WINDFLOWER

My mom died the day before she turned forty-nine. Where were you when you were forty-nine? Or where do you think you will be? 

The abyss of age I stared into had no map.  

She never told us we were Métis. I now carry my Métis Nation of Alberta card, but what does it really mean to be Métis? Was I a pretendian? 

I always believed I could make anything happen. It was what my Dad did, expend superhuman energy to move us to a new place, to get a new job. He drove himself to the hospital when he had a heart attack. Just like my Dad, if something in my life wasn’t working out, I changed the place, (or the partner, or the professor.) But when I became a mother, I couldn’t fake my way anymore.  

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Pulsatilla (Windflower, Pasque Flower) 

Medicinal actions:  

Alterative, analgesic, anti-inflammatory, sedative 

Herbal Medicinal uses: 

Pulsatilla exerts a profound effect on the nervous system. The patient who needs pulsatilla has general nervousness, is fearful with easy weeping. They have changeable symptoms and moods, experience dejection, and are better with consolation.  

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In 2017, instead of taking my audiology license and working in Calgary, I started a master’s thesis project in Saskatoon. I had recently learned my mom had grown up Métis. When I look back, the decision to move to Saskatoon only makes sense in that I was trying to learn about the Métis people.  

Over two months, I tested four hundred babies for hearing loss. They were wrapped like burritos in fresh linens, clean and beautiful. I was surprised by all the Métis babies, more Métis people than I knew existed.  

We travelled up past La Ronge to work with a little girl with a cochlear implant. Towns and fields turned to forests and ice-covered lakes. Ski-Doos drove beside us on the highway. At the school on the reserve, the light filtered into wide hallways filled with art; kids laughed in the classrooms; teachers joked in the staff room. I wanted to stay. I wanted to be in that place where whoever I was felt normal. 

As we drove, my friend told me about Batoche, the town where the battle happened. 

“What battle?” I said. 

She looked at me. 

“You sure you’re Métis?” 

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The herbal tincture Pulsatilla is used to treat nervous exhaustion. Use it with anemic patients or those with a feeble pulse, poor digestion, and cold extremities. It is useful for suppressions of emotions which create tension and pain.  

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I spent my twenties terrified of getting pregnant, so it was confusing when I struggled to conceive in my early thirties. Finally, when I was 34, it worked. A few weeks before my due date I got a fever. When the fever broke, my water broke as well.  

I laboured under the hot water of the shower in the hospital and then on the bed. My contractions surged, tearing and painful. The time from first contraction to birth was only a few hours. I didn’t birth my child – I ripped her out of myself. I lost so much blood they put me on an I.V. Looking back, it seems incomprehensible to me that they would send someone so weak and broken home the same day. 

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The homeopathic remedy Pulsatilla is indicated for people who bend, like the head of the flower bends in the wind. It is indicated for grief and bereavement and is often prescribed when someone describes never feeling well after a certain incident. It is for people who look drawn out but have a deep internal resilience.   

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In Saskatoon, I travelled north to a Métis cultural festival called Back to Batoche. A barn held thousands of people watching the fiddle and jig competitions. I recognized the music. It was the same music my mom played when I was a child. Cabins held artisans with woven sashes and beading. Horses raced on the track, my heart on their hooves. I wanted it all like a body wants blood.  

When I first told my friends I was Métis they said, “But you’re one of the last ones, right? It ends with you?” But there, at Batoche, was Métis culture. It wasn’t that the culture was dead, it was that I was dead to it. At the town of Batoche, I learned the Red River Métis people were a specific group, not just anyone who had some Indigenous blood and some settler blood. I didn’t know. 

At the Batoche historical site I learned the 1885 Battle of Batoche was between the Métis townsfolk and the Mounties. Afterward, First Nations people were forced to stay on reserves and their children sent to residential schools. Some Métis were moved from their traditional lands to the U.S.A. Many hid their identities for their own safety. The massive influx of settlers and the failure of the corrupt scrip system meant many Métis were left landless. The ones who squatted along the sides of roads were known as the “road allowance people.”  

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After the birth, my daughter and I slept on a mattress on the main floor because I couldn’t climb the stairs. We were terrified, but everyone said having a newborn was difficult.  

Two weeks in, the pain in my abdomen flared. I performed the tests for appendicitis: McBurney’s, Rovsing’s. One of them tested positive. The next few days are as hazy as the eerie white fluorescent light I lay under on the hospital hallway gurney. It took them twenty-four hours to get me into surgery, because when they did a C.T. scan, they couldn’t find an appendix at all. 

I woke up in the recovery room throwing up, shitting myself, spurting milk. Two nurses worked to keep me stable. I spent the next two weeks in the false freedom of pain drugs.  

I remember the moment when I became conscious enough to really see my daughter. For the first time, a month after she was born, she looked healthy. She was filling out, already too long for her pink bunny onesie. She lay at my feet on the hospital bed, fluffy and real. 

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I learned the medicinal uses of Pulsatilla first. It was only later, when I wandered the wide grassy Nose Hill Park in Calgary in the spring, that I saw it as a flower. The buds can be seen, like a hidden gift, between pockets of snow; forever returning, despite the hard winter they survived through. The plant was bigger than I expected, the sturdy first-buds fuzz enveloped until they opened nodding and purple, almost too heavy for their short stems. Their colour varies from deep to pale purple and sometimes to white.  

It is the prairie crocus, the windflower, a contradiction in its strength and ability to bend.  

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At a 2023 Métis women’s storyteller gathering, I met a woman whose ancestral land was where the University of Alberta is located, where the bluff overlooks the wide green river valley. Down the hill the bushes are ripe for berry picking. At every Métis gathering, elders speak of the land they used to own. One woman said to another, over a steaming bowl of stew, “My grandparents came home one day to find a white guy in their house with a gun. He told them it was his house now.”  

I travelled to Métis Crossing with my brother and his two youngest kids, northeast of Edmonton on the North Saskatchewan river. I didn’t know the Métis settlements were so close to Edmonton: Lac La Biche, Slave Lake, Smoky Lake. When I was a ten-year-old camper at Birch Bay Ranch, I was playing at hunting, canoeing, trapping, only hours away from where my great-great grandfather and his sons worked as Métis voyageurs. 

Métis Crossing is a village with farmhouses, goats, a storytelling circle, campground, and hotel, cedar beams and light and shadow. There is canoeing and archery and snowshoeing. So much of it reminds me of things my parents taught me growing up in Northern B.C. 

We stayed in a trapper’s tent: canvas shelters on a wooden base overlooking the river. In the morning, I woke early and built a fire in the stove like my father would have. Outside, my brother was already up. I wondered if his kids knew how capable he was, about how much our father taught him about surviving in the bush. 

The sun was almost up. The tops of the trees were lit with the first rays while the trunks lay in shade. The air was still crisp with memory of night. The wood for the fire was cold in my hands. Water, fire, pot, heat, coffee, the rhythm of a camping morning.  

Later we took a finger-weaving class in one of the farmhouses and sat in on a hide-treatment talk in a copse of woods. Staff workers played fiddle music on the small outdoor stage, and I taught my nephew how to jig.  

At Métis Crossing they didn’t focus on colonization. Instead, they gave us what we needed, a celebration of the joy and expertise of the Métis people.  

We were unlikely to forget the trauma of our ancestors. We were much more in danger of forgetting the joy.  

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In 2020, my doctor ordered an X-ray on my hip. The X-ray showed a surprise: a clip was left in my abdomen in 2008 after the appendix surgery. In the surgical report, he read that I almost died on that surgical table. My appendix had fused to the outside of my digestive tract, which left an open hole where food and gastric fluid seeped into my abdomen. For four hours they worked to clean up the sepsis and close me up. I owe my life to those doctors, but I was never the same after that surgery.  

What would pregnancy and childbirth and parenting have been like, had I had a mother? What would it have been like, to have someone who toiled through five births there to tell you what is normal and not normal? 

Was I trying to find out what happened to my mom? Or was I trying to find out what happened to my culture? Was my rage born of the anger of not knowing my culture or of losing my mother? But, were they really so different? Was being a motherless daughter a byproduct of being from a culture whose support systems were dismantled? 

These are the things that I have recently learned, my own secret history. My great-grandmother was married off at thirteen. My granny was left motherless at thirteen when her mother died at thirty-one years old. My mother got married at twenty and received no support in the raising of her kids. Is this what intergenerational trauma is? Generations of women who are trying to “lean in” because they have to go it on their own, because their own parents are either dead or desperately trying to get by? Is the cause of our toughness and our frailty the physical manifestations of colonization? 

It is hard for me to separate them. 

My strategy for survival was always to push harder. I realize now, “leaning in” is a shoddy replacement for culture. You don’t have to “lean” in when you have a safety net. 

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Since Batoche and Métis Crossing, I’ve found and reconnected to my Métis family in the Kootenay region of B.C., where my mother was from. Now I know the stories. My daughter plays the fiddle, and she knows the stories too.  

I grow Pulsatilla in my garden now. It sits strong in a bed of other medicinal and traditional herbs. It appears first in the spring, surprising me every time with its beauty and hardiness. I am happy to have discovered it. It, of course, was there all along, I just needed to find it.