I am always partial to camping in the mountains, but when I asked Audrey where she might want to go this year, she said due East. When I looked for provincial campgrounds with power that weren't too far, Whitney Lakes Provincial Park fit the bill. Ready access to a number of beaches, a town with a decent grocery store only half an hour away, and with fuel nearly $2 a litre, a 3-hour drive suited us just fine.
Our campsite at Ross Lake was the last one in the loop and remarkably well treed, which meant not having to make awkward eye contact with your neighbours everytime you got up from the picnic table or what have you. Tragically, I had gotten saturated with rain while loading the trailer on Monday morning and by Wednesday had symptoms consistent with bronchitis (hey, at least it wasn't covid again, right?).
It was a nice campsite that I tragically neglected to photograph, but between the trees and our 10 x 10 sun screen, it made for a very nice spot. We strung up a line for Canéla so she spent much less time getting tangled than last year, but the abundant squirrels near to drove her mad anyways.
We spent a fair amount of time doing as much nothing as possible, but still found time to take our tubes to the Whitney Lake beach on a hot day, explore Heinsburg and Alberta's last standing wooden water tower, and stumbled across Journey North Cider Company while taking a giant loop around the area and seeing Bonnyville and Kehewin Lake - beautiful country, and taking it in from an air-conditioned vehicle with Glory at the wheel was just the thing for my post-bronchial recovery.
Two historical highlights stood out for us though. The first was visiting the interpretive centre at Fort George/Buckingham House. We would not have known about this amazing site at all had it not been for the blue roadside attraction sign we saw on the highway as we drove to our campsite the first time.
I was honestly expecting a self-guided bit of signage showing the site of competing outposts from the Hudson's Bay Company and North West Company which predated Fort Edmonton by almost a decade, but we instead found a gorgeous interpretive center with tremendous displays, a good amount of artifacts and a perspective that did a great job incorporating the indigenous perspective.
It is ideally set up for young learners and school groups, but the three of us had a great time there - should you find yourself around Elk Point or Heinsburg, make a point of checking it out!
We also took a trip out to the Frog Lake National Historic site. If the same sounds familiar, the Frog Lake Massacre was a key event in the 1885 Northwest Rebellion/ Riel Resistance, and here, signs and a memorial cairn are all that stands to mark the event, but the signs do good work.
They present the facts in a context that invites an objective appraisal of western history, starting with Rupert's Land being sold outright to the Dominion of Canada three years after Confederation.Such a sale was something the indigenous leaders had literally no concept of - land ownership was as foreign an idea to them as any science fiction idea you might come across today. By 1876, most Cree tribal leaders had signed Treaty 6, but not Chief Big Bear, who stalled and resisted, sure that the treat would be broken and warning others against signing it. He finally relented in 1882, but was reluctant to choose lands for his people's reserve.
In the winter of 1885, the government cut off promised food rations in order to force Big Bear and his people to move into a reserve where they faced brutal conditions. In March of that year, news of the Métis victory at Duck Lake reached Big Bear, and despite his protestations, his war chief Wandering Spirit, his own son Miserable Man (AKA Little Bad Man) and six other men went to Frog Lake intent on moving the white settlers from there onto the reserve.
Tensions ran high, the Indian agent who had denied the Cree rations was killed, and when the dust settled ten settlers were dead - it is their stone cairn that stands at the site to this day.
Prime Minister John A. MacDonald breathlessly announced the Frog Lake Massacre in the House of Commons, which galvanized the government to send both militia and North West Mounted Police to apply a heavier hand to the resistance. The rebellion was put down, and the eight Cree were tried without legal counsel and hanged in Battleford, then buried in an unmarked grave.
Children from the nearby Battleford Industrial School (an Indian Residential School) were brought to watch the hangings as a "warning," but this may have backfired, as Howard Adams wrote in his book, Prisons of Grass:
Every member of the Indian nation heard the death-rattle of the eight heroes who died at the end of the colonizer's rope and they went quietly back to their compounds, obediently submitting themselves to the oppressors. The eight men who sacrificed their lives at the end of the rope were the champions of freedom and democracy. They were incomparable heroes, as shown by their last moments.
This grave was forgotten about until 1972 when it was rediscovered by students and eventually a simple headstone naming the eight men was placed there: Wandering Spirit, (Kapapamahchakwew) a Plains Cree war chief, Little Bear (Apaschiskoos), Walking the Sky (A.K.A. Round the Sky), Bad Arrow, Miserable Man, Iron Body, Ika (A.K.A. Crooked Leg) and Man Without Blood.
Big Bear, despite the testimony of both settler and indigenous witnesses describing his efforts to prevent the killings and keep Wandering Spirit and the others on the reserve, was convicted for them anyways as chief, and spent three years in prison, dying a year after his release.
I've forgotten so much of what I learned of the Red River and North-West Rebellions - names of battles and people like Batoche, Cut-Knife, and Gabriel Dumont are still with me but diminished in significance. I was grateful for the opportunity to re-learn a bit about it.
I was surprised to learn that Glory's curriculum had included almost no mention of these events ( I swear we covered them on three different occasions over junior high and high school) and I mused as to why this might be.
"Maybe they knew how angry it would make people like me," she said earnestly. Her sense of injustice had been especially provoked by the juxtaposition of the memorial cairn for the settler victims and an unmarked grave for the Cree.
That was the day we took our long drive, quietly appreciating the beautiful country and letting the lesson we had learned soak in.
Ideally, a vacation should promote feelings of joy and relaxation, not anger at injustices from a century ago, but we were only too willing to trade a little enjoyment for a bit of enlightenment, and hopefully some wisdom too.
And the lake was still waiting for us when Fenya joined us on Friday, and the rain stopped early Sunday, so the trailer was dry this time when we packed it. All in all a great vacation!
No comments:
Post a Comment