Enwhisteetkwa: Walk in Water

Jenifer Lepiano was a writer and drama teacher in Toronto.

Here is a different kind of classroom reader. Jeannette Armstrong, an Okanagan Indian, tells the story of life in her tribe from winter 1859 to fall 1860, through the eyes of an eleven-year-old girl, Enwhisteetkwa.

Enwhisteetkwa’s narrative begins in the second moon of the first season, White Time. Her grandmother is singing, and as she listens Enwhisteetkwa is “warm and dream hearing.” Her life is surrounded by a great mystery, a “something” she calls it. “I always thought of that something as a being, big, warm and strong and all around me. Around my whole family. It was a real living thing that could be summoned.”

The moons change. Snow Time gives way to Buttercup Moon followed by Green Leaf Time. From the winter lodge we accompany Enwhisteetkwa with her cousin’s family to their village at Okanagan Falls. We encounter the first talk of Semas, a people of hairy faces and bad manners who come as visitors but stay as intruders. The Semas run like a rumour through Enwhisteetkwa’s narrative until she sees a few of them in the flesh. One of the consequences of her perspective is that the reader is aware of the Indian’s future under the white men only as an intensely felt irony. To the Okanagan that year, although they were disturbing, even frightening, the Semas remained inconsequential.

Hunting, fishing, trapping, trading, the building and striking of summer camp, spirits, dancing, games, are all experienced by Enwhisteetkwa in season. In Crisp on the Face Moon, she and her people gather again in the big house for “the big feast of thanking.” Their chief leads the prayers to the Great Spirit. “He said that it was good to live as we did. I understood what he said. I liked our food and how we lived. I hoped it would never change.”

Enwhisteetkwa has a place as a supplementary reading book in every public school classroom. Probably in language and style it best suits grade five children, and since that is often the year “the explorers” are introduced, it could well be good medicine. Jeannette Armstrong’s view of a year in her people’s past is more than a school book. It has “something.”