The Women on the Bridge

Christy Conte is a business analyst and entrepreneur in Ajax, Ontario.

Shamefully, the history of Canada’s Native people is not particularly
well known. On the rare occasions we think about it at all, the best
mental images most of us can conjure resemble those from a grade 6
primer. Although this book is a work of fiction, most of the events and
characters in it are historical. The result is a revealing look at the
Frog Lake massacres of 1885 in the Saskatchewan Territories.

The massacre itself is related by Theresa Gowanlock, one of two white
women to survive the slaughter by a dissident faction of Big Bear’s
Plains Cree Band. She begins with an incident witnessed, in the fall of
1884, on the bridge at Battleford. Later, Theresa is captured and forced
to live among the Cree women. Despite her alienation and horror, she
struggles to make sense of her husband’s murder, and, in so doing,
comes to identify with these women.

Dagg explores a number of themes in this collection. On one level, as
experienced by the family of the local Hudson’s Bay factor, life in
the Northwest is a wonderful frontier adventure. (Though the Macleans
lead as cloistered and insulated an existence as one can imagine, they
take pride in having “adapted” so successfully.) More central a
theme is the relationship between the Natives—nontreaty Cree—and
white settlers. The last survivor of the massacre, a trader whose
livelihood depends on the exploitation of the natives, comments, “once
the Indians had been conquered and swindled out of their land, there was
nothing left to take but their culture. Hell, it made sense in a warped
kind of way.” The stories also provide an interesting commentary on
the women of the period. No shrinking violets, these; they are strong
and brutally pragmatic.

This thoughtful, well-written account of a dark moment from Canada’s
past is important reading, for, as the saying goes, those ignorant of
history may well be fated to repeat it.