Dawn Ostrem
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Oct 23/00) - Agnes Casaway sat in her room at Aven Court, her back to the window.

Outside, traffic streaked along Franklin Avenue. Inside, her room was a quiet calm and only the sound of a her clicking crochet needles and a buzzing fan could be heard.

"I'm making couch and chair covers for Christmas for my daughters," she said as her 67-year-old fingers quickly turned the needles. "I gotta make eight of them, all different colours.

"I just finished that one," she said pointing to a brightly coloured woven throw, folded carefully, sitting on a table. "That's a chair cover."

Agnes's room was filled with the comfortable clutter of precious items, mostly pictures of her grandchildren. Her room was small; a bed, the chair in which she sat, a small dining table covered with knick-knacks and a large television turned on with no sound.

A tube ran the width of the floor from underneath the closed bathroom door to Agnes' nose.

"In my room, all winter long, I got the fan going because I can't breathe," she said, adding quietly, "I smoked so much, that's why my breathing's no good. It's really hard on a person, booze and smoking."

The past

Agnes was born in Fort Smith. She was very young when she was taken into the mission there and raised for a short while by Catholic priests and nuns in a world foreign to her and her people. She didn't stay there long.

"My Dad took me out," she said. "He didn't agree with the way we were treated."

When asked how that was, Agnes put down her needles and her usually soft face hardened with a stern, sharp look.

"Not too good so I don't want to talk about it," she said crossly and went back to her crocheting. "When there's a rock you don't turn it over once it's been left there so long."

Agnes paused and added with a hushed annoyance as she stared down at the pink yarn, "Believe me."

The family moved to Rocher River where Agnes, half aboriginal and half Scottish, lived out her childhood, "cutting wood for the old people and hauling water."

She described those years with restraint initially, adding dribs and drabs of description and summing up years of her life with a word or two.

"You jolt my brain awake so I can't think straight," she said, again seeming bothered.

But once the interview questions subsided and Agnes was left to simply talk, her words tumbled out as her mind remembered.

"We stayed in the bush in Rocher River and there's no work there, it's just a little fishing town."

Agnes spoke in a story-teller's tone, pausing every so often.

"We'd look for cans, any kind of can. You make a cup out of it or whatever. So that showed you we didn't have much.

"We didn't have a fridge in those days, not even a cooler. Some people were pitiful and sometimes it was tough but I mean, you have to work hard for the family so they have a decent meal a day. When I had a can of stew I had a big meal for my kids.

"I tell you it was lots. no welfare so it was hard."

Agnes was married three times, she has 14 children, about 40 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.

She met and married her first husband in Rocher River.

"And then the school burned down and we had to move to Fort Resolution otherwise they were going to take our kids away from us, to a residential school," Agnes explained. "But Fort Res wasn't any better."

Moving to Yellowknife

Agnes decided to try and make a better life for her and her children. She moved to the booming town of Yellowknife.

"I chartered a plane for my kids from Fort Resolution and we've been here in Yellowknife ever since."

It was 1969 and the city was sparse compared to today. But it was still a town of too many faces, too many names and too many buildings for Agnes when she walked off the plane. It was almost too much at first.

"Oh, it was very hard, even in Yellowknife. At the start I was so bashful, I couldn't ask for anything I was so shy."

But Agnes did say there were "the good things" in Yellowknife. One of those being the ability to make a living.

With so many children and no father for them at that time, and no welfare, getting by, she said, was hard. But Agnes began interpreting for the Dene Nation and at the legislative assembly. She travelled as a member of a team of pioneer politicians and bureaucrats.

"So that was nice, going to a lot of places and a lot of meetings," she said.

As Agnes continued crocheting a chair cover for her daughter in her small quiet chambers at Aven Court, she stopped and looked up. She nodded her head to the side window.

"In 1969 already Yellowknife was a big place. There's been lots of changes since I came here," Agnes turned her head from the window and went back to work.

"I never been to Wal-Mart for a couple of weeks and now I go there and there's a great big house up. They say it's a hotel or something.

"There used to be a hospital here," Agnes added referring to Aven Court and changing the subject. "There were no hospitals in those other days."

Agnes's mother-in-law delivered her three oldest children in her home in Rocher River. She said in the old times when babies were coming the midwife made a mother work very hard.

She said they made an expectant woman cook bannock, make soup and rice pudding to keep her upright and moving a week before she is to deliver.

"Now they tell you you're pregnant so stay in bed because you've got high blood pressure or something.

"In the old time it's not that way. You have to make moose hides until you're baby is born."

Agnes sat unmoving in her chair as her conversation flipped from pregnancy to hunting and ultimately to food.

"The only thing that is hard about now is (getting) wild meat," Agnes explained. "But it's still okay because my sons, they hunt and they always get meat for me and they cook for me but I'd like to eat it every day."

Agnes chuckled and became very excited at the thought of caribou, fish and reindeer.

Although her life in Yellowknife and in the North is a path strewn with various stones small and large, some can be moved, overturned or simply peeked under for insight and experience.

Agnes expressed only one regret as she sat comfortably, glancing up now and then from her growing crocheted chair cover.

"My Dad was a Scotsman; he wasn't an Indian. Although he was a really old man he didn't know much about hunting and things like that so people used to give him meat and as soon as he got it he bottled it up.

"If they gave him ducks he'd bottle the ducks and if they gave him fish he'd bottle the fish and it was excellent.

"At that time I never thought tomorrow would come and I never even watched how he did it. I thought, 'oh,it was so good.'

"Sometimes I think if I could taste it one more time... I don't think I ever will though, not the way he did it."