How The Elders Lived
English translations of Elder's stories, summarized.

COMMUNITY LIFE
People didn't live in large settlements or stay permanently in one place. They moved throughout this area, camping in groups of 1 to 4 families for periods of time ranging from a few months to 3 or 4 years.

HOUSING
People lived in teepees, or sometimes log cabins or wigwams made of sticks. For insulation people would put spruce branches around the teepees and coat them with snow from top to bottom. Flour bags dipped in lard were used to cover windows in cabins. Stoves were made of clay and burned whole logs. The stoves were used for cooking and heating. Kerosene, candles, and a type of home-made lamp called "a bitch" provided light. The bitch was made by rolling up cloth to make a wick, placing it on a plate, and adding lard, which melted and kept the wick burning.

FOOD AND SUPPLIES
Only staples such as tea, flour, sugar, tobacco, bullets, and kerosene were bought in the stores, which were located at Little Red and Fort Vermilion. These staples were bought with fur. People lived on moose, fish, beaver, rabbit, muskrat, and the occasional bear. When game was scarce, people went hungry.

WORK
Men hunted, trapped, and fished. Women dried meat, made pemmican, picked berries, tapped birch syrup, snared rabbits, fleshed hides, chopped firewood and hauled it, often on their backs.

TRANSPORTATION
Dogs, canoes, and snowshoes were used to move around. Dogs pulled sleds and toboggans and also carried packs. Sometimes people used rafts as portable kitchens when they moved down river in their canoes. They would put dirt on a raft and build a fire for cooking on it. Sometimes, if the wind was right, people used sails on their canoes. Canoes, rafts, sleds, toboggans, and snowshoes were always hand made from wood and birch bark.

HEALTH CARE
There was no doctor or hospital close by. People made medicine from roots and plants. Women had their babies in teepees, even in winter.

CHILD REARING
Babies didn't wear diapers; they were kept in moss bags. Children and young people were not allowed to play outside or make noise at night. They were told that sickness would hear them and come for them if they didn't stay quietly inside. In the morning, they had to get up early; nobody slept in. Children ate bannock, lard, meat, and soup, as adults did. But they were never given tea to drink.

ENTERTAINMENT
The most common form of entertainment was visiting. The old people would tell stories, and sometimes the children would fall asleep while they were speaking.

On New Year's Day, the Old Chief (J. B. Sewepagaham's father) would have a feast for all the people. They came from their traplines by dogsled. Only the men drank, and they didn't drink much. Women and young people never drank.

Some people went to Fort Vermilion at Christmas, travelling by dogsled to see their children in the mission school. The mission released the children only in the summer. They were forced to stay at the school for Christmas, New Years, and other holidays.

Carol Hart, PhD