Caribou & Men

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The aboriginal people of NWT were hunter/gatherers when the European colonists "discovered" them. The 1st Nations were already on the land, and many said that Creator had shaped men from the mud that was found between the caribou's toes.  In those days, men and animals journeyed through an immense landscape every year, following the caribou that fed and clothed them. Every bit of what they killed was used, every scrap of sinew and hide and meat.

The great herds moved unobstructed across the land like water and wind. The people followed. They original inhabitants didn't kill for "fun;" they killed by necessity. Sometimes, when the game traveled on new path or their numbers declined (for one reason or another) the people starved. In the old days, the human population cycled up and down along with that population of prey animals.

The Woodland Caribou is a kind of specialist, different from the Barren Ground Caribou--the one you see on long harrowing journeys if you watch wildlife shows. The Woodland Caribou live and feed in old growth conifer forests where lichens and mosses grow. Trees of 85 to 150 years of age are the perfect hosts for the aerial and ground plant life on which these caribou depend. This means that undisturbed old growth forests are of prime importance to their survival.

Mining exploration had been going on in the NWT since earliest times, ("Yellowknife" refers to the gold blades some members of that tribe once made) but it wasn't until the 1990's that the digging began in earnest now with heavy loud modern machinery. The data shows it is not coincidental that this is the time when the numbers of the Woodland Caribou began to diminish. Mining didn't begin in earnest until the 1990's. It is not coincidental that this is the time when the numbers of the caribou began to diminish.

Toxic waste is a typical by-product of mining; moreover, that industry does not have a good record of cleaning up after itself anywhere, but logging at first seems to have been the hardest on the caribou. Not only noise, dust and continuous human activity, but the clear-cutting of the ancient forests--both the soil disruption and the removal of the trees -- cut severely into the supply of lichens and mosses, (some aerial, some ground dwelling) upon which the woodland caribou depend.

Roads, pipelines, seismic and now hydro lines create clear highways along which predators such as Lynx, Wolf & Bear can travel deep into what were once once (nearly) impenetrable forests. Now these predators hunt the Boreal Caribou where they have long been accustomed to resting, feeding or giving birth, times when they are particularly vulnerable to attack. This kind of habitat fragmentation affects all migratory animals which now share a planet with humans.


Caribou are named for the places the places where they calve. One herd that is failing spectacularly--much to the dismay of the 1st Nations people whose ancient way of life is threatened--is the Bathhurst herd. Once as many as 500,000, now there are less than 10,000. The numbers continue to fall.

This year there is a proposed permanent road north, again through what was once boreal forests, an extension of Highway 3 north to Whati', the haven in the wilderness for which my characters, Sascho and Yaotl, search after their escape from the Residential School. Families who live in Whati' year round now will be benefited with cheaper goods, but once again, their ancient ally, the caribou, will suffer -- and diminish.

Noise will be another as yet not much studied factor -- which affects the caribou and the other animals who are accustomed to living in the area of the proposed Whati road. Studies done in 2012 by the University of Idaho showed that simply broadcasting a recording of road noise--in this case of a heavily used climb in Glacier National Park--was sufficient to drive animals away. Some bird migrations that were documented as common in the roadless test area used by the "phantom road" study completely ceased. We humans don't have to do much it seems to disrupt Nature's once perfect balance.

Things don't have to be this way. Governments, industry and communities could work together to create local plans and solutions. Federal budget incentives could be used as both carrot and stick to assist caribou recovery. Sustainability must become the mantra for all who live and work in the NWT, if they want the caribou and some part of their ancient way of life to remain. 


~~Juliet Waldron


https://blog.wwf.ca/blog/2018/04/20/governments-argue-risk-woodland-caribou-decline/


Volumetrics, Why noise pollution is more dangerous than we think by David Owen, May 13, 2019, The New Yorker


https://cabinradio.ca/12442/news/environment/how-nwt-proposes-to-protect-wildlife-from-new-whati-road/

Tlicho Spirits

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I have to define them as "spirits," because the Tlicho didn't have "ghosts" as the dominant cultures imagines them until after they made contact with Europeans. Digression: during the last 300 years, though, they've taken on some new religious beliefs, in their case, Roman Catholicism. Along with that, I think, came the sort of 'ghosts' that I've read reported in books written by recent researchers into the culture. Those modern spirits are just like ours: the restless and sometimes violent echoes of the bad, the mad, or the murdered. 

Before the Europeans brought their sometimes sad, sometimes scary spooks, the Tlicho could hardly be called "spirit-poor." An almost endless number of supernatural beings inhabited their everyday world, but in ways it took me a while to get the hang of. Mostly these beings are not angry or bent on vengeance. They are simply part of the fabric of the world the Tlicho observed. Staying right relationship with nature, staying in balance, was a central thought in this world view. This careful observation of the world around them, led them to see their position in relation to their environment as a thread woven into a greater fabric, part of which was a vast host of unseen--but--undeniably present beings.

Pre-contact, they were nomadic hunters whose survival depended upon the weather and the movements of animals, so they paid close attention to every detail of their surroundings as they moved about the dè--modern Canada's NWT.

Yearly, they traveled across an immense territory following the annual migrations of birds, fish, and caribou. Their prey, however, was not a simple commodity. The animals collectively and individually had spirit, just as the men who hunted them did. If a hunter disrespected the caribou, they might walk another path the following year and not come the expected way.

It was believed that the caribou willingly gave their bodies to the hunters. As one should when given a gift, the giver should be gratefully and politely thanked. This was done with certain prescribed rituals (which the Tlicho saw simply as "rules of behavior") for the sacrifice of their living bodies. Those gigantic herds were not just food animals, but fellow beings, in relationship with their Tlicho hunters, emanations of the "Great Spirit," all beings going about their business as instructed by the first great Tlicho magician, Yamǫǫ̀zha.*1

Over centuries, The People walked the same trails and canoed the intricate network of waterways. The landscape itself, from forest to tundra, was filled with a species of entity which I first learned about in long ago Latin classes, supernatural beings which the Romans referred to as "Numen." These spirits of place might occupy rocks, trees, camping spots, waterfalls and lakes, all of which frequently had a "power" or "powers" associated with them. 

Small tokens of respect are still left after camping near one of these places, or after fishing, or even simply as one travels past a sacred rock or waterfall. This is called "paying the land." According too Allice Legat: "People leave on site something they value and use, such as coinage, spruce boughs, or rosaries. A student gave a pencil because it was important to her success in school." Further, "...if human beings ignore rules and do not show respect, they will probably have a difficult time because these entities may withdraw their assistance."* (from Walking the Land, Feeding the Fire.)  (*1)

Spirits could sometimes be malevolent. One kind called "weyèedii or 'animal-beings' were "regarded as dangerous, and consequently, always avoided. Through dreaming and the acquisition of ı̨k’ǫǫ̀ or “medicine”, sometimes “power,” “knowledge,” or “luck”, a person could prepare to deal with the world," and the varied powers which inhabit it.(*2)

Spirits of earth and rock were not invulnerable. In order to explain the "continuing death and decay" in the toxic areas which continue to exist around the polluting Rayrock Uranium mine, Elder Romie Wetrade told a story.* Rayrock, he said, used to be called "The Happy Place," because hunters who traveled through the area felt liking singing. When the mine opened, however, in the 1950's, the happy spirits were driven away by blasting and other human activities. The closing down of the mine has not brought them back, either. Displaced by the tearing up of the earth and breaking of rock, these once joyous spirits are now presumed to be fading, homeless wanderers. The very character of these spirits requires a "home place." 

Spirits could be wind or water as well as rock. One modern story I read concerned a wind coming up so heavily that a gathering of elders and teenagers was trapped beside a lake when their float plane could not take off. While the campers waited it out, an elder told them stories about the wind, "in the boreal forests and on the tundra and on large lakes." When the stories had been told, another elder "built a raft, placed burning spruce boughs on it," and pushed it out onto the lake.  As he did so, he asked for "calm winds and a safe journey. It only took two hours for the wind to die down..." so that their journey could safely continue.  (*2)

Where I stand is holy

Holy is the ground 

Forest, mountain river

Listen to the sound 

Great Spirit circles all around me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ-tNr6nW5E

~Juliet Waldron

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*1

This Tlicho story reminds me of the "The Crab Who Played with Sea" in the Just So Stories of Rudyard Kipling. Here, all the animals "played the play the great magician taught them at the very beginning." Kipling probably borrowed this notion from the indigenous people of India where he did military service. 

~In Europe, all through the 19th century and into the 20th, many historians, artists  and literary figures avidly collected, studied, and wrote and made collections of "world-wide" folkloric traditions. To me, all these tales of every nation appear so intertwined--culturally altered echoes of common themes-- that they must be part of our common "out of Africa" psychic past.

~In Miyasaki's Spirited Away, there is a character who befriends the heroine that is a wandering spirit. In this case, it is that of a river which was relegated to underground channels when a city built over it. This seems to be a Japanese version of the Rayrock story of the way things sometimes happen with displaced spirits. This particular spirit has managed to stay positive about humans, which is not always the case.

*2
https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/walking-the-land-feeding-the-fire

Walking the Land, Feeding the Fire, Knowledge and Stewardship Among the Tlicho Dene 
by Allice Legat

 
*3 
From The Tlicho Nation homesite:
https://tlichohistory.ca/en/stories/tlicho-way-life

Total Immersion

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Why write historical fiction? This is a deep question. The 1980’s, when I first started writing, was a low point for the genre. I remember querying ever so many agents and getting replies which said “only a small market for historical fiction.” That was discouraging enough, but not so much that I stopped working on those novels, driven by the writing demons as I was.   

Like everyone else who will reply to this question, I started young reading historical fiction, following the books my mother took out of the library. She was a voracious reader of both history and science fiction, and I became one as well. I began early, and remember writing a short story about the Princes in the Tower back in 8^th grade that got an “A.” (My story successfully creeped-out  the class, too, which was even better.)

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I could say that my love of history happened because I’ve often lived in old houses—several with disturbances of the kind that are often labelled “ghost.” I could talk about the love of my important elders for history, their familiarity with the past, and the way the past was always present in discussions about politics, or about how trips were taken to view gravestones, battlefields, Indian mounds, and museums. 

I could dwell on the lit professor grandpa that I adored. His study fairly breathed of old books, tweed, leather, pipe smoke and things past. A large oil painting of the Canterbury Pilgrims overlooked his desk, a beautiful obsidian spear point that had emerged during the spring plowing at the family farm in upstate NY sat beside his typewriter. All of these objects had stories, and he shared them with his children and grandchildren. At home, that wonderful quote of William Faulkner’s “The Past is never gone. It’s not even past,” was a statement of fact. 

The truth is more that I’ve never felt truly comfortable with the noisy, gasoline era into which I was born. Cars were something to get around in, but not by me beloved. Every time a tree falls in the creation of a road or a new development, I feel a terrible sense of loss.

I’ve often spoken of what I write as a kind of time travel, because for me that’s what it is—a way to be present in another place and time, to smell and taste that world, to deal with the hardships and the inevitable dirt and sweat, the blood and the loss, that is the genuine past.  The “romance” died quite early for me because I read and read and read, ever deeper into my chosen subjects. 

Living inside another time and place, or inside another culture, is truly an immersive experience; I love the scuba sense of diving in and swimming around inside these deep waters of history. Originally, I wrote from my own European-American perspective, and my books were set in 18th Century Europe or England or the colonial US.  The time shift alone caused me to change my perspective. I sometimes get nasty reviews because the 18th Century characters about whom I write do not behave up to the highest standards of the 21st Century. I always want to reply to these folks that I don't write these stories to make them comfortable. I write to show them as much as I can of what I've learned about what was--the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Maybe I'd be richer if I sugar-coated, but taking the trip into the past and taking my readers along with me is always far more important than whatever is currently P.C. If you want to read about the 18th Century people, expect to meet  men who have "patriarchy" firmly entrenched in their heads and women who have no other recourse than to accept or attempt to circumvent whatever their menfolk, their churches and their society dish

out. Englishwomen, as every reader of Jane Austen ought to know, could not inherit property until quite recently.

By Tom Walker~Available at Allposters.com

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In Genesee, and, later, to a far greater extent, in Fly Away Snow Goose, I had another task. here I found I had to shed the Euro-based colonizer culture into which I was born so that I could inhabit (as far as I am able) a life-way with a totally different outlook. The Tlicho tribe in Fly Away Snow Goose were historically a nomadic, communal people, living in small groups that got even smaller in winter--who shared food with one another. They disapproved the kind of willful ignorance of their environment, the braggadocio and "me-first-ism" that is  rampant in the capital-driven European cultures which almost overwhelmed them. 

Instead of "conquerors of nature," the Tlicho strove to always to be in "right relationship" with the earth and her creatures, to eat and/or to make use of every piece of any animal they killed. They saw the spirits in the sky and in the earth and water all across the enormous terrain they traversed every year, following the caribou. Everyone had to pull together, or the group might not survive the long frigid winters where starvation was a very real threat. This experience, this total immersion has changed my outlook on the world in a fundamental way.  

Now, it's as if I've put on an entirely new pair of spectacles.  

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~~Juliet Waldron
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