A Gift of Words, a Gift of Truth: A Chipewyan Story of a Hard Winter

Abstract

This article focuses on a poignant story told by an elderly Chipewyan or Dené woman—Mrs. Nataway—about the hardest winter of her life. She wished to tell me this story to counter any excessively romantic apperception I might have attained of the traditional caribou‐hunting and fishing life in the northern Canadian transitional forest and barrenlands. In traditional Dené culture, storytelling, or giving gifts of words, is a holy activity that is a part of a broader system of reciprocity whereby knowledge/power cycles and the cosmos is prevented from reverting to chaos. In the manner of all elderly storytellers, Mrs. Nataway was concerned that my account of her words be true, since stories are inspired by the animals and inaccuracy can lead to being “out of luck” or having “bad luck” if they are offended. But a more basic concern is that knowledge cannot be empowering if it is not true. The truth is a central consideration in Chipewyan cosmology, wherein the universe is a moral not a mechanistic system. Mrs. Nataway was concerned with didactic, practical, and moral truth, and with the broader emotional truth that tends to be beyond explication. Her story could only be empowering to the extent that the listener could actually feel what the times of hardship were like when she was young, a time when nearly all of the Dené lived year‐round in the bush.