Company more or less collaborated in this policy, since they were anxious to maintain the bison herds, to ensure the supply of bison meat (in the form of pemmican) for the posts, and to make profitable sales of guns and other articles to the Indians who did the hunting and trading.

By the early part of the nineteenth century the situation had developed into a stable military frontier, with the Cree and their occasional allies, the Assiniboine, raiding the Blackfoot but generally fleeing before the implacable Blackfoot could retaliate in force. But the no-man’s land policy held, and the long delay of white settlement of the region was due to Blackfoot hostility and the collaborative desire of the Company to keep whites out.

John Palliser’s accounts of his expeditions across the southern prairie from 1857 to 1859 bear this out. They reveal that although he was making plans to go farther south into the Cypress Hills proper, he was strongly advised by experienced members of his party that because of the Blackfoot whose territory it now was, it would be far too dangerous, and that if he persisted in his intentions, most of his party would desert him rather than go along. Palliser abandoned the idea and, except for a quick run on horseback down to the border and back on the Alberta side of the Hills by two of his men, Palliser and the rest of his party never saw the country south of the Hills either.

Between 1850 and 1865 the southern plains were relatively peaceful. But by the latter date the buffalo were disappearing and those remaining were retreating farther and farther to the west into Blackfoot lands. The Cree, desperate for their food supply, had no choice but to follow them into enemy territory. Milloy describes a party of Cree men in 1868 as having gone to the Cypress Hills, “one hundred and fifty miles inside Blackfoot territory,” which would place the division of territory by the two nations at a line running north-south somewhere between Moose Jaw and Swift Current.

Many skirmishes and deaths were the result. A famous Cree leader, Maskepetoon, was killed by the Blackfoot during a battle in 1869 and this escalated the conflicts into a Blackfoot-Cree war all along the border between the two nations. Often their battles must have taken place in the very land where I live and walk, and that today is emptied of Native people.

In the fall of 1870 between six and eight hundred Cree and Assiniboine warriors—often the two nations are spoken of as if they were all Cree, since they often acted together, despite the fact that they spoke different languages—from all over what would become the province of Saskatchewan advanced all the way west through Blackfoot territory to the junction of the Oldman and St. Mary’s rivers, near Lethbridge in present-day Alberta, where they were defeated in battle once and for all by the Blackfoot Confederacy. But by then there were almost no buffalo left in Cree territory—Bennett dates this as 1877 in the Cypress Hills area—and despite having defeated them, the Blackfoot began to allow the Cree to hunt in their lands. Thus, this territory where I live, once exclusively Blackfoot, became also Cree.

Fourteen years after Palliser’s last Saskatchewan expedition, and two years after that decisive battle near Lethbridge, Isaac Cowie was
sent to the extreme east end of the Cypress Hills—that is, in the Hills just outside of what is today the town of Eastend—to establish a fur-trading post for the Hudson’s Bay Company. Today called Chimney Coulee, it had been a wintering place for the Métis, and doubtless before that for whatever Natives might have been passing through, hunting. Cowie was apparently the first European to come this far south, and he spent the winter there trading profitably with the Métis, Assiniboine and Cree, but not the Blackfoot, the very people the Company had hoped to lure into trade.

By spring he no longer felt it was safe to stay and he and a companion rode out from the post just ahead of a party of Blackfoot who shot the nine Assiniboine who had stayed behind to forage. The Blackfoot then burned the post to the ground. Isaac Cowie and his companion, Birston, heard the shots and saw the smoke from the burning buildings spiraling into the sky as they reached the plain below. Chimney Coulee is about ten miles from where I sit writing this, and from our northwest window I can see Anxiety Butte, the high point above it, on the ranch of a friend.

It was true then that southwest Saskatchewan had been the homeland of identifiable Native people, the evidence of which I saw everywhere I looked. All the more eerie and disturbing then to walk the streets of the towns and, except for Maple Creek, not see a Native face. And I still didn’t know why. I decided it was time to look to the treaties.

There I found that the boundary of Treaty Number Four (1874), with the Cree and Saulteaux, or Ojibwa, included all of the area where I live, and also the Cypress Hills proper. Treaty Number Seven signed in 1877 with the Blackfoot, Blood, Piegan, Sarcee and Stony (Assiniboine)—the latter had to be negotiated with separately since they spoke a different language than the people of the
Blackfoot Confederacy—describes its eastern boundary as “west of the Cypress Hills, or Treaty Number Four.” Despite this, Olive Dickason, in her authoritative
Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from the Earliest Times
, in her map of treaty boundaries, draws a dotted line around the highest part of the Hills, indicating that the boundary is uncertain. I thought that since this area was covered by treaties, there ought to be reserve lands designated within the area, and I spent some time trying but failing to find the papers which would show precisely where they were.

But then I found a paper by historian John Tobias called, ominously, “Canada’s Subjugation of the Plains Cree, 1879–1885,” I found a partial answer to the question why, after centuries of Natives living in and crossing this land, there is now only one small reserve of around three thousand acres, populated by about two hundred mostly Cree and some Assiniboine people, in the Cypress Hills area.

In a nutshell, when the buffalo disappeared in the late 1870s the Plains people were starving, and they massed together in the Cypress Hills area where there had always been game in the past, and where there was Fort Walsh, a North-West Mounted Police post, an agency of the government, and officials with whom to negotiate for land and from whom food, in the meantime, might be obtained. By this time more than half of the Native population of treaties Four and Six, chiefly Cree, was present in the Hills, a situation which alarmed both police and any other resident Europeans present. In 1876 Chief Sitting Bull of the Hunkpapa Sioux had crossed the border with four thousand followers immediately after the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Although it was a temporary situation, this move further alarmed authorities. With so many Native people massed together in one area, the possibility of an Indian confederacy
and then an Indian war loomed large in their imaginations. (In fact, the leaders of the Cree nation, Sitting Bull leading the Dakotas, and Crowfoot of the Blackfoot Confederacy did try to establish an alliance, but weren’t able to come to an accord.)