My Grandmother, or Why I write
My grandmother is at once a beloved and mysterious figure in my life. She’s the sort of person who can keep a secret for a lifetime or share it at the right moment, to everyone’s surprise. Given that she is a Métis woman and was born in 1950, this has served her well, but her silence came at great personal cost. Many people can relate to the agony of hiding behind façades for safety, but few among us can imagine having to do so for 65 years. Silence like that comes from a place of shame, and much is lost to its placid infinity. Silence is so dangerous that it can kill a memory, a language, a history, even a whole person if left unchecked. I’m constantly aware of these carbon monoxide silences, yet I’ve found myself keeping some of my own.
I suppose I should start by saying that the long silence of my family did not start with my grandma. There have been no fluent speakers of Cree in my family for the past four generations. As a language, Cree has been lucky in that it has thus far avoided the twin threats of radical and gradual language death, which loom over many Indigenous languages in Canada. Ethnologue, a global linguistic encyclopedia, assigns it an Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS) status of five for “Developing,” which means that it is generally considered safe—for now. The EGIDS scale measures disruptions in the transmission of language from one generation to the next, along with the sociopolitical factors that support or disrupt that transmission. Factors such as the level of institutional support the language has, the amount of opportunities to use the language outside the home, the economic opportunities tied to language competence, and social attitudes towards the language all play a part in a parent’s decision to transmit one language to their child over another. When the intergenerational transmission of a language is disrupted in favour of another language at a societal scale, this is called ‘language shift,’ which can ultimately result in language death.
What we lose with language death is more than a code of meaning; we lose stories as they were originally told. We lose expressions, unique jokes, songs, prayers, culture, identity, and community. My grandma’s family began shifting away from Cree before she was born. She never got to inherit much of who she was, and what she did inherit, she hid for safety from violence and shame until the world had changed enough for her to breathe out again. As I grew old enough to understand what this meant, I began to realise that I had a responsibility to be a listening ear for anything that she might be able to share, to carry her memory and the memory of her foremothers forward, so that the world might remember what it tried so hard to forget. Listen, I did.
I still listen to her for hours when I’m in town, and I call home when I can, but something changed when I came to university. Very quickly, I learned that I had to be selective in sharing stories and in discussing what those stories mean to me. In such settings, people can be very quick to objectify or prod the storyteller, or even signal disapproval of them when they encounter a story they’ve never been told before. That’s not a bad lesson to learn in and of itself—discretion is a valuable skill. I fear, however, that I tend to take things beyond discretion. Although my reasons are different and my silence on the matter is less complete, I have been increasingly hesitant to speak about my identity as Métis, more reluctant to share my family’s history, and less willing to explain the reasons I do the things that I do. What good does it do for me to have these stories if I do not tell them? Stories like my grandma’s need people who will tell them, learn from them, and share the insights they glean from them. They need to be represented in the public imaginary for them to mean anything.
If you ask me why I write my opinion pieces on a day when I’m feeling generally gregarious, I might tell you that it’s because I have too many opinions and writing one down from time to time keeps me sane. This is mostly true. I do have too many opinions, and writing them down does keep me sane. Occasionally, though, I write to tell a story. Sometimes, these stories generate a bit of a buzz. It seems that this is at least somewhat correlated with the times I talk about being Métis. I shouldn’t be surprised by this, and I suppose I should even appreciate it, even if it scares me and some of the attention is disrespectful or objectifying. It is important to the survival of these stories, points of view, and experiences that I continue to break the silence around them when I can. My grandma was born in a small town called Wabamun, about forty-five minutes west of Edmonton. It sits on the shore of a lake with the same name. The name comes from the Cree word wâpamon, which translates to “mirror” according to the itwêwina Plains Cree Dictionary. In many ways, listening to my grandma’s stories and experiences has been like gazing into a lake and seeing a little more of her in my distorted reflection. I don’t know if Wabamun Lake is as glassy as it once was when someone first thought to compare it to a mirror. I can guarantee that there weren’t smokestacks and oil refineries towering in the distance. Still, I think of that lake, my grandma, and the person I’ve become every time I see my reflection in a body of water. I hope that one day, I’ll be able to pass that on to someone. Maybe I’ll even learn Cree.