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INTRODUCTION

Harry Robinson was a perfectionist. Whether sharpening his knives or keeping a record of births and deaths in his community, Harry carried out his tasks methodically and with great precision. It was his way. Knowing this about him, it was with some apprehension that I put the first copy of his long-awaited book, Write It on Your Heart, in my local Vancouver mailbox on November 1, 1989. With even greater nervousness, I approached his bedside in Keremeos a week later.

“It’s all right,” he said approvingly, “except for one thing.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“You said you would put all my stories on a book, but you’ve left a lot out.”

For the next hour, we discussed the logistics of putting his words into print, especially the hundreds of thousands of words that had passed from his lips over many years onto my reel-to-reel tapes. It was just not possible to capture all of his words in one book! This bothered Harry, and so I promised him that day to do my best to get more of his stories into book form.

Nature Power, a collection of Harry’s stories about the spiritual relationship between humans and their nature helpers (shoo-MISH), is a partial fulfillment of that commitment. Unfortunately, I will never have the pleasure of presenting Nature Power to Harry. In the early morning hours of January 25, 1990, scarcely two months after that November visit, Harry died.

Harry had been frail and bedridden for some time, but his round-the-clock home-care workers, Colleen, Heather, Diane and Stella, had described him to me in my regular check-in calls as “comfortable.” In the third week of January, however, things changed. It started with an unusual pain in Harry’s lower abdomen. Fearing that he might be forced to go into the hospital—an institution he hated—Harry kept his pain to himself. Only when it had become unbearable did he finally complain. An emergency X-ray undertaken at the local Keremeos health clinic on Wednesday morning revealed that his artificial hip had become dislodged, and by now it was badly infected. Harry died early the next day in his own bed, surrounded by his photos, wall hangings and other precious pieces of memorabilia.

His friends and relatives assembled at Chopaka for his funeral five days later. A great tree had fallen, taking with it roots that extended deep into the Okanagan earth.

TWO WORLDS

I first met Harry Robinson in August 1977 at his home just east of Hedley in the Similkameen Valley. On the surface, our two worlds could not have been more different. Harry was a seventy-six-year-old Okanagan Indian who had been raised in the traditional ways of his people by his mother, Arcell, and her parents, Louise and Joseph Newhmkin, at the small village of Chopaka in the Similkameen Valley. A member of the Lower Similkameen Indian Band (one of five Okanagan bands in southwestern British Columbia), Harry spent his boyhood riding and tending horses, bringing in the cattle, fencing, haying, and visiting rodeos and stampedes. At the age of thirteen he began attending the local school at Cawston, but after five months of walking the six miles there and back, he quit and turned to ranching full-time. Harry married Matilda Johnny, also from Chopaka, in 1924. Although they had no children, they ran a very successful ranching business together. By the early 1970s, Matilda had died and Harry had become too old to run the ranch, so he sold it.

Ranching was Harry’s life. “It’s kinde important words,” he wrote to me, “should be on book.”

I get to started feed stock from 2nd jan. 1917 till 1972. 50 years I feed cattle without missed a day in feeding season rain or shine. snowing or Blazirt. sunday’s. holirdays. funeral day. any other times I just got to feed cattle feeding seson in winter. from 115 days up to 185 days. just Depend’s in weather of winter to feed cattle every day. that is I Been doing for 50 winter’s that should worth to be on Book if is not too late.…

some more I have done in my days. I use to buy land and sell land Buy cattle and sell cattle. Buy horses and sell horses. Buy hay and sell hay. Even I buy dog but no sale for dog. No market. Later on I Buy machinery, one tracto[r] at a time. Big one and one small. 2 tractor’s. one farmhand Power hay mower side rack. I put up 120 to 150 tone’s of hay all by my self. alone with that machinery in 3–4 weeks. But before I have that machinery I could have 6–7 man’s working for me to put up 150 tons of hay in 4–5 weeks but later on I have to sell the machinery one by one at a time till I have it all soled. At one time for a while I have 3 home neer Ashnola just about mile an half aprt and was another home and hay land neer Chopaka. Because I buy place with house and barn and everything and sometimes I sell it same way. House Barn corral everything now by then I have 3 place to work in upper part and one down below, that 30 miles away from this other 3 place is but I work in all 4 place in all year round some times I have a hiert man one or two some times all by my self. (Letter, May 15, 1985)

When I met Harry, Matilda had been dead for about ten years. Alone in his rented bungalow beside the main highway, he had no close neighbours, other than his landlords and good friends Slim and Carrie Allison.

In addition to our fifty-year age difference (I was twenty-seven), I had been raised on the other side of the continent, in small-town Nova Scotia. Growing up in a professional family of Anglo-Scottish ancestry, I had spent the better part of my life in school. But my formal education, especially a degree in music at an Ontario university, had left me cold. The oral music-making with which I had grown up—guitars, fiddles, banjos, accordians and pianos played “by ear” in most households—had no place here. Indeed, “playing by ear” was frowned upon. And so-called “world music,” such as the Indonesian gamelan, West African drumming or South Indian percussion, was scarcely mentioned. This vision of culture needed rethinking, and in 1975 I switched to anthropology and “ethnomusicology.”

Two years later, Victoria-based anthropologists Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy offered to introduce me to some elderly Native singers in Vernon and Chase. We left Vancouver early in the morning on August 13 and headed east towards Penticton along the Hope-Princeton Highway. Michael M’Gonigle, my future husband, was also with us. At Hedley we stopped to visit with Harry Robinson, who entertained us all evening with a long story about Old Coyote. After leaving Harry’s, we drove on to Vernon and Chase to see Mary Abel, Aimee August and Adeline Willard, all singers who would later devote many hours of their time to teaching me the ways of their music. During this trip, I experienced a still vital oral culture that bore little relation to anything I had known. Here were songs and stories that were integral to living communities. They were not written and did not require extensive technical skill, yet they were more deeply embedded with meaning than all the classical études and finger exercises of my last ten years.

For the next few years I spent time in B.C.’s southern interior meeting Native singers and sharing their songs. At the same time I discovered the writings of anthropologist/political activist “Jimmy” Teit, a Shetlander who had worked in the same area some sixty years earlier. Wherever I went I carried copies of his handwritten notes, his photographs and his cylinder song recordings.

A FRIENDSHIP

Although Harry was a singer, he could not hear well, making it difficult for him to participate in my music project. He had invited me, however, on that first overnight visit, to come again and stay for as long as I wished. So I did, finding it a refreshing break to sit at Harry’s table and listen to a stream of stories. During these visits, we spent our time running errands in Hedley, Keremeos and Penticton. In good weather, we took trips to local landmarks, such as Coyote’s rocks, old pit-house sites, rock painting sites or whatever appealed to us. Then, from late afternoon or early evening until midnight, Harry told stories.

Our fullest year together was 1980–81. I had rented a cabin in the Coldwater Valley near Merritt to facilitate my field research on songs. Only an hour from Hedley, I visited Harry regularly. He was in excellent health, so we took many trips together. In January and February we travelled Harry’s favourite route south to Omak, in Washington State, where we spent long nights as guests at a sacred winter dance. A few weeks later I picked him up and transported him to my Coldwater cabin, where we spent a week tracking down old friends and relatives in the Nicola Valley. On the long weekend in May, Michael and I took in one of Harry’s favourite events, the annual Keremeos rodeo.

In between visits, we wrote letters back and forth, sometimes as often as once a week. Even though writing was not easy for Harry, he enjoyed it, much as he enjoyed his storytelling. “I could not Help it for written a long letter,” he wrote to me on one occasion, “because Im storie teller I always have Planty to say.” Harry liked letter-writing for other reasons, too. He was a meticulous planner, and he could read and reread, write and rewrite his letters, planning every detail thoroughly. He also believed that letters helped to prevent misunderstandings between friends. In one letter in 1981 he urged me to “take time and figure out. It’s better to be a good friend for last 4 years. We should keep that way because one of these days Im going be missing. Im old.”

Letters helped Harry fill the void left by Matilda’s death. They occupied his time and gave him an outlet for emotions that he would otherwise not express.

I always Happy when I get a words from you. I don’t think I can have any Better friend than you. Your the Best friend I ever known. (Letter, February 28, 1981)

In the summer of 1982, Harry was hospitalized in Penticton for a leg ulcer that had bothered him for some time. Because of his mistrust of the medical staff and his hatred of Western medicine, Harry discharged himself, ordered a taxi and returned to Hedley. He notified us of this in a letter of September 12.

The hospital is no good for Indian like me. Maybe is all right for some Indians Because they don’t know. Got to be in there a long enough to know how bad it is the Hospital.… I depend on whiteman doctor for 11 month but they don’t do. Today is 9 days since I come out of Hospital. Still the same. My ankle not too Bad but not good. So I thought the chance I have I will switch to my own Indian ways. if the Indian doctor can’t do it like the white man doctor, then I will know nothing can be done about it.… The Indian doctor is Different than the White doctor. he can do it ones or he can never [do] it ones.

Harry’s frustration with hospitals and doctors was partly because he believed plak to be the cause of his ulcer.

They call that “plak” in the Indian word. But in English they call it witchcraft. And they could dig that to the river or to the creek or to the lake, wherever is water. Go over there and take a bath, you know, early in the morning. After take that, they hold ’em and talk to ’em just like I do now with you. Talk to ’em and then they tell ’em what his wish. He wish for that person to die or he wish for that person to get hurt. But not die. Just get hurt. Or he wish for the man or woman to get bad luck at all times.

Within two weeks of discharging himself from hospital, Harry hired a couple of young friends to drive him to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to see an Indian doctor whom he thought might be able to help him. It was a long and strenuous trip.

We travel on that road, we musta pass 30 to so trucks to every mile. Im a Def but I can Heard the Hinde wheel singing a song I used to sing, Oh Mollie. Wendy, do you remember that song I sing?… I see the Indian Doctor. He works on me at Sunday night and tell me not to expect to get Better right away.… tell me to use medicine everyday for about 2 weeks or more. (Letter, September 24, 1982)

When his leg failed to respond to the Indian doctor’s treatment, Harry became very discouraged. We suggested that he try a ninety-year-old Chinese herbalist we knew in Vancouver. He agreed, and so Michael and I drove to Hedley with our week-old son, Leithen, to pick him up. In Vancouver, we delivered him every other day over the course of a month to Dr. Lee and his daughter. In the middle of Harry’s treatment, just as his sore showed signs of closing, Dr. Lee died. Dejected, Harry returned to his home at Hedley to treat his leg on his own. The fight against this malady—hours and hours of changing bandages and applying ointments—consumed Harry.

By the fall of 1983, he was so weak that he stayed in bed almost constantly. In a short letter of September 23, he explained that “I might make it or may not. I was so weak and so low in my condition.… I more like to laid down in Bed then anythink els.” Again he sought an Indian doctor for help: “the Indian Doctor were here, him and his wife on the 1st day of November. that night thee work on me for two night. Left on the 3rd.” (Letter, November 4, 1983) By early spring of 1984, Harry finally asked Carrie, his neighbour, to call an ambulance. Back at the Princeton Hospital, he was close to death. After several months of intravenous feedings, he regained his strength, and eventually he recovered. At this point, he moved out of his small bungalow into the Pine Acres Home, a senior citizens’ complex owned and operated by the Westbank Indian Band. Other than the hospital, this was Harry’s first experience with institutionalization, and he did not like it. He missed his home, and most of all he missed his Similkameen Valley: “Im kinda lonesome. Is noone to talket with.”

After a year, Harry transferred to Mountainview Manor, a seniors’ complex located in Keremeos. Here he was finally happy, especially with the thorough home-care provided by his band. Harry lived for almost three years here, sleeping a lot and eating too little. He continued to tell stories, but the vigour was going.

On November 13, 1989, Michael and I travelled to Keremeos to launch Write It on Your Heart. It was a big day for all of us. We had circulated word about the event widely. Harry dressed for the occasion and was wheeled the several blocks to the hall, where he was enthusiastically feted by a hundred of his people. He spoke to his friends, he sang and he drummed. He signed books carefully and precisely, one by one. After he had finished, he watched a slide presentation while the local drumming group sang in his honour. When we said good-bye the next day, it was for the last time.

“NOTHING I CAN DO BUT TELL STORIES”

Although Harry had loved listening to stories as a child, he did not become a serious storyteller until late in life.

I forget for a long time and I never thought. But the older I get, the older I come, and it seems to come back on me. Just like I think and I could see, like. It just seems to come back. That’s the way I remember. But, for a long time, I forget. I didn’t remember. But when I get older and nothing I can do but tell stories. And then I begin to see ’em. And people. Remember again.

In a way, storytelling filled the gap created by the loss of ranch work. “I can go for twenty-one hours or more when I get started,” he explained, “because this is my job. I’m a storyteller.” In his prime, Harry had a huge repertory that he could perform with ease in both Okanagan and English.

Harry learned many of his stories from his maternal grandmother, Louise Newhmkin. While her daughter Arcell worked, Louise looked after Harry. But the arrangement was a reciprocal one. Because Louise was partly blind, Harry also cared for his grandmother. During their many hours together, Louise told her young grandson stories. There were others who told Harry stories, too—John Ashnola, who was in his nineties when he died in the 1918 flu epidemic, and Mary Narcisse, who was close to one hundred when she died in 1944.

Harry recalled that, as a child, he was never content to let a story go unfinished.

They tell stories anytime. And we just sometimes maybe just myself and tell me the stories. But sometimes we need two, three of us. And tell the stories for maybe a couple of hours, the old people. And they stop, because they can’t talk too long, you know. They too old to keep talking, you know. They can tell the stories about a couple of hours, maybe three hours, and they have to stop. And if we remember just whereabout, and next day or anytime after we could remind ’em.

“You tell the stories that much. But you should’ve tell me some more about it.”

“Oh yeah, I can tell you. I can tell you the rest of it anytime, you know.”

Then they tell me the rest of ’em. And that’s the way we do. That is how you leam, that is, if you enjoy the stories. But some of them, they don’t care, you know. Whenever the old people stop telling, then they forget. They don’t care. I always remember and I like to know. I want to hear the stories till they get to the end. So that is the way that happens.

The setting for most of Harry’s storytelling was the front room of his bungalow. At a small Arborite table precisely laid out with his pens, papers, scissors, white-out (for correcting his letters), knives, rulers, cigarettes, ashtrays and matches, Harry felt at ease. He usually initiated a story after dinner. Except for pauses to smoke his Players cigarettes or to suck on peppermints, he spoke without interruption for several hours at a time. His only prop was a continuous series of striking hand gestures, indeed a whole hand language that told the story almost as a manual dance. Harry stopped only when he thought I was tired, usually around midnight.

FROMWRITE IT ON YOUR HEART TO NATURE POWER

In the beginning, I listened to the stories without running my tape recorder. However, as I began to appreciate the cultural depth and historic importance of Harry’s unique artistry, I saw the need to record the stories he told. According to Harry, no one had made a systematic record of them. So one day I proposed to do this. Without hesitation, he responded, “All right. Go ahead.”

For neither of us was this an “extractive” exercise. Harry rejected the idea of payment, which is common in anthropological fieldwork.

If you want to know, I’m willing to tell you stories at any time. You don’t have to pay me. If you happened to be around I might need your help, or may not. Just depends. (Letter, February 7, 1981)

Harry never launched spontaneously into a story. He was always thinking ahead, and he planned his stories well in advance of my visits. Usually, sometime after dinner, he would announce, often without any explanation, “Now, I’m going to tell you number one stories. ‘There was a man …’” Thus would a story begin. At the end, he would announce abruptly, “That’s the end of that story. Now, here is number two stories.”

I did not interrupt while the stories were in progress. He told whatever he felt like telling, and my tape recorder appeared not to bother him. Other than telling me to turn it off during a smoke break, he made little reference to the machine.

The stories Harry told me were always in English. Since an increasing number of his listeners over the years spoke only English, he decided to translate his stories to keep them alive. By the time I met him, he had become as skilled at telling his stories in English as he was in the Okanagan language.

I first proposed to Harry by letter that we turn his stories into a book. He responded with enthusiasm.

About you going to write a Book about me. my stories. I think that is good idea. Do it while Im life yet. You have saying you going to start it written in March. Go right ahead. Im agree about it. (Letter, February 1985)

About my stories, its on tape already for you to put that on Book. But still you want me to Help you on some when you doing that. Oh I will do what I can for the rest of you want to know. (Letter, March 1, 1985)

With support from the Canada Council Explorations Programme, we began our work. Although he followed the project closely and participated directly in certain components of it, such as suggesting items to be included and collecting old family photographs, Harry encouraged me to take the lead in organizing the book’s contents.

that’s really up to you. don’t have to ask me about it. I wrote the some of it or I mention on tape and you do the rest of the work. The stories is worked by Both of us you and I. (Letter, January 27, 1986)

And so I did, listening again to the entire tape collection and selecting from it a representative cross section that I organized into four sections: stories about creation and the animal-people, stories about the early human ancestors, stories about power (the shoo-MISH) and stories about Native-White interactions throughout the past century. These stories were published in Write It on Your Heart.

This second volume focuses on Harry’s stories about “nature power,” the life-sustaining spirituality that guided Harry throughout his life.

You got to have power. You got to, the kids, you know. They got to meet the animal, you know, when they was little. Can be anytime till it’s five years old to ten years old. He’s supposed to meet animal or bird, or anything, you know. And this animal, whoever they meet, got to talk to ’em and tell ’em what they should do. Later on, not right away. And that is his power. And when the time comes, then they could sing his song. Then he was an Indian doctor. Then he can do the way he was told. Just like going to school. The little boy or little girl, they send ’em out in nighttime, the Indians do, send ’em out. Just the one. Just by himself. Send ’em out and tell ’em, maybe they were hunting someplace, then they come down off the hill, way down the road somewhere. Then they could leave something near the road, maybe leave hom, deer horn. Or maybe cut off the heart. Leave the heart there, something for the kids to go get ’em. And bring ’em. And they might, after supper, after dark. And tell the boy or girl, “You go over there.” And showed them whereabouts. “I left something there. You go over and get them and bring ’em here.” Well, this boy, they got to go. They got to be over there. And even if they don’t like it, if they’re scared, but they got to go. And when they get there, or before they get there, they might meet some animal on the way going that way, or coming back. Or maybe that’s the one that they went to get, that’s the one that will talk to ’em. Then, when they come back, well, they got the power already. And they wouldn’t say. But whoever send ’em, they know. And that’s how they get the power.

The first section of Nature Power, “You Got to Have Power,” features five stories of initial encounters with power-helpers (shoo-MISH). Although the stories are quite different from one another, they have one thing in common. In each a child is either taken to an isolated place and left there by parents and relatives or sent at night to an isolated place to retrieve some part of an animal. While alone, each meets his or her shoo-MISH.

Although invisible, this power is very real. “They got the power in them, in their arms, in their body,” Harry explained, “but you cannot see it.”

If there was a fan, I could bring it and sit it here and the wheel is not turning. Then I take this wire and put ’em over there on the plug. The same second, and it’ll turn. It’ll turn by the power. Pull that out, and this wheel, it’ll stop. Did you see that power come through the wire? No. Can’t see. Indian, the same way. You can’t see their power.

The second section, “Power Just for Themselves,” presents five stories about the interaction between individuals and their shoo-MISH during times of crisis. Although the encounter with one’s shoo-MISH occurs early in life, the power-helper does not reappear until one is in need, often much later. Many shoo-MISH offer protection to humans “just for themselves,” not for others.

Or if they got the children, they can use his own power for his children, or his wife, and that’s all, because they’re not told by the other bird or animal, or whatever they talked to ’em, to have a power, they don’t tell ’em to use their power for somebody else.

“Power to Do the Doctoring,” the third section of the book, features four stories about healing others through the shoo-MISH. “Was told by the bird or animal,” explained Harry. “He can do to anybody. He can use his power to anybody what was sick or get hurt, anything like that. And that’s what they call the Indian doctor.” Although Harry was trained in the ways of the shoo-MISH, he never acquired his own: “I was sent out a few times, but I never see nothing.” Consequently, he considered himself vulnerable to sickness and bad luck. “People without shoo-MISH, if they got trouble or something then what can they do? They got no power to get the trouble away from them.” For this reason, Harry had to go to Indian doctors for a cure when he fell ill.

Whoever they didn’t have shoo-MISH, they got to hire Indian doctor. Just like me. Because I got no shoo-MISH. But I was sick, and I know what’s the matter, but I can’t do it. And I got to get Indian doctor to do that for me. But if I had shoo-MISH like the other people, well, I can do it myself.

There were many Indian doctors, each of whom was responsible for curing different ailments.

See? The Indian power, the Indian doctor, the power person, they not all the same. Each one, they got a little different way in their power. They good for certain things, but they not good for the others. Maybe another Indian doctor can be good for the others, but what he know, this other one, they don’t know that. See? That’s the way it goes. Then, there’s a lot of different ways. Some of them power person or Indian doctor, this power, they call it shoo-MISH. That’s his power. That was the animal they talked to ’em. Doesn’t matter what kind of animal. Any animal—bear or grizzly or wolf or coyote or deer, any animal can talk to ’em. And they can tell ’em, the same animal, they can tell ’em: “You look at that. And take a look. And you could see a man or woman. They’re already in a bad way. You do this. You go and do this.” Show them what to do to save ’em. To be all right. He got to be told by his power. And they can go and do that, what they was told. And they saved him or her from getting in a bad way.

Whenever he could, Harry attended the shnay-WHUM, the winter dances in which people sang in honour of their shoo-MISH. Not only were the sick doctored at these events, but just dancing there to support the singers was better than any insurance policy that money could buy. The story “Don’t Forget My Song” describes Harry’s own experience with an Indian doctor at one of these winter dances.

The stories in the fourth and final section of the book, “Encounters with Power,” focus on the wide range of power experiences within the Okanagan world. In one story, “You Can’t See Me, but Just Listen,” a man encounters power in the form of a voice that foretells the network of highways to come. Another, “The Indians, They Got the Power,” describes how some Indian doctors stopped a train with their shoo-MISH. Yet another recounts how a Hedley boy was picked up by a large gorilla-like creature and transported to a community many miles away. “She Was Dead at One Time, but She Come Alive” tells the story of several people who died and returned to life.

“QUITE A BIT OF DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE WHITE PEOPLE

AND THE INDIANS”

From the beginning of our friendship, Harry was preoccupied with power, whether in the context of his own health or in relation to the history of his people. During one of our first taped sessions in 1979, he referred to the source of this power in his creation story, a story that he told many times throughout our years together, sometimes in full, sometimes in fragments. Reproduced in Write It on Your Heart as “Twins: White and Indian,” the story explains how God, at the beginning of time, created five people, two of whom were twins. To each of the first three people he created, God gave a paper containing a set of written instructions on how to survive until the end of time. With only one paper for the two remaining brothers, God decided to go away to think about how to proceed. Before he left, however, he placed the paper under a rock and told both twins not to touch it in his absence. The younger twin became curious about the paper, and fearing that it contained something important, he disobeyed God’s instruction and stole the paper without the other twin’s knowledge. When God returned and asked about the missing paper, the younger twin denied knowing anything of it.

According to Harry, this younger twin, “now today, that’s the White man.… And that’s why the White man can tell a lie more than the Indian.” Angered by the younger twin’s action, God gave him the paper and told him that this would become the source of his power until the end of time.

“That paper … it’s going to show you how

you going to make it to get back here.

But not right away.

Long time from now.…

But when you come back, a long time from now,

you going to have a heck of a time.

You’re going to lose a lot of people.

There’s a lot of people

that’s going to be drowned on that water.…

But that paper, it will show you how you going to do it.

to get back here.”

“And the older twin,” explained Harry, “that’s me. That’s the Indian.” Instead of power in the form of paper, God gave the older twin an intangible spiritual power. “So that’s why,” explained Harry, “the Indian, they got a different way.”

You know, the Indians, God put the Indians in the head, you know, in the heart, for the things to know. But the White people, they got the paper. [If] they don’t read the paper, they forget things. It’s just like that, you know.… The Indians, just like the way I see it, because we supposed to have it on our brains, our heart, you know, the things we will remember.… Most of the Indian people know that. Because there’s a lot of these White people, they don’t seems to know that we are, us Indian, we are that way. They think that we don’t know anything. That’s what the most of ’em thinks. They thinks the Indians, they don’t know nothing till the White people come. And then the White people told ’em. Then they know. But the way I tell you last night, the Indians know that from God, long long time ago before Christ.

Harry told his nature power stories to set straight the historical record so that everyone, Native and non-Native alike, would know why Whites and Indians are different. He was concerned that the deep knowledge of the past was disappearing. To illustrate this he told a story of a meeting in 1881 between the Indians and a government man in Penticton. During this meeting, the government man asked the Indians to tell him about their beginnings.

It means how come to be an Indian here in the first before the White? That’s what it meant. But the Indians at that time, they doesn’t know anything about it. And they try to say, but they say something different. And the other one get up and try to say something different.… They didn’t know.… And one of them, he says,

“Yeah, our forefather, how we become to be

Indian, that’s from Adam, Adam and Eve.”

“No, no, that’s mine.”

“Yeah,” the one ’em says,

“Noah, Noah, the one that built that great big …

when the world flood.”

“No,” he says.

“That’s overseas.

That’s my forefather. Not the Indians.

I’m asking you for your forefather.”

But they don’t know.… Still, they don’t even know today.… Not the people know, but I do, I know.… I know how come for the Indians to be here.

Harry also believed his stories would help people, both Native and White, to understand where they came from and why their interactions have been so antagonistic. He considered these to be important stories that should be circulated widely: “Is not to be Hidden,” he wrote. “It is to be showed in all Province in Canada and United States. that is when it comes to be a Book.” (Letter, January 27, 1986)

OTHER VOICES ON NATURE POWER

Harry’s accounts of Okanagan nature power are not the first to be published. During the summer of 1930, Walter Cline, a Harvard graduate student in anthropology, interviewed a number of Okanagans living on the Colville Reservation in Washington State about their religious worldview. He published his findings eight years later in a chapter of The Sinkaietk or Southern Okanagon of Washington, edited by Leslie Spier (in the American spelling of “Okanagan,” the third “a” is replaced by an “o”). Entitled “Religion and Worldview,” this chapter, though mainly in the voice of Cline, is rich in detail. It depicts a spiritual worldview intricately linked with nature.

The religion of the Okanagon expressed itself in the affiliation of the individual man or woman with a material object or class of objects, usually with an animal, bird, or insect. Their word sumix refers to this relationship, as well as to anything which functioned for a person in this way, and to the physical and spiritual potency which one possessed by virtue of this affiliation. When speaking English, the Okanagon translate sumix as “power” for each and all of the different meanings of sumix …

The Okanagon believed, in a vague way, that it resided inside him, perhaps in his chest or in his heart. When it manifested itself in his power-song, his whole body shook. One’s guardian spirit dwelt somewhere in the woods or the mountains, and came to him when he thought of it or needed its aid. (p. 133)

A more vivid account comes from Okanagan writer Christine Quintasket. Before she died in 1936 at the age of forty-nine, Quintasket wrote her autobiography. Anthropologist Jay Miller edited the work, and it was published as Mourning Dove, Quintasket’s pen name. In this, she includes a chapter entitled “Spiritual Training” that describes how Okanagan parents and grandparents trained their young. “Indian theory,” she writes, “holds that each spirit has the same strengths as its animal counterpart.” Quintasket’s spiritual mentor was an old woman named Teequalt. Teequalt taught Christine many things, and like the spiritual mentors in Harry’s stories, she led Christine along her own spiritual path:

“If you are not afraid tonight, you will see a vision of this power I earned when I was a little girl like you. It is the power of Eagle, chief of birds.”

“THE STORIES IS WORKED BY BOTH OF US, YOU AND I”

As Harry pointed out, each of us had a particular role to play in bringing his stories to a larger audience. His job was to tell stories, and mine was to get them onto the printed page. As I immersed myself in transcribing Harry’s stories for Write It on Your Heart, however, I became more and more dissatisfied with how most oral stories are rendered. Passing through a maze of translators and editors, most stories are cut down and compulsively “cleaned up”— and thereby stripped of their drama and performance, their immediacy and their authenticity of voice. I decided to proceed differently. Because Harry had translated his own stories to perform them in English, editing was unnecessary. Here was an opportunity for readers to experience storytelling straight from the source.

In trying to remain as true to Harry’s originals as possible, I did encounter some problems. The first was that Harry’s words, when presented as narrative prose, were cryptic, and the stories lost the dramatic quality of their original telling. To remedy this, I decided to place them on the page in the form of narrative poetry, which brings out the unique features of Harry’s style—the frequent repetition, the pauses, the sentence structure. Another problem I faced was that Harry used the pronouns “he,” “she” and “they” interchangeably, which I thought would make it difficult for readers to follow the story line, particularly in places where both male and female characters were present. So I changed pronouns to modify their antecedents. And finally, because Harry’s system of identifying stories either by number (“this is number three stories”) or by characteristic words or phrases (“this is cat with boots on stories”) would not draw the reader in, I also gave each story a title and a short, descriptive lead-in.

In preparing Nature Power, I have changed my editorial procedure slightly. For this book, I had two assistants helping with transcription: Blanca Chester, a graduate student in comparative literature, and Lynne Jorgesen, a Native journalist. Based on their suggestions, I have edited original pronouns only when absolutely necessary, such as in places where they clearly disrupted the flow of the story. In addition, the title for each story collected here comes from a phrase or sentence distilled from the story itself. In these ways, the stories in Nature Power are even closer to Harry’s original tellings.

Harry often used Okanagan words when telling his stories in English, mainly personal names, place names and a few well-known terms for which he preferred his first language. There is an international phonetic system for transcribing such words, but without some preliminary study of this system, words rendered in it are quite incomprehensible. In order to encourage readers to “say” the words aloud as they read the stories, I have transcribed Okanagan words roughly according to how they sound. These are crude approximations only. A list of phonetic transcriptions appears on page 268.

Different versions of two of the stories published in Write It on Your Heart also appear in this book—“Go Get Susan, See What She Can Do” (a retelling of “Indian Doctor”) and “Power Man, Power Woman, They Each Have a Different Way” (a retelling of “A Woman Receives Power from the Deer”). I have included them here both because they are important stories on the theme of nature power and because they illustrate how Harry approached a story freshly each time he told it.

“IS NOT TO BE HIDDEN”

When Write It on Your Heart was released in the fall of 1989, the term “cultural appropriation” was virtually unheard of on the Canadian literary scene. I first came across it in a Globe and Mail op-ed piece that I happened to read while travelling to Harry’s funeral in January of 1990. Entitled “Stop Stealing Native Stories,” the article, by Ojibway poet and storyteller Lenore Keeshig-Tobias, attacked the Canadian cultural industry, in particular the film industry, for its marginalization of Native voices. She called it “cultural theft, the theft of voice.” Having just completed Write It on Your Heart, I was naturally interested in her ideas.

Two years later, discussions about appropriation occupy front and centre stage, not just among First Nations peoples but in the whole literary community. Just recently, artists from across Canada attacked Joyce Zemans, director of the Canada Council, for comments she made about the council’s approach to the issues of “appropriate” voice and subject matter. Within the academic community, from anthropology to historical geography, “appropriation” and “representation of voice” are key components of a growing “postmodernist critical theory.” Stimulated by James Clifford and George Marcus in Writing Culture and George Marcus and Michael Fischer in Anthropology as Cultural Critique, many academics are questioning the very legitimacy of the traditional “scientific” approach to the study of the cultural “other,” that is, the very process of objective research. The British-based literary theorist David Murray, in his recent book Forked Tongues, argues that most North American texts are “representations” permeated with ideology, much of which can be related to the power relations embedded in the dominant society.

Today the Native community continues to drive this critical awareness. Where anthropologists talk about false representation, Native commentators decry the appropriation of their voices. At a forum entitled “Telling Our Own Story,” held in Vancouver in January 1990, members of the Committee to Re-establish the Trickster criticized the “silencing the real Native voices that do exist right now and have existed for thousands of years.” They asserted that Native peoples have a right to be heard.

Nature Power attempts to be respectful of these concerns. Harry Robinson wanted his stories to be heard, because he knew they contained important knowledge. As the artifice of the White world enveloped everything around him, Harry wanted everyone—Native and non-Native—to understand that there were ways other than those of the White man. He was haunted by the possibility that his knowledge would die with him: “I’m going to disappear, and there’ll be no more telling stories.”

My role has been to help Harry reach a broader audience with his stories. But I am also present as listener and collaborator. I cannot speak for Harry or for the Okanagan people, but I can speak from what I have learned. I was close to Harry; I travelled with him and cared for him. My world and my way of thinking were changed by this experience. Harry knew this. When he was gravely ill in the spring of 1983, he spoke to Michael and me in perhaps the most serious tone I had ever heard him use. He told us,

So, take a listen to these, a few times and think about it, to these stories, and what I tell you now. Compare them. See if you can see something more about it. Kind of plain, but it’s pretty hard to tell you for you to know right now. Takes time. And then you will see. And him [Michael]. That’s all. No more stories. Do you understand?

These words have remained with me.

One thing I learned from Harry was that he never fictionalized stories. Indeed, the very concept of fiction was foreign to him. This was driven home to me about a year ago while I was spinning through a reel of Department of Indian Affairs document reproduced on microfilm. As I passed by file after file, I suddenly recognized something—the 1889 letters from the relatives of “Ashnola George” (written in the hand of an Oblate priest, Father Lejeune) directed to the warden of the British Columbia Penitentiary in New Westminster. The letters revealed a desperate search by an Okanagan woman for the body of her nephew, whom she was told had died at the prison.

I had heard Harry tell that story and had reproduced it in Write It on Your Heart as “Captive in an English Circus.” The archival account backed up Harry’s version on every point, even though Harry had been told the story twenty years after it had taken place—and had recounted it to me a full century later! Moreover, unlike the formal records, Harry’s account reveals what actually happened to George Jim, who had been abducted from the prison and taken to England where he spent his life as a circus showpiece.

The stories in Nature Power are also true. Yet many of them deal with things that on one level seem fantastic—people dying and then returning to life, people materializing from natural objects, disembodied voices predicting the future, and so on. Are we to take such stories seriously? Having spent time with Harry Robinson, having experienced his precision and clarity and knowledge, I certainly do. Indeed, the truth and accuracy of Harry’s words in Nature Power have made me think anew about what is “real,” what we “know,’ what is “true.” In the West we have built a civilization around the “true” story of a man who died and was resurrected after three days. The people in Harry’s stories experienced nature deeply and directly in a way that I cannot know, but that Harry wanted me, and others to appreciate. To Harry, great powers in life were to be gained from encounters with natural beings, from relationships with nature and with the land. Perhaps not all of us can “know” the truth of this world, but hearing from one who does should change our consciousness.

Today the future of the planet is at stake. Everywhere traditional cultures are dying, and nature is dying with them. As Chief John Tetlenitsa of Spence’s Bridge, a community not far from Hedley, explained as early as 1912, “The snams [the Nlaka’pamux equivalent of the Okanagan shoo-MISH] are forgetting us nowadays because of the coming of the white man. They are leaving the country.” Harry Robinson’s stories convey a very different cultural understanding of, and relationship to, nature. They explain the long-standing antagonism between Native peoples and White people, and its source in that simple White lie told at the beginning of time. From this lie, two forms of power emerged—one, the “power of nature,” and the other, the “power of paper and writing.” As the presence of old people like Harry recedes into historical distance, more and more people—academic and non-academic, Native and non-Native—question whether the world that Harry depicts was ever “real,” whether it ever existed. Drawing on both traditions of power, Nature Power provides an answer.

At the launch in Keremeos, after years of waiting patiently (one of Harry’s home-care assistants believed that in the final months of his life the wait for the book had kept him alive), Harry finally witnessed the ceremonial blessing of his book by the Okanagan spiritual leader Napoleon Kruger. Harry will not be able to launch Nature Power himself, but I hope that readers will follow his instructions.

Take a listen to these

a few times

and think about it.…

See if you can see something more.…

Takes time, and then you will see.

REFERENCES

Barbeau, Marius. “How the Twin Sisters’ Song Saved Tetlenitsa,” The Star Weekly Magazine, 10 January 1959.

Clifford, James, and George Marcus. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Cline, Walter. “Religion and Worldview,” The Sinkaietk or Southern Okanagon of Washington. Edited by Leslie Spier. General Series in Anthropology, No. 6. Menasha: George Banta Publishing Co., 1938.

“Frightening Attack on the Imagination,” The Globe and Mail, 28 March 1992. Letters to the editor.

Godfrey, Stephen. “Canada Council Asks Whose Voice Is It Anyway?” The Globe and Mail, 21 March 1992.

Keeshig-Tobias, Lenore. “Stop Stealing Native Stories,” The Globe and Mail, 26 January 1990.

Marcus, George E., and Michael J. Fischer. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Movement in the Social Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Mourning Dove. Mourning Dove: A Salishan Autobiography. Edited by J. Miller. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.

Murray, David. Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.

“Telling Our Own Story: Appropriation and Indigenous Writers and Performing Artists.” Vancouver: January 1990. Report.