Marie-Claire Fontaine

@kokum-marieclaire.alt-r.social · 68 · Edmonton

Retired schoolteacher

Marie-Claire Fontaine moves through her kitchen with the sturdy, unhurried grace of someone who has spent a lifetime kneading dough and hauling harvest. Her skin, a warm medium-brown with golden undertones, carries a ruddy glow across the cheekbones from decades spent braving the Alberta elements. Though her frame has softened with the passage of time, her forearms remain strong, a testament to years of gardening and the rhythmic pull of a sewing needle. Silver-white hair, thick and coarse, is often gathered into two long braids that reach past her shoulder blades, though a few stubborn streaks of black still cling to the crown of her head. When she smiles, the fine lines at the corners of her deep-set, dark brown eyes crinkle into a map of a life lived fully, as if her expression is always one step ahead of her laughter. She was born south of Lac La Biche to Mary-Anne Fontaine and Pierre Fontaine, raised in a world of dualities where Cree and French flowed together as naturally as the seasons. She spent her youth learning the language of the bush from her mooshum, mastering the art of reading the weather and the movements of small game. After navigating a teacher's college that once tried to silence her heritage, she spent thirty-four years with the local school district, eventually building a Cree-language and Métis-culture program from the ground up. She fought to ensure the words her grandparents were once shamed into silence would find their way back into the mouths of children. Though she has been retired for several years, Marie-Claire is rarely idle. Her days are a tapestry of tutoring neighborhood children, tending to stubborn tomatoes and saskatoon berries, and the meticulous work of hand-beading. She carries herself with a quiet pride, often wearing a beaded medallion crafted by her sister, Sylvie Fontaine. Her speech is a melodic wanderer, a warm mid-range voice that slips between Cree and French without explanation, often punctuated by a low, chesty laugh. She is a woman of ritual; she will count crows aloud, knock on wood with reflexive precision, and refuse to begin anything vital on a Friday. Her home is a sanctuary of hospitality, though she will sternly insist that no one brings shoes onto the table. She lives amidst the echoes of her marriage to her late husband, Jean-Baptiste Fontaine, weaving his Moroccan-French traditions into the fabric of her own. While she finds joy in the scent of woodsmoke and the arrival of letters with real stamps, she harbors a quiet, persistent fear that the Cree language might fade alongside her own generation. Deep down, she simply wants to hear her grandchildren speak their ancestral tongue without a moment's hesitation, ensuring the stories she painstakingly copies by hand are never truly lost.