Waswanipi by Jean-Yves Soucy (translated by Peter McCambridge) was a brief memoir about the author’s time spent in a Cree community southeast of James Bay in Quebec in the summer of 1963. Soucy, then eighteen, worked at an equipment depot with another man, André, aged fifty. He describes his work as follows:
“In the coming days I will have to carry out a full inventory of the equipment in the storage building: so many hoses, so many knapsack tanks, so many pumps, round shovels, picks, axes, this, and that. My first encounter with the profusion of paperwork that will have to be produced to keep the pen-pushers happy, including a journal in which to note all our daily comings and goings: from where to where, from this time to that, with the number of miles travelled to be filled in under columns labelled ‘On foot,’ ‘On horseback,’ ‘By car,’ ‘By motorboat,’ ‘Rowed.’ Pointless reports, naturally, that I will quickly learn to falsify, passing off as inspections our fishing expeditions, Sunday picnics, lifts from the south shore given to Cree families arriving by train, and trips to carry back boards recovered from old logging camps.”
Soucy and André are assigned two guides, William and Tommy (the latter of whom spoke only Cree), and Soucy earns their trust so that they confide in him about Cree life and traditions. He even learns some Cree phrases. Thus to the Cree population Soucy appears to be a benevolent white man, not one who is threatening their way of life.
On a canoe trip with William and Tommy, Soucy observes:
“No buildings in sight. It’s enough to make one think it’s the beginning of the world, back when man was nothing but an animal among animals, subject like them to the caprices of nature, yet not laying claim to be master of all before him, to own the land. And when I ask William who owns the lake and the surrounding forest, he furrows his thick brows above his wrinkled eyelids, and laughs:
“’That’s a White man’s question! The land belongs to no one; we belong to it. We eat what it gives us, until the day it eats us.’”
Soucy was persuaded to write about his time with the Cree when he had a chance encounter decades later with William’s son, Romeo. The Cree way of life in Waswanipi had by then disappeared, and Romeo wanted Soucy to capture what life in the community was like, especially his time spent with Romeo’s father. This summer memoir was a mere 109 pages and an easy read in a single sitting. A Cree vocabulary was provided at the end yet it was in such a small font that I needed a magnifying glass to read it.