Throughout my childhood I sorely wished to find an eagle's feather. It is a powerful medicine. In many cultures and throughout all human history, it has been so. I remember seeing a drawing in a book depicting a young Cherokee warrior laying in wait by an eagle's nest to snatch a feather from the big raptor when it landed, counting coup rather than killing the bird. The eagle has been associated with the sun in the Old World and with the heavens because it flies at the highest altitude of all but a very few other birds.
The keenness of its powers of sight are legendary and are also borne out by science. A very special bird which had become extremely rare by the time I was a child in the places I lived. That fact served to underscore the uniqueness and value of the creature to me. Indigenous peoples and eagles seemed to me to both be heading down the same path. They were on a sky-road which wound through river valleys and over the mountains, finally passing across the Land of Memory and into the Realm of Myth.
The Hollywood depiction of Reel Injuns that we are all quite uncomfortably familiar with was a species of propaganda I began to see through while yet a child. A rare encounter with traditional people helped me immensely to see through much of the falseness. I was treated to a visit to the only small reservation in the entire vast state of Texas. It was the Alabama-Coushatta reserve near Henderson, in Northeast Texas. My mixed Cherokee grandmother took me to watch some pretty young women cooking up corn mush and I ate a bowl at the fire with her and them. It tasted of salt, sweet and smoke and I found it strangely familiar to my taste buds. I then watched an old woman making a pair of moccasins. It reminded me of watching my own grandmother shelling beans.
I spent the longest portion of that visit sitting with a very old man who was knapping flint arrowheads with a piece of deer horn. I knew he was a special man, I could clearly feel it. We spoke of many things and my grandmother left us two alone for a couple of hours. The old man told me all about the rattlesnakes. My grandmother obtained some fresh dried sarsaparilla root in a jar before we left. Not far away down the road back to Beaumont was a high hill-top and we stopped on our way to look out over the countryside. It was there she told me about us being part Cherokee. In that moment, I started to realize why I was always drawn to things indigenous and why I had felt comfortable in that traditional camp. My perspective was shifting from watching them (the other) doing primitive foreign things, to that of a person visiting with his relatives.
With time, I grew in book knowledge to see, that as far as First Nations were concerned, all that I had read had been written by European descended ethnographers, adventurers, soldiers, priests, traders, politicians and statesmen. Only a portion of the available materia aborigina was comprised of knowledge gained at first-hand and even that was necessarily filtered through the biases of a foreign psyche. I eventually began to read books written by native people in addition to the books written about them.
In the Sixties and again in the Eighties, I noticed a shift in the treatment of Native Peoples in literature. It was nothing new, for the noble savage had been romanticized many years before, particularly in Europe. Especially in England, France, former Czechoslovakia and in Germany. Some of the newly updated literary portraits at first served to suck up a bunch of non-native people into pseudo-indigenous ways of being. They taught chimeric religions that were concocted from the remnants of various vanquished families of man mixed with eastern religions. When dipped in the solvent of symbology and separated out into their constituent elements, it became plain to see what was a bit of Carl Jung’s archetypes plastered onto the Jewish Kabbalah.
One book called Hanta Yo took its readers into the intimate lives of the Lakota Sioux. This book was a milestone in that the author had it translated into Lakota and then back-translated into English. This process is a necessary step in order to preserve a true depiction of the channels of thought of a culture, thus crafting a much better likeness of their different reality. Another movie of the time had us Dancing With Wolves when we weren't busy shape-shifting into Wolfen.
Hanta Yo, the book and Dancing With Wolves, the movie both deserve credit. The book had the effect of replacing the mental bias of one dominant group and giving a glimpse of how another group perceives the world. A very big step in the right direction. The film used actual Native North American language in some of the dialogue, which hadn’t been done before.
Today there are cable TV stations dedicated to aboriginal communities. The content I have seen is working a quiet, benign conquest by example. Much like All In The Family did to prepare post war Americans for today’s world realities and Til Death Do Us Part did to prepare the British. It is hoped by non-native visionaries that we will all get on the same page eventually, behave, tolerate each other and pay our taxes.
My encounters with indigenous people while growing up in Texas and Louisiana were very limited until I came to Canada and began to travel about. Many of those encounters were highly negative and some of those encounters were inexplicably wonderful. In my own time, my emotional platform was sufficiently ready to know a deeper historical truth and I educated myself on the Residential School System that had been used in Canada, the USA, Australia, new Zealand and other places. That horrid revelation served a good purpose, however, in making sense of my negative encounters. It couldn’t have been otherwise.
Another set of internal mountains lay just beyond the tears of that realization. One peak in that range was my learning not to take on the guilt of the authors of indigenous misery because I share some of their European blood. Another peak was my learning not to live in a roadside Trail of Tears Museum; perpetuating the victimization for yet another generation and not to confuse history with fate, because I share some blood of the Cherokee victims. A third peak was my realizing that a new tribe had come into being, one that was of mixed blood and thus distinct from what came before even though it was dispersed to the point of being amorphous. All those revelations began to knit together like a broken bone in my soul over much time.
Once, I saw an ad for a rental cabin on a British Columbia Gulf Island when my children were small. A couple from Issaquah, Washington owned it and were renting it out for one quarter the price of what everyone else was charging. I phoned them to ask why and after hearing their story, I booked it for a week. My two sons were still quite young and I knew they would love it.
We found it to be a simple cabin on a huge lot with pine and arbutus trees. The state of wear only added to its charm. We spent very little time in the cabin as we were on a small island that had at least a dozen bays to explore as well as several points. There was one small mountain, which we climbed. The main focus was fishing. Salt-water fishing. Something I knew a bit about and wanted to pass on to my boys.
We were blessed to see otters, hawks, eagles, deer, squirrels, marmots, reef fish and garter snakes. We gathered oysters and had a feast. We swam in bottle-green salt water among cod fry and we hunted seashells until we were giddy from the sun. Nights were unplugged and full of Summer books, cool salt breezes and the promise of each new day. The point nearest to our cabin became a ritual family place to watch the sun go down. At last light we would follow the trail back to our stove and our beds.
The following Summer, we went again. This time we did all of the above plus we drove our rented car around the tiny island to check out every single bay. My boys were good at catching cod but most of the ones they caught were too small to keep. It became my mission to get us some eating sized rock fish. I had never fished for them so I tried everything I knew how to do for ten days. On the last day of that trip, I was desperate and obsessed.
I rose very early and told my wife I would be out on the point and would not come back until I caught a rock fish. Three or four hours later I heard my wife and the boys coming up the trail. I was wearing aqua-socks, standing waist deep in the reef and still empty handed. When my family was several hundred yards away, the solution hit me.
The answer was simple. The waters there were so unpolluted that they supported a huge variety of fish. Most abundant were cod fish. The entire coast of the island was swarming with them. I grabbed my youngest son's butterfly net and scooped several chubby specimens from a tide pool. I discarded my previous bait which had been dead cut-bait. I hooked a little cod through his nostrils and jaw, keeping him alive. I was using a hand-line that I had made from a piece of driftwood gathered from our first trip to the island. It had four coats of spar varnish, it fit my hand perfectly and it floated if I dropped it. I could carry it in my back pocket. It was rigged with a tear-drop lead and a single hook about twelve inches up off a three-way swivel.
I could cast the rig with precision. There was a deep hollow in the reef about seven feet away from where I stood and I let her go in there. The weight carried the cod down fast and I began to roll up fairly fast to avoid snagging on the jagged reef rocks. After five or six turns round the wood spool, she became stuck fast. I jockeyed around the slippery rocks and pulled hard on the rig. It came away easy as pie but not in the same way as when the line has been parted. After a few more turns, I saw it! A big bulgy-eyed rock fish rising like a U-boat decompressing and putting up no fuss. I unhooked it and flopped it in a deep tide pool. The bait cod was still alive and doing fine.
Four fat beauties were laid aside in that pool when my wife and sons scrambled out to the rocks. I had only used two bait fish and the whole process had taken about five minutes. They were all caught in the same hole I had been fishing for ten days. We cooked those up and had a feast. I learned that the rock fish had not recognized anything else I had thrown at them as being food. Only that which the Creator had already put there in abundance was food to them. If I would have put myself in the fishes position, I could have figured it out much earlier.
Several days before, we had tried fishing in a different part of the island where a narrow passage separated us from the next small island. The water there was deep and fast running with strong tides. There were rocks to stand on and grasses growing a few meters in back of the rocks. It was prime garter snake territory. My eldest son had already caught one while hiking the day before. This day it was my turn.
After a good nibble on my bait and a tug to set the hook, I rolled up my line. I expected to see a greenling. Instead, a long, fat, slate-coloured garter snake surfaced and went absolutely curly. It took my son and I many moments to unhook the indignant ribbon with teeth. We had both never seen or heard of anything like it. I checked with a friend in Texas who was a biology professor and he had never heard of it either. A local adaptation to a plentiful food source, is what he reckoned as the explanation. We watched for an hour or so, as other snakes slithered across the hot rocks, plunged into the cold sea and swam back with their catch.
We returned a third time to the island. That last time, the well was dry. We bought water to drink but I had to hike to the sea and haul buckets of water with which to flush our toilet. The drudge work got old fast. Even the otters seemed to be mocking me. I phoned the cabin owners in Washington and they put me in touch with a real estate man who let us into a big luxury house for the remainder of our trip. The children were thrilled, as now they had TV and could sleep in a loft!
We knew the island pretty well by that time and something became clear to me as we hiked and drove around exploring. The terrain had been changed drastically in the past one hundred years. I could tell that the trees were not original nor were all the open fields. This came into my mind when we drove past one particular point. It was a preserve of the local First People. There was no current settlement and it had been left in its original condition from the beginning. If you weren't looking for the differences from your vantage on the road, you might not notice much.
I felt very strongly drawn to it and after some consultation with my family, we parked the rental and plunged into another world. Leaving behind a parched land of dry grasses and stunted trees we entered a realm of man-high ferns and ancient cedars. It was cool and damp and little rivulets of clean water gurgled here and there through the brambles.
The trail was tiny but well worn with thousands of years of use. We could see the sea on both sides and in about ten minutes I saw my first “culturally modified tree." It was a grand old cedar that bore the gentle scars of many seasons of carefully harvested bark. This was the stuff that ropes, fishing lines, whaling lines, hats, bags, boxes, cloaks and shoes had been made from.
We were alone in the flesh but I could definitely feel that we were not alone on another level. Eventually, we came to a small shelving beach that formed a semi-circle of polished rocks and broken stones. The land side was only twenty feet from the water and the water here was deep and bottle-green. It was also near a marine pass between two islands. There was a large rock outcrop that was partly dry at that hour of the tide and from that platform, I began to fish with my boys.
I caught a greenling right away and put it in a tide pool on the rock. We saw a few killer whales blowing through the pass and the sound of their breath coupled with their swift passage through the water lent a very special ambience to that wonder-filled day. There was an eagle fishing around nearby and occasionally roosting on a tall tree on the island opposite with its catches. The boys soon tired of fishing and started to explore.
I felt someone approaching and I soon had verification of this with my eyes. It was a young woman who turned out to be a local Tsartlip. I backed away from the pool where my fish was and continued to cast. My wife was monitoring her approach and watching our boys who were busy absorbing all the sights and sounds. We were expecting a tongue lashing.
The woman slowly approached. The closer she got, the less anxiety we felt. My own attitude was that the earth was made by the Creator and any person who was respectful of that creation and of the belongings of others was free to roam where they would. Rather than owning land and drawing lines around it on maps, everyone occupied the earth and their “ownership” was a circle of stewardship that moved around with them. Similar to the safe distance that any undomesticated creature keeps from other creatures. My own life experiences in cities had never educated me on the etiquette of fishing, hunting or ceremonial grounds and I relied on rare one to one talks with First Nations people to learn about their various ways of seeing those things.
Eventually, the lady came to the beach and we all began to talk. She told us that we were lucky that the young men of the tribe hadn't found us first and I didn't doubt it. I told her that we meant no disrespect to her tribe, her band nor to the place itself. We could clearly see and feel that it was a special place but had not been able yet to read up on its history and thus did not know the story of that place. I told her that I wanted my sons to see what the place they lived in (British Columbia) used to look like before European homesteaders and corporations began extracting everything from it and covering it with cows and concrete.
I told her of my own background and then the story of the Cherokees and the Texas Band of Cherokees. I told her the story of my wife, who was a Filipina of Malay descent from a place fifteen thousand miles away that had over seven thousand small islands and hundreds of different tribes. They had been put through the European fire around the same time as North America by the same kind of people and using much the same tactics. In Texas there were no Cherokee reserves nor were there any Residential Schools, instead there were Colt revolvers, the Battle of the Neches and a simmering pain.
That young woman and I both cried during the telling of our three respective stories and when my stories were done, I apologized for our intrusion and told her that we would leave if she wished us to. She told us that we could stay and that we could keep the fish I'd caught. My wife and the woman began to speak together and we were then treated to the story of that particular beach.
We learned that the beach was the traditional place for that band to teach their youngsters to swim, to fish and to handle boats. Young men had launched whale-boats from there for longer than anyone knew. There were camps there in the Summer for socializing and eating the fruits of the sea. It was also where neighbouring tribes made raids for the purpose of capturing wives.
The rocks thereabouts were perfect for tool making and for thousands of years, fish weights had been drilled and points of all kinds had been chipped on the beach. The surrounding woods had served as a battlefield for inter-tribal skirmishes and some of the spent weapons remained where they fell to be covered with time. It was a place where young people were brought to find their first eagle feathers. Our new friend said she was going to be hunting for arrow and spear points that day.
We thanked her for her stories and for welcoming us to be there with her on that day. I asked her if I could look for my first eagle feather. She told me very solemnly that I might do so but that it was a tradition everywhere on this continent to give away the first such feather that one finds. They were extremely powerful objects and not to be taken lightly.
I promised her and set off into the ferns to search. My wife began to poke around the crumbling bank of the beach on the land side. The lady kicked around the rocky part of the beach and picked up fragments of worked rocks to examine. I had gone about fifty feet away from the shore up a hill and it was dark inside the woods. I cast my gaze about me and all I saw were mossy logs and lichen-encrusted boulders.
As my eyes adjusted to the dim light I started to notice fish skeletons here and there. They were huge and they crumbled to dust if you touched them. They were under the ferns. Suddenly I made the connection. The eagle I had seen fishing kept bringing its catch to the trees on the other island. He was eating them in the woods. That is how the plants got their phosphorus and calcium fertilizer.
About that time, a shaft of strong yellow sunlight shone down through the canopy when a puffy white cloud moved away from blocking it and the stirring breeze brushed aside a tree’s branches. I was standing about three feet from where the beam of light created a golden puddle on a dense mattress of fir needles and cedar mulch. There in the middle of the warm light was an eagle's feather. I looked at it and then I looked up between the trees to the sky. I spoke my thanks aloud. On the way back to the beach, I found three more eagle's feathers!
I gave the first feather to that woman. She smiled and said that she had looked for three whole days as a little girl before finding her first one. She continued searching around the beach for points. My wife opened her hand on our hike back to the car. She had found two intact points while I had been searching for my feather. A leaf-shaped spear point that had lain thousands of years on that tiny beach and an arrowhead that for several hundreds of years had been its partner. Those two points have since been entrusted to an esteemed native anthropologist for a safe return to their home.
Some years later, after I had retired from Canada Post, I was at the Lillooet Farmers Market buying a baby cherry tree for my wife. A man was helping me carry the large pot to my vehicle. As we slowly walked to the Suzuki, a big, beautiful eagle feather spiralled down from the cobalt sky and landed gently on the black soil of the pot. It came to rest against the little tree trunk. I was told by a St'át'imx neighbour that sometimes eagles get a feather damaged and thus pluck out a feather from the opposite side in order to maintain balance in flight. A lesson for me to ponder and at the same time, one of the most important “pats on the back” I have ever received while walking my trail.
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