LAND OF THE RED GIANTS OF IXTLAN

Chapter 15 - British Columbia: "Deganawidah in Armorica"

Suswaps and Crees and Norwegians in western Canada restored my flagging hopes in
the fragmentary aim, and Mohawks and Welshmen as well, back east at Oka Quebec in a
magnificent 78-day standoff back in 1990 with the Surete Quebecois who wanted to dig
up a Native graveyard to put in a golf course, shooting it out with the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police ("RCMP") as well in B.C. in 1995 at Gustafson Lake. Again, a handful
of brave warriors defied the entire might of the Empire and won, both times; and in
countless other roadblocks on logging roads all over the provinces. One cop was killed at
Oka, and others wounded all across the Great North with, of course, hundreds of Iroquois
and Metis mixed-bloods who were routinely murdered on the dark back roads of Alberta
and other infamous Northwest Territories. Seafarers and salmon fishermen, Makah
whalers, and caribou tribes mixed with Kwakiutls in what ol' James Churchward of Lost
Mu fame said was a common oceanic heritage with Australian Melanesians and
Antarctican hidden cultures - and which the Nordski explorer Roald Amundsen, of the
South Pole, described as having a hidden green valley deep in its icy wastes he called
"Carmen Land". Kon-Tiki sailors like Hawaiians or Inuits in their rebuilt Hokuolea
catamarans had steered by Polaris farther than any lousy nuclear-powered polaris
submarines ever could, across the ten thousand miles of the Pacific Basin as big as a
lunar crater with the unerring navigational genius of albatrosses and skua gulls circling
the globe without ever resting or sleeping.
Suniva Bronson on Vancouver Island told me of a million bears killed by hunters
around there, every year, and her voyages on Greenpeace's battleships against Japanese
whalers, and the melting Icecaps the factories of Vancouver and Seattle were destroying.
Suniva and her mother Anne had brought me up to British Columbia and Alberta several
times, on their vast land-wealth pioneered as relatives of the Rockefellers, and she ran
"supplies" into the Suswap Camp that got surrounded by hundreds of Mounties at
Gustafson Lake that summer of '95, getting trapped inside herself with only a dozen or so
of the 'Ts'peten Defenders'.
"Some cowboys, you see," skinny old Percy Rosette explained to me later, a
melancholy Suswap elder, "wanted free grazing for their cows on our sundance grounds.
We put up a wood fence, then they knocked it down, we put it up again, and they came in
shooting drunkenly at us one Saturday night, so we shot back. And the RCMPs said we
were outlaws and set up a seige."
Other Suswaps and Bella Coollas told me they'd never had sundances or pipes in their
ancient cultures, and those were only brought in recently by Lakotas from South Dakota.
Naskapis and Montagnais told me in Quebec Ville and Sept Iles way up on the Fleuve
San Lawrence, at the homes of some of my Wendat relatives, that they only had feasts in
their old days, caribou and shrimp feasts, as their only real spirituality, and that all this
reawakening of native identity and pagan religion was just a bunch of New Age hippies
trying to be cool. I argued that, yes, there were a lot of california rip-offs playing
weekend pipe-carriers and sweat-lodgers and even sundancers - all of which, by the way,
the Cheyennes said they'd originally created and the Sioux had stolen from them, in their
great 56-day ceremony of the Massaum Crazy Animal Dance - but, damnit, a lot of them
were sincere too and we needed all the help we could get.
Another brilliant Suswap elder named Jonesy, who later changed his name to the nom
de guerre of Wolverine, had joined Percy in the standoff at the remote lake way north of
Kamloops British Columbia on their happy caribou hunting grounds. It was a very wild
and tree-filled plateau rising up to the freezing tundra lands of the Yukon and Alaska.
Jonesy had auditioned for a zero-budget video I was shooting about Sitting Bull and his
days on the run in Canada, and we had many good meals and cigars at Suniva's remote
cabin near Pinartan Lake, not far from his home at the agency town of Chase on the big
green South Thompson River.
"Boy, this is some great country you guys got out here."
"Yeah," Jonesy grinned, "you shoulda seen it before the logging companies came in."
They invited me to a big council in Chase, and another one at Kelowna on another of
their Suswap Reserves on the big green Okanagan River, Natives only, to recite one of
my poems, a regular mock-epic in post-modernist literary form, about the Great
Peacemaker Deganawidah, whom I compared to Quetzalcoatl, Sweet Medicine,
Dionysus, Merlin, Thoth, and even King Maui the smart-ass trickster. I was starting to be
treated like a regular wandering troubadour, in these days of our infamy.
But right after those war councils they went in to Gustafson Lake, and the gunfire
could be heard all across Canada and the British Empire, so that I had to expand my
chronicle of it to include all of Armorica, which is the name the original Bretons, some
more of my relatives, call Bretaigne or Brittany in France. When the fun turned bloody
and Suniva got wounded in the arm, and all the warriors were eventually hauled off to
Vancouver kangaroo courts and then prison, I knew they'd want me to write down the
truth of what happened, and sing it orally for their grieving families back in Alkali Lake
and Chase and over in Hinton Alberta. By roaring campfires I sang the old histories as
well as I could, feeling a little like Homer of yore, titling it 'Deganawidah in Armorica':

Les Voyageurs
____________

Sing, Goddess, of the sacred chief,

Deganawidah, and his vision of the Dragon.
Summon our ancestors in the dance of the ice,
CHEEP'WAYAH, those who are giants, the roots
of the great white pine, sing. I am your son Ayonwatha.
Your daughters of many names whose tongues
have forked in harmony, Iroquois and English,
French and Inuit, Algonquian, Athabascan, Siouan,
avec tous les francaises de mon bon pays,
venez ici; and join in rebuilding the Alliance of Peace,
KANONSONNIONWE. We are the origins of the gods,
the carriers of love and death, the Dragon's venom
Your sweetest medicine, of war and children.
Happy and foolish peoples we played in your palisades
frozen under the wastes, once, in wonder;
 cities of our beautiful Canada, homes forgotten
and only pain remembered. Forget. Remember.
Dance in the northern rainbow nights, white snakes,
Great Goddess, mother and lover of mystery. Chantez!

[end of Chapter 15]