Big Bear Read online

  Big Bear

  ALSO IN THE EXTRAORDINARY CANADIANS SERIES:

  Lord Beaverbrook by David Adams Richards

  Norman Bethune by Adrienne Clarkson

  Emily Carr by Lewis DeSoto

  Tommy Douglas by Vincent Lam

  Glenn Gould by Mark Kingwell

  Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin by John Ralston Saul

  Stephen Leacock by Margaret MacMillan

  Nellie McClung by Charlotte Gray

  Marshall McLuhan by Douglas Coupland

  L.M. Montgomery by Jane Urquhart

  Lester B. Pearson by Andrew Cohen

  Mordecai Richler by M.G. Vassanji

  Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont by Joseph Boyden

  Pierre Elliott Trudeau by Nino Ricci

  SERIES EDITOR:

  John Ralston Saul

  Big Bear

  by RUDY WIEBE

  With an Introduction by

  John Ralston Saul

  SERIES EDITOR

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  First published 2008

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

  Copyright © Jackpine House Ltd., 2008

  Introduction copyright © John Ralston Saul, 2008

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  * * *

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Wiebe, Rudy, 1934–

  Big Bear/Rudy Wiebe.

  (Extraordinary Canadians)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-670-06786-2

  1. Big Bear, 1825?–1888. 2. Cree Indians—Prairie Provinces—History. 3. Cree Indians—Kings and rulers—Biography. 4. Cree Indians—Prairie Provinces—Biography. 5. Indians of North Amercia—Prairie Provinces—Biography. 6. Indians of North America—Prairie Provinces—History. I. Title. II. Series.

  E99.C88B5 2008 971.2004’973230092 C2008-902622-5

  * * *

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see

  www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

  This book was printed on 30% PCW recycled paper

  Dedicated to the memory of

  See-as-cum-ka-poo (Little Stones on the Prairie) also known as Mary PeeMee

  and John Tootoosis

  and Duncan McLean

  who told me Big Bear stories

  And to Gil Cardinal, who made the movie

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by John Ralston Saul

  Map of the North-West Territories, 1885

  Author’s Note

  1 Buffalo; Guns and Horses

  2 Plains Cree Boy

  3 Warrior and Chief

  4 Come, Talk to Us

  5 The Rope of Treaty Six

  6 Last Chief of the Free Plains Cree

  7 Signing the Treaty

  8 One United Land

  9 Taking My Name from Me

  10 The Wild Young Men

  11 A Recommendation to Mercy

  12 The Hills of Sounding Lake

  CHRONOLOGY

  SOURCES

  INTRODUCTION BY

  John Ralston Saul

  How do civilizations imagine themselves? One way is for each of us to look at ourselves through our society’s most remarkable figures. I’m not talking about hero worship or political iconography. That is a danger to be avoided at all costs. And yet people in every country do keep on going back to the most important people in their past.

  This series of Extraordinary Canadians brings together rebels, reformers, martyrs, writers, painters, thinkers, political leaders. Why? What is it that makes them relevant to us so long after their deaths?

  For one thing, their contributions are there before us, like the building blocks of our society. More important than that are their convictions and drive, their sense of what is right and wrong, their willingness to risk all, whether it be their lives, their reputations, or simply being wrong in public. Their ideas, their triumphs and failures, all of these somehow constitute a mirror of our society. We look at these people, all dead, and discover what we have been, but also what we can be. A mirror is an instrument for measuring ourselves. What we see can be both a warning and an encouragement.

  These eighteen biographies of twenty key Canadians are centred on the meaning of each of their lives. Each of them is very different, but these are not randomly chosen great figures. Together they produce a grand sweep of the creation of modern Canada, from our first steps as a democracy in 1848 to our questioning of modernity late in the twentieth century.

  All of them except one were highly visible on the cutting edge of their day while still in their twenties, thirties, and forties. They were young, driven, curious. An astonishing level of fresh energy surrounded them and still does. We in the twenty-first century talk endlessly of youth, but power today is often controlled by people who fear the sort of risks and innovations embraced by everyone in this series. A number of them were dead—hanged, infected on a battlefield, broken by their exertions—well before middle age. Others hung on into old age, often profoundly dissatisfied with themselves.

  Each one of these people has changed you. In some cases you know this already. In others you will discover how through these portraits. They changed the way the world hears music, thinks of war, communicates. They changed how each of us sees what surrounds us, how minorities are treated, how we think of immigrants, how we look after each other, how we imagine ourselves through what are now our stories.

  You will notice that many of them were people of the word. Not just the writers. Why? Because civilizations are built around many themes, but they require a shared public language. So Laurier, Bethune, Douglas, Riel, LaFontaine, McClung, Trudeau, Lévesque, Big Bear, even Carr and Gould, were masters of the power of language. Beaverbrook was one of the most powerful newspaper publishers of his day. Countries need action and laws and courage. But civilization is not a collection of prime ministers. Words, words, words—it is around these that civilizations create and imagine themselves.

  The authors I have chosen for each subject are not the obvious experts. They are imaginative, questioning minds from among our leading writers and activists. They have, each one of them, a powerful connection to their subject. And in their own lives, each is engaged in building what Canada is now becoming.

  That is
why a documentary is being filmed around each subject. Images are yet another way to get at each subject and to understand their effect on us.

  There has not been a biographical project as ambitious as this in a hundred years, not since the Makers of Canada series. And yet every generation understands the past differently, and so sees in the mirror of these remarkable figures somewhat different lessons.

  What strikes me again and again is just how dramatically ethical decisions figured in their lives. They form the backbone of history and memory. Some of these people, Big Bear, for example, or Dumont, or even Lucy Maud Montgomery, thought of themselves as failures by the end of their lives. But the ethical cord that was strung taut through their work has now carried them on to a new meaning and even greater strength, long after their deaths.

  Each of these stories is a revelation of the tough choices unusual people must make to find their way. And each of us as readers will find in the desperation of the Chinese revolution, the search for truth in fiction, the political and military dramas, different meanings that strike a personal chord. At first it is that personal emotive link to such figures which draws us in. Then we find they are a key that opens the whole society of their time to us. Then we realize that in that 150-year period many of them knew each other, were friends, opposed each other. Finally, when all these stories are put together, you will see that a whole new debate has been created around Canadian civilization and the shape of our continuous experiment.

  The full meaning of that continuity comes out with Big Bear. We have slowly convinced ourselves that this country can be explained through European traditions. It cannot. To do so is a betrayal of our own past. We cannot grow as a civilization by trying to push the Aboriginal reality to the margins. For example, I cannot think of another powerful leader in the history of Canada who so consciously and publicly lived by ethical decisions; the kind of ethical standards we would like to attach to our society today. Through all his dramas he never ceased trying to explain the difference between what today we would call the public good versus self-interest.

  You can look upon his life as a long and tragic defeat. Or you can look upon Big Bear as an illustration of what is best in our civilization. An ethical leader who suffers tragedy and defeat will often become a model for those who follow.

  Rudy Wiebe tells Big Bear’s story in that great, dramatic tradition. For much of Canada, the latter part of the nineteenth century saw unbridled land hunger and political ambition tear the country apart. From that confusion Big Bear emerges—calm, ironic, coolly angry, always ready to explain—as one who can show us the way, thanks to his actions and to his words.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  How can you write the story of a nineteenth-century man who lived within the oral, hunting culture of Plains Cree and Saulteaux? Whose magnificent orations were never written down in his richly metaphorical languages, who spoke no English, and whose profound, extended images exist only in bits of translation—often made by incompetent translators—that were recorded largely by his enemies?

  To try to write Big Bear’s story, I researched beyond the standard, accepted facts of White Canadian history and considered carefully the complex Plains Cree culture and the enormous physical landscape in which Big Bear lived. His known actions speak to his character and wisdom, his constant spiritual beliefs. The most reliable written records of his words are the few he dictated in Cree to the English speakers he could (or had to) trust. Some of his more sympathetic recorders (e.g., William Cameron, William McLean) understood minimal Cree, and some of his most prejudiced (e.g., PG. Laurie, David Laird) knew none whatever, so I have relied most heavily on the sparse testimony of fluent Cree speakers (e.g., James Simpson, Peter Erasmus, Henry Halpin). But even more important than these written accounts were the oral tradition accounts recorded by Cree Elders, whose living memories of what their ancestors (Big Bear’s contemporaries) told them have carried his powerful story into the present. I found those oral accounts given in Stonechild and Waiser, McLeod, Dempsey, and O-sak-do especially informative (see “Sources”).

  Nevertheless, for me much of Big Bear remained beyond the rational grasp of terse, noun-dominated English. The fluidity of verb and metaphor, something of the sustained poetry, the physical orality of Cree was needed. And perhaps written English could approach that through intimate conversation, could find that spiritual place where land and friendship offer us the optic power of the audible heart.

  So, using the characters and places that history provides, I have also written short dramatic scenes that no history before the invention of the motion-picture camera could possibly record. Big Bear’s long friendship with Hudson’s Bay Company trader James Keith Simpson—a Scots-Cree man of his own age—gave me the idea. During his cross-examination as a witness at Big Bear’s trial in 1885, Simpson stated that he had known the chief for “nearly forty years” and that he “was into [Big Bear’s] camp often trading with them, summer and winter, the same as if I was living with them altogether.”

  Please note that, to keep matters clear, in these invented (and, in that sense, timeless) conversations I do not use speaker quotation marks. However, all the recorded statements/conversations I quote, whether from oral or written sources, are cited accurately within double quotation marks in both the text and block quotes. The speakers/writers are identified in context.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Buffalo; Guns and Horses

  This story happened more than a century ago, but it is still going on. If you want to know it, read this book and then watch the television news or read a newspaper. The news stories about First Nations in Canada today echo the life lived by Big Bear and other Plains Cree in what is now called Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Montana. Big Bear was both more ancient and more modern than the nineteenth-century White Canadians who tried to destroy him. His innate conviction that he had the human right to be himself was as powerful as his understanding of his inalienable right to the land that had sustained and protected his ancestors for five hundred generations.

  THERE ONCE WAS A BABY BOY born at Jackfish Lake, near present-day North Battleford, Saskatchewan, who would grow up to receive the Cree name Mistahimaskwa, Big Bear. His father was Mukatai, Black Powder, a Saulteaux who had long been chief of a Plains Cree band, and his mother was either Cree or Saulteaux. Her name was perhaps too powerful to speak aloud, because no one can remember it. Her name is simply given as None. In the same way, sixty years later, on September 29, 1885, the Inmate Admittance Records of Stony Mountain Penitentiary will declare Big Bear’s religion to be None. And there his name will vanish as well. In a tiny cell inside stone walls as impenetrable as the limestone cliffs they are built upon, Mistahimaskwa will become a number, Prisoner 103, until he was discharged in February 1887. To die within a year.

  Big Bear died in the lee of Cutknife Hill during a January snowstorm, not fifty kilometres as the raven flies from the lake where he was born. As he explained to fellow Cree chiefs gathered near Fort Carlton in 1884: “Our People lived with the buffalo all our lives, so we were blind in regard to making treaty. We did not understand the treaty when we heard of it, nor saw what use we had for it. Our food and clothing were in our hands, the country was free to us wherever we wanted to go, that was why we thought ourselves rich.”

  And the land given to the First People by the Creator—the land stripped from them by treaty—is still very rich. There are again buffalo beside Jackfish Lake where Big Bear was born, herds of cows and bulls and yearlings and little tan calves. But now they graze behind seven strands of barbed wire.

  It was because of the buffalo that many Woods Cree in the late eighteenth century moved to the edges of the boreal forest and gradually became powerful Plains People. As forest hunters they had begun a shrewd trade with the Hudson’s Bay Company when ships from England first arrived in 1668. Beyond meeting their own want for goods such as kettles, needles, tobacco, and tea to gather hospitable groups around winter fires, the Cree quickly became
the peaceful middlemen for other tribes far inland. An axe traded at Hudson Bay for one beaver was worth six beavers when carried a thousand miles inland by canoe to the buffalo-hunting Blackfoot Confederacy, who lived between the Saskatchewan rivers, or to the corn-growing Mandan along the Missouri; a fourteen-beaver gun was worth fifty.

  However, with time, new political relations developed among the tribes, caused by both the pressure of woodland people pushing into prairie hunting territory and the arrival of the horse. While trading with the Cree for European goods, the Blackfoot began to accumulate horses from their southern neighbours. This conjunction on the Great Plains of convenient iron from the north—particularly steel knives and guns—with the astounding strength of horses from the south transformed everyone’s way of hunting the buffalo that grazed everywhere to the prairie horizon. The huge animals that offered everything needed for life, for health and happiness, now no longer needed to be hunted in a solitary, dangerous stalk; People no longer needed to build complex lanes to lure and drive buffalo over the cliffs of a killing jump, or into the corralled surround of a pound, where their wild strength could be crushed together into immobility and speared to death. A horse could outrun any buffalo, it could bring its mounted hunter so close, running flat-out, that one arrow behind the shoulder, one bullet, could drop the great animal dead in its tracks. And beyond that, huge, moveable communal hunts with their glorious camaraderie became not only possible, they also provided rich food for great numbers of People.