Free Big Bear by Rudy Wiebe Page A

shouted, ‘
All
this is our land! It isn’t a piece of pemmican to be cut off and given in little pieces back to us. It is ours and we will take what we want!’”
    The Saulteaux leader Badger had come from Treaty Four and again expressed the concerns he had raised the year before about the huge problems of learning to live by farming. Joseph Thoma spoke for Red Pheasant’s band: “In the list of articles [needed to farm], there are many things overlooked. I want to ask for as much as will cover the skin of the people … what you have offered is too little. And when you spoke you mentioned ammunition, I did not hearmention of a gun; we will not be able to kill anything simply by setting fire to powder. I want a gun for each chief and headman and I want ten miles all around the reserve where I may be settled.”
    To which Morris responded with a curt threat: “What I have offered to you has been accepted before by others more in number than you are. I hold out a full hand to you, and it will be a bad day for you and your children if I have to return and say that the Indians threw away my hand.”
    And then he added a—perhaps ignorant, certainly deceiving—lie: “I want the Indians to understand that all that has been offered is a gift, and they still have the same mode of living as before.”
    His “same mode of living” comment was not discussed, though every hunter knew the buffalo herds were shrinking south. Threatened, Red Pheasant repudiated the statement of his councillor. He agreed with senior chiefs Mista-wasis and Ahtah-kakoop (Star Blanket), who, having been influenced by Anglican missionaries for a decade now and having long cultivated gardens, had already decided that their future must be with the treaty. Erasmus recorded that Mista-wasis said nothing during Morris’s treaty explanations or in the debate the Cree held among themselves—which lasted all ofone day. But toward the evening of that day he did at last rise to his feet:
“I speak directly to Poundmaker and Badger and those others who object to signing the treaty. Have you anything better to offer our people? I for one think that the Great White Queen Mother has offered us a way of life when the buffalo are no more. Gone they will be before many snows have come to cover our heads or graves if such should be. When the Red Coats came, why did the American traders flee in fear, when before they had shot Blackfoot warriors down like dogs and dragged them to the open plains to rot or be eaten by wolves? It was the [Queen’s] power that stands behind those few Red Coats … and I for one look to the Queen’s law to protect our people against the evils of firewater and to stop the senseless wars among our people, and against the Blackfoot. We have been in darkness; the Blackfoot and the others are people as we are. They will starve as we will starve when the buffalo are gone. We will be brothers in misery.… We speak of glory, and our memories are all that is left to feed the widows andorphans of those who died to attain it.… I for one will take the hand that is offered.”
    Ahtah-kakoop spoke immediately after Mista-wasis:
“Yes, I have carried the dripping scalps of the Blackfoot on my belt.… We killed each other in continuous wars and in horse stealing, all for the glory we all speak of so freely.… But with the buffalo gone, we will have only the vacant prairie which none of us have learned to use.… Let us show our wisdom by choosing the right path now while we yet have a choice. For my part, I think the Queen Mother has offered us a new way. I will accept her hand for my people.”
    And next day they both signed, the first Cree chiefs to make their X marks on an English Treaty Six they could not read; they trusted what the translators told them Morris had said was in it. In this way, at Carlton on August 23, 1876, Mista-wasis, Ahtah-kakoop, and seven other chiefs and thirty-six councillors did, in the name of their 1,787 band