Happy new year!
As Vanessa mentioned, the 24th edition of the RVF is almost here. We can’t tell you what the RVF’s 2022 theme is, but I can say that I am reading two books right now that fit right in with it.
Lydia Campbell’s Sketches of Labrador Life and Elizabeth Goudie’s Woman of Labrador are two memoirs that describe the lifeways and rich traditions of rural Labrador in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born almost a century apart on the same river system, both Lydia Campbell and Elizabeth Goudie lived off the land. Both women also wrote books that spoke about their experiences as women of Labrador, passed on local traditions, and had a long-time and profound impact on their communities.
Lydia Campbell was born in 1818 on the shore of Double Mer Inlet in Groswater Bay (Kangerliorsoak in Inuktitut; Baie-St Louis in French). Her English father taught her to read and write in English and her Inuit mother taught her to speak Inuktitut. Her mother also shared traditional stories she grew up with and her traditional knowledge about hunting, fishing, sealing, traditional medicines, and the preparation of country foods with Lydia. Lydia married young and moved to Rigolet (Inuktitut: Tikigâksuagusik) where she lived on the land, hunting, trapping, gathering, fishing, and caring for her children. She also taught her children and grandchildren to write.
At 75, Lydia wrote a series of vignettes about her life, the stories of her parents and other community members, as well as traditional Inuit and Innu narratives. These were published in 1894 and 1895 in the Evening Herald, a St John’s newspaper. They were also gathered up and published as the book, Sketches of Labrador Life.
Lydia Campell’s great-grandniece, Elizabeth Goudie, was born in 1902 in Mud Lake (Tikigâksuagusik in Inuktitut), a small settlement in central Labrador, on the shore of Patshishetshuanau-shipu (also known as the Churchill River). She received only four years of formal schooling, but reading was always a part of her life. In 1920 she married Jim Goudie, whose ancestors were French, Cree, and Scottish, and they had eight children together. For more than two decades, Elizabeth and Jim lived mostly off of the land, hunting, trapping, gardening, and gathering as their ancestors had. In the 1930s, when the bottom fell out of the fur trade economy, Labradorians who trapped and hunted for a living were at risk of starvation. Construction of the Goose Bay Air Base began in 1941, and by 1944 Elizabeth and Jim left their last trapper’s cabin and moved to the newly-established Happy Valley-Goose Bay townsite for work. In 1963, after Jim’s death, Elizabeth began to write her memoirs, which were published as Woman of Labrador in 1973. Elizabeth Goudie died in 1982 at Happy Valley-Goose Bay.
Here’s an excerpt from Elizabeth’s book that I particularly like:
“I would like to see this writing of our life and the life of the Labrador trappers published. These people all knew each other and were always happy to get together … It was a good life, a very plain life. Just poor people – most of us were alike, but life didn’t seem hard. We were honest with each other, and if you had two meals of meat and your neighbour had none you shared with him.”
Catherine Fisher, blogger
Image: Margaret (Campbell) Baikie, Daniel Campbell, and Lydia Campbell. Mulligan, c.1895. Flora Baikie collection. Image courtesy Them Days, Happy Valley-Goose Bay, NL
