Re-Constellating lii zitwel pi l’syel

Keywords:

• stars,
• sky,
• northern lights,
• devil,
• memory,
• time,
• Michif,
• Métis,
• Manitoba,
• Stories

Mots-clés :

• étoiles,
• ciel,
• les aurores,
• le diable,
• mémoire,
• le temps,
• Michif,
• Métis,
• Manitoba,
• histoire

Mots-clés michif:

• itwel,
• syel,
• lii chirraan,
• li djiable,
• mimwayr,
• li taan,
• Michif,
• Manitoba,
• histwayr

“Oh, les étoiles! Vous avez de belles étoiles au Manitoba!” Twenty years ago, we stood on Jericho Beach in Vancouver, British Columbia, watching, and waiting for a battery of mortars on a barge out on English Bay to unleash a burst of fireworks. Radios and boomboxes and loudspeakers squawked around us in anticipation and folk crammed the shoreline looking for a view of the water. A barrage of ariels, rockets, and shell bursts would soon light up the sky, and glittering chrysanthemums, peonies, willows, spirals, spiders, crossettes, and dahlias would bloom in synchrony with the music on the radio — someone said this was a competition, different nations putting on a show with light and sound — but we were young, and from elsewhere, staying at the hostel, and we had few notions. My wife and I had wandered onto the beach in awe at the lights, the city sprawled like some crumpled sheet at the feet of the mountains across the water. The crowd snaked around us on the sand, and eventually to avoid being swept along we sheltered atop a small pier with other guests from the hostel. We met a francophone there, un Québécois — you could tell by his accent — and we started to chat. We told him we were from Manitoba. “Oui, y’a du monde qui parlent l’français au Manitoba.” “Non, on vient pas du Québec. Never been,” I told him. We went through the old dance that always happens when you meet another francophone, from elsewhere, but then the man said something that made us pause. He talked about our stars. “Vous avez de belles étoiles au Manitoba!” We thought he was pulling our leg. Some new riff off la vieille joke. C’t’une bonne chance que vous avez des beaux grands ciels parce que y’a rien à voir sur la terre. Fly over country, right? Drive through country. Except, c’est pas vrai, là, la partie à propos de la terre, anyways. But then the man kept going, and he mentioned the road signs that he had seen when he first hit the prairies — those blue rectangular panels with a big star on them. The provincial government had placed a bunch of them along the highways to draw attention to local historical and cultural sites. Economic stimulus, t’sé. Watch for the ミ☆, they proclaimed. The man had seen the signs, but he misinterpreted their meaning. And so, as he told it, he pulled over and stood along the highway, and as a semi-truck groaned passed him, he looked up into the sky, like really looked up into the sky. “Vous avez de belles étoiles au Manitoba!” I couldn’t tell you precisely how the fireworks looked twenty years ago, or how the music sounded either — it was probably a sensory bouquet of dissonant percussions and something vaguely classic. Strings maybe. Certainly no fiddle. No, what I remember is the way that this man talked about the stars. Les étoiles. In the years since, my wife and I have periodically exclaimed “les étoiles!”, affecting the same breathless enthusiasm that this man displayed, in some parody meant not to ridicule or deride, but rather to reminisce about our adventures — six weeks camping out of a red Pontiac in B.C. — and, I think, to marvel also at that joyful appreciation of our skies and the meaningfulness of that momentary kinship. Watching the sky is what folk on the prairies do. There is nothing like watching thunderheads swell on a hot summer’s day — towering masses of bulbous white clouds brushing up against heaven, …