Big Bear Read Online Free PDF Page A

No one could know how profoundly that wild or bad would reveal itself.
    (In 1989, Imasees’s mother will be called Na-tachi-skau-n, or simply Joanne in sworn statements deposited at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The same statements will name Imasees as Little Bear.)
    The seasonal cycles of band hunting continued in the 1850s. Not raids, but providing food and protection for his band and growing family, were Big Bear’s daily life. The Cree had established their buffalo territory on the plains, and though there were still clashes with the Blackfoot Confederacy, a mutual need for less violence had Elders in both tribes advocating peace. One Cree in particular, Chief Maskepetoon—who had allowed himself to be touched by Methodist Rundle’s holy water and, it was said, could hear Christian Cree words on birch bark or paper—gradually became a powerful peace negotiator.
    Years before, while the chief was away raiding, Blackfoot warriors had destroyed his camp, killing his aged father. Maskepetoon was told the name of his father’s killer, butinstead of pursuing revenge, he led his People into the Beaver Hills for healing. He began to talk aloud about the wisdom of peace. Now, it was told, Cree warriors had brought several Blackfoot into Maskepetoon’s camp and called out the name of the killer. The Blackfoot men were surrounded; the killer stood motionless facing the chief, waiting like a warrior for whatever would hit him.
    Maskepetoon turned, went into his lodge, and emerged with his ceremonial warrior clothes, the suit of beads and quills and scalps he had not worn for years. Put this on, he said in Blackfoot, and after the man had done that he told him to mount the horse tied beside his lodge. Then Maskepetoon looked directly at him.
    Both my hands are empty, he said. You took my father from me, so now I ask you to be my father. Wear my clothes, ride my horse, and when your People ask you how it is you are still alive, tell them it is because Maskepetoon has taken his revenge.
    The Blackfoot warrior slid off the horse; he took Maskepetoon in his arms and held him hard against his heart.
    My son, he said. You have killed me.
    As this story was carried across the plains and along the rivers of the boreal forest by both the People and White missionaries, the Cree and Blackfoot Elders had a powerfulteaching for their Young Men. Perhaps there were greater, braver honours to be attained than stealing and bloody coups and killing. Consider the profound pre-eminence of magnanimity and hospitality, the hard discipline of forgiveness. Who showed the greater courage: a warrior who fought wars with enemies or a man who rode unarmed into an enemy camp and tried to talk peace? Slowly, peace treaties—the Cree called them
âsotamâkêwin,
meaning “promise”—among the tribes reached over the prairie, lasting almost four years.
    Big Bear had given up the canoe of his boreal ancestors and become a superb horseman. The Hudson’s Bay Company now brought goods up the North Saskatchewan to Carlton and Pitt and Edmonton and Rocky Mountain House in huge York boats dragged by men with ropes over their shoulders, but Big Bear remembered the Company governor, George Simpson, crowned by a black beaver hat and sitting stiff like a grand chief in his canoe while his voyageurs paddled him past so swiftly that the evening sun rippled the river into floating fire. He never met “Little Emperor” Simpson, not even at Pitt, where he now traded most often.
    Then one spring (1861), after a Cree war party had ruined the always precarious peace promises by killing a Blackfootchief and the tribe had retaliated by killing twenty Cree camped near Fort Pitt, the chief factor there told Big Bear something very strange.
    The factor’s name was James Simpson. Big Bear had known him for fifteen years as a trader, always fair with his weights and counting. Now, drinking tea with him in his log house inside the high spruce palisades of