Your Great Mother Across the Salt Sea

by Kelsey Hutton

PART ONE

Kwayask nātohta. Listen carefully. There once was a woman who sewed clothes so powerful they made you become the person you needed to be. Children’s feet wrapped in her flower-beaded moccasins never stumbled. Otipēyimisowak orators, backs held straight by her finger-woven sashes, never lost a vote. Loved ones, buried in family robes storied with a thousand hand-dyed quills, were never forgotten.

This woman, called Miyohtwāw, used her gifts with bead and shell and calico and stroud to sew kin relationships together all across the Plains. Then, at the direction of the grandmothers, she was asked to do the same between the Otipēyimisowak and the distant Hauthasan kwīn.

Yes, she remembered their language from her time with the nuns. Yes, she could still count their coin and twist her hair up like a “lady,” though it was now touched with grey. A Hauthasan lord sailing home was even willing to present her in the Hauthasan court. This lord assured the Otipēyimisowak that his great woman leader across the salt sea was a compassionate and upright woman, who cared for the people of the lands she ruled from afar like a mother cared for her children. No matter how different they might be.

But Miyohtwāw was no ambassador. She always spoke through her clothing if she could. And yet, the Otipēyimisowak Nation badly needed to be heard — before the next great wave of land-hungry Hauthasan moved onto the Plains. The grandmothers heard out her own qualms but insisted nonetheless.

Over and over, for the two lonely moons it took to sail across the world, she reminded herself: others, at least, thought her gifts were enough.

They finally arrived at the cold Hauthasan palace — a monstrous block of white stone held tightly together by its harsh, straight lines. Inside, Miyohtwāw trailed the Hauthasan lord as he hurried them to the “audience room,” where they were to meet his leader, the kwīn. Every angle and awning was astonishingly cut, with an almost inhuman precision. Miyohtwāw couldn’t help but run her fingers over the gleaming metal banisters, the plush bench covers, even stopping mid-ascent to press her palm flat against the impossibly smooth marble stairs. This earned her a frustrated harrumph from the lord presenting her, just as the nuns once scolded her as a dawdling child. All it took was that one huff of scorn for Miyohtwāw to feel as stripped bare as she had felt decades ago, defenseless before the nuns. She quickly carried on.

Soon enough, the palace helpers stopped in front of a set of heavy oak doors. They threw them open and ushered her into a cavernous room that smelt sharply of boot polish. She barely knew where to look — at the great pillars, intricately carved and sparkling with gold? Or the ceiling, painted with hundreds of near-naked figures laying on clouds? The room itself was filled with hundreds of the queen’s kin, dressed in swelling skirts and brass-buckled coats. Furious whispers rose up like a deadly storm of mosquitoes — each word too quick for Miyohtwāw to catch but all together enough to strip a horse of its flesh.

She fought to catch her breath. It was the sheer size of it all. This room alone could have held every Otipēyimisowak woman, man, and child in her hunting brigade, plus the carts, even before the Great Famine several winters before.

Suddenly she was back on the Plains, she and the other women taking advantage of the late-setting sun to bead together in the cool breeze, her mother-in-law laughing raucously. Home.

Miyohtwāw wished she could sink into the sweet memory of that laugh; let herself believe her family was only an arm’s-brush away. But now was not the time. She let the memory’s medicine loosen her chest and straighten her back but blinked the tears away.

The Hauthasan lord’s hard palm pushed her forward until they stood before the queen — a short, round-faced woman whose sharp eyes moved lightly around the room, as if counting wayward children. But when Miyohtwāw opened her mouth to introduce herself, the lord’s voice drowned her out.

“Your Majesty Queen Victra, may I present to you one of your very own red children, who has travelled a great distance to meet her Great White Mother Across the Salt Sea,” announced the man, who was called Lord Macall. He bent deeply at the waist, head down, as if afraid to look his Great Mother in the face. They called it “bowing,” she knew — a gesture Miyohtwāw still found strange.

The queen herself did not look angry with the lord, although she did not look particularly joyful to see him, either. Her clothes were richly made but unassuming: her skirts did not lack for fabric, swirling in lace-edged folds that gently pooled to the floor, but their soft grey calmed the room. Her face remained still as she listened.

“She is a full-blood herself,” the lord announced, inexplicably, as if this were meaningful information. “But she married into a group of half-breeds from the outskirts of La Foursze, where your Hauthasan subjects have been dutifully working to create a new colony out of such wild land. I have assured her people, who are a fractious breed, that Your Majesty the Queen has always loved her empire’s red subjects well. As Your Majesty knows, you are always kind to them, and they strive to be obedient in return. This woman’s chief has sent her to honour you with gifts and to thank you for your benevolence, Great Mother, which has done so much already to improve her people.”

Miyohtwāw nearly choked on the unexpected disdain folded neatly into this introduction. Was this the lord’s intention all along? She looked for malice etched into the deep lines around his mouth, but saw only . . . indifference.

While she struggled to think how best to correct this characterization of her adopted nation, he added as an afterthought, “Her civilized name is Mrs. Maurisse Paquette.”

The queen’s servants began opening the chests of gifts Miyohtwāw’s okimakan had indeed sent with her, but as a sign of reciprocity and mutual respect — two dozen buffalo robes, stacks of beaver pelts, tobacco and other medicines, and more. The spicy-sweet smell of sage wafted through the hall.

“Your Great Mother thanks you, Mrs. Paquette,” the queen said, not uninterestedly, as her chittering kin around the room nearly toppled over each other to get a better look. Then, to Miyohtwāw’s dismay, the queen looked over Miyohtwāw’s shoulder, her eyes already on the next person in line.

A rough official was pinching her elbow to pull her aside when Miyohtwāw found her voice.

“Great Mother,” she said, which were bittersweet words for her, as for any orphan child, no matter how much she had grown and how many children of her own she now had. “Please — I have a gift of my own making to share.”

The mosquito-chatter abruptly stopped when Miyohtwāw, herself wearing only a simple waisted dress with a single line of buttons down the front, opened the chest at her feet and pulled out her gift — a gown that balanced the structured esthetics of the Hauthasan with the varied influences of the Otipēyimisowak Nation and their home community of La Foursze.

She had decided to keep the corseted bodice and satin overskirt that marked Hauthasan high fashion. But she’d splashed the cream silk with beaded serpentine leaves the tender green of new spring, using a unique two-leaf pattern of her mother-in-law’s design. The heavy folds of the skirt were trimmed in white fur, from northern foxes Miyohtwāw had trapped and tanned herself. The soft deerskin leggings underneath — a testament to the days she’d spent dragging the stiff skins over the mouth of a metal pipe to break and soften the hide — were pure Otipēyimisowak. Rosettes of porcupine quill, echoing the decorated ankles of Miyohtwāw’s own leggings, were laid over ribbon work in every colour of wildflower imaginable.

For the Otipēyimisowak, Miyohtwāw had poured every one of her gifts into the making of this gown — the ones she’d learned, the ones she’d been born with, and the ones that came straight from the Great Mystery; gifts of power that sometimes defied explanation. Even now, lilies — living, breathing lilies, which she had woven around the high collar of the gown — bloomed the fresh colour of a Hauthasan girl’s blush. This beauty was the lily’s own to give; but it was Miyohtwāw’s touch that ensured that, despite crossing an ocean in a locked trunk, not a single lily was crushed.

Miyohtwāw stumbled slightly over the Hauthasan words she hadn’t spoken for half a lifetime. “It makes my heart sing to bring you this gift of kinship, representing the many ties between the Otipēyimisowak and our Great Mother Across the . . . Salt Sea.” She almost said “ocean,” which she knew was the correct term, but decided it was safer to reflect their own words back to them.

The queen’s sparse eyebrows lifted incredulously while the Hauthasan lord sputtered. She peered closely at the luminous gown but didn’t touch it. She was silent a long time.

Miyohtwāw opened and closed her mouth. She’d hoped to sew a dress powerful enough to remind the queen who the queen claimed as kin, and who claimed her in return. Should she present the Otipēyimisowak petition now? Should she wait?

“This is certainly . . . one of a kind, Mrs. Paquette,” the queen said at last, and Miyohtwāw could not tell if it was the queen’s intonation or her own rusty language skills that flattened the queen’s tone. Then the red-coated official bent low to whisper in the queen’s ear; she nodded, fixed her eyes on the next group behind Miyohtwāw, and did not look at her again, even though Miyohtwāw was only a few strides away.

The queen’s kin followed her lead, turning away from Miyohtwāw with a rustle of taffeta and a tilt of the chin. The only one, seemingly, who could still see her was the Hauthasan lord, Lord Macall. Shoulders tense, he suddenly loomed large at her side, muttering “Come, come.” The weight of his presence forced Miyohtwāw to step back, nudging her towards the door.

Without a word, she had been dismissed.

Even after her fourth request, the queen still would not grant her an audience. Miyohtwāw tried to appeal to Lord Macall, who had made such protestations of the queen’s concern for her red children when he met with the Otipēyimisowak in La Foursze, but her messages went unanswered. As winter all too quickly slipped past, Miyohtwāw found herself confined to her small musty room in a far corner of the palace, at a loss for what to do.

She should have spoken up when she had the chance. What had the grandmothers been thinking, to send her? All she was doing now was waiting — and she couldn’t wait, trapped, within these walls forever. The relationship between the Otipēyimisowak and Hauthasan farmers had been fraying badly, and Otipēyimisowak families were the ones suffering for it. They needed someone, anyone, to intervene by spring — when the ice would break on the connecting rivers, and waves of new Hauthasan settlers would bleed out of the eastern cities into the Plains, armed with scribbles on paper and land-claiming “surveyor sticks” as lethal as guns.

Her nation’s petition, its beeswax seal unbroken, weighed on her mind until she could not even sew. Under the judgemental eyes of the half-dozen grandly dressed Hauthasan men whose portraits decorated her silk-covered walls, her stores of cloth and sinew from home sat untouched. Instead, she punished herself with the backbreaking task of drilling miniscule holes into soft stones for threading and tried to swallow her fear.

Then everything changed.

In the dying days of kisepisim, the cold month, the knob of Miyohtwāw’s door squealed and nearly spun off its track as the door burst open. Miyohtwāw blinked blurrily, looking up from the small table where she worked, to see — the queen, in her chambers, practically bouncing like a pup.

“It worked!” the queen called out with apple-red cheeks.

Miyohtwāw held completely still, unsure how to reply.

“Great Mother?” she finally asked, tentatively. “Are you well?”

The queen startled at the address, but her eyes softened and she smiled. Deep lines framed her thin mouth.

“My dear,” she said. “I wore your dress, and it worked.” And Miyohtwāw set down her bow drill, her shoulders shaking with the sudden release of tension.

“I wore it to the House of Lords,” the queen said, “and it utterly bewildered them! Which is exactly what I needed it to do. The republicans were too distracted by the wildness of it all to push forward their calls for reform, and their latest chance to press advantage over the monarchy slipped out of grasp. For one more session of Parliament, at least.”

Her tone abruptly changed even as Miyohtwāw stood up, struggling to remember who the rēpablikans were.

“Please forgive my inability to meet you before this, Mrs. Paquette, but my affairs have been keeping me extremely busy these past weeks.”

“Of course,” Miyohtwāw said graciously. “A mother is always busy with her children.”

“It is ‘Of course, Your Majesty The Queen,’” the queen corrected.

Miyohtwāw clicked her jaw shut. She was familiar with the address, although not its exact meaning. But it couldn’t possibly be a stronger term of respect than mother.

“Forgive me, Great Mother, your majesty,” she said finally, her bones singing with renewed opportunity. Rude or not, what mattered was that the queen had given her a second chance. “The Otipēyimisowak have nothing but the greatest respect for your power and compassion. In fact, they have sent me with a petition, asking you to help rectify a great injustice being done in your name.”

Miyohtwāw quickly drew out the petition, but the queen stopped her.

“Oh, yes? Well, we shall come to that. But first, I must make you a commission. Specifically, another dress.”

Miyohtwāw paused. Another dress like the one she’d given the queen would take most sewers a year to make, and had made use of so many gifts — the fox its fur, the lilies their beauty. Even with the added strength her ancestors gave her, it had taken Miyohtwāw four full moons. And to her knowledge, the queen had not yet gifted the Otipēyimisowak anything in return for the stacks of furs and medicine Miyohtwāw had presented that first day in court.

But the queen called herself their Great Mother. She saw herself as kin.

“Of course,” Miyohtwāw said. “I will lend you my skills. In the meantime, you may review our petition.”

“Wonderful!” The queen’s sky-coloured eyes lit up, but then she seemed to grapple for words. “Next month I am meeting someone our court very much needs to befriend. I need a gown . . . not like your previous one — perhaps ruffled, or with a cape; it must be acceptable in our courts, at any rate. Perhaps . . .” She moved her hands in a vaguely dome-like gesture around her generous hips. “But absolutely nothing like the ones I already have,” she said severely, then looked helpless again.

“Don’t tell me what you think it should look like, your majesty,” Miyohtwāw interjected, although she already winced at the short timeframe required. One month! “Tell me instead what you need your dress to do, and it will do it.”

The queen’s head bobbed back in surprise. Then she leaned in closer. “What I need . . .” She licked her lips. “I need to seduce.”

Miyohtwāw’s throat tightened. She knew the word sedōs, thanks to the grey nuns she’d been placed with as a child after typhus took her parents. It had featured prominently in their lectures on the sinful ways of women, especially dark-skinned, loose-moralled women like Miyohtwāw, and Miyohtwāw’s mother, and her mother’s mother before her.

Years later, after she’d arrived in La Foursze, Miyohtwāw had had to work hard to suppress the memories of the grey nuns, who lived on as voices in her head. Her mother-in-law helped the most, as did her own daughters, born not full of sin but squalling and perfect. Decades later, Miyohtwāw no longer accepted the nuns’ edicts as fact. But seduce . . . she didn’t believe in toying with others’ emotions. What did this queen mean by that word? Did she mean the same thing the grey nuns meant? Miyohtwāw wished fervently that the nuances of this language didn’t slip so easily out of hand like a fish.

The Hauthasan queen was far from perfect. But she needed something from Miyohtwāw. And Miyohtwāw needed the queen to remember how family leaned on each other.

“Our two nations must help each other in our times of need,” she said gently. “I will finish it in time.” She took a deep breath and reached out to shake the queen’s hand.

Shock spasmed across the queen’s face, and Miyohtwāw almost yanked her hand back. She knew it wasn’t her knobby knuckles that put the queen off, or the pulsing veins in wrists that gently betrayed her pounding heartbeat. It was that she had broken Hauthasan protocol. She was attempting to strike a deal with the queen — not as a supplicant, but as an equal.

But between the nuns, then the Otipēyimisowak, and now here, Miyohtwāw had spent her whole life first unlearning and then relearning protocols. And the Hauthasan queen had sought her out, after all. Had come to Miyohtwāw’s out-of-the-way quarters to make a private request.

Miyohtwāw waited with eyes of water — balanced, cool — that hid her turmoil within.

Eventually the queen shook her hand, once, and left the small musty room.

At the end of four weeks — four long weeks, in which Miyohtwāw offered tobacco and gave thanks to sinew and silk, sewing late into the night — the dress was ready.

It was slimmer-fitting than the first, the bold red of a cardinal, with feathers that accentuated the queen’s hips. Capped sleeves were made of single rose petals Miyohtwāw had whispered sweet encouragement to, until they were larger than any rose petal had a right to be. Intricate cutouts edged the neckline, creating more petal shapes through the absence of fabric, rather than its presence. Most daringly, down the centre of the bodice was a small slit, only a finger’s width, but almost to the queen’s navel. There it disappeared into a wide ribbon bow.

The cardinal was Miyohtwāw’s oldest daughter’s favourite bird; the wild red roses had been gently cultivated over many seasons by Miyohtwāw’s son. She had kept the queen’s intent firmly in mind as she sewed, until every stitch knew what to do. It was quieter in many ways than the first dress, but it held the promise of conversations in voices kept low. It had also depleted half Miyohtwāw’s stores to complete.

The queen, who had just had her ninth child and was not known for her fashion, could not put it on fast enough. With a swish of silk, her short figure softened into a much younger-seeming silhouette. In the privacy of her dressing room, with only Miyohtwāw in attendance, her eyes glowed with — surprise? Yes. And delight. And — greed. The joy of such a daring gown stripped years away from her frame.

It suited her.

“Why, I could pass for a girl of twenty,” the queen said softly, and indeed, the lines around her mouth and at the corners of her eyes almost melted away. “When I was bold enough to take on the world!” Then, suddenly, she asked, “Is it . . . magic?” Her voice sounded as young as Miyohtwāw’s smallest daughter’s, who was just beginning to know herself as a woman.

Majik . . . A Hauthasan word for a person’s unique gifts, perhaps? The queen’s tone was edged with fear. It was true some gifts were more mysterious — and therefore more frightening — than others. Miyohtwāw knew her clothing made people become who they needed to be in ways simple cloth usually did not. But everyone had gifts, of all different natures. A person’s strongest gifts, no matter their origin, were often the most overlooked by the person gifted them.

“I don’t know this word, Great Mother, your majesty,” Miyohtwāw said gently, to calm the queen’s fear. “Perhaps you are simply more powerful than you think.”

Miyohtwāw squeezed the queen’s hand. The queen snatched it back, as if bitten, and hastily returned to admiring herself in the oval of glass that reflected her like water.

Miyohtwāw stood as tall as she could. “But now, Great Mother, we must discuss the petition I brought,” she said. “I hope you can see why it is so urgent to rectify this matter for the Otipēyimisowak Nation?”

“Ah, yes, the petition,” the queen said, but she wouldn’t meet Miyohtwāw’s gaze. Instead she continued to feast solely on her own image, swishing the deep red satin to and fro. “I regret that I have not yet had time to review it, but you may read it to me now if you wish.”

Not yet read it? But it was almost spring!

Once again, Miyohtwāw wore only simple clothing, with a light scarf tucked into the neckline of her shirt and sturdy beaverteen trousers. But even the cotton fibres of her clothes froze in place in her cold grip of panic.

“Your majesty . . .” she started, then couldn’t think of what else to say.

“Are you going to read it to me, or not?” the queen said, more sharply this time. “I still have it, there, on my dressing table.” The motion coiled in her short frame told Miyohtwāw she was prepared to leave if Miyohtwāw didn’t act quickly.

So she did, cracking the still-sealed wax.

When the first Hauthasan farmers arrived on the Plains, looking to laboriously seed and plow great tracks of land they claimed to “own,” the Otipēyimisowak thought them crazy but harmless. The people of La Foursze were a mixed people, after all, and many had family ties to the newcomers through their Hauthasan great-grandfathers. The Otipēyimisowak, the most respected hunters on the Plains, shared their bison meat with only a little ribbing when the farmers’ crops failed six years out of ten.

But then the settlers claimed they acted with the blessing of the queen. They forbade the Otipēyimisowak from cutting firewood to warm themselves, or from fishing to feed their families. They built homesteads on communal lands that had been used by the Otipēyimisowak for generations, splitting apart large extended family townships who relied on each other to survive — physically, and emotionally and spiritually as well. The words the settlers uttered to the Otipēyimisowak at the trading posts grew more hateful by the day, and suddenly Otipēyimisowak women could no longer safely sell their beadwork in town.

All the while, the bison that clothed and fed them all fled farther and farther west.

All the while, more and more Hauthasan arrived every spring. Every plot of land surveyed for the settlers broke the Otipēyimisowak Nation —  “the people who rule themselves,” the ones who had given Miyohtwāw a home, a family, a purpose — further apart.

“. . . this theft of Otipēyimisowak land clearly contravenes the nation-to-nation relationship set out in the Royal Proclamation of 1763,” Miyohtwāw read, stumbling a little over the Hauthasan words. “We press our Great Mother the Queen, or a representative of Her Majesty, to come see for themselves the destruction being wrought on her Otipēyimisowak children in her name. We must reclaim our responsibilities as kin to each other, before our children starve, our families are separated, and our land chokes on our suffering. Signed  . . .”

Four thousand names affirmed the petition, starting with Miyohtwāw’s husband’s. She handed it to the queen.

The queen finally ripped her gaze away from her own mirrored image to take the proffered petition. Her mouth thinned into a straight line as she read name after name. “Mrs. Paquette, you will remember that that proclamation was my father’s, made before my time as Queen.”

“Our relationships do not end with a single generation,” Miyohtwāw said. “That is why we teach our children history and help them learn for the future.”

In the taut silence of waiting for the queen’s reply, Miyohtwāw’s ears roared with the distant clatter of servants’ footsteps outside the queen’s door. She didn’t miss the queen’s glances, drawn over and over again to her silk-wrapped image in the mirror.

Miyohtwāw’s nails dug into the soft pads of her palms. How many families’ lives revolved around this single Hauthasan woman, a wife and a mother and a leader? Not just here in the palace but across the Hauthasan nation and the other lands they laid claim to. How many other families looked towards Queen Victra, even as she stared, entranced, at herself?

“Is this how you wish your children to see you?” Miyohtwāw burst out at this woman who claimed the role of “Great Mother Across the Salt Sea” yet seemed to reject its responsibilities. “As uncaring? Indifferent?”

Rose petals, from bushes lovingly tended by Miyohtwāw’s son, twitched at the queen’s shoulders.

In the looking glass, the dress’s cardinal-red hem began to smoke, then crumbled into ash. It was one of Miyohtwāw’s creations, after all. And Miyohtwāw’s clothes were always vested with more power than silk or sinew carried alone.

The queen’s eyes snapped furiously to Miyohtwāw’s, not noticing the change in the reflection of her dress. “I was not aware of your concerns before this, was I?” she said. “But I am disturbed to hear that my children are being treated in such fashion. I will appoint a governor, who will travel to your lands and act as my proper representative, as requested.”

She paused, her eyes far away.

“In fact . . . yes, that dovetails well.” The queen’s spirit seemed to snap back into her body. “The man I’m meeting today. He has been agitating for a position, and I cannot have him wooed away by those pushing for reform. A governorship in your lands . . . Now that would be just the thing. It will settle both our problems.”

A gahvahner . . . Miyohtwāw would have to learn more about what this was, but for now, the self-doubt tightening around her heart loosened its grip. The reflection of the dress stopped trying to shift with her conflicting intentions and shimmered back to something whole. The queen looked every part the seducer once again.

The queen, who had listened. The queen, who was willing to change her plans on the Otipēyimisowak’s behalf, with Miyohtwāw’s help.

“I am confident in our joint success,” Miyohtwāw said, head light with relief.