I'll trade you 1 sacred fire for 5 earthquakes

On Indigenous People's Day, in Indigenous History Month, a bit of history would have been nice for a change. It's all around you, once you clear away the New Age detritus. And it's amazing.

Can we leave off with the Age of Aquarius dingbattery please

Straight off, I haven’t the faintest idea what on earth is happening in Kingston, Ontario. It appears to be some sort of Hopi-inspired (or not) Sacred Fire event to which some Truckists have taken a fancy, and the local Indigenous people, and the local police, are wishing it would all just go away.

The event is associated with this bunch, and is described this way: “This Sacred Fire Festival is the realization that we are now living The Legend, The Hopi 7th Prophecy of the Condor and The Eagle. Together we celebrate and strengthen our humanity, celebrating who we are, in movement, music, and soul healing. In Light we find our path forward.”

This is has a suffocating reek of patchouli about it. One can’t help but imagine armadas of Honda Accords descending on Kingston with Free Julian Assange bumperstickers and dreamcatchers hanging from the rear view mirror and old copies of Shambhala Sun magazine strewn about the back seat, and they’re all driven by Susan Sarandon wannabees whose pretext for leaping and dancing around at Indigenous-tinged New Age jamborees like this Sacred Fire thing is some dubious claim to Cherokee ancestry.

Okay, that was mean. Sorry. But all that would be cringe-making enough, and now it seems that big-rig trucks with F*ck Trudeau flags may be forming up convoys to head to Kingston for the event too, or have already done so. Here’s the Kingston Police: “This event has been organized by members directly and indirectly involved in previous protests held in Ottawa earlier this year and involves an undisclosed number of individuals travelling from as far as British Columbia and Alberta to participate.

“. . . Police have become aware that event organizers are reportedly travelling to the Kingston area to participate in a gathering to celebrate the Summer Solstice with a ceremonial sacred fire in recognition of noted Indigenous significance, on what will be National Indigenous Peoples Day.”

Here’s what several Kingston-area Indigenous groups say about this: “For those who are participating in these actions, the Indigenous Community does not support the setup of a sacred fire in Kingston in support of the ‘Freedom Convoy’. . . This letter is to serve notice that the Kingston Indigenous Community does not support or endorse these actions. If these actions continue, we have no other choice but to support the Kingston Police in their efforts and actions to stop this at once.”

The thing is, you can’t really “stop” this sort of thing. Just ask the Pikwakanagan First Nation, who have been noticing that at least 1,000 Ontarians, some of whom are quite prominent and you might say “professionally” Indigenous, are not Algonquin at all.

Whatever it is the hippies and truckists are up to it’s got nothing to do with the genuine Sacred Fire observations that are common among the Kingston-area descendants of the first Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat peoples.

Knowing when to anticipate the summer solstice and how it will change how one goes about one’s affairs is critical intelligence to farming peoples, and the Indigenous people of the Kingston area were, among other things, agrarians. They’ve always been farmers of corn and tobacco and sunflowers and so on. Sacred fires at solstice time is a real thing, and it’s really old.

It’s the sort of thing that was common at Spancilhill even, just down the road from the farm at Bodyke in the auld place. Solstice fires were lit every year and there was a great deal of merriment and prayer and music and foolishness like rolling bales of hay down hills. It’s observed still in many places, having long ago shifted to Saint John’s Eve, “Bonfire Night,” ordinarily June 23 nowadays.

Here’s the First Earthquake

It just so happens that it was on the morning of June 23, 1946, that the ancient Pentlatch people made themselves known to the modern world in the most dramatic way, at the very moment of a terrifying earthquake that shook Vancouver Island. Back then, the thriving coal port town of Union Bay was shaken mercilessly. Most of town’s chimneys collapsed. But it was just to the north, in the shallows of the Courtenay River, that the earthquake had its strangest effect, and the most astonishing thing happened.

Hundreds of wooden posts popped up out of the sand and mud, revealing a vast complex of intertidal salmon and herring traps that is now understood to be possibly the largest pre-colonial fish trap complex in North America. The latest archaeological work has mapped more than 300 interconnected traps in the complex, with “wings” extending up to 300 metres in length, built and rebuilt over at least 1,300 years with as many as 200,000 individual hemlock and fir stakes.

It’s an unavoidably sad story. The Pentlatch flourished for time out of mind at the epicentre of the most densely-populated area of North America west of the Mississippi and north of the Valley of Mexico. Inter-tribal warfare and smallpox had reduced them to a handful of survivors among the K’ómoks people by the time the Colony of Vancouver Island was established in 1849. That’s Indigenous history for you. Their story, and quite a bit of Indigenous history as told by the K’ómoks, was the focus of this long-form piece I wrote for Macleans a couple of years ago.

Here are four more earthquakes

What happened on June 23, 1946 was associated with one of those awful megathrust events that arise from the Cascadia subduction zone, a plate-boundary fault about 50 sea miles off the British Columbia coast. The last really big one out there occurred on January 26, 1700.

This brings us to the a'yahos, a strange serpent-like being that summons earthquakes and crashing waves whenever somebody encounters it. There’s a rock associated with an a'yahos encounter near the Fauntleroy ferry dock in West Seattle, which just happens to be right on top of the east-west Seattle Fault, "a multi-stranded striking reverse fault" that runs across Puget Sound, through downtown Seattle, and across Lake Washington. The fault ruptured about 1,100 years ago, causing a massive tidal wave in Puget Sound.

There’s another a'yahos story site down near Burien where a massive landslide occurred a long time ago, and two more a’yahos encounter places that geophysicist Ruth Ludwin with the Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network at the University of Washington has placed in a line that neatly follows the east-west trajectory of the Seattle Fault.

The thing about Indigenous history is that we do its recognition absolutely no respect by reducing the “oral tradition” to tidy little Turtle Island moral tales, or stories that elderly Indigenous people recall about things that may have happened in their dimly-remembered childhood, no matter how important or useful those recollections might be.

The young linguist John Reed Swanton, who spent time with the Haida mythtellers Skaay and Ghandl in 1900 and 1901, got it right. He found that his translation work was like “constructing a nation’s literature. . . or rather like Homer collecting and arranging a literature already constructed.”

Those sagas rank with the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Ramayana. It is serious literature, a treasure of humanity’s legacy on this earth. The linguist and poet Robert Bringhurst understood this while he was recovering those ancient epics for the contemporary world in A Story as Sharp as A Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World. I reviewed Bringhurst’s work, shortly after he published it, here.

So do please leave off with the New Age and politically fashionable uses to which the Indigenous imagination is put. To encounter Bill Reid’s Raven and the First Men is to be in the presence of something every bit as breathtaking, for instance, as the majesty of what one encounters in Michelangelo’s Pieta at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

This is a dangerous business. It is easy to hang a red dress at the end of your driveway because you’ve heard it’s what virtuous people do, something to do with missing Indigenous women and girls. But it’s dangerous to notice out loud that the little creek down the way that’s about to be diverted into a culvert for a new freeway is a place known to be holy from ancient times, or that the marsh that the new highrise condos are going to need to have filled in with hundreds of tonnes of rock and gravel is a place where a lightning snake lives, or an ogress has been known to inhabit down through the ages. Those places, too, are part of humanity’s treasury on this earth.

In which my pal Ernie and I make an astonishing discovery

You’ve had to put your feet up to get this far, but you’ll really want to stretch out if you’re interested in this thing I wrote, which originally appeared as Der Andere Fluss in Letter International (Berlin), but can be found in English at Dooney’s Cafe. It’s about what happens when you spend any time in the Other River, which is not the same as the River We Know. There’s a fun part in it that involves stakes coming up out of the mud, like the ones that popped up in 1946 at the mouth of the Courtenay River:

The old men at the Jubilee pool hall told those stories, but underneath all that, just a block east of the Labour Temple, in 1969, Don McIntyre was doing some minor excavating in his basement and found what turned out to be a huge stone from an ancient circle of stones, which would have been 13 metres across in its day. It was a mystery. And on a fine spring day when I was fishing for oolichans with a Sto:lo friend, Ernie Crey, we came upon a small mystery of our own.

We were net-fishing from a canoe in a back channel of the Lower Fraser, behind a small island, McMillan Island, under the roaring traffic of the Port Mann Bridge. There, we came upon a row of stubby posts from what looked like an old pier, poking up out of the riverbank. We told an archeologist from the University of British Columbia about it. Later, she told us that indeed it was once a kind of pier, probably for fishing, and she'd had the stakes carbon-dated, and they were about 1,000 years old.

The thing they used to say in the auld place after the annual solstice fire: Go mbeirimíd beo ar an am seo arís, which means “May we all be alive and well at the same time next year.” Next newsletter is just in a couple of days though, after my column for the Ottawa Citizen and the National Post is out of the way, so I trust you’ll all be alive and well for that.

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