This is Mrs A. T, a First Nations woman, speaking Cree and a little English, with Louise Dufour translating. Because so much needed to be translated and clarified, this interview took much longer than the others. I’ll post it in three parts. This is Side A of the first tape.

We asked Louise if Mrs T fully understood what we were doing and why we wanted to talk to her. We wanted to make sure the language barrier hadn’t caused us to mislead Mrs T. about our intentions. We explained that so far, we had only interviewed white women, and that she would be the first Aboriginal woman we had interviewed. Louise explained that she had told Mrs T. to answer for herself first if she understood the question, and if she didn’t understand, Louise would help.

Where Mrs T. is identified as the speaker, she is speaking English. Otherwise, she is telling her story through Louise. Very often, you will see Louise trying to clarify something Mrs T. has told her, or addressing a follow-up question of her own directly to Mrs T.

Mrs T. was born in 1931. On the day of the interview, she said she was 67 years old. Given that we spoke to her in early December of 1997, though, she must still have been 66, just shy of her 67th birthday. She was sixteen years old when she had her first baby.

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LOUISE: As soon as you turned sixteen they had a husband for you. The marriages were arranged. So she had to get married at sixteen. As soon as she turned sixteen she was married, she had to get married, and she had a baby.

MARYANNE: Soon after?

LOUISE: She was still sixteen. You didn’t even have a year?

MRS T.: No.

LOUISE: 1947 she had her first baby.

MARYANNE: So how many children do you have altogether?

MRS T.: Sixteen.

MARYANNE: Sixteen children?

MRS T.: Every year I had.

MARYANNE: And how many of those were born at home?

MRS T.: Four.

MARYANNE: Four born at home?

MRS T.: No, no, four in the hospital.

MARYANNE: Oh, four in the hospital, the rest at home?

MRS T.: Ah-hah.

MARYANNE: The rest at home, so twelve would have been born at home.

LOUISE: Yeah. Forty six, that’s when she had her last baby.

MARYANNE: Okay, so where were you living when you had most of your babies?

LOUISE: Chitek Lake. What reserve? Black Lake, no Pelican Lake, Pelican Lake Reserve. Okay, Pelican Lake Reserve is where she was living.

MARYANNE: How about when you were sixteen? Where were you at sixteen years of age?

LOUISE: In the bush. They were residing mostly in the bush because he was working, her husband was working in the bush. Her husband was doing, those were the 8 foot.. ah … poles for fence. Yeah wood, cord wood, is was what he was doing, he was cutting wood all the time so that is how they were making their living–by cutting this wood and she was there helping. She would help even though she was pregnant, she still had lots of work to do. She was helping her husband with this cord wood.

MARYANNE: What kind of a house or cabin did you live in?

MRS T.: Log house.

MARYANNE: Log house? Can you tell us a little bit about it?

MRS T.: Log house that the fillings in between were with mud. It was a mud, log house.

MARYANNE: Who built that house?

MRS T.: Us.

MARYANNE: You built it yourselves?

MRS T.: My husband and I helped him.

MARYANNE: Oh, so you built it together?

MRS T.: Yeah.

MARYANNE: Where did you learn to build a log house? Did your parents teach you?

LOUISE: That was the main way of building your houses at that time was building log houses. Everybody had log houses, everybody learned from each other.

MARYANNE: How big about was that house? Was it one room or did it have a bedroom?

LOUISE: They had those log houses, they were quite big. They had two bedrooms in that one and they were quite warm because they used to get slabs. (That last word is unclear on the tape. This is my best guess.) They used to get lumber from the sawmill to build these cabins inside and they made rooms. So they used to use the lumber to make the bedrooms and wallpaper on the walls. That’s how they fixed them and they were really warm.

MARYANNE: So how was it heated then?

LOUISE: With a wood stove. Kitchen stove, kitchen stove? Okay, the first few years they used to stay in a tent. They were building their home they were living in a tent and she had by that time three or four kids. But it was really warm the way they fixed the tent, you know they had, they would make a big hole in the middle and filled it with rocks and put a stove over it and once those rock get hot they would stay hot all night, it would keep the tent warm all night.

MARYANNE: Was it a home made tent?

MRS T.: Home made.

MARYANNE: Out of what material?

MRS T.: Canvas.

MARYANNE: So did you sew it actually?

MRS T.: Yeah, I made it.

MARYANNE: You made your own tent, you sewed it by hand.

MRS T.: Ah-ha. Yeah, by hand.

KAREN: Didn’t it get cold in winter?

MRS T.: No, it wasn’t cold.

MARYANNE: Did you put snow up around the outsides?

MRS T.: Yeah.

LOUISE: Did you put snow around? Oh, bales, okay, they had bales all around.

MARYANNE: Wow, and we think winter is tough in our heated homes. At that time, did you have enough money or was it a time that you were kind of struggling?

LOUISE: Yeah, with his job, what he was doing, they had money all the time, they weren’t having a hard time. They had enough money for groceries and besides the groceries were quite cheap.

MARYANNE: Did she have a garden?

LOUISE: They were at the bush. They lived in the bush until her first child started school. That’s when they decided to come and stay in the village because he was supposed to start school, the first child. And the kids were so used to being brought up in the tent at that time they, whenever they used to come to town and stayed in a house, they weren’t able to cover up or anything because it was so hot for them, they just couldn’t stay there, they couldn’t sleep. That was the first time they moved into a home, a house. They moved back to the reserve from the bush. Her kids were quite scared because they were brought up in the bush. When they first moved to the city the kids couldn’t stand the people and they would start crying when they would see people.

MARYANNE: Did her husband hunt at all?

MRS T.: Ah-hah, lots.

MARYANNE: So you ate venison, moose?

MRS T.: Moose (And few other words I can’t quite understand, but moose is repeated about three times.)

MARYANNE: Okay, well talking a little bit about your pregnancy and preparing for birth, did you know what to expect?

LOUISE: Whenever she was pregnant then she was due they would come to the village, to the reserve.

MARYANNE: Had anyone told you what it was like to have a baby, with your first baby when you were sixteen?

LOUISE: Her mom told her what to expect. Her mother did prepare her some, and told her what it would be like to have childbirth and she had seen her mom giving birth, when she was in labour and what her mom did. Her mom would wash clothes when she started having pains. Her mother would start washing clothes by hand and you know she’s starting to have pains. I guess it’s more or less to get everything cleaned up, you know, all the clothes, because she wouldn’t have time to do that for a while, I imagine. So she did the same thing. … She would start washing all her clothes, she would take all the time to do her clothes washing while she’s in labour and then walk back and forth whenever she gets pains and stuff and… ah … she wouldn’t rest, she had to keep moving. And all her clothes were done, you see, because she wouldn’t have time to do all that when she had the baby.

MARYANNE: Did she wash with a tub and a washboard?

LOUISE: Yeah, a tub and a washboard and so when it came time for her to give birth, that’s the only time she would go and lay down, to give birth. And after awhile when she is feeling much better, after the baby is born and everything then she would get up and start doing chores, light chores. Okay, she says, they used to, she used to stay in bed for about three to four hours after birth and then she would get up and start doing her chores. Nothing heavy though, but she did her… probably cooking. Okay, she did the cooking and stuff like that, nothing heavy. She didn’t lift anything heavy but, she said, years ago people were much more healthy than they are today when they’d give birth. When she used to give birth she was fine right after the child was born. So she’s comparing the health today with the health then.

MARYANNE: So she was very healthy.

LOUISE: She was very strong she said.

MARYANNE: Who was with you?

LOUISE: She always had one woman helping her or her mother in law, but there was a lady, a midwife.

MARYANNE: So she was a traditional midwife, was she? Or was she a nurse?

LOUISE: These women knew Indian medicine and they used Indian medicine so they would give her some herbs to drink for so long.

KAREN: Do you know what kind they were?

LOUISE: One of the things that she remembered is the sweetgrass. The sweetgrass they would boil it. She can’t remember the rest. Okay, she doesn’t know the kind of medicine used, but she does remember that one of the medicines used was a person who was having a tough time giving birth. They would give this drink to this person and the baby would be born just like that. It was that strong. Now she doesn’t know that medicine, but there was such a medicine.

MARYANNE: So there was always was just one woman with her? Not more than one?

LOUISE: When she had her sixth child her mother-in-law brought this old lady with her to (unclear)…, while she was giving birth. Her mother-in-law used to help her a lot in some of her births and this old lady came. Her mother-in-law brought this old lady with her because she had medicine and she was going to give her some medicine and this old lady told her, “You will never suffer again in childbirth.” And her mother-in-law told her, “You drink that and you will never have another child.” And so she didn’t drink it, she threw it out.

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