The Cree of Big Trout were tolerant enough of my bumbling attempts to improve their lot, but the isolation, the mosquitoes and blackflies, and the arduous labour of professional do-goodism on a small stipend quickly dissipated a lot of the romance for me. Frankly, it was a difficult summer as far as teaching was concerned. I did everything but stand on my head to leap the language barrier and teach the children something. I must have looked berserk at times. For example, I would write a simple word such as jump or run on the makeshift blackboard, get them to print the word in their copybooks and then, seizing one of the smaller boys, would lift him up and down like a rag doll or run with him across the room to act out the word. I taught the alphabet phonetically and made up songs for this and a host of other basics of learning. I brought various objects into the class—cups, knives and forks, a grub box, paddles, traps, items of clothing—and got them to give me the Cree word for each and then had them copy out the English. At other times I used pictures cut from old copies of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Beaver magazine or old newspapers.
Singing proved the best route to learning of all. They could learn words and concepts in an hour through songs that would have taken much longer otherwise. Besides, the government handbook said singing was good for their lungs, an aid in helping prevent tuberculosis. Several students had one or more relatives in the sanatorium at Fort William (now Thunder Bay) and I soon learned that it was generally accepted at Big Trout Lake that those sent out there very seldom came back.
TB, a legacy of the European conquerors, was endemic, a fact of life. Once a year the Indian agent came to pay out the treaty money— about five dollars a head for having signed over thousands of square miles of their territory to the Crown in the mid-nineteenth century. As well as a Mountie escort, a doctor and a couple of minor civil servants, the agent’s party brought along a portable X-ray machine, which was used to check on all the band members. It was at best a very hit-or-miss affair. One time it was scandalous. When the treaty party came that summer, there was the usual annual X-ray marathon. You could hear the little one-stroke motor that powered the generator for the machine running far into the night for four days. About two weeks afterwards, a radio message came to the DOT crew at the weather station asking the schoolteacher (me) to inform a list of eight or nine Cree that they had TB and instruct them to get ready for a plane ride (on a Catalina flying boat) that would transport them out to Fort William. I accepted the unhappy task, and on the appointed day they took teary farewells of their loved ones on the company dock and departed.
A week later, while I was in the midst of teaching, I heard the familiar whisper going around the room: “Pimosayawin.” Plane! Since it was impossible to keep them settled while a plane was arriving, not to mention my own curiosity, I dismissed the class and we joined the usual stampede. When the aircraft finally tied up, to my astonishment all of the people I had previously sent out disembarked. There had been a mix-up in the X-ray plates, it seemed, and those with the dreaded disease were still on the island. I was told there was nothing to be done but wait until the next checkup— a full year away. It is a fact that some members of that particular treaty party were drinking almost continuously during the Big Trout Lake X-ray examinations, so the mix-up was not the result of ordinary human error. I was only twenty at the time and politically very naïve. I now realize I should have gone to the media immediately upon returning to Sioux Lookout that fall. I did make a written protest to the Department of Indian Affairs, but nothing ever came of it as far as I know.
After school hours I tried my best to work with the boys in particular, doing what used to be called manual training, and teaching sports. I have to confess that the results were very meagre in both cases. Our first crafts project was a howling failure. I had noticed that there seemed to be a streak of cruelty shown towards animals and birds among my male students. (This has to be seen against a setting where their whole lives depended upon hunting and fishing.) For example, they used to catch field mice, put them in the lake while still alive, and then try to pick them off with catapults while the mice frantically swam for shore.
As a counterweight to this kind of behaviour, I decided we should make some birdhouses. There was considerable enthusiasm for the idea once I had made one to demonstrate. The boys slaved away for hours each afternoon and evening, sawing, hammering and nailing with great gusto. When they were done, I got a primitive ladder and showed them how to erect the birdhouses on slim, tall poles, or in the eaves of their cabin homes.
A couple of evenings later, when I was walking through the centre of the settlement, I encountered a commotion. Several swallows were flying in tight circles around the new birdhouses and making plaintive cries. Something seemed to be agitating them, preventing their entry. When I got closer I found several of my boys hiding behind the wooden fences around their homes and trying to shoot the swallows with their catapults every time they landed on a perch. Of course, I made them stop, but they seemed astounded. Even their elders looked on curiously at my interference. Puzzled, I summoned Mr. Garrett to see if he could find out what was going on. After he had talked with the boys for a while, he grinned broadly and said: “They don’t understand why you’re stopping them from shooting the birds. They say they thought that was the whole idea, a new kind of trap!” He went on to say that the parents had shared this view and thought the new schooniowgamow (school boss) was really clever for conjuring up such a sneaky device. I realized it was a lost cause, and taught the boys to make stools and grub boxes instead. But they never showed the kind of zeal for these that they had for the birdhouses.
The boys, and indeed all of the able-bodied men of the village, loved playing soccer, using tin cans, a bundle of rags, anything that could be kicked, when there was no ball available. They had no concept whatsoever of boundaries, however. Often two players would disappear into the bushes still kicking and in pursuit of the ball. They would kick it down along the shore, through swampy places full of marsh grass, and finally back out to where the other players were sitting awaiting their return. Some white lime and a marking device were flown in and we set out to make a proper soccer pitch. This activity was watched with enormous interest, and even the men listened politely as I tried to explain with gestures and the aid of one or two older lads who knew some English. When play resumed, however, the game did not change one iota. They completely ignored the outsider’s strange views and kicked the ball all over the cleared portion of the island. In fact, they wore out the soccer balls at such an alarming rate that someone in the agent’s office at Sioux Lookout sent a wire in via the DOT asking with sarcasm whether we were roasting the soccer balls and eating them for Sunday dinner.
In the summer of 1949, I went north again in early June to teach school a second time. Things went well for the first week, although I was a little troubled one day when I noticed a dead husky floating in the lake just off the small dock where we were in the habit of drawing our drinking water. The missionary and his family had a wooden yoke that went over the shoulders and there were hooks on each side for a pail. The water was carried up to the house and transferred into a large drum. A drinking ladle hung on the wall nearby. Since the dock was on a small bay quite a way from the main dock and other cabins or teepees, and the lake was considered by all to be pristine, nobody thought it necessary to boil the water before drinking it. I was in the midst of teaching the children a simple