Diane Denny
Eskasoni
Transcript:
[-]
"The sheet, at wakes, some people that don't understand what the sheet is about, they call it "to hide the dirt on the wall". I've heard people say this, but that's not true, it's not true at all. The sheet was hung on the wall for a purpose. The sheet was hung, and it draped over a platform, and they put this person on the platform, and after sufficient time has passed for the wake of the person, they rolled this person up in this sheet, and they sew the sheet shut, and they burry the person with that sheet. And when the coming of the white man and the church and all, the people saw that Jesus himself had a shroud, when he was buried he had a shroud. So the priest and the people involved in the burials didn't mind it because they knew that Jesus had a shroud, and they recognized this sheet as a shroud. And in some communities today, they decorate these sheets with hieroglyphs, symbols of death and all that, that you die, you rise again and go to heaven and this is not the end, you go to... you pass on to another world. My father was from Newfoundland, in a small community on the south shore and in Newfoundland, they make shrouds for people when they pass on. It's a shroud and just your face is showing, and I think they still do that today there. But Salite' and the shroud are both holy, we consider them holy."