The Chilliwack Tribe

Although the Kwakiutl are a costal people of British Columbia, their domain reaches well inland into the mountains bordering the Fraser Valley.  It was twice I lived on the Soowalie reserve, first as child where I attended primary school in Vedder Crossing.  My father was going through basic training there as a construction engineer, so we spent a lot of quality time along the Vedder to Chilliwack lake where he loved to fish rainbow trout.  The white crested shear peaks and their cascades of falls from the spring melt were utterly breath taking.  To drink from their waters was pure energy and could keep one trekking for miles without exhaustion.  My father got on well with the local colour, though these were sad times for their folk.  To the valley dwelling evangelists, they were just plain drunks that would never amount to anything civilized, and shunned them like the plague. You could see them in the Empress hotel on their knees teetering in a stupor, yet never falling down.  Mind you, the army guys were no different, always enjoying a good piss-up for lack of anything better to do on a Friday night.  My father spent his adolescence in a gold mining camp in Northern Quebec, so this was nothing new to him.  You could say it was all like one of those classical scenes out of “Paint Your Wagon”, except set in the most astoundingly beautiful landscape.  I remember the stories of his escapades with his mate “Joe Smoke”, whose house you couldn’t miss way up on the mountainside- with “Joe Smoke House” emblazoned in big white letters on the tar shingled roof.  One night it caught fire so my father and his mates went to see what they could rescue.  When they got there, Joe suddenly fell to his knees in riotous laughter at the spectacle.  While the whole thing was ablaze, the animals were running around it inanely in circle making a tremendous ruckus. “Shit man, your house is burning down, what the hell are you laughing at?” they stammered awestruck at the inferno. “Oh who cares about that, I can build a new one- but just look at those crazy animals” he laughed.  Indeed, this is the difference of accepting your lot in life to appreciate the irony of the curves that nature can throw you. The bush-sense of survivalism, and the way of the warrior that my own ancestors also shared in common.  I remember the legends we were taught in that school, about the thunderbird and the spirits of the warriors dancing in the auroras on clear nights.  The songs I used to sing to the wights of the land as the sun rose over those fantastic peaks.  The rainbows after a spring shower and firey colours of fall, the mammouth trees and the pure blue glacial waters.  In the spring you could hear the mountain sheep clashing horns like shotgun fire. Watching those clever bears always up to something, and how they would fish and forage.  The place was just teeming with lessons in nature. I couldn’t have been in a better place, in those very formative years of early youth.

When I returned years later, it all came back to me as if I had never left.  The carvings on the war canoes and totems, and the stories of their clans. I would spend days trekking around the reserve to the homesteads of different friends. We would sit around the fire at night, throw in a cedar log to spice up the air, then exchange stories of our travels and experiences.  One night I had the rare pleasure of discovering that one of my friends had mastered the skills of a Hamatsa fire eater.  The academics had assumed that this tradition had died out since the gov’t restrictions on the potlatch ceremonies, but here it was alive and well, having been passed on to him by his grandfather.  Of course our fireside encounters were never complete without the odd stories of earthlights around Mt. Baker and the legendary Sasquatch. There, this creature is believed to a be an inhabitant of the otherworldly, an alterreality understood as being on the borderline of ours in those parts heeded by ordinary man and bear alike. Only the Hamatsa have psychic prowess to venture those parts, commune with its dark spirits and gain their knowledge unscathed. It is revered as the domain of the “cannibal spirits” or “supernaturals” of the underworld.  The story tells of the great hunger that drove their people into these reaches through the icy realms of the giants, where they transformed into "supernaturals" by the eating of human flesh.  Indeed there are a great many parallels with ice giants of nordic mythology. Not all nations came over the Bering bridge, but this one undoubtably did.  It is said that D'znoqua is a stealer of children in the night, but there is one story of two who escaped with the treasures said to be stashed in the creature’s lair.  Theirs was a very poor family, so it brought great fortune to them in a time of desperate need. In essence, it's just one of those things the academics will never catch on film, rather, is like any journey of the soul into the great unknown, a voice of the hunter-seeker that calls out from deep within us.