The Man Who Lived with a Giant by Alana Fletcher

Author:Alana Fletcher [Alana Fletcher and Morris Neyelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781772124668
Publisher: The University of Alberta Press

II Oral Histories from the Life of Johnny Neyelle

Life with My Parents, Jacque Neyelle and Marie Kotoyeneh

THIS STORY is from the time of my dad and my mom.

I remember travelling all over the place with them, going wherever there was plenty of fish and wildlife. I was born in 1915 and in 1923 my parents sent us to residential school in Fort Providence, one that was run by the Catholic Church. It was during those years that I really didn’t know the ways of life on the land.

In 1927, I was sent back to Fort Wrigley to stay with my parents for good. My mom Marie and my dad Jacque had asked the bishop to send us back home in consideration of their grief over losing their other son, Michel. It was after that time, back on the land, that my parents started really teaching me on-the-land skills.

My parents lived around to-ka-toeh, Blackwater Lake, most of their lives. Once in a while they would go into the Mackenzie Mountains to hunt mountain sheep and build moose-skin boats, and then they would come back to the community. I have five brothers and no sisters.

I went hunting a lot of times with my dad. I started at a very early age, so young that I remember my dad could pack me up and carry me when I got too tired. He showed me how to butcher moose, caribou, sheep, and beaver, how to make snowshoes, how to make fire in winter, and many other skills. He taught me about hunting moose by thinking like the moose and getting to know its habits. He also taught me how to recognize from moose tracks what kind of animal the moose was: old or young, bull or cow, and which direction it was going.

My mom taught me how to tan hide, how to sew, how to weave, and all the other basic skills of bush life, even including being a midwife. I guess that was because we were all boys in my family, with no sister to make our equipment or do other women’s work.

Eventually, I guess they knew that we could all survive on our own. That’s when my mom stood up and gave us a talk. She said, “You can’t live with us the rest of your lives, and you can’t live alone like that either. God willing, you will go and get a wife now who can take care of you.” Then she added, “I myself am getting old and tired of doing all the work for you boys!”

My older brother Albert found a wife and got married in the year 1928 and moved away to raise a family of his own. We would meet him every once in a while when he came to visit Tulita (Fort Norman) to trade furs and meat to the Hudson Bay store, and we knew it would be our turn next to get wives of our own.

We were wintering around Blackwater Lake, but when summer came my parents went to Wrigley.

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