Friends, I was gladdened to feast mine eyes upon the beaming visage of Dene film-maker and writer, Raymond Yakeleya, arms suitably akimbo, proudly hoisting his recent The Tree by the Woodpile: and Other Dene Spirit of Nature Tales, stories collected from his grandmother, Elizabeth Yakeleya and elder Harriet Gladue, of Tulita, Denendeh.
It seems more the wave of the present and with good cause, to make our communal efforts to help preserve the words of a former time, of dogsleds and life on the land.
For my part I recall ancient legends passed on from our own grandmother and closely related to Mr. Yakeleya’s Mountain Dene of the Sahtu, Great Bear Lake region.
In a time when storytelling was an art, she even made the age When the World Was New come to life for me and oldest sister, Judy. It must have been rather comical too, with the three of us solemnly puffing to grandma’s pipe, the little mosquito bar covering us in our summer fishcamp tent just filling up with smoke!
Be that as it may, these are the kinds of memories we have to pass along to the younger generation, as storytellers like Raymond Yakeleya have bound themselves to do.
I have been working on my own book, now for about five years and finally coming to the light of publication, for next May 2019, in time for the next NorthWords Literary Festival.
From Bear Rock Mountain; the Life and Times of a Residential School Survivor, in part celebrates the legends of Yamoria, who remind us that as long as we remember Bear Rock Mountain, how the evil giant beavers were killed by the cultural hero and what the stories really mean, we will be fine as Dene.
One of the lessons learned from doing such a memoir, friends, is that the hardest part is the start, how we as children, myself at only seven, were yanked right out of the arms of our parents to begin a life of misery in a foreign land, among the mola, white people.
In fact, no words on a page can ever take that kind of pain away, only pass on the memory.
It made a big difference in being able to work with the Cree staff and editors at Brindle & Glass, my publishers.
We have our own resources, too, right in the North. Some among us, like Mary Wilson, at great personal cost, helped piece together the terrible memories of residential schools. Hopefully these, too, will find their way into the educational institutions of the future.
Stories become the lives we live in this way, in the tellings by committed people like Raymond Yakeleya.
Mahsi, thank you.