Re-Constellating lii zitwel pi l’syel
Matthew Tétreault is Métis and French-Canadian from Ste. Anne, Manitoba. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies at the University of Manitoba. He holds a PhD from the University of Alberta, where his dissertation, a literary history of the Red River Métis was awarded a Governor General’s Gold Medal. He has published work on Métis poetry and national literature. Matt is also the author of What Happened on the Bloodvein, a collection of short stories, and Hold Your Tongue, a novel that explores francophone Métis experiences in southeastern Manitoba.
“Oh, les étoiles! Vous avez de belles étoiles au Manitoba!”
Twenty years ago, we stood on Jericho Beach in Vancouver, British Columbia, watching, and waiting for a battery of mortars on a barge out on English Bay to unleash a burst of fireworks. Radios and boomboxes and loudspeakers squawked around us in anticipation and folk crammed the shoreline looking for a view of the water. A barrage of ariels, rockets, and shell bursts would soon light up the sky, and glittering chrysanthemums, peonies, willows, spirals, spiders, crossettes, and dahlias would bloom in synchrony with the music on the radio — someone said this was a competition, different nations putting on a show with light and sound — but we were young, and from elsewhere, staying at the hostel, and we had few notions. My wife and I had wandered onto the beach in awe at the lights, the city sprawled like some crumpled sheet at the feet of the mountains across the water. The crowd snaked around us on the sand, and eventually to avoid being swept along we sheltered atop a small pier with other guests from the hostel. We met a francophone there, un Québécois — you could tell by his accent — and we started to chat. We told him we were from Manitoba.
“Oui, y’a du monde qui parlent l’français au Manitoba.”
“Non, on vient pas du Québec. Never been,” I told him.
We went through the old dance that always happens when you meet another francophone, from elsewhere, but then the man said something that made us pause. He talked about our stars.
“Vous avez de belles étoiles au Manitoba!”
We thought he was pulling our leg. Some new riff off la vieille joke. C’t’une bonne chance que vous avez des beaux grands ciels parce que y’a rien à voir sur la terre. Fly over country, right? Drive through country. Except, c’est pas vrai, là, la partie à propos de la terre, anyways.
But then the man kept going, and he mentioned the road signs that he had seen when he first hit the prairies — those blue rectangular panels with a big star on them. The provincial government had placed a bunch of them along the highways to draw attention to local historical and cultural sites. Economic stimulus, t’sé.
Watch for the ミ☆, they proclaimed.
The man had seen the signs, but he misinterpreted their meaning. And so, as he told it, he pulled over and stood along the highway, and as a semi-truck groaned passed him, he looked up into the sky, like really looked up into the sky.
“Vous avez de belles étoiles au Manitoba!”
I couldn’t tell you precisely how the fireworks looked twenty years ago, or how the music sounded either — it was probably a sensory bouquet of dissonant percussions and something vaguely classic. Strings maybe. Certainly no fiddle. No, what I remember is the way that this man talked about the stars. Les étoiles.
In the years since, my wife and I have periodically exclaimed “les étoiles!”, affecting the same breathless enthusiasm that this man displayed, in some parody meant not to ridicule or deride, but rather to reminisce about our adventures — six weeks camping out of a red Pontiac in B.C. — and, I think, to marvel also at that joyful appreciation of our skies and the meaningfulness of that momentary kinship.
Watching the sky is what folk on the prairies do. There is nothing like watching thunderheads swell on a hot summer’s day — towering masses of bulbous white clouds brushing up against heaven, and flattening out into dark, anvil-like forms. The groan of distant thunder in the earth. The roar of approaching winds. These are our mountains, there, in the sky. Liminal, unscalable. At once beautiful and awful. Pregnant with stories.
I have learned a little, a very little, about the Thunderbird, that great being whose immense wings cause thunder, but I didn’t grow up on those stories. I know lii Michif share sky stories with their nêhiyaw and Anishinaabe kin, among others, including stories about Star Woman, and about Sky Woman, but like the Thunderbird stories, I didn’t grow up on those either. Too French, I suppose.
You could say that I grew up with le diable. Li djiable. La chasse-galerie — that’s a familiar one. Isn’t that a sky story too? That’s another story lii Michif share with others. Y’en a plein d’autres histwayr à propos dju djiable itou. But vraiment, I grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
When I looked up at night as a kid, I was drawn to the stars. I wondered at what lay beyond, and I marvelled at the possibilities. I loved those episodes where time seemed to curl back upon itself like ouroboros. Space — that was where my mind went. I even had plastered across my bedroom wall a mural of the space shuttle Atlantis orbiting the earth.
Space — the final frontier. Those lines gave me chills.
Though, I always wondered why Jean-Luc Picard spoke with a British accent.
The stars. Pas les étoiles.
Les étoiles. Pas lii zitwel.
* * *
In grade seven, our class took a winter camping trip to Moose Lake, in southeast Manitoba. We spent two or three days cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, making fires, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows, and drinking hot chocolate. We slept in small cabins, on bunkbeds, and we lazed in the main lodge on old sofas and chairs watching movies between outdoor activities. The place had log walls and a stone fireplace, a big kitchen, and some boardgames… I think. Sometimes I wonder at my own memories. I will remember some general things about the past, forget some detail, and then worry at how my mind fills in the blanks with narrative approximation. I think about this often when I see old photos of myself. There is this one vieille photo in particular that causes me great anxiety. Throws everything into doubt. The photo was taken when I was about three years old. In it, I am wearing my first pair of skates, and I am standing in the basement of our old house on Walnut Street, in Winnipeg, a few months before my parents moved us out to Ste. Anne. Every time I see that photo, I believe for a moment that I remember standing in the basement, but then I remember nothing else about that day, and hardly anything about that old house, and so I convince myself that I cannot possibly remember that far back. I convince myself that what I remember is in fact a reconstruction. That la mimwayr is nothing but the collective imaginings that have built up like sediment in my mind and become fused through the pressures of time, the story of those skates as told by my mom, puis mon père, and by the accumulated reflections brought upon by some recognition of self in the photo. Memory as re-constellated fragments of experience. Down this rabbit hole, I tumble.
Back on Moose Lake, we drill through the ice and drop fishing lines and small hooks into the water. We catch a few fish, I think — I believe — but what I remember most about that time, is how dark it was. We are fishing in the dark. But it’s not actually dark. It is cold, like deeply cold, and icicles form on the outside of our scarves, but the air is so still, and if you are dressed for it, like we are, the cold can’t touch you. The glow from the cabins and the lodge, and from the salt sprinkle of stars over our heads lights up the lake and the snow, and we don’t need the flashlights that we brought along. After a while, we tire of fishing, and we lay back in the snow with our ski pants and parkas, our tuques, and our mittens, and we listen to the squeaking, Styrofoam crunch of snow underfoot as some keep fishing around us, and the voices of others that carry far across the lake on the cold air, and we look up beyond our white burgeoning breath at the sky, and our guide begins to talk about les étoiles.
They tell us about how, dans l’temps, people used the stars to get around. How men on boats would follow the stars across the ocean. We know this one already, but I guess it’s a nice story — tinged perhaps with lament, and a romantic nostalgia for what might have been in those days before contact, even though we wouldn’t be here without contact, how it might have unfolded differently — because we mostly keep quiet and listen as the guide talks. Then the guide tells us about the constellations, those shapes of legend, the beasts, and other things, that populate the heavens: la Grande Ourse, la Petite Ourse, Orion’s belt. Three pearls strung across the archer’s waist. We search, and — là, regarde! — we find those stars, and I marvel at them.
Even today, when I step outside at night, and happen to look up, I’ll see the big dipper, maybe spot litwel di norr, but I will search for Orion’s belt. Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka. The three kings. The three sisters.
Are these sky stories?
* * *
Around the same time of year as the Moose Lake Trip, but maybe a year earlier, or maybe a year later, doesn’t much matter, our school volleyball team played a match in Niverville, a small-town half an hour south and west of Ste. Anne. Or maybe it was in Grunthal, another small-town, also half an hour away, but more south than west. We might have won, and we might have lost. Like the shape of those fireworks in Vancouver, I couldn’t tell you. What I remember about that night is the sky.
It was the dead of winter, and we were on our way home — five or six boys hopped-up on Gatorade and Pepsi, packed into the back of the coach’s Caravan, flying along the highway. I don’t know who noticed them at first, but suddenly the van was stopped and idling on the snow-packed shoulder of the two-way as we stared northward through the windows. The sky was alive avec lii chirraan. Les aurores. A kaleidoscope of emeralds and lavender. As if beckoned, we piled out of the van, into the cold, and we looked up as ribbons of green and purple billowed overhead. The power of those lights silenced us, captured our imagination.
I don’t know how long we stood there before winter drove us back into the van, but in those few moments that we withstood the wind and the snow, something happened. Perhaps time distended. Perhaps the magnitude of this cosmic event — the sight of solar radiation lapping across the pole — overwhelmed us. Perhaps it spoke to us. Not so much in words as in feelings. And then again, perhaps I have simply re-constellated my reflections into something larger, more meaningful — a manufactured moment in which I return for solace.
Did you know lii Michif call the northern lights lii chiiraan, and lii viyeu told that you should never “tease” or “whistle” at the lights, because they would come down and “take you away”? They said that “the spirits of the dead are in [them]”. In some ways, I wonder if the spirits of the living are there too. We are transfixed by recognition, and we pause to commune.
I have spent much time these past few years thinking about how Métis culture is shaped by land and place, and how that relationship includes the prairie skies as well. Métis writers through the generations have written about these relationships: from Louis Riel’s personification of the wind as the voice of his country, “Il me semble que c’est ta voix / Ma douce contrée”; to how an old fiddle player, “got one song from dah wind at Batoche” in Maria Campbell’s short story, La Beau Sha Shoo; to George Morrissette’s suggestion of how music is born(e) of and on the winds of Lake Winnipeg “[une] tempête arctique sur la prairie / effrayante, déchirante / [qui] fait sauter ce violon”; to Marilyn Dumont writing about buffalo spirits, “pulling the universe in their sway / the Milky Way — dust of buffalo spirits passing”. In many ways these are all also sky stories, celestial stories that speak to the sacred relationship between earth and sky and being and the ways and the experiences of living in and with this place. These are prairie sky stories, and winter sky stories, and buffalo sky stories. They are timeless and current, at once short and unending, reshaped and retold as we renew ourselves under these skies. Sous lii zitwel.
In return for these, I offer my own poor stories, muddied by memory, shaped by cold and silence, re-constellated now, crystallized in writing.
Mots-clés :
ciel, devil, étoiles, histoire, histwayr, itwel, le diable, le temps, les aurores, li djiable, li taan, lii chirraan, Manitoba, mémoire, memory, Métis, Michif, mimwayr, northern lights, sky, stars, stories, syel, time