The Gookumnouch Council shares life teachings

 

When Irene Bearskin House was 10 years old, she learned in school that the fiddle wasn’t an instrument from her own culture. She became curious: what was played in Cree culture? Bearskin House asked one of her grandmothers, a woman who helped raise her after her parents died, “What did we use? Did we dance or something?”

But her grandmother didn’t answer her. Bearskin House persisted for a year, asking again and again, until her grandmother finally said, “Okay, my granddaughter. We had the drum. And we had the dance.”

Then she stood up in her skirt and began to dance, holding a blanket across her arms and chest like a shawl and moving her feet up and down.

“When she stood to dance, I’ll never forget her face,” Bearskin House recalled. She had never seen her grandmother smile and laugh like that.

As Bearskin House grew older, she studied history and realized how frightened her grandmother’s generation must have been when they were told that their traditional practices and ceremonies were evil. “That’s how I learned how deep that was, that fear,” she observed.

Lessons like this led Bearskin House to join the Gookumnouch Council, the group of grandmothers who advise and guide the work of the Cree Women of Eeyou Istchee Association. “The grandmothers have to be in place now to guide the people, to acknowledge again who they are,” she said.

Born in a traditional dwelling close to La Grande-3, Bearskin House was raised on the land for the first seven years of her life. When her parents died in a plane crash, she was taken to residential school. “My life got a little messed up as a teenager and a young adult,” she acknowledged. “The first seven years was what kept me grounded and strong.” 

In her late 30s, she started to reflect on her past. She went back to her birthplace and interviewed people there. “I had to do research on myself,” Bearskin House explained. The land, the people and the practices all came back to her. “All that I witnessed, what I heard, all the life out there those 10 months of the year was instilled in me.”

The Gookumnouch Council held its first gathering in Chisasibi in March 2016. People travelled from across Eeyou Itschee to share and listen to what Bearskin House and others call life teachings. A caribou ceremony and a ritual for a young woman at her First Moon time were conducted. The young woman wore a beaded veil and special regalia. Participants learned about the meaning of the denim skirt, its ribbons and colours.

A book was written to summarize the teachings shared at the first gathering. Bearskin House was asked to write the introduction. “Our ancestors guided us, Nishiyuu, through our kuukuminuuch that a sacred gathering is to happen…to teach traditional life teachings and to remind us that culture is our medicine,” she wrote. 

A second gathering was held this September in Waswanipi.

“Every one of us has to go through these teachings in order to understand our place in this life,” Bearskin House noted. “I guess that’s why our people have become so confused, especially the younger generation. A lot of that has been missing, that understanding of those rites of passage.”

Nellie Bearskin House, Irene’s older sister, provides support to the Gookumnouch Council as an honorary Elder. “Where we are as Crees, I saw the social issues escalating,” she said. “I saw suicide as a big, big crisis. I saw what was happening with the youth and the children. I always had the question: where are we going?”

Nellie saw the Gookumnouch Council as a place where she could work on these issues, teaching about colonization and oppression.

The booklet of teachings from the first gathering reads: “From the general impacts of residential school to denying women the right to accomplish their role, our people have suffered much from intergenerational trauma, thus disturbing the sacred balance found within the core of every being.”

Nellie and Irene’s mother went to residential school, but she returned to live on the land afterward. Nellie said her mother’s generation could “reprogram themselves,” drawing on what they had learned as children. “It’s us who didn’t go back to reprogram ourselves. We learned the ways of the white people so well. When we came back, we had 9-to-5 jobs,” Nellie says. “We only went camping.” 

Nancy Danyluk is a member of the Gookumnouch Council. She lived with her grandmother when she was young, and remembers her teachings. She would go out on the land with her parents as a child, and after leaving home at 18, she missed those experiences. 

As a child, Danyluk didn’t always believe what her grandmother said. Her grandmother would speak to her about white society and what would happen to Crees.  

“All the things that she told me – they’re happening today,” Danyluk said. “They say that Native people are just going to be like white society in the future, but you want to pass on the teachings that your grandparents and parents taught you.”

People have a hard time understanding, Nellie observes. “They think that they need to go back to the past and live in that way. That’s not true. You take the present and the past and you combine it into one.”