Admonishment

Photo Credit: David Pilling

Sky at the Shuswap

At the breakfast table there was a request for me to read an story from my Gitxsan collection of Indigenous stories (from a class I took at UVic). 

A couple of days ago, I had asked Miranda  if I could tell potentially chilling, thrilling and bloody stories to her children.

She replied “Why not, they hear stories like that other places.”

This morning I choose “The Whirlpool”.

In this story, a disabled child curses the gods of the sky for letting snow fall in the spring.

He is admonished not to curse the gods. It is too late and the people are already snowed in.

The people try to escape. Their canoes are sucked into the whirling vortex of a whirlpool that is on the Skeena River. One canoe breaks loose and they alone get to safety. That canoe was the one carrying a grandmother and a small girl who has not yet reached menses.

To this day, the crest which is at the head of their house is the head of a woman on a man’s body.

The End.

[I choose to be the one in the story along with Alice who was saved - a grandmother and her grandchild, a small girl not yet having reached menses.]

Being trained in colonial myths, I reached in my own cultural backpack to make sense of the story.

Lucky for me no one knew the word admonished, so I have been focusing on that word all morning. Afterall, the small boy was admonished by his elders not to do that.

Miranda modeled the word for the kids by admonishing me not to leave dirty dishes on the counter at nights so that mice and ants are attracted to the food on them. She also gave me eye contact with her admonishment.

I modeled admonishment for the kids by telling Miranda that she should not be letting any of her kids go to kindergarten if they interrupt when someone is telling a story. I told her that also refers to kids going into Grade 2 as well.

The End.

Arta