Mrs R. A, a First Nations woman, had been referred to us by Louise Dufour, the translator for Mrs. A. T’s story. Mrs A’s was the last interview we did. Louise had given us a little background on the information Mrs A had to share, and had given Mrs A a little information on what we were going to ask questions about. By this time, we had learned that the women were eager to tell their stories. Very, very rarely did they wait for us to begin with the formalities of a questionnaire; usually they jumped right in as soon as we’d all sat down. Mrs A went a little beyond this, even. She began telling her story as she was showing us into the living room. The tape begins in medias res, so to speak, and we never caught the beginning of the story. I believe she was describing traditional customs, rather than one woman’s particular experience, and she was telling us what she had been told, when she had asked similar questions of an elder. Even in her hurry to speak, she describes the scene very effectively.

As it turned out, Mrs A had all her own babies in the hospital.

MRS A: She said, “it was nothing to… you’ll have to drop everything…”

MARYANNE: Just a moment please!

MRS A: “It was nothing to stop as we were moving, as they were moving,” she said, “because they had all these travois.”

KAREN: Right, yes.

MRS A: And she said they would pitch up a little teepee and the midwife was there, all the time. So if the mother had a baby, and right after the baby was born they didn’t believe in keeping the woman in bed because the blood had to circulate, and so they got the woman moving and also they… (inaudible, likely because Mrs A was still moving around, getting comfortable) … and even if there was a little creek that she would walk in there and go and wash. That’s how tough we had to be.

KAREN: Isn’t it interesting how people are coming back that way now? You know, getting the women up and moving about right away.

MRS A: Yes, so when she was finished everything (having the baby and cleaning up) they would go on with the journey. Now, can you imagine! And then, too, I said, “Like what did they use for pads and that?” I said, “What did they use?” And she said, “Moss, because that’s why the grandmothers…” (She suddenly notices the tape recorder.) Is that going?

KAREN: Yeah.

MRS A: She said, “The grandmothers, that was their job to pick the moss in (unclear, sounds like “early fall”). You know, there’s ah, in the muskeg, you pull up the moss and it’s (unclear)nice and soft, eh? It’s like if you’re sitting on all that moss, it’s like a cushion.

KAREN: Doesn’t it itch?

MRS A: No, it’s not (“itchy”), and, do you know, she said that they used to pull that and hang it on branches all over and let that dry. Then, she says, they used to take a piece of hide or blanket or whatever they had. I imagine it was hide. And she said, “Then they used to take hours to sit there and comb through the moss to take all the little twigs, everything that was in there. It had to be combed. It took hours and hours and they used to fill bags and bags of that.

KAREN: Did they use it for other things? It sounds like it had quite a wide range of uses.

MRS A: Well, okay. Now, she said, “Our pads were…, they used to cut a strip of hide about that wide (gestures) and tie it around your waist and cut another strip of hide about that (gestures again) wide and they’d put it at the back and put it over that tie.” And then she said, “They used to put a layer of moss there and then they used to put under and in front of that tie.” And also, like, you know, those were the disposable diapers, like Pampers, too. That’s what the baby used, in the moss bags. But anyway, this is what they used as pads.

MARYANNE: This is your mother-in-law that told you this?

MRS A: My mother-in-law, now, I don’t know what she used, but she lived to a ripe old age. When she died she still had her hearing, her eyesight and her mind, and she died peacefully.

Some discussion follows about her mother-in-law and where she was born, but the voices are unclear on the tape.

MARYANNE: What time period would that have been? 1800s?

MRS A: She died in 1963 and she was about 100.

KAREN: So she must have been born 1863-ish?

MRS A: Maybe around 1865. Anyway, now what you wanted to know is…

KAREN: Actually, we don’t really know! Generally, what we want to know is stories of home birth, so I’ll be asking you about your own births. Did you have children at home or did members of your family have children at home?

MRS A: Ah, no, I had all my children in the hospital.

KAREN: Okay. But you know stories of others. What you told us so far is wonderful.

MRS A: My Dad’s mother was one of the leading midwives, with the French ladies, with the Metis ladies, with the Indian ladies. She was hardly ever home. At that time all the childbirth was at home.