Hunkered Down - From here to the NWT

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Here in Pennsylvania I watch with trepidation the progress of COVID19 across the world. I'm isolating, as most folks in the 60 and up age group have been advised to do.  I've already spent plenty of time in my local hospital, and have no great yen to return--under any circumstances.

My Grandma Liddle, (who lived to 99) told me her story many years ago about having survived the 1918 Influenza. She was just 18 when it came, and living in a boarding school in New York City when she gazed out a window and saw the bodies being removed from neighboring buildings by men wearing masks. I believe that not long before, she'd also seen the troops returning from World War I coming home, a rejoicing with bands and parades, that was nothing less than ill-advised with this influenza already raging in Europe. How she survived exposure, I don't know, but she did, and her many descendants, happy to be here, are grateful that she did.

At least we are not as badly informed as the folks who endured the historical plagues. We have some idea of how the disease works, of how it spreads, and even, thanks to electron microscopes, what the beast looks like. I don't know if that's any comfort if you contract this evil bug, but I'd rather have an idea of what the danger was and also get some genuine advice on how to avoid it. Imagine living in times past when people believed that diseases like malaria and dengue fever came from "bad air!" As scary as things are now, it must have been infinitely worse in times past when sickness came for apparently no fathomable reason.

I read tonight that Dr. Kami Kandola who is Chief Public Health office for the Northwest Territories has instituted a ban for non-essential travel. This is because of the dangers of this kind of highly communicable disease presents to First Nation's and other isolated, small communities, where crowding and close quarters living situations prevail.  Just one sick individual in a small outpost could infect--or, worst case, wipe out--an entire extended family group. 

Often, too, the only medical personnel may be a nurse, one that, no matter how highly-skilled, could not save a  seriously ill Coronavirus patient without access to the kind of high tech equipment that is needed to save the life.  Several reservations in Ontario have closed their borders with the outside world, because crowded housing is more the rule than the exception and a communicable disease such as this would spread like wildfire.  

I will end with this lovely video. I've read that young women from many 1st Nations have begun this spiritual work, performing a dance which is prayer for healing called The Jingle Dance. Each step upon the earth draws up energy from our Mother.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8A_fhx085s

I watched and said a little prayer...

~~Juliet Waldron

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Solstice in the NWT

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I went looking for the weather in Yellowknife, NWT, and this is what I found:

On the 22nd December, 2019, it was -28 in the early morning. By noon time it had roared up to -24, and this is an average December day day.

That is  darn cold by my U.S. standards. Some of the coldest U.S. mornings I've experienced were in January, 1969, in western Massachusetts, in a little woodland cabin with minimal insulation (read none) and a wood stove in the kitchen. On one memorable morning, it was -30, although, thank-fully, this was a one-off. We could sit at the kitchen table and extend a hand toward the outer wall and actually feel a slice of cold penetrating. However, that being said, this -28 is just an ordinary December day in NWT.

Accommodations for aurora tourists in the NWT model a higher profile lodge.

Orion blazes blue in perfect dark sky 

They have 4 hours and 57 minutes of daylight, which, on top of the temperature, has to be stressful. From an astronomy site, I learned : "Geomagnetic field conditions will be mostly quiet, with unsettled periods overnight. Watch for gentle auroras above the northern horizon and overhead." As usual, "peak activity expected in the hours before and after midnight." The higher the latitude, the higher probability you'll see the magic of our atmosphere's protective shield.

It's okay for us moderns to exclaim about cold, but imagine the people who came here between the glaciers, ever so long ago. These folks, and their descendants, until fairly recently, spent their winters in family groups sheltering beneath tents of caribou hide, and resting upon beds of spruce bows and furs. Only imagine the work that was necessary to collect the food and fuel that would be necessary to get through a long season of daunting temperatures and snow.

Before the Europeans got well dug into the north -- and that's apt, as Europeans are mostly interested in the north nowadays for what they can remove from the ground, things like diamonds and uranium  -- winter was the time you spent all the warm months getting ready for. It was easy to starve if you weren't prepared--and, sometimes, even if you were. Fish were dried, meat laid in, furs tanned and cut for clothes. Wood was gathered from the more southerly areas still inside the tree line. You were stocking up not just for the human members, but for the dogs, the original pack animals of the north. 

In the long dark, snowbound, in intense cold, family members gathered. Calorie conservation would have been necessary for everyone in this world of now limited resources, so originally, the people did not gather into large groups, but rather dispersed. Some men went with dogs to tend trap lines; keeping the fur and surviving on the flesh of whatever they caught. 

Story telling was one of the activities in the lodges, stories to teach the children and stories to pass the long frigid nights. Here was the time of teaching life-ways, transmitting skills involved in making tools of bone and stone. It was also a time for telling ancestor tales and tales about the spirits who inhabited the land. Prayers were offered to the sleeping roots, plants, to the four legs and to the fish as well as to the spirits of ancestors who danced over their heads in the aurora. Animal stories were told now, as it wasn't considered respectful to tell the stories when the animals were awake and might overhear people talking about them. In a world where survival depends upon animals (such as caribou) willingly giving themselves to men for food, this respect and sense of circle-of-life community is of prime importance. 

The Tlico flag proudly displays the old skin lodges

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~~Juliet Waldron

Soul in a Heat Wave

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I've just returned from a retreat, a week of living in a cabin at an old boy scout camp with a host of other like-minded beings.  The venue had some comforts, unlike the tent and bunk house communal camping I've been used to. Each cabin had electricity, facilities for light cooking, a couple of flush toilets and showers.  There was also a small common room and a deck, which was mostly used at night for star-gazing (meteors!) and heart-to-heart sharing.

Three meals a day were provided by kitchen staff inside a large shed-like building whose cement floor,  not leveled, sloped down the hill. There was a tin roof, and just enough wall to interfere with the airflow. At the bottom of the hill was a rectangular pond created by damming the outflow of a hillside spring. The rooms in my cabin were small and crammed with beds, leaving only a narrow path in which to navigate. In other cabins I visited, the plan was open, with bunk beds lining the walls and a pair of couches in the center.

We had fans, but besides cold showers,  the pond, or the bone-freezing heart-of-the-rock water from the creek, we had no way to get cool. The week busied itself with setting all kinds of records for heat and humidity.

We had come for Spirit and Renewal and Guidance through communion with the Earth. Although I received many blessings, just as I'd hoped, at that camp in the Appalachian foothills, I came face to face with Mother Nature wearing one of her fiercest aspects. Personal survival had become a big part of the lesson plan.

My historical writer self began to manage the situation in it's own bent little way. Lying down in my room wearing next to nothing after lunch, I practiced the venerable hot weather tradition of siesta--don't move an inch or sweat will pop out in sticky freshets from every laboring pore--to collect and categorize various physical sensations, starting with the slightly moldy smell which oozed from the walls during each burning afternoon. "Get Experience" said Jimi Hendrix, and I collected this in a mental notebook, from the drone of the fan to the images that arose during a heat-trance nap. When the fan in my room turned, it blew air at the same temperature as everything else, so there was no sensation of cooling, that little breeze which can bring relief.

On my way to a meeting, I'd wrap a cooling towel around my neck, wear a hat and scurry from one shady spot to the next. I was constantly reminded of the remarks of a friend after a move to Florida:  "The air is 98 degrees and the water is 98 degrees and your blood is 98 degrees..."

Although we weren't living the cushy 21st Century life most of us are used to, we're far more comfortable and a lot safer and better fed than we'd be if we were migrant agricultural laborers, and leagues better off than 1930's dust bowl refugees and today's homeless people on the streets of Mumbai. After all, we didn't have to work in the fields or shovel bubbling macadam onto a road, we only have to attend classes and feed our souls. We are cooked for (brilliantly, I might add) and cleaned up after. We were safe within our community, which had planned this event and which now sheltered us.

To some, this 1950's era venue might seem rough, but we've all camped together in places where you had to walk distance at night, flashlight in hand, just to relieve yourself inside a fiercely aromatic porta-potty, so this new campground is a comfort upgrade. Nevertheless, when we were this hot, there was a definite feeling that we were also getting a lesson that was personal and separate from our studies or spiritual work. This lesson was visceral, teaching that we, without our the protection of our modern house-machines, without the infrastructure  our society provides are puny creatures, completely at the mercy of the good will of others and our planet's disturbed systems.

Stripped of that ever so recent invention, a/c--I remember the days before only too well--you must attend to this sack of biochemistry and water where your proud spirit resides. You must put salt and sugar into your water bottle each time you replenish it--and you need to dump gallons down--to keep heat stroke at bay. Without the shelter of our complex material culture, I was forced into living fully in the present, as I walked from tree shade to tree shade, minute by sweaty, thirsty minute. It was a valuable lesson to remember that I--a human being, stripped of all that customary, comfortable 21st Century armor, only exists at the pleasure of the planet--that fragile terrarium at the bottom of which we all reside.

~~Juliet Waldron

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NWT -- A Few Fantastic Facts

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A Yank, I knew next to nothing about Canadian history, but this has certainly changed since I became joint author with John Wisdomkeeper of Fly Away Snow Goose, one of the books in the Canadian Historical Brides series. The first fantastic facts I learned were political, from the period of European migration, after these (already occupied) lands had been parceled up by European nations.

The Northwest Territories remain an immense region today, but once they were even larger, comprising the entire midsection of Canada. In the 1870's this vast area--which had been designated Rupert's Land* and The Northwestern Territories--was acquired by the Canadian government from The Hudson's Bay Company and Great Britain.

Prince Rupert, swashbuckling, semi-piratical nephew of the hapless, beheaded Charles I
 

In those days, the Northwest Territories stretched from Ontario to the Yukon and included today's provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta. It grew even larger in 1880 when many Arctic Islands were transferred to the Canadians too. Sir John Macdonald, the first Prime Minister, wished to construct a British nation and also to keep out American settlers. This is analogous I think to the period in American history when the Louisiana Purchase during the time of Thomas Jefferson doubled the size of The United States.

The geological age of the region is immense, tickling my "way back machine" fantasies. The Canadian Shield is 3.96 billion years young, some of the oldest rocks on the planet. They have been stripped bare by a series of glaciations, the last of which came in the Pleistocene. Those ancient miles thick sheets of ice that once covered this land have left their tracks in meandering waterways, low undulating plains piled with heaps of sands and gravel, bogs and tundra, places where the permafrost is just now is beginning to melt. Those barren lands are the home of caribou and many of the fur-bearing animals that the Europeans were eager to buy. They were also the hunting grounds of the Tlicho, Dogrib, Yellowknives and other aboriginal people of the region.

Read the names of the aboriginal people who still comprise one half of the population of the NWT:  Dene, Inuit/Invialuit & Metis, Chipeweyan, Dogrib, Yellowknives, South and North Slavey, Gwich'in and Sahtu. There are still eleven languages spoken in the NWT: Chipaweyan, Cree, English, French, Gwich'in, Inuinnaqtun, Inuktitut, Inuvialuktun, North and South Slavey and  Tlicho. (The young couple, Sascho and Yaotl, whose story Fly Away Snow Goose tells, are Tlicho.)

Recently, I've been reading some human history of a different kind, the astonishing discoveries that appear almost daily in science columns, the marvelous stories written in our human DNA.  There have been many ideas about where the original aboriginal people of the Americas came from, but the most recent discoveries, tracing DNA, seems to point toward a group of people who came from Siberia, perhaps as long as 24,000 years ago. These people may have crossed the glacial maximum land bridge from Asia to a now drowned land called Beringia.

Beringia

 

Rising sea levels may have been the culprit that left these migrants, who probably came hunting big game across the glaciers, isolated for a very long time--5,000 to 8,000 years. The "Beringian Standstill" as this theory is called, is now well on its way to being proven. During this immensely long interval, those hardy Asian adventurers, carrying fifteen mitochondrial DNA strands, developed some notable genetic variations that were adaptive to enduring the frigid climate and to metabolizing an oily fish-and-meat-heavy diet. These same adaptive markers have been shown to exist today in all populations of First Nations, in both North and South America. Imagine what a strange and isolated frozen world these First People inhabited! Imagine the mega fauna and other wonders they discovered as they moved into a hemisphere innocent of human beings. The Inuit and their cousins, the Athapascans, were the first enter North America and make these lands, thousands of years ago, their home.


~~Juliet Waldron
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Sources:
(A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford.)
https://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Everyone-Ever-Lived-ebook/dp/B06XP9Z5TS/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=adam+rutherford&qid=1555984681&s=gateway&sr=8-2

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/northwest-territories

Snow Goose Time

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Every year the geese pass over in great numbers because I live in the Atlantic flyway. When I was small, my dad made a big deal out of the Canadas, because at that time, DDT had nearly killed them off. This is hard to believe now, of course, as the Canadas are seen as a golf course/corporate campus pest.  

In those days, though, the sound of their haunting voices would bring Daddy out of the house with his little girl in tow. He’d tell me another extinction story, the one about the Passenger Pigeons, although the last representative of that family had died a decade before he was born. These birds had gone from a population of perhaps 5 Billion to none in fifty years.

“Men still live who, in their youth, remember pigeons; trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind. But a few decades hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know.”

—Aldo Leopold, “On a Monument to the Pigeon,” 1947, from Audubon online

The goose represented wilderness as they flew and called in the truncated V arrangements typical of the early ‘50’s. Where were they going, I wondered. “To the North, to the shores of the Bering Sea, way up north in Canada.” The magical destination was now named--a world as mythical to a small American child as the Back of the North Wind.

The snow geese were a revelation and a delight to a transplant to central Pennsylvania. I remember the first time I saw them, just a few flying over our home, in the sunlight that follows a February snow squall. Light gleamed on their bodies against a blue sky. In a moment of late winter quiet—no trains, planes, snow blowers--I heard their high voices, sweet and whispery compared to the brash honks of their Canada relatives.

The magic of white geese with their black tipped wings reminded me of other mythologies—like those European stories upon which the Swan Lake ballet is based. The sight of them set off thoughts of enchanted princesses and frozen lakes and -- magic!

The snow geese that come through here have a rest-stop fairly close, in Middlecreek. I'd been there in the summer, on long bicycle rides. Once, though, I'd driven out in February and had been lucky enough to find a great host of migrants already there. 

I was simply blown away by the sight and the sound of so much avian beauty, some rising in clouds while others, dumping air beneath their wings like fighter pilots, landed in open water. There were snow geese flying and snow goose swimming and snow geese resting upon the ice. In one small outlet, like royalty keeping to themselves, were the elegant Swans.

Like a child, I could look up and imagine myself rising from the earth and flying off with them, joining the storm of wings. I'd find my place among relations, get in line and cruise across mountains and forests. I'd forget the past and the future and just be in today--the next patch of green, the next drink of water, delighting in the strength and power of my wings! 

This flight of fancy ended abruptly when an eagle cannoned into the cloud of geese and took one of the beautiful creatures. For an instant, seeing a limp neck dangling in his claws--a creature that just seconds ago had been full of life--I was stunned. That's when I remembered the rest of a goose's--or any wild creature's life--suffering through storms, the fox in the night, the insatiable men hidden in the reeds.

 Coming home from a friend's house last Sunday as the sun went down behind low clouds, I could hear the Canada's calling in the last quarter mile. Overhead sailed great Vs of travelers. Others were landing, in the littered cornfield behind a row of old houses. When drivers in front suddenly turned in. I followed them, and sure enough, from a back alley, I could see snow geese, a great army, taking a break, looking around, talking to one another, here before sundown. 

 I had the pleasure of seeing them up close--just for a few minutes. It didn't take the wise old leaders long to figure out that there were too many people here. Soon, too soon, they lifted up again and moved on north, in the direction of larger and more isolated fields. For the brief time it took for the great cloud to arise, I was a kid again, imagining that if I wished hard enough, I could grow wings and travel with them, looking down upon the wonders of our Mother Earth.

~~Juliet Waldron

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Dream Trip North

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Ah Canada! I learned so much about NWT and even a bit about neighbors like B.C. and Alberta in the process of writing Fly Away Snow Goose. The land, so important in the story, got into my head until I began to have a fantasy about traveling to see it.

The kind of travel I envision, is the kind that, ideally, a 30 year old should undertake, but heck, it doesn't stop me from imagining. So here it goes: my dream of a northern adventure, carried out by some athletic babe ideal of my physical self at 34. (Not that this powerful woman ever existed!) For some reason, the fantasy-prone being who inhabits this body always wants some sort of hardship to accompany her dream travel. In my real crone self, each of these travel destinations would be a tough slog, only available to a stateside person with bucks.


Nevertheless, dream on! How about starting this journey in Alberta with a trip to Jasper National Park Dark-Sky Preserve in the winter as part of a dark skies tour? Where the temperature falls to -22 routinely, it would be a good thing I'm not an astro-photographer, like the adventurers whose story inspired me: folks I read about in an issue of Earth-Sky* who have taken mind blowing starry images.*

Credits:
Image via Jack Fusco for the Chasing Darkness project
https://www.jackfusco.com/
https://chasingdarkness.smugmug.com/What-is-Chasing-Darkness/

https://earthsky.org/human-world/stargazing-destination-alberta-chasing-darkness-video?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=b82e8c58ad-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_02_02_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-b82e8c58ad-394055697

To see the stars glowing like Tesla-fired blue globes, reflecting upon icy water would be an incredible experience. Even virtually, it's a gift to me, these images of a glorious, nearly pristine world. If I was actually there, I'd feel the searing cold in my lungs (it probably would turn them inside out) and feel frigid air demons gnawing at any bit of exposed skin. I'd hear the crunch of the snow under a pair of massively high-tech winter boots. Maybe, in the distance, perhaps I'd hear wolves howling.

Wood Buffalo Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is also in Alberta. Here, nature proceeds as it once did, before the incursion of strangers from the west. This is a place for summer travel, I'd come prepared for the onslaught of insects and prepared to see plants and animals I've never seen before.

https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/256

"Wood Buffalo National Park is the most ecologically complete and largest example of the entire Great Plains-Boreal grassland ecosystem of North America, the only place where the predator-prey relationship between wolves and wood bison has continued, unbroken, over time."

https://www.pc.gc.ca/en/pn-np/nt/woodbuffalo

I’ve always wanted to travel back in time, and this park would offer me a window into the way the land was before Europeans arrived. Wood Buffalo Park is the only breeding ground for the magnificent Whooping Crane, a species on the edge of extinction.  Perhaps I'll imagine myself there in spring, when they arrive, calling to one another with their beautiful whooper voices!

The Wood Buffalo which lives there is another species under extreme pressure, a marvelous relic from the Pleistocene. This buffalo's woodland life style is different from the plains animal with which we down from south are more familiar. 

And then, because this is an imaginary travelogue without budget or schedule, I'd fly to Yellow Knife in the Northwest Territories and see a modern frontier city perched on the edge of the Great Slave Lake. After a few days of people, I'd be ready to begin my voyage into the North Slave, the land of the Tlicho, the tribe from which Sascho and Yaotl come.

Here, in a land of stone, water, and ever-dwindling forests I'd follow the rivers, muscle my way across portages, while following the ancient trails, like Sascho and Yaotl, on their way to Great Bear Lake, to see a body of freshwater even larger than Great Slave, a veritable ocean. Of course, this would take a very long time, a lot of supplies and a lot of willpower--even on a fantasy journey. Perhaps I'll imagine I'm back in time, in another body in another world, making my way north with a family group, working my fanny off as women always do, carrying and cooking and minding kids.

An easier way to reach Great Bear would be to make the whole thing modern, to imagine floating the Mackenzie to Tulita, then, where  the Great Bear River empties, turning east and traveling along that tributary to Deline. Here I could make a pilgrimage to the home place of the famous Sahuto'ine Prophet, Eht'se Ayah.

In March of 2016, Great Bear Lake and the surrounding area became the largest UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in North America. The people of Deline are now self-governing, their charge to protect the lake and to preserve their ancient mystical connection with it. The old ones believed that beneath Great Bear's surface a massive heart beats. This is a great magic, one which "gives life not only to the surrounding area, but to all the natural world."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/great-bear-lake/

Standing on the edge of this astounding place, for the grand finale, I'll conjure up a display of the aurora borealis, those shimmering spirits of ancestors, who remind us of how astonishing it is to be conscious and to be able to view these incredible wonders of our earth.

Even, in this case, if it's only a Canadian journey of the mind.


~~Juliet Waldron

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Sedna, a Dark Tale For Winter Solstice

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For this blog, I will travel north, far above the lands of the Athabascan peoples, into the land of the Inuit.

Sedna is the Inuit goddess of sea creatures, of primary importance to the Inuit people whose food source was the seal, fish, and whales which once abounded in the Arctic Ocean. Her story is a dark one, filled with mixed signals for any modern reader, especially if raised on cleaned-up versions of these often strange and bloody stories. 

Every human group created these origin tales in ancient times, and what is now formally designated “mythology” comes from stories told around campfires where small family groups rested after their daily struggle to survive in a world which seemed indifferent to their presence.   The Inuit, like other northern human groups, were nomadic people who followed the game that they relied upon for food, clothing, and shelter. They hunted along the sea shores and across the ice.

Men and women filled different roles in this society—the men hunting and making tools, the women doing almost everything else. Sedna is supposed to have been both beautiful and accomplished. This meant she would have been able to clean what the men caught, prepare food from the flesh and prepare hides and gut to make clothing, containers and shelter. 

There are many versions of this story, but Sedna is supposed to have rejected all the suitors who came to her. Her father, tiring of this, (or food had grown scarce--depends upon which tale you read) told his daughter that the next young hunter who came looking for a wife would become her husband. And sure enough, almost at once a handsome stranger presented himself, one who promised to be a good provider and give Sedna furs, warm blankets and plenty of food, both fish and meat.   

Sadly, after Sedna went away with him, her new husband stripped off his human disguise and revealed that he was not a man at all, but a Fulmar. Instead of a warm home, she was expected to live in a rocky stinking nest and eat nothing but raw fish. The nest stank because the Northern Fulmar has a reservoir of oily nasty smelling fluid in its gut, which it can spray at will upon the birds which prey upon it, or upon men at sea who anger it.   

https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/northern-fulmar

When her father at last came to visit, he found Sedna in despair. Angry, and frightened too, that this shape-shifter had taken his daughter away under false pretenses, he waited beside her on the windy  rocks. When the Fulmar returned at night, and while he was still in his bird shape, the older man killed him. He and his daughter fled in a skin boat, but the other Fulmars, learning of what had happened, pursued them.

With their mighty pelagic magic, the Fulmar raised a great storm. The father, now fearing for his life, decided to save himself. He pushed Sedna overboard into the icy Arctic water, hoping that the Bird Spirits would be appeased. When Sedna tried to climb back into the boat, he chopped off her fingers so she could not hang on. As her fingers and blood fell into the water they became seals and whales and walruses and all the other mammals of the sea.

Sedna, transformed in this great storm of magic which surrounded her, sank to the bottom of the ocean, the Adlivum, which is the Inuit underworld. Here, in a new fish-tailed, flipper-handed form, she now rules both the dead and the wide ocean, giver of all life. It is Sedna ("The One Down There") that Inuit Shaman call upon for help when game is scarce and the people are starving. In trance, they descend into the watery darkness to visit her, to soothe her by combing her hair and massaging her wounded hands. They beg her to release the sea mammals who hide in her hair. 

    

https://www.deviantart.com/badgersoph/gallery/

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What can we make of this ancient story? Here we have a female heroine who commits the sin of pride, who suffers and dies, and is transformed. She becomes Mother Ocean, sometimes angry, sometimes peaceful. When she is happy she sends her animals, to feed the people. If people disrespect her, she will withhold her gifts; if children do not listen to their elders and play in dangerous places on the sea ice, she is likely to snatch them away, down into the dark underworld.  

At her most abstract, Sedna reminds us, we spiritual travelers, that there are "nourishing gifts to be found in the dark, cold places that we most fear."*

*Goddesses Knowledge Cards of Susan Eleanor Boulet, text by Michael Babcock  



~Juliet Waldron

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedna_(mythology)

 http://www.mythencyclopedia.com/Sa-Sp/Sedna.html

http://www.polarlife.ca/traditional/myth/sedna.htm

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/the-goddess-of-the-sea-the-story-of-sedna

Christmas Sale!

Announcing a price special on the Canadian Historical Brides Collection in time for the Christmas Holidays 2018

All 12 books in the Collection will be available for $100.00 (print) and $30.00 (eBook)
(Regular price on print is $16.95 to $19.99) and ebook are $4.99 each, so this is an opportunity to anyone who wants the entire Canada Collection to get them all for themselves and to give as gifts.

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In 2017 and 2018, Canadian publisher BWL Publishing Inc. released the Canadian Historical Brides Collection. The Collection featured one book for every province and territory in Canada, each written by a different Canadian author, or in some cases a Canadian author in collaboration with an international historical fiction author. Criteria for the content stipulates the story must be historically correct and must include a bride.
Each book in the Collection features a historical event or location as well as the story of a bride and groom, representative of the men and women who came to Canada in search of a new life and new freedoms. These books combine fact and fiction to show how these brides and grooms, all from diverse backgrounds, joined in marriage to create new lives and build a great country.


The Collection:

Titles in the series:

Brides of Banff Springs by Victoria Chatham ~ Alberta
His Brother's Bride by Nancy M Bell ~ Ontario
Romancing the Klondike by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey ~ Yukon
Barkerville Beginnings by A.M. Westerling ~ British Columbia
Pillars of Avalon by Katherine Pym and Judith Pittman ~ Newfoundland
Fields of Gold Beneath Prairie Skies by Suzanne de Montigny ~ Saskatchewan
Fly Away Snow Goose (Nits’it’ah Golika Xah) by Juliet Waldron and John Wisdomkeeper – Northwest Territories/Inuvik
On a Stormy Primeval Shore by Diane Scott Lewis and Nancy M. Bell – New Brunswick
The Left Behind Bride by Mahrie Reid – Nova Soctia
Envy the Wind by Anita Davison and Victoria Chatham – Prince Edward Island
Where the River Narrows by Kathy Fischer-Brown and Geneviève Montcombroux - Quebec

A Tlicho Raven Story, A Tale For Our Times

Fly Away Snow Goose - Amazon

Fly Away Snow Goose - Barnes & Noble

Fly Away Snow Goose - KOBO

Here is a Tlicho Raven Story, based on the one told by Johnny Mantla to Allice Legat and reported in her “Walking the Land, Feeding the Fire.”

Once a very long ago, soon after the beginning, the animals lived like people. They had villages together, hunted and fished together and married one another. Not only that, they hunted and ate everything—and, for the sake of the story, other “villagers” must not have been on the menu.

Raven could fly and see everything, so he was always well fed. The other animals came to rely on him for news of the caribou on their yearly walk-about, and other important things hunters needed to know. In time, he became responsible to the others, whose feet could not leave the ground. Raven and Wolf were brothers-in-law; Raven’s sister had married to Wolf and Wolf’s sister was married to Raven. Both Wolf and Raven were  Ka’owae and each had many followers.  Wolf was a mighty hunter and provided plenty of food and so he had many followers who ate up all the caribou he brought to camp quickly.

Raven, though, was more powerful than Wolf, because he flew everywhere and could see everything for miles around. He brought back information that everyone used to hunt. He was The indispensable man!

Then, one year, the caribou did not come and the village was starving. Raven and Wolf met as usual and sat down to speak with one another. Wolf said, “My wife, your sister, and everyone else in this village us starving. We can hardly move around we are so weak and hungry. Have you seen the caribou? Have you seen any game for us to hunt in all your flying around?”

Raven replied that he hadn’t seen any caribou or any other game. “We are all in the same predicament,” he said.

Wolf kept his counsel. He watched his old friend Raven, who was began telling a story to the others, to distract them from their hunger. Wolf thought Raven seemed very comfortable and pleased with himself.  While Raven was the center of attention, Wolf called some kids over and asked them to sneak a look into Raven’s traveling pack. “I think there is some meat in there,” he said.

The kids did as they were told and Raven never saw them. They came back to Wolf very upset, saying that Raven did have dried caribou in his traveling pack.

After he’d finished his story, Raven excused himself saying it was late and he must go home now. Wolf agreed and Raven left.

After he'd gone, Wolf asked two men with strong ink’on  (spirit power) to follow Raven. They watched him fly until sunrise. It became very hard for them to see, but one, who’d rubbed charcoal on his lids, had strong magic and could still see Raven landing at his village. And what else did he see? All the caribou they’d been waiting for, trapped behind a snow fence!

Wolf sent for Fox and told him he must travel to Raven’s home, set fire to his tail, and leap in among the caribou. The caribou, who panicked at the smell of smoke, would jump right over the snow fence and run away. They’d even forget how much they hated the feel of snow on their bellies in their haste to get away.  (This is why the tip of the fox’s tail in now black.)

Well, Raven was very angry when that happened. He’d become greedy and proud and imagined all the caribou were his.

Wolf and the others came and told Raven how wrong he was. “We are here in this land to help one another, all of us living here together. Were you willing to let your sister, my wife,  starve?“

Wolf and the other villagers put Raven in the middle of the circle and lectured him sternly. This was serious; people had come close to death! It was well known that those who hide or steal food from the group can be cast out. Everyone took turns telling how they and their families had suffered from Raven’s greed.

A decision had to be made about Raven. Some wanted to shun him, but Wolf, who was Ka’owae said, “Raven, from now on, you will only eat dead animals. People will live around you, but you will eat their garbage. Your power is gone; you can no longer kill for your food.”

And so that is how Raven lives today. He drinks the dirty water others pour away. When garbage is tossed out, he eats it. It is a humiliating and pitiful way for a once great hunter to live.

Johnny Mantla finished his story by saying: “That is how powerful Ka’owae were in the old days. They are the ones who are supposed to take care of the people, but even Ka’owae can become lose their way and grow greedy. When this happens, the people can no longer depend on them. People who do not think about others should not be followed."

~~Juliet Waldron

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