Page 24 - 1st Anthology 2011

insects inside the house. We didn’t have big holes down there where we kept it clean. So
we didn’t have any insects of any kind.

The employment we had on the reserve, was cutting wood and selling them to the city.
Everybody had wood stoves. They didn’t have electricity. They didn’t bring in their food
and warm it up like today. They depended on wood and clean water. They would dig for
wells, and some of them were artesian wells. There’s still some on the reserve, I know one
place, and right now it’s still coming up. Up in the hills, we call it Blueberry Hill and there
are two springs there.

It’s where we used to go. We used to go up there a lot during the summer. There used to
be so many blueberries. We would camp in the Six Mile Coulee. During the weekends,
Friday evenings, pretty well everybody packs up and goes up to Blueberry Hill. We would
spend our weekend there picking berries. Some will be hunting, and when they kill
something, they would split the meat up amongst the people that were there. That place
is still there. I used to go up there every year with my own family. Harley and Calvin, my
boy Rupert that passed away. He was never interested. He was only interested in
livestock. He had cattle and horses, I don’t know what happened to them. I don’t know

who has his livestock.

Some of the men cut logs at the Blueberry Hill. They cut them to make the corrals. The
wood at the Blueberry Hill lasts longer then the poplar trees. Spruce trees last longer, and
some would make log houses out of it. A lot of them were very talented, for doing things
for themselves. Well we had no money to buy anything, so we had to make out with what
we had on our land.

The kind of teachings did my mom and dad had to offer, was my dad did a lot of talking
with us. Not my mom, my mom was a quiet person. I don’t know why she’s shy to talk
about our life. My dad he was outgoing and took all the time to talk to us.

My dad he used to make us do lumber. There will be two of us on each end of the saw
cutting lumber. I still had that saw but I don’t know what happened to it. Since I can’t
work outside all my tools disappeared. Whoever wants it can just ask.

Right now I have to watch my buckskins, because I still have lots and beads. I just got one
full suitcase full of white beads. I bought them all when I was down in Los Angeles. We
went down there with our teepees. They invited us from the Calgary Stampede and we
moved down to Los Angeles with our teepees and our teepee poles. We just took our stuff
that belonged to us and there was a truck that took the rest of our stuff.

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