I’m at Brookside Cemetery, swatting mosquitoes, frowning at an empty patch of grass where administration has told me a headstone should stand. Standing in the dappled shade of an elm tree, I look at the place where I’ve been told she was buried, almost 100 years ago, but her marker is gone. Certainly, there is room for one more headstone in this row, but the spot is mute to what lies beneath.
I return to the administration office to inquire again. Pulling a dusty ledger out from some back room, they confirm the location, and note the stone was purchased and engraved in 1931. This is the resting place of someone completely forgotten, a child of my maternal grandfather’s unspoken-of first marriage. Young Grace Moore died of tuberculosis in the sanatorium at Ninette, a newlywed, but only a teenager.
I had come to this little patch of grass as part of a long journey to find her. Through birth and immigration records, through old Henderson’s Directories and through the astonishingly thorough records of the Lung Association and Bardal Funeral Home. She was elusive and mysterious, and her short life and obscured identity and origin seemed to call to me to learn more, to introduce myself and to be the first in a long time even to know she existed.
Supplied
Rebecca Chambers’ great-grandfather, Thomas Johnstone, with two of his sons, likely in the late 1920s.
I love a good quest, so on this story-finding journey, I also scoured the Free Press archives, and to my astonishment, found a wedding announcement and a photo. The newspaper had only recently begun featuring local photos, and here was my teenage aunt, dressed for her wedding, smiling at me through time.
Pages of the newspaper are the voices and sometimes the faces of people known only to us, stories that matter primarily to those in this place. It’s this, our place-based storytelling, that calls us to ensure we are all represented in these pages — not just blushing English brides but the triumphs of newcomers, brave entrepreneurs and fearless Indigenous leaders. The stories and events that reflect who we love and what we care deeply about become the voices and faces of ancestors who will continue to guide and inform us even after they are gone.
This commitment to storytelling also binds us in our responsibility to Indigenous Manitobans. We recognize our pages haven’t always featured faces representing all of us, and that other modes of storytelling predate our first issue by several millennia.
My English ancestors found their names in the newspaper, but my Métis forebears found none at all. Their stories had to be dredged from Post Journals at Moose Factory, or pieced together over tea with aging relatives and younger storykeepers. (Post Journals were Hudson’s Bay Co. chronicles of events of note and people’s arrivals and departures, among other things.)
But we do know our history. The cousins retell the stories now. We tell of the Hannah Bay Massacre, the starvation and orphaning of ancestors, and the great uncle who couldn’t afford a horse so had a moose pull his cart. We gingerly revisit the artifacts: the rifle, the beadwork, the handwritten testimonials and scant photographs are reunited and shared. We speak of other objects lost to time: the fiddle that made us dance, the precious ring lost while threshing grain. We can describe them even though we’ve never seen them. For my Indigenous relations, this is our archive, our repository of all we know from what we have been through; all that lives directly within our bodies and was never written down.
Adding to our shared stories about this place, the Free Press is launching an email newsletter focusing on Indigenous issues and Indigenous voices, co-written by me and my colleague Niigaan Sinclair. We want to explore and examine Manitoba experiences from an Indigenous perspective, and establish a place to reflect on the work done at the Free Press to support, strengthen and sustain Indigenous voices and stories.
“This commitment to storytelling also binds us in our responsibility to Indigenous Manitobans.”
The staff at Brookside Cemetery told me my aunt’s headstone, the last physical reminder of her time on Earth, has sunk into the ground, as many of ours will too, one day. It’s the stories that will outlive us. Every day at the Free Press we endeavour to do better than the day before. We learn from one another, from our diverse and dynamic province, and we are honoured to learn from those who have told the stories of this place for far longer than we have.
rebecca.chambers@freepress.mb.ca
Rebecca Chambers
Rebecca explores what it means to be a Winnipegger by layering experiences and reactions to current events upon our unique and sometimes contentious history and culture. Her column appears alternating Saturdays.
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