mitoni niya nhiyaw / Cree is Who I Truly Am

Strong women dominate these reminiscences: the grandmother taught the girl whose mother refused to let her go to school, and the life-changing events they witnessed range from the ravages of the influenza epidemic of 1918-20 and murder committed in a jealous rage to the abduction of a young woman by underground spirits who on her release grant her healing powers. A highly personal document, these memoirs are altogether exceptional in recounting the thoughts and feelings of a Cree woman as she copes with the challenges of reserve life but also, in a key chapter, with her loneliness while tending a relatives children in a place far away from home and, apparently just as debilitating, away from the company of other women. Her experiences and reactions throw fresh light on the lives lived by Plains Cree women on the Canadian prairies over much of the twentieth century. The late Sarah Whitecalf (1919-1991) spoke Cree exclusively, spending most of her life at Nakiwachk / Sweetgrass Reserve on the North Saskatchewan River. This is where Leonard Bloomfield was told his Sacred Stories of the Sweet Grass Cree in 1925 and where a decade later David Mandelbaum apprenticed himself to K-miyoksihkww / Fineday, the step-grandfather in whose family Sarah Whitecalf grew up. In presenting a Cree womans view of her world, the texts in this volume directly reflect the spoken word: Sarah Whitecalfs memoirs are here printed in Cree exactly as she recorded them, with a close English translation on the facing page. They constitute an autobiography of great personal authority and rare authenticity.