TRANSCRIPT

It was an early Spring and of course everybody is preparing to start seeding, and he would hurry up and go walk everybody's fields before they would plow up the fields, because that would shut him down once all the fields were. And I remember one time the whole family was picking rocks by hand. We were all working pretty hard, and of course, he's picking too, but he's not picking the same ones we are. He was picking the little ones. And my dad was pretty discouraged, he had lots of rocks to pick up, and he called over,'Henri! Why don't you come over and pick the big rocks?' And we laughed, we got a big kick out of that. And he said 'Well, I suppose I should.' We had a good laugh over that. There's lots and lots of memories. We would come home, and he was a real storyteller, it was just about a gift. He could have you there for hours, telling you about stories. The whole native culture fascinated him. And he always said that we the white man figured that life started, well, since Saskatchewan started in 1905, life may have started in 1870 or something like that. He said it didn't matter where you went if you got down on the soil and looked you would find traces of people. There have been people here for thousands and thousands of years. I remember I gave him this cartoon about the tip of a pyramid sticking out of the sand, and he wanted it reproduced so he could keep it. You never know what you'll find when you start digging. He was good at telling stories, good at telling jokes, he was basically a walking encyclopedia.

Guy Roberge