© 2002 Tom Bacig
Bones, marrow, blood. Genes and chromosomes. Amino acids and sunlight. Dead matter leaping to life. Life leaping to consciousness. From time to time we learn who and what we are. Some small piece of the idiosyncracy that is identity is illuminated by light reflecting off water flowing from the heart of an unknown world. In canoe country, I feel this sense of connection, wondering how it was when first we came, or perhaps before they came. The country is in my blood.
Recently, I've begun to guess that being Gertrude Lillian Durand's son, is making this 12th generation Canuck-Canuck a crafter of words, a maker of tight-mitered word corners. She is a cabinet maker's daughter. When they needed someone to hang a perfect door, they called Joe Durand, even when he was seventy. I saw him set and sharpen a crosscut saw with pliers and a flat file at age 73, sighting and shaving bent and rounded steel into perfect points and alignment. His own saws were toledo steel and he bent them tip to heel and let them spring back to show us what good tools meant. He kicked my ass and laughed when, at twelve, I tried to put trowel to wall after watching him for half a day. "Now watch close, and next time do it right," he said. He was a tyrant, and a master craftsman. What made him, what made my mother, is making me. I am trying to understand the difference between our dreams of perfection and our realities, trying to frame the sentences that build word homes for all the people of the world. I seek to explore the frontiers of our pasts for the sake of our future.
On September 23, 1662, Jean Durand, a peasant from the town of Doeuil in the province of Saintonge, having completed his three year contract to earn his way to New France, took to wife Catherine Annennontak, daughter of the late Nicolas Arendankir captain of the Hurons of Georgian Bay. In 1658, she fled her fathers death and the annihilation of the Huron nation by Iroquois armed with Dutch and English muskets. The orphan and 200 other women and children were led to Quebec by the Jesuit missionaries who had been converting them. She was reared and taught in the French manner" by Madam de la Peltrie and Marie de l'Incarnation at the Ursuline convent in Quebec, so that she "could someday marry a Frenchman." The Jesuits of Canada dowried her for marrying her frenchman, giving 350 livres to the newlyweds. She was fourteen years old.
And from this blood and bone, from these genes and chromosomes, from the policies of Champlain and the Recollets and Jesuits, of church and state, spring 12 generations of people of mixed blood. Mixed offspring married mixed offspring, and in Quebec no one kept track. In the west, moving up the lakes they were called bois brûlé, "burnt wood," coureurs de bois,"woods runners," voyaguers, "canoemen." Catherine and Jean's sons, Louis and Ignace were among the first to go. As these fur traders moved west to the plains, spreading from the Missouri basin to the Arctic, they came to see themselves as people apart, as the Métis, the mixed. They were of the borders between civilization and the wild, between the first nations and the old world, of the edges of earth and water, of the parkland where forest met prairie. Leaving behind a past of European servitude and new world peasantry they became hommes libres, freemen, natives of the land, the new people born of the meeting of the peoples of new world and old.
Gertrude Lillian was of these, Canuck-Canuck, Knick-Kinick, Kinige-Kinige, all mixed up French-Anishanabeg and full of story, laughter and prayer. Here is her final song.
We three fallen
Catholic sons
Gathered round
Your soft death bed
Murmurings
Seek to decipher
Your final words
You have forgiven us
Our omissions
Our commissions
Our heresies
Our agnosticism
Our falling from faith
Now in your final hour
We can not understand
Your murmured words
I hear a pattern, repetition
Dad in his death bed,
You with the beads,
Holy mother,
Then in the hour
Of his death,
Praying the decades,
Saying the rosary.
I voice "The rosary.
She's saying the rosary."
Hail our mother
Full of grace in this
Your death.
Blessed are thou
Amongst women
Blessed are we
By your faith
The fruit of thy womb
Your sons
To be with you
In the hour of your death
Calling the Virgin Mother
To be with us
Now and then.
We answer your hailing
With our holy
And find grace.