Edited by Richard J. Hebda, Sheila Greer and Alexander P. Mackie, 2017.

In 1999 hunters looking for sheep found human remains on a glacier in British Columbia, in a region so remote and with such extremes of weather that it is accessible at best for two or three weeks a year. The bones and soft tissues were so well preserved by the cold and ice that a great deal of information would be gleaned from them.

The elders of the Champagne Aishihek First Nations (CAFN), on whose land the remains were found, felt responsible for the respectful treatment of what was left of a human body. Anthropologists and other researchers on the project realized that only minor adjustments were necessary to make their practises conform with Indigenous customs, and that these changes did not compromise scientific rigour. Generally parallel ways of knowing—scientific and traditional—were made for a time to intersect and to work together.

After some debate, scientists were allowed to take the remains to the Royal British Columbia Museum for analysis. This showed that the remains were between 150 and 300 years old and those of a man 17-19 years of age. His age was estimated from his not quite fully adult skull. The diet revealed in his bones showed that he had come from the coast. His incipient tuberculosis was evidence of contact with Europeans. Death was probably the result of exposure rather than violence. He may have laid down to rest in the cold and never got up again.

Some chapters of the book are densely scientific and far beyond my understanding. If I were 20 years old, I might begin to apply myself to learning the genetics and other science necessary to grasp these chapters. Given my age and my lack of talent for hard science, I just skipped over these parts.

The scientific knowledge gained from this discovery helped CAFN develop new knowledge in the present of how traditional clothing was made. Science-based conservation techniques led to the enhancement and revival of traditional knowledge. The young man’s spruce needle hat and gopher robe thawed out and revealed their secrets, and this knowledge helped in the revival of the arts of spruce-root weaving and gopher-robe making in the present.

One old woman, born in 1913, remembered watching her mother make gopher robes, but no living person had actually made one. A robe used as many as 29 skins, and to make a robe of this number of matching skins required tremendous patience and skill and sophisticated knowledge of animal habitat and behaviour and of weather patterns. The colour and shading and density of the fur varied depending on the time of year, the weather that year, and the animal’s nutrition. I am blown away by the kind of knowledge necessary to make a gopher-skin robe of perfectly matched skins. (And while morally opposed to the wearing of fur in contemporary society, I recognize that it was essential for survival in this world.)

My basic skill at sewing and mending gives me some understanding of the skill and knowledge necessary to create a robe of such usefulness and such beauty. I appreciate beautiful things, especially beautiful hand-made things that are also useful. Women are generally not given enough credit for the beautiful things they create—if men made the best of these things, they would have a place in a national museum or gallery.

My appreciation does not, however, mean that I have the skill to make such things myself. I love finely-made baskets, and used to think I would take up basket weaving in retirement, but by the time I arrived at this stage of life realized that I lacked the keen vision, manual dexterity and patience necessary. Likewise, when I laid in a few supplies for jewellery repair, I quickly discovered I lacked the precise vision and hand-eye coordination necessary for restringing my broken necklaces. Knotting even one bead properly was beyond me. In a traditional culture, my value would depend on my enjoyment of young children and any wisdom I might possess rather than my eyesight or skill at handicrafts.

DNA analysis revealed that the young man, who had died without descendants, had fifteen living relatives descended from a common ancestor. These relatives played a key role in the burial of the young man man’s ashes in the area where the remains had been found and in accordance with CAFN customs and beliefs. The bag of religious objects found around the young man’s neck was never opened and was buried with him. In this culture spirituality runs deep and is deeply personal—quite a contrast to our frequent oversharing of every superficial thought and emotion.

Teachings From Long Ago Person Found showed me that I was unconsciously ignorant of the complexity, sophistication and richness of Indigenous cultures, and made me think about larger issues of racism and my response to them. It was as much an eye opener as Clearing the Plains by James Daschuk (who, incidentally, is appearing at the Strathcona Library on Jan. 30^th), a book I read a few years ago and which I reviewed in an earlier blog post.

Before reading these two books, I knew there were various tribes and nations, and did not think that all Indigenous people lived in tepees. And I certainly knew about the residential schools.

When I was younger it was still pretty common for children from remote areas to be “sent away” to school, and a generation before me, my grandfather’s refusal to spend the money to send my mother away to school meant that her formal education ended when she was 13. I was, however, not aware of how endemic and how coercive this practise was with Indigenous children. My parents raised me to understand that where there are people there is injustice, so I assumed there was some injustice in these places, but I had no idea how systemic the injustice was.

My parents gave me a deep sense of my brothers and me as their most precious treasure, and I carry this knowledge with me into old age. This is how most decent parents feel about their children, how the parents of most of the children packed off to residential school must have felt. Their sense of powerlessness and of grief at this outrage is still being felt and is deeply damaging down the generations. In a sense this packing off was similar to the upper class British custom of sending children off to boarding school—although this does at least seem to be the choice of privileged parents who don’t want their lives cluttered up with children. Most of the Indigenous parents whose children were wrenched from them would have felt the separation as a physical and spiritual pain.

A friend of mine worked on this project almost from the time of the discovery in the glacier. I now have a much better idea of what her work entails, and understand why she is away from her Edmonton home for long periods. I see why the project took so long. Collaboration is much slower and much messier than having a CEO push things through.

I plan to act on my friend’s suggestion that all of us on Treaty Six territory learn some basic Cree. At my age I am never going to become fluent in Cree—or any other language I don’t already know– but it would be courteous for me to know a few words of the language of the people whose territory my people usurped. There is now a Cree language circle at Highlands Library on Wednesday evenings. That is too far for me to travel in the cold and dark, but I will be alert to an opportunity closer to home.

Teachings From Long Ago Person Found has made me think about the history of my family in Minnesota and South Dakota. My Norwegian grandparents may not have personally driven the Indigenous inhabitants away in the search for gold and for farm land, but they certainly benefitted from the expulsion. I wonder how Norwegians and Sioux communicated when they encountered each other.

My learning some basic Cree will not erase the past or my ancestors’ specific participation in the “clearing” of the plains, but it will be a small step in the right direction.