The old man is sitting alone and bowed, on an empty range in Stony Mountain Penitentiary. Light streaming through tall windows behind him is shadowed by the bars. He is wearing prison garb, and his long tresses have been cropped. As the splash of water plasters hair to skull, cascades over the ridged forehead, falls down the eyes, around the nose and mouth, I begin to shudder. Am I watching some obscene water sport? Some pornographic mockery?
My discomfort is more than a reaction to the stereotype of prison baptism as more con than conversion. The old man's, Big Bear's face, as portrayed by actor Gordon Tootoosis, behind the fall of water, gives few clues. There is no sense of exultation, no epiphany of transformation. But I cannot be sure. Is there a sense of stoic submission? A choice to assimilate? A crisis of faith? A tragic fall? Or is he merely permitting zealots to do with him what they will? They are only dousing his outside. They cannot shift his understanding of the world as he knows it, alter his conviction, damage his powerful spirit, change his heart. For his power comes from the Great Bear Spirit. No matter what these newcomers do to him, to his family, to his people, to the buffalo, to the land, the Great Bear remains. Surely Big Bear would never have recanted?
I was watching, of course, earlier this year (1999), the CBC two-part mini-series Big Bear, about the legendary leader of a band of Cree who inhabited the great northern plains at the time of Confederation (1867) and westward expansion (1885). Canadian writer Rudy Wiebe won the Governor-General's Award in 1973 for his novel The Temptations of Big Bear. Alberta Metis filmmaker Gilbert Cardinal collaborated with Wiebe to transform the novel into a made-for-television filmscript. But how do we, the viewers, know how the real Big Bear felt, how he worshipped, what he thought about the destruction of the world as he knew it, his loss of authority, trial, incarceration, illness, about the future of his people and his homeland?
Even the historians cannot agree. Wiebe has Big Bear baptized in prison. Hugh Dempsey, in his Big Bear: The End of Freedom (1984), says there is no evidence Big Bear ever abandoned his own religion. Wiebe makes Big Bear a North American Moses, as if including him in the pantheon bestows some sort of legitimacy. Cardinal acknowledges that there was much he did not know about the old chief and his ways. He too wanted to be respectful, to get things right. But how can viewers assess whether he has succeeded or not? Or do we content ourselves with another kind of truth?
