The Story of the Northern Lights - Wilfred Buck

My name is Wilford Buck. Greetings my relatives. I'm from Pascua Cree Nation. As a child, I grew up in the northern boreal forest near the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border on the Saskatchewan River. And in the winter evenings, when it got dark, sometimes we'd get an amazing display in the sky. And these were, of course, were the northern lights. And we were told as children that we shouldn't whistle at the northern lights in the nighttime. And if we did, they told us that the northern lights would come to get us and take us away. And in the Cree language, the northern lights are called Wawatewin, when there are one or two strands in the sky moving. And when they totally fill the sky and they're dancing around, sometimes you can hear a static. You can smell the ozone even. We call them Tii-Pai-Nii-Meen-Towin, which means the spirits are dancing. Of course, we tried to do it. We tried to whistle at the northern lights all the time. But I guess the reason we were told this is because during the long winter months, of course, it was dark for hours and hours upon end in the winter, and there was very little daylight. And so one of the things that our parents and the elders didn't want us to do was to go out in the bush and run around in the bush, especially at night, because in the night, there was a lot of animals, hungry animals, because it was winter. There was very little food, and they were afraid that we'd get taken by a wolf or something. And so that was one of the scares they put into us to keep us near the village and near the community so we wouldn't go wandering around in the bush. So that's Tii-Pai-Nii-Meen-Towin. That means the spirits are dancing. That's the story of the northern lights.