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Caregiver of culture remembered

Evelyn Cook was as comfortable in the city as she was on the land

Nathan VanderKlippe
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Feb 22/02) - In dying, as in living, Evelyn Cook wouldn't slow the pace of her life.

Diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer in 1998, Cook didn't so much battle the disease as ignore it: she was at work a little more than a week before she died.

"She never dwelled on it, she kept working, she kept busy, it didn't slow her life down," said Paul Clark, her husband.

A memorial service will be held for her at St. Patrick Catholic Church at 1 p.m. Feb. 23. A drum dance and traditional feast will follow in Ndilo.

Cook was indefatigable, unwilling to bend to either internal or external obstructions.

"She had a very active life," said Clark. "Even on a dull day when it was raining or snowing she would liven things up. She didn't mind going out on the lake or in the bush in the rain. She would just get up and go."

She had an intimate relationship with the lake and the land, something best described in the spiritual terms of her ancestors, people of the land who passed that knowledge down through generations.

Her husband remembers hours filled with worry after Cook would pack up their three children and head out onto the lake on her own.

"She gave me grey hairs," he said.

She was independent, an explorer who never quite left her roots. She was born in the bush, at Spark Lake, and raised by her father, a hunter and trapper who had migrated North from Saskatchewan, eventually finding a stable home in Lutsel K'e.

Her intimates say she was the last woman alive who truly knew Great Slave Lake, and her love for it was infectious.

"I fell in love with her and then I fell in love with the land," said Clark.

Jonas Catholique, her step-brother-in-law, used to joke that "she's not a woman, she's a man."

Cook was a caregiver for her culture, using her relationships with elders to nurture her own knowledge.

Her heart for her traditional customs was matched by her heart for youth: when she was sick, young people from all over the territory called to pass on their regrets. Cook spoke fluently the languages and customs of two cultures: that of her native ancestors, and the western culture that surrounded her in Yellowknife.

Equally at ease in urban and in rural surroundings, Cook would try anything -- especially if it was initially denied her.

"She wasn't scared to try anything, she was always wanting to try something new," said Clark.

That spirit brought her through a lengthy list of jobs: cook, commercial fisher, government print shop employee, outfitter and CBC reporter.

As a reporter, she had a genuineness that was disarming, said Catholique, who also works at the CBC.

"People opened up to her because she was just so friendly."

But always, on the job or out, she was connected to her family, her custom, her land. And so, this spring when the sun begins to reinvigorate winter's bare branches, Cook's cremated remains will be returned to the land, spread across her father's grave by the breezes which once gave her life.