I tell myself stories about the cycles of the world, before I fall asleep. The other evening, I was telling myself a story about glaciers.
I have already heard, during a traditional ceremony, this idea: the rocks are our grandfathers. Their memory is beyond us. It even exceeds the age of our societies today. I tried to imagine in my mind what that could represent as a memory. Their memory is so long, we cannot consider the years, since they are lost in the thousands. The rock on which we walk, no matter what, wherever we are, already represents ten thousand times more lives lived than us. And it is this memory that we honor when we name the stone “my oldest”.
My human limits do not allow me to know the extent of a thousand years. If I’m lucky, I’ll live to be 100, and there I’ll know a measure of a century. My consciousness will then be full of it.
I can still imagine beyond a century. I can imagine 200 years, 300 years, 400 years.
When we are indigenous, we sometimes reflect on the world by calculating 500 years of lost landmarks. The next 500 years will be for reunion and balance. That’s 1000 years of consciousness.
Rebirth means rediscovering these ancient lines to better draw the future, to better rebalance things of the present as best as possible. But that is a separate subject. To paint my greatest visions, I need to go back to my memory.
Since my memory has also been somewhat erased, I can hardly know and imagine our lives before 1492, for example. So I won’t be able to consider – or perhaps feel – the extent of time over thousands of years at all. I then feel tiny right next to this immense rock on which I stand, on the banks of the river, here, at the mouth of the Amédée river flowing into the Saint-Laurent river, in Baie-Comeau.
When I close my eyes, I exercise my memory. In the instant after lowering my eyelids, my eyes have already taken in what is around me. And then, through tiny channels, travel in what we now perceive as the distant and inaccessible past, when, in truth, the old is very close to us, every day. Even the smallest pebble is in truth ten thousand times older than us.
This is why I feel called by the glaciers. Inexplicably, I am called. Enigmatically, they are also our elders. I say it’s enigmatic, because knowing the ice, from my perception, it never really lasts. We who see the winters here in annual back and forth movements, we know by heart the melting of the ice. When the flakes hit the ground, we know it’s not to last. We have already given up.
If we know the glaciers, it will be only by their absence. When the geologist recounts the birth of the Saguenay Fjord, for example, we imagine this strange giant (a little cold and distant!) Crossing the land and digging an insightful gorge in its path: it will be the bed of a river, carrying the water from a lake to a river, in the future.
So in the massive body of a glacier there is all the build-up of decades and centuries in our lungs when we learn to breathe in ice. The snow piles up, monopolizes, accumulates so much that it ends up transforming into solid ice. The air is evacuated, expelled. Everything is slow. We barely perceive the journey of a glacier, its route, its trajectory. Its progress.
And in this slowness, I walk alongside a glacier whose rough wall I touch. Under my hand, I feel his icy breath. Perhaps in ten years, if not in twenty years, the glaciers will have disappeared from the face of the planet. There may only be a few tough enough left, buried between the highest mountains, but they will no longer be thousands or giants.
I hear about their slow race to their demise much like I hear about the melting of my mother tongue, Innu-aimun.
Before telling myself stories about glaciers, I wanted to tell myself about snow. It is December, and even if she came a few times to cover the asphalt of Tio’tia: ke-Montreal, as of this writing, she fled with the last drops of rain. I browsed the Innu dictionary, this book which is my bedside book, and with a single finger all the variations resulting from the different perceptions and the different states of snow. Then I realized the extent of my growing helplessness.
Recently, I was told that our Innu children now speak very little our language. Some now barely understand it. Yet until now, we were among the last indigenous peoples in Canada to still speak our language to a large percentage of our population. The alarm is ringing. The reflex today is to speak French, since the school is in French, the outside world is in French, films, games, television. French is mixing more and more with Innu-Aimun on a daily basis. We do not have enough tools or enough resources to help us preserve our languages from erosion and eventual disappearance.
Indigenous languages are massive glaciers, but we perceive very little of their extent and value. Innu-aimun is my oldest child. Our memory crumbles, constantly distracted by the daily struggles; like having access to equitable health care, or simply having access to the power of cultural security. Or the fight to finance a tent for the homeless in Cabot Square in Tio’tia: ke, the Raphaël André tent, to protect the most disadvantaged indigenous people.
In January 2022, the decade of indigenous languages named by the United Nations will begin. It is described as “the historic opportunity to save these languages”. May our resolution at the end of 2021 for the next decade be that of ensuring the sustainability of indigenous languages, the glaciers of our collective memory.