Everything about Solomon Ratt’s 2023 book kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember is unique. It’s a bilingual book, written in the two ways of representing Ratt’s mother tongue, nîhithowîwin or Woods Cree, syllabics and Standard Roman Orthography (SRO), and English. As the book’s editor, Arden Ogg, notes in the introduction, Ratt is one of the few residential-school survivors who is “blessed with full retention of his language.” His parents were fluent speakers, and even after he was taken away to the residential school in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Ratt spent the summers with them on their trapline near âmaciwîspimowinihk or Stanley Mission, northeast of La Ronge. Later, at Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, he learned to read and write in both SRO and syllabics. That led to a long career teaching Cree at that institution, now First Nations University of Canada, from which he retired a couple of years ago. (Full disclosure: Solomon was one of my Cree teachers, and he helped me with some of the language in my book, Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road; I’m grateful to him for that assistance and a fan of his writing.) Most of the book was written in nîhithowîwin first, and then in English; from what I knew about the genesis of the book, watching its brief sections being published online over a period of years–it was at least a decade in the making–I suspected that was how it was composed, and when I emailed Solomon to confirm my hunch, he told me that was the case.

kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember is singular in two other ways. It brings together âcimisowina, or “personal, autobiographical stories,” as Ogg translates that term, with âcathôhkîwina, or sacred stories. The book’s âcimisowina are short fragments, sometimes poetry, sometimes prose, in which Ratt tells stories about his life, his responses to settler colonialism, and urges people to retain or relearn their languages. Ogg refers to Cree/Métis scholar Deanna Reder’s 2022 book Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition, which argues that telling one’s own story is a Cree cultural and intellectual tradition. That’s part of the reason the personal stories are here. The reason for including the âcathôhkîwina is clear: for Ratt, as a child in residential school, those stories were a lifeline to his family, language, and culture. Ratt heard them from his parents before he was taken to that school; they were his true education. As Ogg notes, Ratt often says that his schooling interrupted his education. Since they are only supposed to be told in winter, when snow is on the ground, and since Ratt was only with his parents in the summers, the transmission of those oral stories was broken. Discovering written versions of those stories in the school’s library, particularly Cree writer Edward Ahenakew’s versions, published in English in 1929 as “Cree Trickster Tales,” enabled him to retain them and maintain his connections to family and community. In that way, the sacred and the autobiographical come together.

Those sacred stories or âcathôhkîwina feature wîsahkîcâhk, the Cree culture hero. Those stories have a pedagogical function: they are intended to teach people how they ought to behave, often by negative example, since when wîsahkîcâhk doesn’t follow the rules of proper behaviour, he ends up in trouble of some kind. They tend to be both serious and funny. One of the âcimisowina is a quotation from an article by the Anishinaabe Elder, language teacher, scholar, writer, and residential-school survivor Basil H. Johnston, which argues that sacred stories contain “the essence and substance of tribal ideas, concepts, insights, attitudes, values, beliefs, theories, notions, sentiments, and accounts of their institutions and rituals and ceremonies.” Children who hear those stories–anyone who hears those stories–comes to learn all of those things–especially, and perhaps most importantly, how to behave in a good way. When âcathôhkîwina are taken out of their cultural context by settlers, they often lose their complexity and educational value, becoming understood as odd little tales, which is not their intention, purpose, or function. Of course, Johnston’s words are translated into Woods Cree. I wonder if this book marks the first time that’s happened?

The âcathôhkîwina Ratt tells are both comical and serious because, as the late Delaware poet and playwright Daniel David Moses once explained, they are “at once admonition, instruction, and entertainment.” I think the nature of the Cree language might have something to do with it, too. As Tomson Highway has pointed out in interviews, Cree is funny–when people speak that language, he says, they laugh constantly–and it’s visceral, with bodily functions discussed openly and casually, without judgement or shame (as tends to happen in English). In the last âcathôhkîwina in Ratt’s book, an ermine saves wîsahkîcâhk from a wîhtikow, a monstrous cannibal with a bottomless appetite and no sense of its relationships or responsibilities to other creatures, by climbing into the creature’s anus and eating it from the inside. Other, tamer versions of that story, intended for settler audiences, have the ermine jumping into the wîhtikow‘s mouth. That would not be a safe point of entry, what with the teeth and all. The anus would be unpleasant in all kinds of ways–well, one in particular–but by entering the wîhtikow that way, the ermine would be less likely to become an appetizer before the creature’s main course. As an odd parallel, Ratt’s stories about surviving residential school are also a combination of the serious and the comic; as Ogg notes in her introduction, “Solomon’s reminiscences of residential school escapades almost always end with a close call and a smile.” He was a prankster, and a lucky one, too, and in the stories he tells, he comes across like a Woods Cree version of Tom Sawyer.

I’m teaching kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember this week, and I’m sure my students will be intimidated by the book’s apparent length. Not to worry: the first half of the book consists of the text in syllabics, and the rest is evenly divided between Standard Roman Orthography and English. “Don’t worry,” I told them in an email. “You don’t have to read the Cree unless you want to.” I hope some of them know how; despite my language classes, I would find it difficult, although the bilingual nature of the text means that readers can see how the Cree paragraphs and stanzas translate into English.

This book has tremendous value, not least because its mixture of poetry and prose, memoir and sacred narrative confounds the categories through which settlers understand the world. It’s vitally important to try to see the world the way other cultures do–to understand that our way is not the only way, maybe not even the best way.

If you’re curious, kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember is available from University of Regina Press.