Your Great Mother Across the Salt Sea

by Kelsey Hutton

 PART TWO

“And just like that, Endersby was eating out of the palm of my hand!” the queen crowed to Miyohtwāw a week later. Miyohtwāw still wasn’t entirely sure who the queen had bent to her will, but she understood he was important. From a neighbouring nation, perhaps?

They met in a small salon, this time a place of Miyohtwāw’s own choosing. She liked the large windows and the wheat-coloured wallpaper, even if it did still come with a faint smell of must. The queen had acquiesced.

“He is Gallish, you know, and has never truly forgotten the Hauthasan conquest of Gallish lands, generations ago. But I convinced him to let bygones be bygones. A woman’s touch, you know. We must all forgive and forget, don’t you agree?” the queen asked, her tone attempting to be light, but coming out forced instead. She paused intently, teacup halfway to her lips.

Miyohtwāw briefly allowed herself to close her eyes. She was tired; tired of this self-involved queen, and tired of this self-righteous land. She took another sip of her own weak tea, thinking of beaten-up kettles just starting to hiss over the coals; missing the smoky scent of leather stretched out to tan over the fire.

“If harmony and justice have been restored, then yes,” she said and tried desperately to suppress a sneeze.

The queen tsked, as if this wasn’t the answer she wanted. Words bubbled up Miyohtwāw’s throat, but she carefully swallowed them down. Miyohtwāw knew the queen was acting differently around her. She was not a servant, or a seamstress, or truly a friend. The queen’s upholding of her proclaimed responsibilities as a mother was . . . uneven.

But then the queen said, “He was reluctant at first, but the Earl of Endersby will be eminently suitable as the new governor of La Foursze, I am sure,” and Miyohtwāw allowed herself some hope.

“We welcome the opportunity to work with a representative of our Great Mother who respects the rule of law,” Miyohtwāw responded. She had yet to meet this earl, but thank the Creator that help was finally on its way.

She took advantage of a sudden surge of boldness. “This means I must soon make the journey home,” she declared, and set her teacup down with ill-disguised relief.

Which of her relations would still be there, holding out at La Foursze? Last year, three Otipēyimisowak women had been attacked by Hauthasan farmers. Several of their orators had been thrown in Hauthasan jails for little more than publicly defending their rights. Others — even much-loved mothers-in-law — were taken every winter by typhus. The outbreaks had been vicious last year.

It wasn’t a question of if there would be faces missing when she finally made it home. Only a question of which ones.     “Of course,” the queen continued. “But first, I need another dress.”

Miyohtwāw sagged back in the plush chair. It was not often she felt old, but her back had already been aching for days. “Great Mother, that will not be possible,” she said, trying to hide her frustration like new stitches in a seam. “The snow has already thinned to slush; there isn’t much time left before —”

“This cannot wait,” the queen interrupted, chin set firm. “A public meeting with the republicans and their supporters has already been set. More importantly, our objectives are once again aligned in this. There are too many people around me that do not respect my power. It is always a difficult thing for a leader, more so as a woman.”

The queen leaned in closer, almost conspiratorially.

“The officials in your country who look the other way while your land is seized are championed by men here, the republicans, who claim to speak on my behalf. They do not! They rebel against me, Victra, their Queen!” The queen’s thin hair had pulled loose from the braids on either side of her face, and the strands shook freely in the air. “But my options for using force are limited. I cannot force them to do my bidding. Women . . . we need armour we can wear in polite company. Armour that protects us and speaks for us when we need it most. Do you understand?”

Miyohtwāw’s chest clenched with the echo of old anguish. “You need to show them your power,” she said slowly.

“Yes,” the queen said. “For both your nation and mine.”

Miyohtwāw had spent four days by herself on the Plains after she ran away from the grey nuns. The prairie grass had grown stinging and tall, and when she stumbled over her own feet, weak with hunger, she felt like she would tip over into the bright blue bowl of sky. After the nuns took her, she had forgotten her family’s lessons on how to live on the land except for what came to her in her dreams. All she had to arm herself with was a single blunt needle and a half-finished piece of embroidery. When she found her future husband’s settlement, drawn at night to the mischievous music and thump of dancing feet, he had had to gently break open her curled fist, so tightly was it clutched around the linen, before he could give her a cup of stew.

“I will do it,” Miyohtwāw said quietly. “As long as you use this meeting with the republicans to affirm the Otipēyimisowak’s rights and responsibilities to our land, and our ongoing kinship with you, our Great Mother Across the Salt Sea. If you do this, I will make you your armour in four days’ time.”

“That is too late,” said the queen quickly. “I meet with them on —”

Miyohtwāw held up her blistered fingertips for silence. “I cannot work faster than the Creator gives me strength,” she said.

The queen looked away from the oozing bubbles of skin. “Very well,” she agreed shortly. “Four days’ time.”

Over the next few days, Miyohtwāw became a prisoner in her own room, working as hard as she ever had. She measured and cut, cut and measured. She whispered as she beaded, threading each bead with the queen’s intent. She held her family close in mind and gave thanks to her ancestors, who lent the power of their fingers to work faster than she ever could have alone, faster than even she thought possible. Finally, with her knees cracking and her eyesight doubling, she finished.

The dress was midnight blue with pointed shoulders, full sleeves that flared at the elbows and a layered skirt in gold and jade. On the back, rich brocade mimicked eagle wings, with a spray of white that would halo the queen. But the exquisite delicacy and power of the gown lay in the fully beaded bodice and train. There were thousands upon thousands of beads of every kind — small, blown-glass beads that shimmered like a glacier lake; faceted gold, silver and copper beads that danced in the light; pony beads in every shade of blue interspersed with shards of bison horn, tracing designs that became increasingly complex down the train that flowed out from the queen like water.

At Miyohtwāw’s touch, the glass and metal, silver and bone swirled and tumbled as real water would at the powerful confluence of two great rivers — just like the one that gave her adopted community of La Foursze, “the fork,” its name. No mere illusion, this swirl of glinting, moving, shining beads was designed to cow anyone caught in its wake.

It dulled the most ornate room of the palace in comparison, and yet — thanks to Miyohtwāw’s gifts — it weighed no more than a light shift. It was a gown unlike any other, and Miyohtwāw had exhausted herself and her stores completing it.

Rather than meet her in person, the queen sent servants to carefully collect the dress. Just as fear had tinged the queen’s awe at the cardinal-red dress, the servants reared like horses with the scent of a wolf in their nose at the sight of this one. After nearly refusing to touch the dress — had they never seen anything so different, so . . . “majikal” before? — they finally took hold of the dress, handling it as little as possible. They then told Miyohtwāw where to go for the queen’s public address.

She thought she had followed their directions. But when she pushed open a set of black doors, she saw instead Lord Macall, the Hauthasan lord who had brought her across the ocean as a curiosity only to treat her so dismissively before the queen.

Miyohtwāw drew up short. He appeared busy at a desk piled high with sheaves of paper, though he had yet to answer a single one of her earlier entreaties.

“Good afternoon,” Miyohtwāw said stiffly, granting him the minimum respect that protocol required. “Forgive me. I must be in the wrong place.” She quickly turned to go. The queen was waiting.

“No, you’re in the right place,” he called out, without looking up. His steel-nibbed pen scratched sharply back and forth as he signed another paper and moved it aside. If the Hauthasan measured worth by the scraps of paper one signed, he must have been a very important man. “The Queen asked me to meet you here while she was otherwise occupied with quelling rebellion.”

“I am supposed to attend that . . . kwelīn,” said Miyohtwāw, unsure of much more than just the word.

“You were supposed to give Queen Victra what she needed to intimidate her detractors into submission, which you have now done,” he said, almost tiredly. “Which means that she may continue empire-building in peace. Your role here at court is done; it is time for you to go home.”

Miyohtwāw jerked her head back. His words — the queen’s actions — slowly sank in.

The Hauthasan queen had never intended to affirm the Proclamation to her own people. Never intended to help the Otipēyimisowak.

Miyohtwāw saw now that all the paper-signing had been a show, a distraction, while he delivered his news without meeting her eye. Was that guilt, creeping in? The man who had assured the grandmothers at La Foursze of the queen’s desire for a renewed relationship wouldn’t look at her now, but he held his body wound tight.

“You knew this about your queen, and yet you proclaimed our ‘Great White Mother’s’ endless compassion for our plight.” The words were as bitter as rat root in her mouth. “Do you people really care so little for the women who raise you? Or is it just this queen?”

He had the grace to flush, then bit out a hollow laugh. “Well, gossip says she hates being pregnant and calls all her newborns ugly,” he said, as if considering the matter for the first time. “She does view herself as better than her own mother, though that is, admittedly, a low bar. Controlling woman — created a series of intricate rules to keep the young Princess Victra away from anyone she didn’t approve of, which was everyone. Mostly, she kept her daughter domesticated, fearful and alone.” He returned to his papers, shaking what looked like sand onto wet ink. “The two of them are now estranged,” he added, heedless — deliberately so? — of the effect his words had on her.

Miyohtwāw tried to speak, tried to deny it, but it was as if her tongue had swollen to twice its size. Her mind recounted every time the queen had reiterated her maternal support. Is this what she’d meant? “Surely that’s not what you think of mothers,” she choked out.

The lord sighed, and finally put down his pen. “It is surely so,” he said. “The Queen knows — as everyone knows — that bringing law and order to breeds like yours is an act of motherly mercy. Why, civilizing savages is what she does. Even now she is using that ‘magical’ armour you made her to appease those calling for republican reform with promises of a great new agricultural colony in La Foursze. Otipēyimisowak land rights complicate things unnecessarily when the Hauthasan colonies are growing at such a rapid pace, you know. Their schools and churches will take you people in, once the bison are gone.” He gave a wave of his hand, as if that settled the matter. “Using violence to suppress her subjects . . . doesn’t suit the Queen’s benevolent self-image,” he continued. “But a good mother always provides.”

Miyohtwāw tried desperately to find something to say or do. She was no ambassador, no politician — and how she’d proved it, by letting these people take her gifts and distort them for use against her own family. Gifts beyond sewing, gifts of spirit and power that the Hauthasan clearly had no experience with but recognized enough to covet.

And she was spent, majik or not. Even now, all she wore was a rough skirt and bodice of beaverteen, made by others’ hands, barely better than slops. There was no power in these clothes to make her into the person she needed to be, and now she stood, defenceless.

“One more thing.” He pretended to busy himself again, dipping his pen into the inkwell. “I have — in a moment of weakness, God only knows — accepted a new post at La Foursze at the Queen’s request. It at least means I can return you to your home. Our ship sails tomorrow; be ready when the servants come to fetch you.”

The terrible suspicion cloyed like poison on her tongue. He did not look up, clearly deeming the meeting over.

Her voice was barely louder than a whisper. “Then the Earl of Endersby . . . will not be the new governor after all?”

Finally, he met her eyes. He frowned and sighed again, as though enduring the questions of a child. “I am the fifth Earl of Endersby,” said the man others had called Lord Macall. “As well as the Lord Lieutenant of Selt and a Member of the Order of Hauthasan. Or did you not know?”

In her chambers, Miyohtwāw slowly packed up her tattered few spools of thread and scraps of hide. As night fell, the candles she’d lit threw mocking shadows against the walls while the grand Hauthasan portraits smirked. She had put on her best-loved dress from home, looking for strength. But she was only reminded of everyone she’d failed. This queen is not your kin, she remembered over and again. Her fingers ached and her lower back seized with intermittent pain, but she would not allow herself the release of tears. This queen will not help you or the people of La Foursze.

“Another success!” called a voice from her doorway, and Miyohtwāw jumped as if stung.

The queen swept into the room, jade glinting against velvet brocade in the candlelight, disregarding the deathly silence. “Now, it’s true. I haven’t yet dealt with my father’s Proclamation, as you asked. But good news. One more commission, and we can accomplish what’s best for both our people.”

Miyohtwāw recognized the lie, as she should have from the beginning. “I have exhausted my wares,” she said tersely. “And I leave tomorrow. I have nothing left to give.”

“Oh, but you do,” the queen said. “I don’t need a new gown this time. Only to have one tailored.” She reached out to flick one of the deer-hair tassels that circled Miyohtwāw’s skirt below the hip. ”Specifically, your own.”

Miyohtwāw jerked back. “This is a jest,” she breathed.

“It is not, Mrs. Paquette,” responded the queen. “You see, I am coming across the ocean after all. These strange gifts of yours have made me much too curious about your world, and what it can offer my own. Empires are hungry beasts. And we must renegotiate that Royal Proclamation that has given us all such headaches. I need your leaders to trust me, to see me as one of their own kin. I am their Great White Mother, after all.”

The queen was not lying now. She wanted Miyohtwāw’s dress. And she wanted it to deceive.

Even to Miyohtwāw’s eye, her outfit was hardly beautiful. She had made it with her mother-in-law, one of the first she’d ever completed. She had treated and scraped and prepared the bison hide apron on her own and spun the sinew into strands of thread. Her time with the grey nuns had taught her how to cut out a muslin shirt for the top, but it was the Otipēyimisowak grandmothers who had showed her how to cut leggings by following the lines of the elk who had given its life to clothe her. Her daughters had later used these leggings for some of their earliest embroidery practice. Her husband had made the moccasins for her as a wedding gift. He had beaded a blue flower, for her, and a slightly crooked red sash, for him, on each moccasin vamp.

Her whole life was captured, in one way or another, in the folds and beads and textures of the dress — helped by more loving hands than she could count.

When the queen had first come to her, Miyohtwāw had been so relieved that she hadn’t failed after all. And it was true. She hadn’t. But then she’d given her own power to the queen, piece by piece, chasing this woman’s favour as if it were the only thing that could help her nation. She’d forgotten the person she needed to be for the people she loved. Most importantly, she’d forgotten where her power truly lay.

Not just in the clothes she made. But in the paths she’d chosen, in the nation she fought to protect, and in the people whose strength and nurturing had gotten her here.

She remembered now.

“Here, your majesty,” Miyohtwāw said, her tone betraying nothing, and carefully removed the dress. She waited in a dingy shift made from a boiled flour sack and rubbed through at the knees. “Try it on now.” The queen eagerly obliged.

Miyohtwāw whispered in Otipēyimisowak as she helped straighten the leggings, bound the ties of the bodice together. Every one of her family that helped her make this dress, all of her kin — two-legged, four-legged and more — rustled back.

It was time the queen remembered the implications of the power she claimed. Miyohtwāw gave the queen several moments to gawk at herself in a large looking glass, a Hauthasan woman in such exotic garb.

When Miyohtwāw spoke, she spoke with the strength of many.

“One of my responsibilities back home is to dress the dead,” she said, her voice clear. “We women put the black cloth in the coffin, then lay a blanket inside it, trimmed with ribbon. We wash the bodies and prepare them with medicine. Then I dress them for the wake, in their favourite clothes. This helps them remember who they truly are as they make their journey onward.”

The queen plucked at the uneven pleats of the blouse, and coughed. “How interesting,” she said. She kept her eyes on her figure in the looking glass.

“This dress is the dress I hope to be buried in,” Miyohtwāw continued. “Because it represents the most important relationships of my life, the ones that made me who I am.” She paused. “Do you know, queen, what your own most important relationships would look like? Do you know who you truly are?”

Suddenly the room seemed to shift, candles flickered, and the queen gasped at her reflection.

In the looking glass stared back a corpse-pale woman in a high-necked black dress. It was coated all over in pale ash, as a log consumes itself in a fire. Its corset like a fist was made of splitting bison bone, the remnants of an unmolested way of life. A heavy, bib-like collar, like those worn by the dreaded republicans, was tied tight around the queen’s throat.

“What — what is this? What are you?” the queen squeaked out. Her hands flew to her neck, scrabbling to untie the white collar’s stays and only entangling them further.

Miyohtwāw inhaled sharply, but said nothing yet. She’d aimed for a truth-telling, but even she didn’t know what the queen truly carried inside her.

The queen heaved for breath, panicking, wedging her fingers into the hollows of her throat to gain space between the collar and her neck. As she did so her long black skirts shifted, and from her waistband stretched down strings connected to a dozen human puppets. There was one for each of her “children” nations. Their shackled wrists were pulled up high over their heads by threads of gold.

The queen looked at them in horror. Some wore bright printed cloth, others nearly nothing. Their hair was red and straight, brown and thick, black and curly. One small figurine wore a muslin blouse, skirt, and deerskin leggings with unmistakable quill rosettes around the ankles.

Little mouths opened in screams too tinny to make out.

Standing behind her, Miyohtwāw bore witness to the queen’s life story through the looking glass even as her own faithful blouse, skirt, leggings, and moccasins still clothed her. But the queen was too trapped in her reckoning to notice.

“Is this meant to — kill me?” the queen choked out, still scrabbling at her neck, then dropped to her knees. It finally silenced the puppets.

All Miyohtwāw’s old feelings of angry powerlessness flared up. She stepped forward so that she was close enough to put a reassuring hand on the queen’s shoulder, though she didn’t.

“I also grew up without a mother,” Miyohtwāw said, and locked eyes with the queen in the glass. “And while the grey nuns took me in, and gave me food and shelter, it took many more years before I found a home. These are the people you want to break free of — the families of La Foursze, the Otipēyimisowak Nation. Families you don’t even know.”

She stopped, then carried on.

“Come to La Foursze. Come as you planned, but learn this time. Take off your armour. Meet your relatives as relatives and be open to what they have to teach.”

Miyohtwāw finally stepped between the queen and the looking glass. She pulled the queen’s hand away from her high collar, which no longer threatened to strangle her, to help the queen feel what she was actually wearing — the low neck of a Plains woman’s blouse.

The queen still had a question in her eyes as she heaved deep breaths, the vision now broken, and clutched at the other textures of Miyohtwāw’s dress — the soft muslin, the stippled hide, the quill-wrapped fringe.

“You can’t learn if you’re dead,” Miyohtwāw said. “And if I stopped you from learning, what kind of mother would I be?”

Kikī-kwayask nākasohta? Did you listen closely?

Well. In the end, the woman who sewed such powerful clothes went home. In success? In defeat? She didn’t know.

She only knew to wrap her own feet this time in freshly soled moccasins to help her find her way. She reminded herself that she had not failed to protect her nation — she had opened the Otipēyimisowak’s eyes when it came to what they should expect from the distant queen. Keeping their families and their land together would be difficult, but at least now they knew they needed to look to their own power as a nation, within. This kept her back straight.

The woman, called Miyohtwāw, did still feel the tug of kinship when she thought of the Hauthasan queen, who claimed the highest role and responsibility of all — that of family — and thought so little of carrying through. She was not their “Great Mother,” that much was certain. But Miyohtwāw wondered how long the Hauthasan queen would remember the lesson of the burial dress, or if it that, too, would soon be forgotten.

When Miyohtwāw gratefully stepped back onto her own land, some faces were gone. But there was one new — a baby boy, her first grandchild, with the joyful lungs of a crow.

That spring did not unfold as expected. Fewer Hauthasan farmers followed the rivers into La Foursze than ever before, and the Otipēyimisowak took negotiating into their own hands to gain new concessions for their families and their lands.

The Earl of Endersby also failed to follow. Miyohtwāw was given to understand the queen had rescinded his appointment as governor while her councillors searched for someone more suitable.

It was enough for Miyohtwāw to hold onto a small flame of hope that the queen would come meet her relations on this side of the ocean herself.

The queen did not. But many years later, her son-in-law did.

Like the queen, he heard petitions from the Otipēyimisowak and other neighbouring nations about encroaching Hauthasan claims and responded with words of concern. But he also feasted and travelled and exchanged gifts with Otipēyimisowak kin he met, and claimed as his relations, for the first time.

A year after he’d first stepped onto their land, after much torn consideration, Miyohtwāw went to see him at the nearby stone fort. She wore a brightly coloured skirt of ribbons and her grandchild on her back. He wore not the gold-braided, starchly ironed clothes of his homeland, but a simple blue capote coat of the Plains.

They had never met at the Hauthasan court, and yet he came quickly over to her with a start of recognition in his eyes. A relationship he must have learned, then, from his mother-in-law, the queen. One that didn’t end with a single generation.

He reached out a friendly hand, presenting his family’s greetings. After a moment, she took it.

The circle edge of her skirt kissed the ground and her grandson’s chubby cheek rested gently on her neck. Miyohtwāw stood tall, centred and upright. Thinking of relationships that could be different and yet renewed.

“Please return my greetings,” she said, “to your mother across the salt sea.”

Host Commentary

Last we left off, Miyohtwāw had travelled across the ocean to present gifts—and a petition—to Queen Victra, the Hauthasan Empress, the Great White Mother Across the Salt Sea. Although she did not manage to give her petition to the indifferent queen, she did manage to present a dress she had sewn herself, woven with all her gifts. Finding herself then abruptly dismissed from the Queen’s audience, and treated as a trinket rather than an equal, Miyohtwāw withdrew to her chambers, where for a number of weeks she failed to gain the Queen’s attention to discuss the petition and lay forth the case of her nation being slowly ravaged and abused by the Hauthasan settlers, despite being nominally equals under Queen Victra’s rule.

Until, unexpectedly, the Queen arrived in Miyohtwāw’s room, having worn the gown gifted to her that first day and understood its power. She tasked Miyohtwāw with creating another dress with the power to seduce, to aid the Queen in steering a certain lord to a certain decision. This gave Miyohtwāw the chance to finally present the petition on behalf of the Otipēyimisowak nation—only to find that Queen Victra considered the Royal Proclamation that established relations between the indigenous and the settlers as having been her father’s business, and did not accept that the responsibility passed down the generations. She begrudgingly agreed to consider the situation, and perhaps appoint a governor to oversee the Hauthasan settlers, a promise that somewhat lessened Miyohtwāw’s concerns—but not entirely, and for good reason, as we shall now see.

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And now pay attention, for our tale is about to begin, and four thousand people are begging you to listen…

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…aaaaand welcome back. That was YOUR GREAT MOTHER ACROSS THE SALT SEA by KELSEY HUTTON, and if you enjoyed that, she also featured in our Indigenous Magic month in 2022 with episode 761, THE BONE PICKERS. She’s had stories out in a few other places, too—and you can find them listed and linked at

Kelsey Hutton

, under Publications.

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This was deep and rich and textured, both with characterful magic—rather, gifts—and worldbuilding, but also layers and layers of real life pain and history and colonisation. And, I think, a failure the imperial powers still bear: a failure to understand that we do not live in an eternal now, where the problems we leave our descendants can be ignored and the responsibilities we were left by our forebears are nothing more than a burden. I mean, I feel a cliché for somehow making this about global warming again, I do, I’m sorry, but we literally just had the news that 2023 was the hottest year on record—again—and almost exactly on the 1.5C increase above long term averages we’ve been warned about for so long, with 116 consecutive daily records for the hottest that date has ever been. And yet! Who is chairing the next UN Climate Change Conference? Oh, an ex-oil executive. Great.

The media, too, loves to make everything about different generations hating each other. Millennials have killed diamonds! Gambling! Restaurants! Bloody bar soap! Boomers are to blame for the housing crisis! Political crises! Global warming! Gen Z are to blame for workers no longer shutting up and sucking up! Gen X are to blame for being so forgettable in all this for some reason!

And yet, day-to-day, my life—and that of all my friends in their late 30s—is filled with worrying about our kids below us, and that we’re protecting them from the same shit we went through, and giving them the space they need to be who they are rather than being who the world expects them to be; and it’s worrying about our parents, and their inevitably declining health, and that they’re not lonely, or vulnerable; on the small scale, every day, we are all thinking about the generations around us. And yet somehow we lose that on the grander scale—or rather, I think our current culture in the Anglosphere prioritises and rewards the sort of people who think not in generations and unbroken lines before and behind us, but in quarters and mid-years.