Meander elder light-spirited and impish

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The following article has been excerpted from "A Sharing With Those Who Know", a book being written by former Windspeaker editor Dianne Meili to commemorate elders from the 10 different nations in Alberta. The collection of elder interviews, accompanied by color photographs, will serve as a lasting record of the lives and wisdom of our beloved old ones who embody the best of what it means to be an aboriginal person. Meili is the great-granddaughter of Victoria Callihoo, a well-known Cree elder born in 1860 in the Edmonton area. Her book will be published in 1991.

Perched on a kitchen chair, toes barely touching the floor, tiny Marie Cecile Chambaud is giggling like a schoolgirl at the joke she's just made.

Interpreter Maggie Deedza translates Cecil's Slavery description of early Dene clothing. "She says her dad used to wear a breechcloth, something short around his hips - like a diaper. She remembers he used to cover up his legs in the winter with stroud leggings to keep from freezing."

Cecile continues speaking with a mischievous look on her face and suddenly she and Maggie burst out laughing.

Chuckling, Maggie tells me the joke."She said 'I guess my dad had to take his diaper off a lot of times when he made me!"

I join in the laughter and notice Cecil has been watching for my reaction. She starts giggling all over again, hand over her mouth and eyes crinkled shut. At 88, she's high-spirited and her impish sense of humor is fully intact. I learn later just how infectious her bubbling personality is.

"When she came into the hospital every now and then for treatment, we didn't want her to leave. The nurses and doctors just loved her," recalls Helen Valstar, a former nurse at the High Level Hospital. "If we could have kept her in the hospital all the time, I'm sure we would have. There's really something special about the little old lady. She's so full of laughter."

Cecile's eyes hold a youthful light and her long hair is still black except for a few white strands. She's wearing a brown skirt that almost reaches her ankles and thick, blue gym socks underneath miniature tie-up moccasins.,

"A long time ago my dad took the stomach of a bear he'd just killed and pulled it over my head. He did it two times and that's why I don't have white hair. She says her father "knew something". This is the Dene way of saying someone has spiritual powers.

The stove in her little house on the Meander River reserve, 70 km north of High Level, is spewing heat and Cecile throws another spruce log inside. She settles in a living room chair underneath a huge tapestry of Jesus which hangs on the wall. The Messiah's eyes are cast downward and it looks for all the world like he is watching over one of the smallest "sheep" in his flock. Cecile's daughter puts steaming coffee cups in our hands and we settle in for a friendly afternoon of storytelling.

"I remember when I was 12 or 13, Adam Salopree ( a neighbor who lives in Mander River) lost his mother, his father and his brother all at the same time. The ground was frozen and they just left them there, under a tarp. Adam was just a baby so my sister had to raise him and breastfeed him. I felt so sorry for that little baby," she says in a high-pitched voice that sounds like a young girl's.

Her own parents died when she was young, so Cecile understands the loneliness of losing loved ones. But, she notes, at least she was lucky enough to have known her mother and father before they passed away, whereas Adam has no memories of his parents at all. After Cecile's parents dies, her aunt cared for her.

"I remember how much I missed my mom when I was a little girl. I missed her so much I went to a tree and talked t it. I don't know why....I guess I just didn't have anyone to talk to."

Cecile was raised around Bistcho Lake, just south of the Alberta / Northwest Territories border. Despite the haunting stories of spirits and monsters who make their home in Bistcho Lake, it was a place young Ccile wanted desperately to return to after catching her first glimpse of an RCMP officer.

"We heard about treaty money being given away in Meander River so we packed everything we owned on our backs and came over. There was a log house where the church is now and that's where the RCMP were giving out money. I think maybe that was the first year they gave out money after the treaty was signed.

"We crossed the river (Hay River) and came up the hill. When I set my eyes on the RCMP (officer) dressed up with his big boots and hat, I stared crying." T a little girl used to seeing dark-skinned people wearing soft, brown moosehide clothing, the sight of a tall, light-complexioned Mountie in a still-looking uniform was astonishing.

"I kept crying and my father had to take me back across the river and I stayed there. When I woke up the next morning, I was still scared and I wanted to go back to Bistcho Lake."

Years later, as Cecile passed into womanhood, the arrival of her monthly period frightened her a little, but she allowed herself no tears this time.

"My mother had sent me to set snares and my period came. I didn't cry so I wouldn't lose a relative," Cecile says. She had been warned if she was sad and sobbed when she discovered the first sign of her body passing into womanhood, she would cause a relative to die.

"I was told when it happens I should just stay where I was so I just sat there in the bush. Finally they must have noticed I was missing so someone came. I was scared to look up and then when someone came for me it was a woman. She took me by the hand and explained what was happening to me."

The woman led Cecile home, but stopped short of the family's camp. "She made me a little camp and I stayed there for eight days all by myself....my father kept me supplied with wood," Cecile says. When she emerged from seclusion, she had passed through a Dene initiation of becoming a woman.

About one and a half years later, when she was 14 or 15, a young man named Batiste Chambaud came to take Cecile for his wife.

"For the first two nights I was scared, but my new husband 'knew something' and he put his coat around me. After that I wasn't scared of him anymore." Two years later, Cecile gave birth to the first of 12 children she would eventually bear...

"You had to go away from the family tent when you were going to have your baby, too. We were superstitious. They made a little place for you, with a tarp over spruce branches and the ground covered with dry grass. There was a pole for you to hang on to and when you had labor pains, a woman held you with her arms around you from behind to help stretch you up. You sat up when you had your baby." After giving birth, mothers stayed in separate camps away from other family members for a month.

Cecile says her husband took good care of her until he died in 1967. "Lately, I think about him lots and I have tears." She smiles sadly and takes a picture down from the wall. It shows a tall, handsome man dressed in work clothes with his arm around tiny Cecile.

Even though she likes her warm house and appreciates how easy it is to buy food from the stores, Cecile says if she could turn back time and be with her husband on hi trapline, with only a fire and a shelter made of spruce branches and sticks to warm them against -40 Celsius temperatures, she would do it without hesitation.