Page 11 - 1st Anthology 2011

I forget the man’s name, and I know it too. I’ll probably sleep on it. You know some of the
names I forgot, even some of my language and when I’m sleeping I’ll think of it. And my

son Harley said why don’t you just sit up and write it down. Anyway, maybe someday I’ll
do that.

My grandfather, old man Otter used to have a house there. That was the first house I
knew. There were four houses in a row. I knew the old people that used to live there. I
can’t say their names in English. All I know is by our native tongue. One was Teddy
Manywound’s grandfather that lived in one of the houses. He lived in the second one next
to old man Otter’s. I only know those two, but I forgot the other two.

Indian agents gave permits, and it was at Fort Calgary. There was a fort. It wasn’t a town
or city. It was a fort because logs enclosed it all. The people that lived there were scared
that Tsuut’ina people would attack them. They were scared of us Indians. Anyway, if they
don’t come back on time. They used to have a clock at that gate at the fort. They would
set it at a certain time, so they would know what time to be back. Somebody from the fort
used to put the clock on, just so the Tsuut’ina people would know that the time is set for
them.

Even if my parents wanted to go to the city, they had to get a permit from the Indian
Agent. When you go to the city you had to be gone for certain amount of hours and be
back at a certain time. So that was given to the people when they wanted to go to the Fort
Calgary. And they would go get groceries or go trade with the Hudson Bay. That’s when
the Hudson Bay would get rich off us. We would trade them our beautiful fur, like beaver
pelts or coyotes, anything they would want to trade. I heard a lot about the Hudson Bay,
and I also heard a lot about people that worked for the Indians.

My dad is Oscar Otter, his dad was old man Otter and his dad was a powerful medicine
man. My mother was a Grasshopper before she married my dad. Her name is Daisy Otter.
I talk about how the Otter name came about, and Brokenknife. Old man Otter is my
grandfather and that’s how we got the name Otter. They just didn’t pick names. There
had to be some kind of date to mark a name. The Indian Agents they didn’t know how to
translate it so they just called him Otter. That’s how he got his name Otter.

He was sitting at the edge of a river. Something went wrong in his home life. He was
crying, sitting there. Something didn’t go right. A beaver came out of the water and tried
to console him. He said “do you want to have something you can depend on so you won’t
be crying anymore?”. The beaver told him to close his eyes. The old man Otter did, the
father of my grandfather. He closed his eyes and when he opened them he was in a teepee

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