Mrs. H. C. Calverley, 10209 – 14 Street, Dawson Creek, B.C.   Dear Mrs. Calverley:   In reply to your request for information on several names in the Peace River area I have the following information:   Methye Portage We have nothing specific on this naming. However, Methye Lake in Saskatchewan is named for a… Read More

By Dorthea CalverleyWhite men called them “medicine men” or worse, “witch doctors”. We will use the more correct word, “shaman”. “Witch doctor” reflects the white man’s religious arrogance and superstition. When they encountered the Indian, the white men were separated into narrow, antagonistic, even violent religious groups (just as they still are today in certain… Read More

By Dorthea Calverley All Indian men had a “medicine bag”, much as a white woman has a purse. Like the purse, the medicine bag — which might be three or four feet long — contained objects and substances which had a meaning for the owner. Mementos of events which occurred during his vision quest as a… Read More

By Dorthea H. Calverley The Tse’kehne’s (Beaver’s) earliest acquaintance with tobacco is assumed to be in 1793 when it was introduced by Alexander Mackenzie. Morice states that even the very act of smoking was unknown to them before that. Their stupefaction at beholding smoke issuing from men’s mouth – and their scorn for tobacco when they… Read More

By Dorthea CalverleyBefore the oil and gas boom in the Canadian west, and before damming the Peace River was more than a wild scheme of “Carbon River” Jones to get at the fabulous gold that should be caught in the canyon reefs, there lived near Moberly Lake and Chetwynd a striking old Indian remembered as… Read More

Interviewed by R. Belcourt and Dorthea CalverleyIn the summer of 1973, Norman Mercredi, of Cree-Beaver ancestry and of a noted Indian family of the Chipewyan and Northern Alberta district, visited Dawson Creek. Mr. Mercredi is the brother-in-law of Chief Chonkolay of the Assumption Reserve, and is known among his people as one of a family… Read More

By Dorthea H. CalverleyWe have chosen the title “cures” instead of the English word “medicine”. “Medicine” in the Indian’s vocabulary has a very different connotation from ours. The title “medicine man” has a certain suitability, because the French word for doctor is medecin, whereas the feminine medicine means “medicine” or more exactly “medicament”. The French… Read More

By Dorthea H. CalverleyA non-scholarly but well-researched book by Hubert Creekmore has the intriguing title, Daffodils Are Dangerous [George I. McLeod, Canada, 1966]. While confining itself to discussing poisonous plants that may be grown in gardens or greenhouses, it lists an astonishing number of plants known to be growing wild in the Peace Country. One… Read More

By Dorthea CalverleyThe Indians of our area used a version of the sauna bath as a method of treating disease. A small hut was built of pliant saplings in a miniature igloo-shape and covered with skins. On the earth in the centre, heated stones were placed. When the patient was seated over them, water was… Read More

 By Dorthea Calverley The natives of the Peace River area had access to various medicinal salts from ancient times, but little of the lore concerning their use has reached this historian. Mrs. Caroline Beaudry, the Cree medicine woman of Dawson Creek, remembered being sent by her grandmother on a long horseback journey from Lesser Slave Mission… Read More