Jorge Barrera
Northern News Services

Snowdrift (Aug 13/01) - There is a place up the Lockhart River where an old woman lives. She can heal.

An elder unclasps her hair, it falls in a black and silver wave to her shoulders. Bending over the rocks at the edge of the water she dips her hair into the water. The sky is grey and drizzling. Tea is boiling on a fire up on a slope. Smoke drifts over her wet hair.

Young women dip their hair as well. They've done this for generations. A few metres away the river falls in a torrent of white water, carving rock, the spray misting spruce clinging to the top of a 91-metre cliff.

This is Deshun Heda, Granny's falls in Chipywan, Parry Falls for the white man.

Every year for generations, the Chipywan from Lutsel'Ke travel to these falls to heal sickness. They carry the sick and wait for the elders and at the edge of the water they offer tobacco, matches, knives.

They used to walk for days to get here, now the band charters a float plane that lands at an unnamed lake about an hour's walk from the falls. Red ribbons mark the trail.

These are sacred waters. Bundles of matches and tobacco are swept by a million litres of rushing water into the lap of the grandmother who lives in these falls. Sacrifices. And Chipywan prayers to their Catholic God mix with prayers to their Grandmother.

I can hear the Hail Mary muttered in a language I can't understand. But I know watching their lips move as each bead on their rosary slips and disappears through dark fingers.

Hail Mary full of grace, blessed are you among women.

The Lockhart River was once called Deshun Bedeze, Granny's River. That was a long time ago. But still the river runs in a cardiac rhythm through the veins of the Chipywan, people born from a land still on the other side of development, a land of blueberries and clean water.

Since 1989 the Lutsel'Ke band has organized a spiritual gathering on the shores of McLeod Bay, at the end of Great Slave Lake, near the mouth of Deshun Bedeze, a place littered with looking- glass lakes.

On clear days it's hard to tell which way is the sky.

We stand on the shores of McLeod Bay. The main camp for the gathering. The air is thick with mosquitoes, gunpowder, wood smoke.

People gather in a circle around the fire, summoned by three blasts from a shotgun, fired by Archie Gadeleh, chief of the Lutsel'Ke band.

Four drummers bathe their drums in smoke.

An elder steps into the middle, rosary threaded through her fingers, and prays over the fire to begin the six-day spiritual gathering on Aug. 3.

She throws tobacco into a silver bowl and walks around the fire. Others follow, one by one they throw a pinch of tobacco into the bowl.

Beating drums.

The tobacco is dumped into the fire. A woman steps into the middle, her voice quivers on the edge of tears and tells about walking to Deshun Heda in April, she talks about her asthma and sobriety.

They've all gathered for the journey to the falls to visit the grandmother who lives there forever.

It begins with fire and ends with water.

Along time ago there was a boy who swung on sunbeams. His parents called him Sat'lu--sunbeam in Chipywan.

He became a powerful medicine man. An old woman lived in his band and she wanted beaver blood but the hunters wouldn't give it to her so she left.

After awhile people began to wonder where the old woman went and so Sat'lu went to find her.

He went to a water fall just up from Deshun Heda with three caves on the rock face, water falling like a curtain over the entrances. He turned himself into a fly to look for the old woman there. It was pitch black and he heard a woman's voice asking what do you want? He said he was looking for the old woman. She said if you don't want anything you must leave or I will kill you.

And he knew.

Henry Basil and I lie exhausted at the edge of a cliff overlooking the falls. Two days, breathing mosquitoes and sand-flies, thrashing through bush, following no trail, just the river and we finally arrived.

Basil said one needs to be humbled before going to the falls. Rotting tree trunks and gnarled spruce branches rip through my boots, scar my arms.

Basil, 54, does survey work for Du Beers for $300 a day. His wife died in a car accident in the 1970s. His son is in his thirties. We share a bag of Skittles and he gives me a bundle of matches to toss in the falls. I have tobacco.

Always drink from the river with two hands, he said.

He isn't a Catholic and doesn't cross himself like the others.

"I feel like the elders are caught between two worlds," said Basil. "They move towards tradition yet they still practice Catholicism."

Basil knows what world he stands in. He sees no need for Catholicism. Burn it.

It's a strange hybrid, the falls and the saints. The grandmother has never been canonized, yet she's revered.

But this pilgrimage is like the last knot in crocheting, untie it, the whole garment unravels. The Church conceded this and co-opted it.

"I don't know what to make of it," said Bishop Denis Croteau.

"We respect it. God can be reached through many avenues. They pray to her like praying to saints," said Croteau.

There are other stories about the old lady but they all tell the same tale. An old woman on the margins of her society found magic to heal broken people. And she lives in the water forever.

Gadeleh said he wants to see a move to traditional beliefs. But for the elders Catholicism is part of their tradition now, and their memories are the archives for this culture.

"We have to respect it," he said. "I feel more comfortable in a sweat lodge than in church."

Peter Abel tells me more people used to come to the gathering when it started. We sit on the beach on the shores of McLeod Bay waiting for a float plane.

"I don't know why," he said.