I live in a place where the South Saskatchewan River runs like a razor through the heart of the city, through a cleft in the earth of Treaty Six territory. I grew up here, out of place and next to this river, but my Indigenous roots, my Métis and Cree roots, flow down toward Treaty Four lands, where my Cree ancestors were made and born of the earth and its landmarks, where my great great grandfather was born at a traditional fishing weir, where my chapans¹ were buffalo hunters in the days when there were still buffalo herds across the prairies. I think about those ancestors now, about this river, a skinny thread on any map, running through different places, different people, back to my history, connecting as it flows, connecting me to my story and to myself.

My story has been difficult and is still in the making. Adopted as an infant, I was raised without my birth family, without my culture, and away from the cues that would tell me about myself. I hit my teens with a deep sense of longing and confusion—Native yes, but what kind? To have knowledge of my Indigenous nation is fundamental, foundational, something all children should be able to take for granted. I remember learning about different Indigenous nations across North America and praying that I was not some less-known (to me), distant kind of Native. I wanted to be close to my homeland; I wanted to be able to recognize my Indigenous identity when I found it.

The South Saskatchewan River runs rapid in the background of my whole life’s existence, along with the Red River of my great Métis ancestors: both ultimately joining to empty into Lake Winnipeg. From the place of stories lost to me over time, I imagine a spot where I too join up with my Métis ancestors who originated at the Red River, the homeland of the Métis, and made their way into Saskatchewan, settling in the Touchwood Hills and other areas in what would someday become Treaty Four territory. There, my ancestors and I make up part of the moving, flowing, powerful, ever-changing water. The passage of time is meaningless to the river, the fact of past and present and future generations are mere technicalities. The river erases all doubts and allows the connections to simply exist as they are, as the most natural things in the world.

The rivers rush to empty their water and sediment into Lake Winnipeg, rubbing the rough edges off my old grandfathers and carrying them to this ancient meeting place. Which parts deposit into the lake and which parts, which sediments, lodge and form a delta, form something new? Something that didn’t exist before but then suddenly does. Like the Métis ourselves, created at the Red River, spawning ground for a nation, the natal nest and nursery of identity, spilled, gathered, a thimbleful at a time, building, a force of nature.

I searched for many years. I still search today. I understand now: my ancestors are my responsibility. They wait for me. They want to be found and remembered. It’s my duty now to carry them.

In my desire to not be alone on this journey, last year, even though I don’t hold much stock in it, I took two commercial DNA tests. I had the overwhelming desire to find a sibling from my father—on the off-chance that a sibling exists. I took the two tests that are the most popular in North America in order to have the broadest chance to make a connection. I found many cousins, a few displaying a close enough match to potentially be paternal half siblings, but not the definitive “aha” I was looking for. Not the bright moment when I would locate a co-conspirator to come on this journey with me.

Looking for a sibling is my means of looking for my father, who died decades ago—I never knew him. It’s really my father I wish for, to accompany me on this journey down the rapid river to the place I might find the meaning of myself. It’s my father who I imagine would make me feel less alone, make the introductions, tell the stories, reveal to me who I am and where I come from.

In the ceremony of my existence, the image of the two rivers coming together reflects who I am. The rivers flow now just as they moved long before me, as they will continue to move through my whole life, as they will after I exist no more. Coursing downstream is not a movement into the past, nor the future, but instead a space where time past, present, and future meet. Where it is possible to commingle my identity with those of my forebears, where I will no longer be alone but rather finally wholly together—the fragments and the sediments brought to one place and disgorged into the big bowl of the lake of our common existence, a homecoming.

 

Without water nothing lives. Water is oxygen, movement, creatures—two legged, four legged, winged, and finned²—seeds, spirit, sustenance, mud, blood, DNA, language, song, and the laughter of my Métis kin. Water rises to air, to clouds, to become again, something new; the cycle of life. Water is animate, transporting sediment, lives, whole constellations from place to place and constantly emptying itself of all that it carries, emptying out of its mouth, feeding the ravenous lakes like a mother bird feeds her hungry babies. By the water, I’m nourished. The river itself is a poetics, a living art. We create and recreate ourselves, our narratives, our own flowing rivers, until the moment we can no longer—then, we are driven, like the river, to rush and meander, to stand still, and reflect, and diverge. We are life, water is life, we are water, we are poetry. In this ceremony, I bring myself back to myself, back to my ancestors, alive, each of us to the others, as if we have never been apart.

Over the years I’ve spent time running or walking by the river, moving across the bridges, against the current, with the current, up a trail, down a path, through the rain, under the sun, against the wind, breathlessly repeating, over and over, again and again, the same search. There is no full course of healing and resolution, but I have found moments of grace where I invite myself to pause, tie a ribbon to a red willow branch, and listen to the current.

 

¹ great grandparents
² Borrowed from the book title Two Legged, Four-Legged, Winged, Finned, Rooted and Flowing, by Kathleen M. K. Menke (2010).

 

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Lisa Bird-Wilson is a Saskatchewan Métis and Cree writer whose award-winning novel, Probably Ruby, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Fiction Award and the Amazon First Novel Award. Lisa lives in Saskatoon and is the CEO of the Gabriel Dumont Institute, Canada’s first Métis post-secondary education and cultural institute.