Born in the Blood: On Native American Translation

6. Performative Translation and Oral Curation: Ti-Jean/Chezan in Beaverland

Performative Translation and Oral Curation Ti-Jean/Chezan in Beaverland Amber Ridington and Robin Ridington The Setting In 1999, as Amber Ridington was preparing to enter the ma program in folk studies at Western Kentucky University, her father, anthropologist Robin Ridington, recorded a French folktale told by Sammy Acko, a talented Dane-zaa storyteller (for the full text of this story see appendix A). The Dane-zaa, also known as the Beaver Indians (or Dunne-za in earlier publications), are subarctic hunting-and-gathering people who live in the Peace River region of northeastern British Columbia, Canada, close to the town of Fort St. John, where Amber was born. For almost fifty years, since Robin began his fieldwork in the area, the Ridington family has referred to the area where the Dane-zaa live as Beaverland. Until 1942, when U.S. Army engineers pushed the Alaska Highway through their territory, the Dane-zaa were nomadic hunters. They had participated in the fur trade since 1794, when the Northwest Company established the first upper Peace River trading post, Rocky Mountain Fort. In 1822 the Northwest Company merged with the Hudson’s Bay Company, and Dane-zaa continued their interactions with this fur-trading monopoly. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Peace River was a major transportation route connecting eastern Canada with Arctic drainage fur and game resources. The Dane-zaa have, therefore, been in contact with a variety of cultural influences for several centuries. Because of this long history of fur-trade contacts, most Dane-zaa men spoke Cree, the traders ’ lingua franca, as well as some French, the language of the voyageurs. 138 Even after taking an adhesion to Treaty no. 8 in 1900, the Dane-zaa continued to travel seasonally to hunt, trap, gather, and socialize with their kin groups. Today, farms and oil and gas development dominate in the region, the Hudson’s Bay Fort is long gone from the area, and the city of Fort St. John is a thriving urban center. Yet the Dane-zaa continue to tell traditional stories. In talking about the “narrative technology” of the Dane-zaa, Robin has written: “Literature is more than a pastime in First Nations tradition. It is where stories become experience and experience gives rise to stories” (Ridington 2001a:222). Similarly, Dell Hymes describes narratives in Native American culture as being produced by “thoughtful motivated minds, seeking narrative adequate to their experience , surviving and renewing” (2000:11). Dane-zaa experience includes cultural exchange with Europeans, so it is not surprising that they have added stories learned from their new neighbors to their narrative repertoire. Robin first met the Dane-zaa in 1959, and was introduced to much of their oral literature through participation, observation, and documentation when stories were being told. Perhaps because he identified himself as someone interested in documenting traditional Dane-zaa culture, he was not exposed to and did not record any European folktales in the Dane-zaa repertoire until 1999. Dane-zaa Oral Tradition While the Dane-zaa participated in the rich mix of cultural and linguistic influences of the fur-trade era, their knowledge remained entirely within an oral tradition until the 1950s, when the Department of Indian Affairs established the first Indian day schools in their communities. Dane-zaa children were not allowed to speak their own language at the day school. However, they were fortunate: unlike their close linguistic relatives the Sekani and children from many other First Nations across Canada, they were not taken from their families and placed in church-run residential schools where they were forbidden to speak their language at all times. In addition to cultural exchange with the other First Nations groups in the area, particularly the Cree and the Sekani, the Dane-zaa have come to share cultural traditions brought by the traders with whom they came into contact. As Robin has pointed out elsewhere (Ridington 1990:64–83), the tradition of Dane-zaa dreamers was strongly influenced by images and metaphors from Christianity, as well as by the changed relation to the natural environment that the fur trade brought about. The men who Performative Translation and Oral Curation 139 140 Ridington and Ridington ran the forts (the factors) were generally Scots from the Hebrides and Orkneys, but many fur traders and other employees in forts across Canada were francophones. Some were Iroquois from eastern Canada, while others were Métis...