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A hundred years
A hundred years have passed
Yet I hear the distant beat of my father’s drums
I hear his drums throughout the land
His beat I feel within my heart
The drum shall beat
So my heart shall beat
And I shall live a hundred thousand years
© Shirley Daniels, 1969
On a summer day in the mid-1980s, Shirley Daniels sat on her balcony in downtown Ottawa writing poetry. She stepped inside for a moment and a gust of wind lifted the sheaf of her poems and scattered them far and wide over downtown Ottawa, the city she loved.
Maybe it was the work of Nanabush – the Trickster – but Daniels was heartbroken. The work was lost forever.
The lost poems are a perfect metaphor for a woman who worked so hard to preserve her Ojibway culture, left the collection to languish for years, then, almost by accident, brought the old traditions to a new generation eager to learn the songs and stories of their ancestors.
Daniels died in Ottawa of cancer on Dec. 21. She was 70.
Daniels was born in Lake of the Woods, Ont. in 1944, She was the third of five children to John Daniels, Chief of the Big Island First Nation, and Mary Comegan from nearby Grassy Narrows First Nation. The family moved a lot, partly for work, but also to keep one step ahead of the RCMP and the Indian agent, who were known to forcibly remove children and place them in residential schools. John and Mary were adamant their children would not suffer the same treatment they had endured in residential schools, where two of John’s siblings had died and were buried in unmarked graves.
When Shirley was about seven, the family moved to Middleboro, Man., near the Minnesota border, where the children entered public school. She graduated high school in Fort Frances, Ont., and excelled in literature and Latin (she said that Latin helped her understand English). An essay she wrote on racism earned an A and given pride of place on her high school bulletin board – until somebody tore it down.
“I guess someone didn’t like the story,” said her eldest daughter, Chantal Batt. “That really hurt her. I think my mom knew about racism from a very early age.”
Daniels went to teachers college in Montreal, but balked when her history curriculum talked about native “savages.” In 1965, she boarded a train for Ottawa and was dazzled by the view as the train crossed the Ottawa River on the Alexandra Bridge.
“She saw the Château Laurier and Parliament Hill and she thought it was so beautiful,” Batt said. “She said, ‘This is where I want to live’.”
Daniels began working at the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, which is where she conceived the idea of returning to Big Island and Grassy Narrows to record the songs and stories of the older generation. At age 23, she arrived with a camera and a reel-to-reel tape recorder and went to work, even though some of the elders were suspicious of her intent.
One of them was her maternal grandfather, George Comegan, a medicine man.
“He didn’t like her using modern technology,” Batt said. “He was suspicious of the machine that was stealing his voice and stories and taking it away to strangers in the city.”
Daniels explained the project in a 1968 Ottawa Citizen story: “Time is running short. Within a few years, a lot of this will be gone,” she told the paper. “The old people are dying and the practices are phasing out.”
At the same time, Daniels cautioned she wasn’t crusading to “promote the renaissance of Indian culture” which, she said, remained very much alive and evolving.
Shirley Daniels wearing her traditional Lake of the Wood Jingle Dress in August 1962.
Daniels was extremely close to her father and his death in 1969 under mysterious circumstances was devastating. She couldn’t bring herself to listen to the recordings she made of him. It was the beginning of years of depression. The tapes gathered dust. She worked hard on the written transcriptions, translating them from her Lake of the Woods Ojibway dialect into English, but grew frustrated because literal translations proved impossible – the English words just didn’t exist to convey the Ojibway concepts in the stories and legends. A perfectionist, Shirley would put down her pen until she could consult with an elder, but as the years went by, the elders died off, including her mother, Mary,
“She didn’t like listening to any of it,” Batt said. “The elders were all gone. It made her realize how much of the language was gone.”
Shirley continued to work as a court translator, a radio freelancer, a university teacher, and as a consultant on Aboriginal culture for movies. She married a lawyer and had three daughters, but it was an awkward interracial marriage fraught with misunderstanding.
“The marriage was a huge cultural adjustment for both sides of the family – more than either side was prepared for or would ever admit,” Batt said.
In 2012, Daniels began feeling ill and in January 2013 was shocked to be diagnosed with inoperable cancer. “I guess I’ll never finish the legends and chants,” she told her daughter.
Batt set about digitizing the audio recordings, transferring the reel-to-reel tapes onto a USB stick. She sent copies to contacts in the Big Island and Big Grassy communities.
“I was nervous about sending the material home because I wasn’t sure how it would be received – it had taken so long to make its way home,” Batt said. “My mother also wasn’t satisfied that she’d done enough work on the project. She had wanted to do some more translation work on the Nanabush stories, which were her favourite.”
In August 2013, Shirley decided at the last minute that she wanted to go home to Big Island for the annual community pow-wow
“The first morning of the pow-wow, there was the usual breakfast feast at the pow-wow grounds. My mother was sitting at a picnic table eating breakfast with her many cousins. Then I heard drumming and singing and recognized the music. I asked my mother if it was one of the songs from the recordings. She said, ‘Yes, that’s my father’s song.’
A group of five young men were sitting in a pickup truck listening to the track of John Daniels’ “Sunset” song, studying the recording that had been made 45 years earlier, learning the long-forgotten beats and rhythms of their elders’ traditional Ojibway ceremonial music. The truck was parked just metres away from where the Daniels’ family home had once stood.
“I said to my Mom, ‘Your work has come home’.”
Though she was elated to hear the music, Daniels could not give herself credit for her work. “She kept feeling guilty that she didn’t do the job perfectly. I had to tell her that what she had done was incredible enough – how many other 23-year-olds would have thought up such a project? That if she’d done all the work herself then she would have made it too easy for others not to learn and appreciate for themselves what has been kept alive. I told her that maybe it wasn’t meant to be for her to do it alone. And that was OK.”
Shirley was never well enough to return home, but the chief of Big Island and the Elders Council of Big Grassy formally thanked her for her work. The Big Grassy elders also sent her a pair of finely-stitched moccasins in appreciation.
Daniels died on Dec. 21, the first day of winter. Ojibway tradition holds that story telling cannot start before the beginning of winter, Batt said, making it a fitting day for “the storytellers to call her home.”
Her funeral was a traditional Ojibway service, with drumming, burning sage and prayers. She was buried in her ceremonial moccasins.
And Nanabush was there again at the end. The gravediggers had been expecting a cremation urn, not a casket, and had to quickly dig a larger hole while family and friends waited.
“We stood there laughing,” Batt said. “The others must have wondered about us. But it was so true to form that my Mom and Nanabush would conspire together on this little stunt. It wasn’t upsetting. It was the way it was meant to be and a sign that my mother’s spirit was playing along and letting us know she was OK.”
Shirley Daniels-Batt is survived by her younger brother, Melvin; three daughters Chantal, Samantha and Natasha; and three grandchildren.
bcrawford@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/getBAC
Related
查看原文...
A hundred years have passed
Yet I hear the distant beat of my father’s drums
I hear his drums throughout the land
His beat I feel within my heart
The drum shall beat
So my heart shall beat
And I shall live a hundred thousand years
© Shirley Daniels, 1969
On a summer day in the mid-1980s, Shirley Daniels sat on her balcony in downtown Ottawa writing poetry. She stepped inside for a moment and a gust of wind lifted the sheaf of her poems and scattered them far and wide over downtown Ottawa, the city she loved.
Maybe it was the work of Nanabush – the Trickster – but Daniels was heartbroken. The work was lost forever.
The lost poems are a perfect metaphor for a woman who worked so hard to preserve her Ojibway culture, left the collection to languish for years, then, almost by accident, brought the old traditions to a new generation eager to learn the songs and stories of their ancestors.
Daniels died in Ottawa of cancer on Dec. 21. She was 70.
Daniels was born in Lake of the Woods, Ont. in 1944, She was the third of five children to John Daniels, Chief of the Big Island First Nation, and Mary Comegan from nearby Grassy Narrows First Nation. The family moved a lot, partly for work, but also to keep one step ahead of the RCMP and the Indian agent, who were known to forcibly remove children and place them in residential schools. John and Mary were adamant their children would not suffer the same treatment they had endured in residential schools, where two of John’s siblings had died and were buried in unmarked graves.
When Shirley was about seven, the family moved to Middleboro, Man., near the Minnesota border, where the children entered public school. She graduated high school in Fort Frances, Ont., and excelled in literature and Latin (she said that Latin helped her understand English). An essay she wrote on racism earned an A and given pride of place on her high school bulletin board – until somebody tore it down.
“I guess someone didn’t like the story,” said her eldest daughter, Chantal Batt. “That really hurt her. I think my mom knew about racism from a very early age.”
Daniels went to teachers college in Montreal, but balked when her history curriculum talked about native “savages.” In 1965, she boarded a train for Ottawa and was dazzled by the view as the train crossed the Ottawa River on the Alexandra Bridge.
“She saw the Château Laurier and Parliament Hill and she thought it was so beautiful,” Batt said. “She said, ‘This is where I want to live’.”
Daniels began working at the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, which is where she conceived the idea of returning to Big Island and Grassy Narrows to record the songs and stories of the older generation. At age 23, she arrived with a camera and a reel-to-reel tape recorder and went to work, even though some of the elders were suspicious of her intent.
One of them was her maternal grandfather, George Comegan, a medicine man.
“He didn’t like her using modern technology,” Batt said. “He was suspicious of the machine that was stealing his voice and stories and taking it away to strangers in the city.”
Daniels explained the project in a 1968 Ottawa Citizen story: “Time is running short. Within a few years, a lot of this will be gone,” she told the paper. “The old people are dying and the practices are phasing out.”
At the same time, Daniels cautioned she wasn’t crusading to “promote the renaissance of Indian culture” which, she said, remained very much alive and evolving.
Shirley Daniels wearing her traditional Lake of the Wood Jingle Dress in August 1962.
Daniels was extremely close to her father and his death in 1969 under mysterious circumstances was devastating. She couldn’t bring herself to listen to the recordings she made of him. It was the beginning of years of depression. The tapes gathered dust. She worked hard on the written transcriptions, translating them from her Lake of the Woods Ojibway dialect into English, but grew frustrated because literal translations proved impossible – the English words just didn’t exist to convey the Ojibway concepts in the stories and legends. A perfectionist, Shirley would put down her pen until she could consult with an elder, but as the years went by, the elders died off, including her mother, Mary,
“She didn’t like listening to any of it,” Batt said. “The elders were all gone. It made her realize how much of the language was gone.”
Shirley continued to work as a court translator, a radio freelancer, a university teacher, and as a consultant on Aboriginal culture for movies. She married a lawyer and had three daughters, but it was an awkward interracial marriage fraught with misunderstanding.
“The marriage was a huge cultural adjustment for both sides of the family – more than either side was prepared for or would ever admit,” Batt said.
In 2012, Daniels began feeling ill and in January 2013 was shocked to be diagnosed with inoperable cancer. “I guess I’ll never finish the legends and chants,” she told her daughter.
Batt set about digitizing the audio recordings, transferring the reel-to-reel tapes onto a USB stick. She sent copies to contacts in the Big Island and Big Grassy communities.
“I was nervous about sending the material home because I wasn’t sure how it would be received – it had taken so long to make its way home,” Batt said. “My mother also wasn’t satisfied that she’d done enough work on the project. She had wanted to do some more translation work on the Nanabush stories, which were her favourite.”
In August 2013, Shirley decided at the last minute that she wanted to go home to Big Island for the annual community pow-wow
“The first morning of the pow-wow, there was the usual breakfast feast at the pow-wow grounds. My mother was sitting at a picnic table eating breakfast with her many cousins. Then I heard drumming and singing and recognized the music. I asked my mother if it was one of the songs from the recordings. She said, ‘Yes, that’s my father’s song.’
A group of five young men were sitting in a pickup truck listening to the track of John Daniels’ “Sunset” song, studying the recording that had been made 45 years earlier, learning the long-forgotten beats and rhythms of their elders’ traditional Ojibway ceremonial music. The truck was parked just metres away from where the Daniels’ family home had once stood.
“I said to my Mom, ‘Your work has come home’.”
Though she was elated to hear the music, Daniels could not give herself credit for her work. “She kept feeling guilty that she didn’t do the job perfectly. I had to tell her that what she had done was incredible enough – how many other 23-year-olds would have thought up such a project? That if she’d done all the work herself then she would have made it too easy for others not to learn and appreciate for themselves what has been kept alive. I told her that maybe it wasn’t meant to be for her to do it alone. And that was OK.”
Shirley was never well enough to return home, but the chief of Big Island and the Elders Council of Big Grassy formally thanked her for her work. The Big Grassy elders also sent her a pair of finely-stitched moccasins in appreciation.
Daniels died on Dec. 21, the first day of winter. Ojibway tradition holds that story telling cannot start before the beginning of winter, Batt said, making it a fitting day for “the storytellers to call her home.”
Her funeral was a traditional Ojibway service, with drumming, burning sage and prayers. She was buried in her ceremonial moccasins.
And Nanabush was there again at the end. The gravediggers had been expecting a cremation urn, not a casket, and had to quickly dig a larger hole while family and friends waited.
“We stood there laughing,” Batt said. “The others must have wondered about us. But it was so true to form that my Mom and Nanabush would conspire together on this little stunt. It wasn’t upsetting. It was the way it was meant to be and a sign that my mother’s spirit was playing along and letting us know she was OK.”
Shirley Daniels-Batt is survived by her younger brother, Melvin; three daughters Chantal, Samantha and Natasha; and three grandchildren.
bcrawford@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/getBAC
Related
查看原文...
