Aurora Borealis Tonight!

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Back in the 50's when I was a kid, the U.S. was just in process of building its interstate highway system. My parents had money back in the day--my dad was one of those "Mad Men"--and good at his job--so every winter Mom and her annual bronchitis and me went for a month or so to the West Indies. It was good for her health; it was also very cool thing that no one else did. In those days, the West Indies were truly paradise. There were no high rises, no mobs on those pristine, pre-plastic white beaches; it was our Island in the Sun.

One March, while flying home, we had to lay over in Bermuda because of a huge winter storm that hit the coast. The next day we flew into what was then Idlewild airport (JFK now). First adventure, we got stuck upon landing, in a snow bank, and the next plane coming in flew right over us in order to use the runway to land. We were sitting there, feeling the pilot trying to move the plane--this after a very rough flight--when the other guy roared over our heads. We already had stuff in the aisles and people screaming, and that sound, of another plane approaching, set off more noise. I didn't scream; I was too busy puking into one of those brown bags.







Then, after finally reaching the terminal, Mom and I found my Dad, who'd spent the night there waiting for us. He, of course, had to return home after two weeks and get back to work, leaving Mom and her yearly bronchitis, and me, in the West Indies. He'd driven from Syracuse, NY the day before to pick us up.  Now we'd have a long haul home, through a snowed in world.  The Thruway A.K.A. I-90 was still in pieces of construction, so we'd drive through the city until we could connect with one of the sections which was complete and open to traffic. With all the snow and the blowing, we found ourselves following snowplows more often than not. Progress was slow.

The sun had gone down. We were still not home. Dad drove and drove. Mom was asleep in the back seat. The snow was in high banks all around us, glittering, while a northern high drove it in long moving snakes across the road, the surface of which began to vanish as fast as the plows passed. That night was the single time I've seen Aurora. She appeared as the post storm high moved in. Pale red curtains that moved and shook across the sky; my Dad explained what they were.






We were absolutely alone on the nighttime highway, so he stopped the car and told me to roll down my window. White snow! Black sky and stars like jewels! Hallucinogenic blobs of red--and a faint crackle and hiss, as if we could hear those heavy curtains shaking! I've never forgotten it, this other worldly phenomenon. I'd love to see Aurora again before I die, and I know that the NWT, about which I've written, is THE place to go to see this wonder.  So I'm adding to my "dream trip" list--because today, Aurora tourism is now a "thing" in the NWT.






Circumpolar folk stories are very similar. There are lonely spirits trying to speak to the living; there are spirits of animals and ancestors, some of them dancing, some playing games. Europeans told of the  shields of the Valkyries gleaming, or saw a rainbow bridge to Asgard where dwelt their ferocious Gods. The Inuit tell of walrus skull games played by the dead. The Athabascans speak of ancestors who are ever present, looking down upon their children. Northern people world wide gazed into the aurora filled sky and made stories to explain what they saw.

"The ends of the land and sea are bounded by an immense abyss, over which a narrow and dangerous pathway leads to the heavenly regions. The sky is a great dome of hard material arched over Earth. There is a hole in it through which spirits pass to the true heavens, only the spirits of those who have died a voluntary or violent death--and Raven--have been over this pathway."

We know more about what causes Aurora today than was known in my childhood. We've discovered that this phenomena is caused by our solar wind, constantly blowing from our own mighty local star, when it collides with Earth's magnetosphere. In a way, the original inhabitants of the land are correct--the "hard material" arched over Earth is our planetary shield--and we can see the lights dancing as the solar winds strike.


NWT has plenty of aurora tourism available for the hardy traveler, from Yellowknife to places north, closer to the magnetic pole, where the magic is most reliably to be seen. You can fly or snowmobile or travel in great ice road vehicles farther north; you can even, I read in my wishful thinking ravel brochures, sit in hot tubs and watch the skies, which has to be the height of blissful decadence. I hope to see Aurora again, before I check out, and NWT is clearly the place to go.

Coincidentally, tonight will be a good night to look out for Aurora, perhaps dancing in a cold clear sky over your fortunate head! If you are in Canada, keep a sharp look out! It seems that Old Sol has actually sent a Coronal Mass Ejection our way. Maybe I sensed Aurora coming, dreamer that I am, as I pondered what to write for Canadian Historical Brides...




~~Juliet Waldron
For all my historical novels:
https://www.julietwaldron.com

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The Mi'kmaq of New Brunswick

In my research for my novel set in New Brunswick, I came across the two main native tribes that lived there. I touched briefly on them in On a Stormy Primeval Shore, but they deserve a more in-depth introduction.

First, the Mi'kmaq people. Known as one of the original settlers of the Atlantic provinces, oral history (and archeological discoveries) suggest the Mi'kmaq have been in eastern Canada for over 10,000 years. The name is thought to mean "one of high ability." Other sources say it means "my friends." They refer to themselves as First Nations.

The men hunted and fished, and went to war to protect their families. Women tended the children, gathered herbs, and built the traditional wigwam. These homes are made of wood covered in birch bark. The people lived in villages, usually near water sources.
Men wore breechcloths (a skimpy garment that covered their privates) and leggings. The women wore tunics, long skirts and a peaked hat. They decorate their clothing with dyed porcupine quills, a skill they are famous for.

Traditional quill box

 
Chanting is another tradition, consisting of vocables (broken syllables) that express emotion rather than words with meaning. The Mi'kmaq language is part of the Wabanaki cluster of Eastern Algonquian languages.

Feathers are only worn in their hair during ceremonies. Bothe men and women wore their hair loose and long. White settlers complained, "I can't tell the men from the women."

The Mi'kmaq paddled in canoes, or traveled through the winter snow in sleds and snowshoes. The English word "toboggan" comes from the Mi'kmaq word for sled. Dogs were their pack animals in the years before colonists brought horses to Canada.

Traditional military coat, rear view. Courtesy Glenbow Museum/Museum of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia

When the French came in the 1600s many of the Mi'kmaq converted to Catholicism. But European diseases resulted in the death of half their population. Conflicts with the French ensued, though the natives worked together with the French in fur trade.

The British colonization of the eighteenth century brought about the slaughter of the French (Acadians) and breaking and remaking of treaties. The Mi'kmaq were pushed off their fertile land.
The English wanted to alter the indigenous peoples' way of life. Today the 'rights' of the Mi'kmaq are better protected, but their lifestyle is forever changed, their traditions usually limited to special  ceremonies.

View of a Mi'kmaq wigwam, a man, and a child, probably Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, photographed 1860. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Photo NO. 47728.

To learn more about the Mi'kmaq please see the Canadian Encyclopedia link below. 

To find out more about the formation of New Brunswick in On a Stormy Primeval Shore, or to purchase my books at Amazon or All Markets: Click HERE

 For further information on me and my books, please visit my website: www.dianescottlewis.org

 Diane Scott Lewis grew up in California, traveled the world with the navy, edited for magazines and an on-line publisher. She lives with her husband in Pennsylvania.

 
Source: Canadian Encyclopedia

Spirits Can See Red

Residential School Escape

Coming of Age in the Wilderness

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

• 
  
• Christine Cayedeto, Aged 9, disappeared from her front yard in 1986
• Tiffany Maureen Skye, 19, disappeared August 8, 2011; she was Bloodvein First Nation;
• Annie Pootoogook, 46, an renown artist from Cape Dorset, Nunavut, was found dead in the Ottawa River, September 19, 2016 
• Rose-Anne Blackned, 24, mother of two, found frozen in the Val D'Or, Quebec, on November 16, 1991
• Olivia Lone Bear, mother of five, her body discovered nine months later, June 25, 2018
• 
  

Besides the fact that they are women, what else do they have in common? The years of their deaths/disappearances are different, as are their ages.

All these women are indigenous, some from the US, others from Canada. According to the U.S. Justice Department, indigenous women face murder rates--on some reservations--as much as 10X above the national average.

This shameful statistic is caused by a long standing inequity in the law. If a native woman is assaulted by a non-native person on tribal land, they will not be prosecuted, because the tribal police may not arrest or prosecute a non-native person. This has, very simply, created open season on native women. Rates of homicide and disappearance of native women and girls, apparently for the sex trade, appear to be ever-growing. Spikes of violence are now occurring in the oil rush fields of the U.S. and Canada where transient workers come and go.  

If an indigenous person is accused of killing a non-native person on the reservation, he may be prosecuted twice--by the tribal authorities and by whatever state in which the crime was committed. You may say that the fact that this remains law here in the 21st Century, is nothing more or less than institutionalized racism. However, solutions remain difficult, for the problems are many and complicated. 

Tribal police are hesitant to give state police any assistance or make it any easier for non-native law enforcement officers to come onto their land. Add to this that the tribal police are generally underfunded and that the territories which they cover are enormous. Next comes the poverty, substance abuse, family disruption (among these, the residential school system) and lack of work on the reservations, which exacerbates the tragic history of the people who live there. Racial violence is now embedded in indigenous bodies, descendants of brutalized survivors. 

Violence is an often-unacknowledged part of our European American past. Most of our people fled injustice, starvation, and sectarian violence in their lands of origin. This ancestral violence, likewise planted in our bodies (and, it now appears, in our very DNA) has been, in turn, visited upon the original inhabitants of North America.

There's 500 hundred years of bad blood between immigrants and indigenous people.  It's unsurprising that European Americans and 1st Nations' meet and sometimes clash in the border towns where  indigenous people must to come in order to find work or get supplies. Some of these cities/towns appear to have resident gangs waiting to abduct young women for the sex trade.

In an effort to raise awareness of the issue, several art projects have been created. One is The Red Dress Project. This began in Canada and is a public art commemoration of the Aboriginal women known to be missing or murdered. Canadian Jaime Black (Metis) began the project in 2000. 

Jaime Black explains: "Red is the only color spirits can see. So (red) is really a calling back of the spirits of these women, allowing them a chance to be among us and have their voices heard through their family members and community." 

A few of the  organizations trying to raise awareness of these Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women using both civic action and art may be found @

https://www.facebook.com/groups/walkingwithoursisters/about/

Native women’s Association of Canada

https://www.nwac.ca/

This group is designed to raise awareness about the Missing/Murdered Indigenous Women crisis in Canada—violence against women, girls and two-spirit persons.

Sisters in Spirit vigils continue to be held across Canada every year on the 4^th of October.

The home site of Missing Murdered Indigenous Women:

 https://www.csvanw.org/mmiw/

https://www.facebook.com/mmiwusa/

Meanwhile:

Tylena Walkalong, 14 years old, last seen in Billings Montana, August, 2018

Talelei Oldcrane, 12, disappeared June 17, 2018, Billings, Montana

Valencia and Valentina Haswood, aged 16 and 14, last seen in Sawmill, AZ 08/18

Khadijah Britton, 24, abducted at gunpoint by an ex-boyfriend, Mendocino, CA, 02/07/18...

European North American women like myself have made limited progress towards equality under the law, but aboriginal women and women of color have been left behind.  We must remember the names of these lost sisters and hope that their spirits, though battered, will find their way home when they see the red dress. 

We must "Pray for the dead, and fight like Hell for the Living."*

~~Juliet Waldron

See All My Historical Novels @

julietwaldron.com

* Mother Jones

Another view of the Red Dress Movement in this powerful article:

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/terese-marie-mailhot/dont-hang-a-red-dress-for-me_a_23019892/

If I Could Go Back In Time by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

If I could go back in time, where would I go? I was born and raised in Canada where our non-native history goes back almost 400 years if you look at what is now the province of Quebec or 1000 years if you count the Vikings having a settlement in what is now the province of Newfoundland.

In 2017, I travelled across Canada to the site of the Viking settlement at L’Anse Aux Meadows on the tip of Newfoundland’s Great North Peninsula. There I toured through the encampment which consisted of replicas of the timber and sod buildings constructed by the Vikings who had sailed from Greenland. I talked with the costumed interpreters who were sitting around a fire inside one of the buildings cooking their meal. It felt surreal to be there, to know that my ancestors (I have recently found out that I have Viking heritage) lived there for a few years. This is the first known evidence of European settlement in the Americas. From the camp, I walked along the rugged cliffs overlooking the Atlantic Ocean and crossed a large bog on a boardwalk. Then I toured the museum, looking at the fascinating artifacts that were found during the excavation. The site was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978.

 

This year I spent 66 days in Europe and one of the places I visited was the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, just outside Copenhagen, Denmark. In the museum is a permanent exhibition of parts of five original Viking ships excavated nearby in 1962. A thousand years ago these ships were deliberately scuttled (filled with rocks and sunk) in a river to stop the enemy from invading the city by water. Over the decades since they were found, the pieces have been preserved and put together on a metal frame to show how the ships would have looked. Also at the site are replicas of the Viking ships and I became a Viking for an hour. A group of us sat on the seats and rowed the ship out of the harbour using the long oars. Once on the open water we hoisted the mast and set sail. After sailing for a while we headed back to the harbour. As we neared it I had the honour of pulling on the rope that lowered the mast and sail and we glided back to our dock.

 

So if I could go back in time I would like to be a Viking Shield-Maiden. Women of the time were not called Vikings because they normally did not take part in warfare. They were called Norsewomen. However, women fought in a battle in 971AD and Freydis Eiriksdottir, Leif Erikson’s half-sister is said to have grabbed a sword, and, bare-breasted, helped scare away an attacking army. These women were called Shield-Maidens.

http://bookswelove.net/authors/donaldson-yarmey-joan/