Northerners will recognize a slice of their own lives

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North Spirit: Travels Among The Cree And Ojibway Nations And Their Star Maps

By Paulette Jiles

Anchor Canada edition 2003 (sc) $21

In 1973, Paulette Jiles left behind a failed relationship with her significant other in Toronto and accepted a CBC assignment to work in Big Trout Lake, where she helped establish a radio station that would be run by the local Aboriginal people. With a book of published poetry to her credit and work in progress on another (and a much greater body of publishing credits since) Jiles' precision with language comes through in a lyrical and evocative first-person account of her northern experience.

She describes North Spirit as a book of creative non-fiction. Most of the book's characters are composites. So is the fictional community of North Spirit Lake, which is based on the real communities of Big Trout Lake and Sandy Lake. The events in the book are all true, the author says. North Spirit reads like a well-woven memoir, for that is what it is, selected accounts from a significant phase in an adventurous writer's life.

North Spirit is a lot more than that, however. Through Jiles' eyes, the reader gets to see the effect of the dawn of modern communications on remote communities and on Indian reserves in particular. A sense of nostalgia may come upon the reader for the traditional way of life that is vanishing in the sweep of technological change. While the old values of sharing and caring remain, the compromises with the outsider culture are starkly evident. As television and VCRs become common, consumerism gets a foothold, and the old gatherings for storytelling and family-centred entertainment decline. By the 1970s, the mythology that has underpinned both the stories and the beliefs of Indian peoples for eons is already fissured and split. Here and there, the old people remember and relate portions of their stories, and Jiles dutifully records them.

At the heart of Jiles' book, first published in hardcover in 1995, lies her fascination with the Star People and the night sky, and the Ojibway and Cree legends reflecting differing cultural beliefs about the constellations. The legend of the Stern Paddler, Oda-Ka-Daun, is an underlying theme throughout:

"He and his great vessel full of figures, characters, plots, denouements and resolutions were flying down the time-stream, bearing us all away. Carrying us through season after season, through the dangerous time. Like now, the bridge between seasons. The most dangerous time in the north. And here we are in a village that had gone backwards, or perhaps had jumped sideways, however temporarily, out of the western civilization supply grid, into another state. A state of new rain and clean saffron lamplight, wood smoke and people sitting quietly, listening, lifting their mugs of tea."

Jiles began her seven-year sojourn among the northern Cree and Ojibway people with a romanticized view of what life in a cabin in a remote Native community would be like.

Whatever illusions she may have had were shattered as the ice at spring breakup her first night there. She cavalierly declined to stay in accommodations set aside for white people that had electricity and running water, but quickly found out she knew nothing about chopping frozen green birch, starting a fire, or drawing water from a lake in winter. She nearly froze in an unheated cabin, but eventually learned how to live there, with the help of her Native neighbours. Jiles worked hard from the start to learn enough of their language to get by too.

One thing that the author said early in the book puzzled me. She states her age as 38, and I asked myself why a city woman of that age would go to the North as unprepared as Jiles was, without the proper clothes, and opt to sleep in rough accommodations in winter without basic bush skills. "It was colder than anything I had ever experienced," Jiles relates early in her tale. "A cold that pierced through everything I wore, especially the shrink-wrp parka and thin, city dress boots."

If she was 20, such naivete would be understandable, but at age 38 one would expect her to have more smarts. When I learned the author was an American from Missouri who had only arrived in Canada in the 1970s, I better understood how she would underestimate our extremes of climate.

The front of the book, though, says Jiles was born in 1943, which means she was actually 30 when she first went North. The reader may wonder, as I did, why Jiles would fictionalize her age. The voice that comes through seems like someone in her twenties at times, but this is attributable, I think, to Jiles having to adapt to what was for her a foreign environment, having to take a crash course in life skills, and having to rely so heavily on the Native people who were superiorly equipped to live with nature.

Part-way through the book, Jiles says she took a two-year hiatus from northern life but returned as a reporter for a fledgling Native newspaper, during which time she traveled by bush plane into many communities up the Hudson's Bay coast.

Jiles is forthright and at times expresses humour and irony in relating her foibles as she adjusts to Indian life. She is non-judgmental about the things she doesn't understand, or it may be that she left much of what she did not understand out of her book. She was humble enough to go to the Elders to tap into their wisdom, and shows her skill at reportage in relating incidents both wonder-filled and tragic just as she saw and experienced them, letting the reader do most of the interpretation.

Anyone who has lived in the North will recognize that Jiles so often gets the details right: the culture shock on both sides, the daily interactions and interdependence of community life, the self-reliance and stoicism and humour of northern peoples, the seasonal transitions, the precarious balance of life and death.

I knew if the book strove for authenticity it must include a forest fire-a cyclical, recurring event i Northern Ontario.

Jiles does not disappoint. Late in the story she writes, "Hot winds and heat columns beat us all the way to Cat Lake, a little village only one hundred miles north of Sioux Lookout."

What she describes is reminiscent of my own travels in 1981, when much of the North from Dryden to Red Lake was charred and smouldering.

Where Jiles falters a bit is in the first chapters, in places. There are a few too many speeches about the play she is writing, which struck me as self-absorbed and boring. I wondered if she had found it difficult to find a starting point for her tale. In addition, sometimes the dialogue by Native people just does not ring true-long speeches there too-devices Jiles used to fold in the necessary exposition, when the likelihood is that a word or two, or a look, replaced a lot of the talk. But of course, the explanations have to be there; a book cannot copy life exactly or it would never work as literature.

When Jiles describes something-a place, an incident-her voice is a waterfall cascading over little stones, eddying, carrying the reader deftly to a new experience, but the book would have benefited from stronger character development throughout.

The other weakness I found irritating for a book that has been reprinted several times is sloppy copyediting in the early pages, starting with page one of the preface. Either that improved after a few chapters, or my awareness of it was subsumed by a beautiful story told by a writer of great skill.

Review by Joan Taillon