Fort Providence –“You’re smudging, right!?” Says Chris, after telling him about our dilemmas on Beaver Lake.
“Uh, smudging?” I reply.
“You know…tobacco…appeasing the river?” He continues.
Chris dons a Toronto Blue Jays T-shirt and ball cap and cuts the figure of a man well fed. He has just stopped his truck to speak with us. We’re camped at the far end of Fort Providence in wide open fields and with are the obvious new arrivals in town.
“You gotta smudge when traveling the river for safe passage.” He removes his ball cap and pulls his long greying hair back behind his head. His look is incredulous. “I think this is why you’ve had such trouble on Beaver Lake.”
He opens up his truck door, grabs a cigarette from a pack he has sitting on the dash. “Here take one of mine. Make sure you burn a little or sprinkle a little in the water before you start each day.”
Mills Lake – another widening in the Mackenzie like Beaver Lake – lies just ahead and by all accounts has a fearful reputation. Chris warns us of it as does everyone else we chat with during the day. “The water can get dangerous out there…steep waves, high winds.” warns Michael Nadii the MLA for the region who has dropped by. “Go when the wind is calm and stick the the south shore. Make sure to smudge before you cross.”
The smudging to appease the river is a new thing for me and reflects the spiritual connection the people here have to it. Dehcho is more than just a big river but rather a mystical thing that has ties to the ‘creator’
I’m not a religious person but it not hard not to feel something powerful here. We’re camped in fields that act as both the ceremonial outdoor spaces for the town as well as a memorial ground. Just a short distance from our tents is a graveyard for the local people that died because of the ‘Indian’ residential school system. This heinous program was enacted on our First Nations for over 100 years and the scar it left is still profoundly felt among the people. When I wondered out loud when this program was finally stopped my 10 year old daughter Arianna pipped up and said “In 1996 Daddy, that’s when the last residential school was closed”. I take some solace that our youth are learning of this atrocity.
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