“Over there, look, an eagle!” You follow her gaze, letting your eyes roam across the sky, finally seeing the huge raptor wheeling above the wooded slopes of Sagamook Mountain. A moment before, Rhonda Pelletier-Bélanger had pointed out three White-Admiral butterflies on the rocky shore of Lake Nictau. Rhonda, a Maliseet First Nations’ woman and park interpreter at Mount Carleton Provincial Park, is in her element.
The area that is now the park has always been important to her people. Rhonda was 17 the first time she came to Mount Carleton. She said, “I felt like it was calling to me. It was the meeting place for many nations. It was a place to hunt caribou and moose, to fish and collect medicinal plants.” Every summer for the past 10 years she has been able to answer that call by working at the provincial park.
Mount Carleton’s two highest peaks are Mount Carleton itself, and Sagamook – a Maliseet word for “chiefs.” Rhonda has climbed Sagamook many times. It is her favourite walk in the park. She said, “Natives climbed the mountain to ask the Creator for a good hunt and good fishing. For a good year, really.” But for Rhonda, the peak of Sagamook is also a place to gain some perspective on the world. “When you are up there, you see how small things are. You see how small we are compared to the world.”
Maybe that is why, when she talks about her memories of the woods or stories from the park, she chooses to answer with small moments: the cry of a lone loon at night, or the howling of coyotes, a songbird’s call or even mentioning a frog she saw on a forest path. She sees and hears so much of what is around her.
School groups often come to the park to experience the great outdoors and Rhonda has a game she plays with them to open them up to the forest. The game is about looking and seeing: The Unnatural Trail. She gathers anything the students have, like scissors, rulers or spoons and hangs the objects along the trail - and not in hard-to-find spots. Then they walk down the trail and she sees how many of the unnatural things the students find. “This game is to show people how we don’t really look when we are in nature.”
Rhonda is hoping to make Mount Carleton a gathering place for aboriginal people again, not like in the past when her people gathered here to hunt caribou and moose, but as a place to share their culture, language and respect for nature with others. It would also be a chance for the Elders to share their stories. Rhonda knows a lot about the land, but said, “I’m not the storyteller. Only the Elders are. They have the voice.”
It isn’t hard to see why Rhonda loves the park, with Sagamook looking down over the expanse of Nictau Lake. And when eagles wheel along its slopes and answer to the call of native drumming: “I’ve been at gatherings here and when we played the drum and chanted, eagles came. It is like they have been called.”
Mount Carleton has clearly called to Rhonda as well.
Mount Carleton Provincial Park
7612 Route 385
Saint-Quentin
506-235-0793