Mark Dawes, Staff Reporter

Cree Indians of Wemindji enjoying themselves in the snow. - Contributed

Wemindji, a small community off James Bay at the mouth of the Maquatua River in Quebec, Canada, is home to about 1,200 Cree Indians. For many it would represent one of the uttermost parts of the earth. But it was home for many years to Christopher and Winsome Davis who did Christian ministry there.

Christopher, an Anglican minister, hails from Hamilton, Ontario. He did graduate studies at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada. There he met fellow student,Winsome Gibson, the sixth daughter of the late Harold & Mary Gibson of Mandeville in Jamaica. Winsome is also the sister of Children's Advocate, Mary Clarke. Christopher and Winsome married in 1981 and they have two children.

In the past 25 years, they have served in various ecclesiastical parishes in Ontario and Quebec. However, beginning in 1987, they devoted most of their time - 19 years in fact - to ministry among the Cree, a tribe of native Indians. Last month they got a new posting to a place called Kugluktuk - there they will serve Eskimos that make up the Inuit community.

The joys

In an interview with The Gleaner conducted just before the couple relocated, Rev. Davis, 56, focused on the joys he and his wife experienced doing ministry to the Cree. He said, "When I married Winsome, I thought, 'Oh good, the Lord is going to send us to some hot country with palm trees and beaches.'

"Well, either the Lord has a sense of humour, or He gets His wires crossed. Instead of Jamaica, we are in James Bay, Northern Quebec, one of the coldest, most sparsely populated places on earth. We are at the 53rd latitude, which corresponds in England to Liverpool, but there the similarity ends.

"We are in the interior of the North American continent with a severe continental climate like Siberia. In January and February we have to be prepared for -30°, -35°, -40° Celsius. And when it is that cold it doesn't matter whether you think in Celsius or Fahrenheit, because at -40° the two sets of mercury meet.

"When it is that cold, or when there is an Arctic blizzard, one hardly ventures outdoors. Winter is exceptionally beautiful when the sun is shining, but it is very long, and brings on a state of mind called 'cabin fever.' By March and April Winsome and I are desperate for spring to come."

Being Canadian and married to a Jamaican was in some senses a cross-cultural learning experience for him. Furthermore, he found that the Cree people felt comfortable talking with Winsome because she isn't white.

Rev. Davis explained: "Any similarity between Cree people and the image of Indians in westerns is purely accidental. We have German tourists who want to see Indians wearing feathers and riding horses, but they are sorely disappointed. Today's Indians drive American-style pickup trucks and vans and Canadian snowmobiles, and listen to the latest country & western hits on their radios and CD players.

"When it comes to religion, Cree people are overwhelmingly Christian. The evangelical wing of the Church of England, the Church Missionary Society, sent missionaries 150 years ago to James Bay, and an Anglican church was built in every village. Roman Catholics and Pentecostals came along much later, but my village is still a solid 99 per cent Anglican.

State religion

"Anglicanism is the state religion supported by the chief, Band Council and village elders. No other church has been allowed to establish itself. The village of 1,200 people is basically one huge extended family, and everyone is related by both blood and marriage. The sense of unity in the community is highly prized, and that is why no other church is allowed. They want no interdenominational theological controversies dividing them."

Among the Cree people of James Bay, the Anglican Church is seen as a rock of stability, part of the glue holding the community together. Many Cree, Rev. Davis said, "have a simple, uncluttered faith, and they are quite sure that the Bible is the Word of God."

Cree people love their church, and they don't want it to change much. Sure, add some lively country & western style guitar music, but leave the rest alone.

Rev. Davis, an evangelical, is unhappy that sections of his denomination have opted to endorse same-sex marriage and homosexual conduct among clergy. His convictions are shared with the Cree community. He said, "The Cree people who watch the news are not pleased with these developments. Cree society is very family-oriented, and at a recent parish council meeting a motion was passed unanimously to uphold the Church's traditional teaching on man-woman marriage. The Cree parishes of our diocese have made it clear that they don't like the way the Anglican Church of Canada is going on these issues.

Though the village where the couple served had 1,200 persons, this translated into average Sunday attendance of 115. Rev. Davis conducted three services on a Sunday - each service in a different language. For the Sunday morning service it was Moose Cree, the dialect spoken in Northern Ontario. The Sunday afternoon service was in Wemindji Cree. And the Sunday evening service was in English.

Mother tongue

Rev. Davis said almost all Cree young people have Cree as their mother tongue - nevertheless, most of them cannot read or write their own indigenous language. Many of these youngsters choose to worship in English. There exists in the village, he said, a cultural tension as the elders don't like to see the young people moving to English. "Personally, as an outsider, I stay out of that controversy. I can't really speak Cree, but I do the liturgy and prayers and hymns in their language as much as I can, and the elders appreciate that," Rev. Davis said.

The Canadian wilderness is immense, and it has an awesome, silent majesty, Rev. Davis said. "When I am there, I am so aware of the God who created all this. It is almost untouched by human hands. Our family home is in Kingston, Ontario, and to get to my parish up on James Bay we drive north for two days through 1,500km of mostly forest. In the last 600km of our trip there is only one petrol station and restaurant with indoor toilet. One has to have a relatively new and reliable car, because if one has a breakdown up there, it could be a matter of life and death. You don't want a breakdown in January when it is -40°. Freezing to death is not my cup of tea, thank you very much. You always travel with blankets, newspaper and matches, so that you can start a fire to keep warm. Last summer I was changing a flat tyre in the wilderness, busy cursing under my breath, but then I remembered to thank God this wasn't happening in January.

"It is hard for many Southern Canadians to grasp that the largest part of Canada's land mass does not speak the country's official languages - English and French, but all the various Native Indian and Inuit languages. Our village, Wemindji, has 1,200 people and it is 99 per cent Cree. Almost all Cree people are mixed. Some are dark like Indians in Mexico or Peru, and some look like they would easily fit in back in Scotland."

In 1670, King Charles II signed the Hudson's Bay Company charter, and ever since then mainly Scottish fur traders have traded with the Cree people. As a result, English is the second language for most of the Cree. That Scottish influence, Rev. Davis observed, has had a profound influence on Cree culture.

The Scottish influence is still evident as:

The Cree national drink is tea.

The Cree national bread is bannock.

At a Cree wedding you will see all the traditional Scottish reels.

The Cree national musical instrument is the fiddle. A few years ago a troupe of James Bay Cree fiddlers went to the Scottish Highlands and were a big hit. The Cree people had preserved some fiddle tunes that had been lost in Scotland.

Many Cree people have Scottish surnames inherited from fur trader ancestors. Common surnames in James Bay are Gilpin, Sutherland, McLeod, Archibald, Hardisty, Stewart and Spence.

Some of the old ladies in Rev. Davis' church still wear tartan dresses down to their ankles.

It was not harder to minister to the Cree than to white Canadians, Rev. Davis said.

However, in many ways, the Cree were more open to the Gospel than their Caucasian Canadian counterparts who are increasingly resistant and event hostile.

"One thing one must always remember with a tribal group, they think more collectively than individually. A whole family will get saved together, rather than one individual in the family.

(Continues next week)

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