Our interview with Mrs A. T took about two and half times as long as most of the other interviews because we needed a translator. Mrs T spoke Cree, with very little English. For me, as a former language student, listening to a language I didn’t understand was almost as fascinating as listening to the birth stories themselves. Mrs T would usually answer our questions by relating an entire anecdote to the translator, Louise Dufour, who then had to remember all the details, in order, before she could relate it to us. There was a tremendous amount of back and forth as Louise checked details, and often Mrs T would add extra information that she hadn’t included the first time.

About an hour into the interview, Mrs T’s daughter, 17-year old Lorraine, arrived home from school. She wandered into the living room, puzzled, and asked what was going on. We explained that we were gathering birth stories, to learn about women’s experiences giving birth at home before giving birth in hospital became routine. Lorraine was the second youngest of sixteen children, and must have immediately realized her mom would have a lot to tell. She asked to sit in. She told us she spoke almost no Cree, and because her mom spoke almost no English, she had never heard any of her mom’s personal history.

Lorraine sat quietly, on a tiny foot stool with her back against the wall, as long as she could, but eventually she began interjecting with questions and comments of her own. She enriched the conversation immensely, introducing us to cultural traditions we would never have known to ask about. One of my favourite memories of this project is of watching Lorraine grow more and more captivated as she heard more and more and more of her mom’s history.

Mrs T died a few years later. Lorraine managed to track me down, calling me sometime in 2002 or 2003 when I was sitting by myself in a coffee shop. She asked if I still had the tape of the interview. She said it was the only record the family had of the stories her mom had told. Mrs T was also—if I recall the conversation correctly—the last member of the family whose first language was Cree. No one else in the family spoke Cree fluently. Mrs T’s and Lorraine’s participation in this interview had sparked the family’s interest in all their birth stories, and revived their commitment to their language. That touched me—it meant that for this one family, we had already accomplished our primary objective with the interview alone.

Lorraine was wondering if I could send her a copy of the tape. I had no idea–then–how to copy a cassette tape, and didn’t want to keep Lorraine and her siblings waiting while I figured it out and got it done. She didn’t ask me to, but I sent her the original. We’d already had the tape professionally transcribed, so I had a record of the entire conversation.

For archival reasons I probably shouldn’t have sent it. But for Lorraine’s sake, and for her family’s sake, I’m glad I did. Without that tape, Mrs T’s stories of her life as a young woman, narrated in her own voice, speaking her own language, would have been lost to her own family. With the tape, the narrative thread that ran through their family could be picked up again by her youngest daughter.

Picking up as many of those narrative threads as we could, before they were broken forever, was exactly why we were doing this project.