Waswanipi

It’s 1963, Jean-Yves Soucy is 18 and looking for a summer job. He dreams of being a fire warden scanning the boreal forest from a fire tower. But to his dismay he is sent to an equipment depot somewhere between Val-d’Or and Chibougamau in Northern Quebec. His disappointment vanishes when he learns that the depot is located near a Cree community and that he will have two Cree guides, including a man named William Saganash, and his work will involve canoeing through the lakes and rivers of the region. On each encounter with the Crees, on each of the long trips across water or through the bush, Jean-Yves expects to see a new world but realizes he’s meeting a different civilization, as different from his own as Chinese civilization. Yet he knows nothing about it. Nor does he understand the nature surrounding them as do his Cree guides—and friends. Jean-Yves Soucy wrote this story because Romeo Saganash, son of William, insisted: “You have to write that, Jean-Yves. About your relationship with my father and the others, how you saw the village. You got to see the end of an era.”

Peter McCambridge, originally from Ireland, holds a BA in modern languages from Cambridge University, England, and has lived in Quebec City since 2003. He runs Québec Reads and founded QC Fiction, an imprint of Baraka Books. His translation of Eric Dupont's La Fiancée américaine, Songs for the Cold of Heart, was shortlisted for both the 2018 Giller Prize and the 2018 Governor General's Award for Translation. It has now been published worldwide, by HarperCollins. Romeo Saganash was born in 1961 on the shores of a lake in his parents’ tent near Waswanipi in Northern Quebec. Cree was the only language he heard and spoke for his first seven years before he was taken away to residential school. First Cree in Quebec to graduate in law, he served as Deputy Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Cree and was one of the principal authors ofLa Paix des Braves—a landmark agreement between the James Bay Cree and the Government of Quebec. He was the Member of Parliament for Abitibi-Baie James-Nunavik-Eeyou from 2011-2019. Jean-Yves Soucy (1945-2017) was a writer, editor, publisher, journalist, scriptwriter, and mentor based in Montreal. Award-winning author of eleven books (novels, historical accounts, biographies), his writings have been translated into English, Spanish, German, Turkish, Romanian, and Armenian. His books in English include Family Secrets, The Controversial & Shocking Story of the Dionne Quintuplets (with Annette, Cécile and Yvonne Dionne), and A Summer Without Dawn with Agop J. Hacikyan.