Now I am the Only One

The Sadness

           So my old buddy Frank has died. Now I am the only one. No one but me can speak our language anymore. It was great speaking and listening to him in the words of our people, even if it was only over the phone, as he lived so far away. I know of no other person left who has the language. All those wonderful stories will have no listeners that will understand them like my generation did when we were raised with them as they were told in the language. In English they are not the same. They are so very different. The humour does not translate well, and the culture and the history do not receive sufficient respect. What we laughed at as children, will no longer seem funny to anyone but me anymore. And the tales of our past that were told in songs that we learned, and often sang by a fireplace on an evening, no longer have voices, nor ears of those who understand what is being sung. I can’t remember when I last sang any of them for an audience other than myself. And that seems wrong. In the powwows of days long past, when I was a young man I would sing them to a crowd that understood, and would sing them along with me. An Elder or two would come up to me and shake my hand. And I could feel the spiritual presence of the ancestors.

           My children all live in the big city now, which has given them jobs, and financial security. They had to leave, as did I, when the community was destroyed by the damming of the river for electrical energy, flooding our homes, and our cemetery, drowning our ancestors. I am glad that the lives of my children are successful in monetary terms, but they will never truly know what they have lost with the language. A piece of their souls will always be missing, whether they are aware of it or not.

A Knock on the Door

           There is a knock on the door of my room. I don’t think that it is yet time for one of my physical checkups, and it’s not time yet for lunch. I walk over to the door, not knowing what to suspect. One of the health care aides says to me, ‘You’ve got visitors’. I am soon out of my room and headed for the entrance. I have no idea who it will be. It’s been a long time since anyone came to visit.  Then I see them, two teenagers, a girl and a boy. They look related to me. She looks a lot like my sisters and cousins, now no longer on this earth, and he looks a lot like I think that I did as a child. They walk up to me slowly, like they are afraid of how I might react to them. Then they both say to me at the same time, the word that I used to use to address both my grandmothers and my grandfathers, when I was a boy. They said ‘ahshootahah’ ‘my grandparent’. I am almost too filled with joy to respond. I say back to them, first to one, then to the other, ‘ahshoot’ ‘my grandchild.’

           Then I asked them, ‘How did you learn that word?’ She spoke, “Our father, your son taught us. It is one of the few words in the language that he knew. He told us to say it to you, as it was a sign of respect.

           The two of them became regular visitors at the home, taking their lessons in the language once a week, speaking the words several times before they wrote them down in their personal dictionaries. Sometimes we would go into the woods nearby, and I would teach them the names of the trees, bushes and medicine plants that we would see there. They would first repeat the names several times, then they would say them again when they would spot another. 

           One day they asked me to give them personal names based on the trees that served our people so well for so long. I gave my granddaughter the name Yandatsekwa ‘birch,’ as she wanted to learn how to make baskets. It was a word she would often say in their lessons in the woods, even before I gave her the name. My grandson was called ‘Wahta’ after the maple tree. He had joked that he wanted a tree name like his sister had, but he wanted to have a shorter name, so it would be easy for him to remember.  I thought it would be appropriate for him, as I had seen him eat pancakes covered in syrup.

           The day they received those names, they asked me what mine was. I told them that I received the name Tsawenhohi, a traditional chief’s name meaning ‘osprey,’ when I was a young man. I especially enjoyed it when Yandatsekwa saw an osprey in its nest on high, and said Tsawenhohi, first pointing at the nest, and then at me. I would then spread my arms out like the wings of an osprey beginning its dive to catch a fish..

Another Pleasant Surprise

           I decided that because my name had come back to life again, I should have it written on cardboard and taped on the door to my room. I was surprised one day when someone knocked on the door, looked at me and pronounced the word like he said it every day, translating it as well. He was from the same First Nation, and had not known, as I did not either, that there was someone from the same community living in the long term care home. 

           He joined us in the lessons, learning, but also teaching some of the words he remembered from his past. He knew of a dictionary written by a missionary a long time past. It would soon be a teacher for the four of us. It wasn’t long before we became greater in number. My children joined our classes, and they knew a few people of our nation who would be interested. The language was beginning to live again, or maybe it is better to say that it was sleeping and we gently woke it up. I was no longer the only one, and I felt confident that our language would never sleep again.