Spoken Word

No pen and ink recorded the precontact history of Canada’s First Nations. The word was spoken. Stories were told and retold, passed from generation to generation. More than a lively art, storytelling was the vital chronicling of a people, but when Europeans brought new ways to communicate and new versions of history, oral traditions began slowly to wither. But some natives such as Ontario’s Louis Bird have dedicated themselves to preserving the stories of the Elders and maintaining the oral tradition. The best stories turn on eloquence, imagination, and drama, and, in the case of this sly inversion of the first contact between First Nations and Europeans, not a little humour.

Huddled close to the fire, he would listen to his uncle tell stories, all the while counting the number of times his uncle’s spit would sizzle into the flames as he got more animated. Later, Louis Bird and his cousins would laugh as they imitated their uncle. Now, six decades later, it is Louis who tells stories, choosing his words carefully and confidently, a man who clearly loves to play with language. Mushkego Cree is Louis’s mother tongue, so the words he would like to use don’t always translate very well into English. He thinks for a moment, then experiments with a word or two before settling on just the right one.

I’ve known Louis Bird for ten years. His stories sweep me into his world along the rugged muskeg coastline of western Hudson Bay and James Bay, taking me to a time before the arrival of guns and Europeans, when physical survival was intricately linked to knowledge of animals, plants, weather, and the land. Other stories describe skirmishes with other aboriginal peoples or with the European newcomers. They are not cute or fanciful stories. They often reflect the harshness of the environment and ancient rules of survival. They tell of murder, jealousy, and suffering, but also of kindness and the determination to survive. Louis’s stories can go on for hours or days and may involve many characters who impart something about being a good hunter or a good parent or about respecting the environment.

There was a man in those days before the European came. The Elders used to give up their life for the safety of their young generation. And this one old man asked to be left behind so the young people would not starve or would not be in need because he was getting old. He instructed his descendants to make a nice tepee and to leave him there to die, so they could exist.

Louis Bird was born in 1934 in the wilderness between Fort Severn and Winisk in northern Ontario. During the 1930s, his parents and grandparents lived in a cabin and trapped fox.

Louis was about four years old the first time he saw a non-native person or, as he would say, “a strange-looking person.” That person was the priest who lived in the only building in Winisk.

Like many of his generation, he was sent to residential school at age five. He travelled by river canoe to Hudson Bay, where the schooner Repulse took him to James Bay and the community of Fort Albany. He was a year away from home the first time. Later, he would spend two years without seeing his parents. At age eleven, after several years of residential school, he returned to his parents feeling he had “lost the joy” of their bush life. He looked down on his parents. They didn’t have any sense of time.

And this person in particular survived the winter by a miracle and in the springtime when the geese and other summer birds came, he happened to get out from where he was left to die and went to crawl close to a creek.

His parents ate when they were hungry and washed when necessary. To him they were now “uncivilized.” He felt detached from them and their way of life, and it took him a good year before he would settle into the bush life again. But when he did, it would be the stories of the Mushkego Cree that would sustain him. “It’s like living in a story,” Louis says.

The stories stay with you.

And he happened to stop right under the poplar tree, close to the creek. At the same time there was another man who was t rapping, looking for the otters in the spring because they use otters for their shoes and moccasins. And the trapper came upon this little creek and he heard someone humming ... singing. A man. Then he went and looked and saw where the voice was coming from. He came upon the poplar trees, just barely breaking buds for the leaves. And there, under the trees, sat the old man, blind. And he was humming a song. The trapper didn’t understand. He didn’t know the name of the song, but he walked up to the person and said, hello. And the old man said, “Ah... there grandson. I am glad that you came. I was hoping that someone would pass by this creek so that they could find me, and I can be with people again.”

Louis Bird began collecting stories around 1965 when he realized that the Elders who knew the Cree stories were dying. Since then he has collected hundreds of hours of taped stories, making it his mission to retell, document, and keep alive the stories of his people. He has traveled from village to village, from Winisk to Attiwapiskat and Kashechewan and down to Fort Albany, Moosenee, and Moose Factory’ to listen. Some stories stop at one village or area and continue on in the next. There are different versions of stories and Louis is curious about what makes them different, even if the themes remain the same. Since most Elders don’t like to be tape recorded, Louis simply listens, then records in his own voice what he just heard.

So the man says, “Yes, I can take you. I will take care of you.” And he asks, “How are you? How did you come to be here by yourself?”

Louis has seven daughters, and when they wanted to hear the stories in English, he began to translate, retelling them in the “to-be-continued” segments the way his uncle had taught him. His uncle had also tried to leach him that stories should be told for a reason, usually to teach a lesson. At the time, Louis didn’t realize that, but he did learn that there were different levels of delivery depending whether you were telling the story to a child, a teenager, an adult, or an Elder. Today, he constantly adjusts the stories in his head to edit the harshness or the elements that he doesn’t think the listener is ready for.

In 1985 there was a disastrous flood in Winisk. Two people were killed and many people lost their homes and possessions. While Louis was lucky to be away in Sioux Lookout, he lost a substantial portion of his tape collection. The village was moved further up river and renamed Peawanuk. Undaunted in his mission to collect and document Cree stories, Louis continued on.

Louis recounts a time when the Church did not like the Mushkego Cree to speak of the spiritual part of their history. The stories, he says, “went underground, so to speak, and were told in the bush.” He feels it is important to make stories a legitimate part of native culture and history and use them as they were originally intended - as an educational resource.

The man says, “I was left to die and instructed my descendants to leave me here to die, but unfortunately my time has not come. I have been sitting here amongst these white men and they couldn’t do a damn thing about me. ” He chuckled. And that was the first time that the guy who found the old man heard about the white man. The old man says, “Those white men who stand amongst me — they couldn’t do anything to me.” He chuckled again. And it so happened that he was a prophet, the old man.

Those of us who don’t live in northern Ontario are fortunate that Louis attends storytelling festivals nationally as well as internationally. Currently an Elder-in-residence at the University of Manitoba, he is recruiting graduate students to help him transcribe tapes to make them more accessible to native-studies students.

Maureen Simpkins completed her PhD in education at the University of Toronto specializing in aboriginal oral tradition and the law. She is currently an associate professor at University College of the North.

This article was originally published in the April-May 2000 issue of the Beaver. Since then Louis Bird’s recordings have been collected and placed online at OurVoices.ca. Stories are available in English and Cree.