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18 BEING DENE I hope that these accounts of two Dene lives, Helene Rabesca, a Bear Laker, and Louis Norwegian, a Slavey, help to personalize some of the broader ethnographic and historical views in this book. I regret that I recorded almost no consistent life history materials. They would surely have enriched the source material of future ethnohistorians . This volume is dedicated to Teresa and Nancy, my two American field companions, and to Louis and Vital, two of my Dene friends/teachers. Vital Thomas has a brief biography in Prophecy and Power among the Dogrib Indians (1994). This chapter offers a study, rather than a biography, of Louis Norwegian. Of a very different genre is the first part of the chapter: a remembering by Helene Rabesca (née Yambi) of what life was like at the start of the twentieth century. helene rabesca, 1897–1996 At Lac la Martre, Nancy Lurie had two interview sessions with Helene Rabesca in August 1962, when Mrs. Rabesca was sixty-five years old. Two young Dogribs served as interpreters, Mary Adele Jeremik’ea (later Mrs. Charles Bishop) for the first interview and Alexis Nitsiza for the second session. Mrs. Rabesca shifted back and forth on topics. The presentation here does not follow the zigzag sequence of her narrative, and I have rephrased, rearranged, and dropped some of her account as it was received by Nancy in translation. The time frame of Helene Rabesca’s account is the first quarter of the twentieth century. Her story impinges on Naedzo’s remembrance in chapter 9. Naedzo was eleven years older than Helene, who was born in November 1897. Naedzo followed the Bear Lake Chief; Helene was the youngest child of the Bear Lake Chief. Naedzo’s memories are of group esprit and hunters rallying to the leader’s call, of the days when ‘‘every one goes like we are one.’’ Helene’s personal memories are those of a lonely, unhappy, abused child-wife. In place of the great days of Naedzo’s remembrance , Helene details minutiae of the struggle to be warm, clothed, and fed and of women’s toil. In his old age Naedzo laments, ‘‘Nowadays, it is not as good as before, because no one listens or cares for one another.’’ Helene sees people’s loss of strength and health since white men came but remembers that in the old days people suffered exhausting exertion and came close to starving: ‘‘Since the white man came, things have improved.’’ Nancy’s comments on the sessions with Helene are illuminating; they follow. The first interview with Mrs. Bruneau Rabesca was a near fiasco. I had asked Mary Adele Jeremik’ea (serving as interpreter) to find out if Mrs. Rabesca could talk to me now. I wanted to set out to Mrs. R’s house, but Mary Adele sent Sonny Fish. Sonny told Mrs. R that she was supposed to come to my house to tell stories, so she arrived hot and a bit annoyed just as I was zipping up my case to trundle over in the event that she was available. I got Mary Adele to apologize to her as much as possible. Mrs. Rabesca sat down by the tape machine and asked if she’d get paid. I said, of course, that old Mrs. Beaverhook had asked me to order dress goods as payment to her, but I could get Mrs. R whatever she liked. She brightened at that considerably and asked for five yards of dress material, a nice print. Also there was a can of peaches which she realized I’d brought out as a gift for her, and good feelings were restored all around. At one point she commented, ‘‘I thought maybe because you are a white woman you don’t want to come and sit in my house.’’ I’m sure she knows I visit around. My peremptory order, as she misunderstood Sonny’s version of my message, bore out her worst suspicions. The fact is, I haven’t gotten to know the Rabescas before this. She’s a proud woman and has not come to visit as other women have, and her husband, Bruneau, visited only when I saw him outside and invited him in. I was relieved, however, that she admitted to her feelings and could laugh about them once the rhubarb was straightened out. The interview went on with little prompting by me. Mrs. Rabesca grasped what I wanted and simply took off like a bird in...

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