John Mary - 2015;2013;

STONEY CREEK WOMAN

THE STORY OF MARY JOHN

Bridget Moran

STONEY CREEK WOMAN

Copyright 1988 by Bridget Moran and Mary John
New preface 1997 by Bridget Moran

FOURTEENTH PRINTING: 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form by any meansgraphic, electronic or mechanicalwithout the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.

ARSENAL PULP PRESS
#101-211 East Georgia St.
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 1Z6
arsenalpulp.com

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program, and the Government of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program for its publishing activities.

Typeset by the Vancouver Desktop Publishing Centre
Printed and bound in Canada by Printcrafters
Cover photo: Mary John, 1965
Author photo by Phyllis Parker

Photos reprinted with the permission of the Provincial Archives of British Columbia, the Prince George Citizen, and Mary John.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Moran, Bridget, 1923-1999
Stoney Creek woman

ISBN 1-55152-047-8
EISBN 978-1-55152-336-1

1. John, Mary, 1913-2005 2. Stoney Creek Indian Reserve (B.C.)Biography. 3. Carrier IndiansBiography. 4. Indian womenBritish ColumbiaBiography. I. Title.

E99.T17J63 1997 971.004972 C97-910480-7

ISBN13 978-1-55152-047-6

This book is dedicated to my dearest daughter, Helen Jones, who inspired me to tell my story, Helen died on May 19, 1987, while the writing of this book was in progress.

MARY JOHN

ALMOST A DECADE HAS PASSED since Elder Mary John and I autographed the first copies of Stoney Creek Woman, a project which had begun with a simple letter ten years earlier. That initial book-signing on November 12, 1988 was the beginning of what Mary calls an adventure that has taken us both into undreamed-of places and relationships and events.

Although, as I write in the original introduction to Stoney Creek Woman, I feel as though I have known Mary John forever, in fact I first met her in 1976, when the people of Stoney Creek joined together to force the justice system to hold an inquest into the death of Coreen Thomas. The twenty-one-year-old Carrier Native was in her ninth month of pregnancy when she was struck and killed by a car driven by a young man named Richard Redekop. During the time before the inquest and for months afterwards, I was often in Mary Johns home, and each time I came away warmed just by having been with her.

And the letterit was written in 1977 by Marys beloved daughter Helen, and in it she asked me to write the story of her mothers life.

Regrettably, the letter has been lost, but I have not forgotten Helens words. She wrote that she felt her mothers life was the story of many aboriginal women of Marys generation. But more than this, wrote Helen, she believed that her mother had special qualities that should be set down in a book, so that future generations of First Nations could know her mother as her family and community knew her.

Regrettably, too, by the time Mary and I were in Mosquito Books in Prince George, B.C. that cold November day in 1988, Helen had passed away. Nevertheless, before she died, she knew the book was underway. For months, even years after her letter to me, on weekends and during summer holidays, she would discover my little motorhome parked beside her mothers house. She could have predicted the scene she would find inside: her mother glancing out over Nulki Lake, her hands endlessly busy with her beadwork, and me, across from her, knitting at a fairly frantic paceI was trying, successfully I might add, to quit smoking. A cheap little tape-recorder was between us on Marys big work table, quietly spinning away, recording for all time our words, our laughter, our anger, and sometimes our tears.

In the years since the publication of Stoney Creek Woman, Mary John and I have criss-crossed British Columbia many times. In villages and cities, on reservations in the Nass Valley and off the coast of Prince Rupert, in the heart of Vancouver Island and on reserves closer to home in the central part of the province, we have visited schools, colleges and universities, and attended head-start programs, conferences, work-shops and meetings of every kind. We have also become more deeply involved in each others lives: Mary has invited me to potlatches, wakes, funerals, and gatherings on her reserve. She comes to my parties, my special events, and I have taken to calling my spare room Marys room. Unless one or the other of us is travelling, we talk on a weekly basis, sometimes more.

During our travels together, an interesting transformation has taken place in the way we refer to Stoney Creek Woman. We began by describing it as my book about Elder Mary John. Imperceptibly the description changed to our book, and then, without either one of us quite knowing how or when the change occurred, it became, and remains, Marys book.

Again, imperceptibly, over the years we developed a routine in our public appearancesI make the speeches and, for the most part, Mary answers the questions. We talk about everything: the residential school system, life on Stoney Creek, racism, the potlatch system, the Elders Society, the Catholic Church, her work to preserve the Carrier language and culture, her health, her concerns about poverty and un-employment, her arranged marriage, and how Stoney Creek Woman was written, including her refusal to let me put any word about sex into the book. There are no areas of her life, nor in mine for that matter, which are off limits when we appear together.

And during these public functions, there is much laughter.

There is the story Mary tells of the young person learning the Carrier language who believed she was asking for the time when in fact she was saying, White mans ear. There is also the tale of the youths who wanted to make traditional food and deliver it to the Stoney Creek elders in their homes. They told me they wanted to make fish head soup, Mary says, and asked me what to do. I told him to get fish heads, water, a little salt, some onion and potato, and to let them boil. The young people told me they decided to try the soup themselves, but when they saw the fish head in the dish, they said, Yuk! Its looking at us! and they couldnt eat it. So they put the soup in the elders van to deliver it, but it spilled. The van smells like fish to this day!

Needless to say, each of us has a life that is active and apart from the other. Mary John is involved in clan gatherings, justice committees, land claim hearings, Carrier assemblies, child welfare committees, economic development planning sesssions, and institutes dedicated to preserving Carrier language and culture. And with it all, she is a loving mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother; at last count she had thirty grandchildren, thirty-one great-grandchildren, and three great-great-grandchildren.

She has received many honours. In 1992 she was awarded the Governor Generals Medal commemorating the 125th anniversary of the Confederation of Canada. In 1996 the University of Northern British Columbia bestowed an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree on her, in recognition of her many years of service to her people. At an Elders Society dinner to celebrate this awardthe elders called it her graduation dinnerthe Carrier Sekani tribal chief, Linda Prince, presented her with a cape; a caribou, symbol of Marys clan, was out-lined on the back. And in April 1997 she travelled to Ottawa to receive the Order of Canada from the Governor General.