Bits of my Background

As a young girl, pre-school to mid-teens, I walked many times with my father on the natural prairie grassland of southern Alberta. At that time, early 1950’s and on, there were still large areas of unplowed land. My father showed me tipi circles set along the rims of coulees, showed buffalo wallows and explained how they were made, pointed out the ancient deep grooves where herds followed trails in the coulees. He showed me bones, arrowheads and as we walked, he told stories of the people who had lived here for hundreds of years.

I grew up in Calgary but spent parts of many summers with our family, visiting grandparents on this homesteaded land where we walked. This was where my father was born, in 1916, delivered in the back of a wagon with the assistance of a veterinarian. Or so the story was told.

We went to visit but also to work and help out with threshing and harvesting and getting the grain to the Nemiskam Grain Elevator. As the youngest of the four children, I was mostly left out of the labour. My brothers were given tasks, but my 12 year old sister, the oldest one of us, daily drove the grain-loaded truck to deposit the wheat while my two brothers and I goofed around in the back, laying in the grain, tossing handfuls at each other, and chewing mouthfuls to make it like gum.

I spent a lot of time in my teenage years with my horse, boarded on the edge of the city, acquired when I was 13. Riding mostly bareback, I explored the Tsuun’ina (Sarcee) land along the Elbow River and fence free, imagining the city gone and only the prairie, where the buffalo had once roamed and the Indians travelled on horses over this vast land.

After graduating from the University of Calgary, travelling in Europe, always looking for where I could be out of the city, I moved with my husband to BC, to a forested hillside by Kootenay Lake. After several years of hauling stone, digging out a terraced and rocky hillside for a garden, the work of building a stone house beginning, I returned to Calgary to acquire a degree in education. I taught for 24 years at the local school, where a happy group of kindergarten to grade twelve students attended, their annual population ranging over the years between about 80 to 140. Gradually I began to write again, articles for educational magazines and then a book: Rights to Responsibility; Multiple Approaches to Building Character and Community published by Zephyr Press.

But the images that had been alive in my childhood when I wandered with my father on the prairie came alive again and pointed to writing stories about that land and its history. Napi’s Dance was first published by Second Story Press, the second edition by me as ReSounding Books. Finally, Napi’s Braid appeared as the sequel, also by ReSounding Books, both offering the history of this land in a fictional format.

I had come to meet and spend time with people of the Kainai (Blood Tribe) who were Snake Woman’s people. One of the knowledge keepers assigned Napi’s Dance to the suggested reading list for a Masters Program on Blackfoot Health and Wellness at U of C. “It’s a really good book,” he told me. “I’ve just started reading it for the third time.” This affirmed an accurate historical context of the novel and it very much pleased me to know it was well-received. Napi’s Braid continues the history and weaves together bits and pieces of so many people’s lives during this period of great upheaval. It’s a fascinating time that was never covered in my own education. On reading Napi’s Dance, a great many people expressed their dismay at never being taught about this history. My hope is that these two novels contribute an historical understanding of the period, that it offers appreciation for the lived experiences and that it contributes to the process of reconciliation.