From the Introduction by Raymond Yakeleya
If CBC had chosen to do a white man side of the story, we might have heard something like, “Let’s do Alexander Mackenzie’s voyage,” but that’s not the First Nation perspective. What did the Dene really think of Alexander Mackenzie? They didn’t think very highly of him. Mackenzie’s Dene name translated into “long neck” and they perceived him as being very lazy because he was being paddled around all the time. He didn’t work as a Chief would with his people.
Alexander Mackenzie didn’t have good things to say about the river that bears his name, in fact he called it “The River of Disappointment” because it wasn’t a shortcut to China. But to the Dene People, the river was a river of life — a highway that would lead Dene People from town to town to trade with our relatives. It was something special for us and in our language we call it the Dehcho, which means the Great River. Our perspective of the Dehcho was different from Mackenzie’s because of its great utility. In winter time we’d drive dog teams along it to visit relatives and friends, and in summer we’d take boats to hunt moose and to fish. The Dehcho has great meaning to us for its fishing places, meeting places, and sacred places.
But the white men did not think like that, they thought, “How can we make money off this?” Dene People are not motivated by that. For us, the value comes from places along the river that are holy places so you go there and make offerings and pray, because our inner spirit needs to be revived and refreshed with a spiritual connection. The white man does not see that in our lands or in other First Nation lands. But we see that.
Something that would have come out much differently if white people had told the story is the discovery of oil. In the film and in greater detail now in this book, my Uncle Joe Blondin talks about his experience and how it affected my own family to a great extent. The Blondin central camp family homes were in what became Norman Wells and oil has been oozing out of there for thousands of years. They used the oil to treat the runners on their dogsleds, especially in the spring when the snow was soft, and to seal up canoes to waterproof them. Other Dene nations would be able to recognize canoes from Norman Wells because of their black bottoms. The Blondin family would always invite other people to come and use the oil because it was meant for everyone, so they would use it on their boats in the summer and on their sleigh runners so they could travel in wet snow. They didn’t know about petroleum at the time but they knew they had something special. They did not know how to read or write because the white man’s education system had not got to them yet, but they eventually learned about claims and how you could put a claim to the land. Dene people realized later that because they were not citizens of Canada, they had no rights — only the white man had rights to the mineral wealth. But the white man only wants wealth, that’s what their minds are geared for. They come onto the land and say. “Where’s the timber, where’s the salmon, where’s the gold, where’s the oil? Where are the really good lands we can put a farm on?” Our People are not like that. We look for the good hunting territories, where we can find caribou and moose or mountain sheep and things that sustain us.
