Strong Medicine (part 7)

Posted on 30. Oct, 2008 by Kerry Banks in Writing from the road

Tribal elder George Keener is about to demonstrate how to cook salmon in a fire pit. But before he does, we ask Rhonda Shackelly, the manager of Xats’ull Heritage Village, to pose with the sacrificial fish. Without hesitation, she gives the salmon a smooch. Keener then takes the fish and guts it with a knife, washes it and stuffs its innards with herbs and onions. Hot stones are taken from a fire and deposited in the bottom of an earthen pit. Then the salmon, wrapped in foil, is placed inside atop evergreen boughs. As the pit begins to fill with smoke, it is quickly covered with dirt. The salmon will cook in the pit for about four hours. We’ll eat it later tonight, after our hosts have given us a sampling of traditional Xats’ull culture.

The Xats’ull (pronounced hats’ull) First Nations community is known to non-Native society as the Soda Creek Band. Xats’ull translates as “on the cliff”. The Xats’ull are part of the Secwepemc Nation, and Soda Creek is the northern-most Secwepemc (translated into English as “Shuswap”) Band. The Xats’ull people have occupied the benchlands north of Williams Lake, high above the Fraser River, for some 5,000 years. At one time, several thousand lived in the area, but a smallpox epidemic decimated the population. Today, there are only 350 left in the community.

This heritage village is not a luxury destination. There are showers and indoor bathrooms, but visitors sleep on hardboard floors inside tepees, and socialize and eat around a campfire. However, everything about the place, aside from the tepees, is authentic. The tepees, which were imported from Alberta and erected by a Piegan medicine man, are a concession to the expectations of German visitors, who make up a large segment of the village’s clientelle. Germans have a deep fascination with the North American Wild West and aboriginal people. The seeds of this interest date back to the late 1800s and a German author named Karl May (pronounced “my”). May wrote more than 60 books but his most successful and beloved characters were Old Shatterhand, a German immigrant trapper and his blood-brother Winnetou, noblest of all the Indian warriors. Initially aimed at a juvenile market, May’s romantic yarns began appearing in print in the late 1870s. He was quickly adopted by a wider reading public and became more famous throughout Europe than any other writer on the subject, including American authors.

Ironically, May never set foot upon the American plains and largely researched his subject in German prison libraries while serving time for, among other things, fraud and impersonating a police officer. Despite being peppered with historical inaccuracies, May’s stories continue to be immensely popular. His works have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, far more than any other German author, and his fans have included the likes of Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, and even Adolph Hitler.

“When we started this project in 1993, the band didn’t want to do it,” recalls tribal elder Ralph Phillips. “They said, ‘We’re selling our culture.’ ‘I said, what culture? We don’t have any culture left.’” Phillips, a lanky, grey-haired character with a wicked sense of humour and a cackling laugh, conducts the camp’s sweat lodges. Phillips says there are several types of sweat lodges: regular, medicine, healing and warriors.’ A warrior’s sweat–used when men go into battle or before a hunting expedition or a long journey–is the strongest. “There are 28 rocks in a regular sweat; 48 in a warrior’s sweat. Each round lasts one hour, and there are four rounds. Between rounds, the men will come outside and drink a cup of juniper tea.”

Traditions regarding sweat lodges vary among different tribes, says Phillips. “Some allow women, some don’t. In some you have to be clothed. In others you can be nude.” The mention of nudity causes Phillips to launch into a story. “We had a lot of guests and I’d been running sweat lodges all day. I said, ‘This is the last one I’m doing.’ There was a large Dutch woman sitting there with a towel wrapped around her, and she announces, ‘Well, I’m going in this one.’ She stood up and dropped the blanket and she was buck naked. All this flesh jiggling around,” says Phillips, grabbing his heart in mock horror. “There was a bunch of Korean students on a bus trip standing there and their eyes were bulging out of their heads. I said, ‘Woman put that towel back on!’ Those Dutch people have some different ideas about nudity.”

Later in the day, George Keener leads us down to the river for a demonstration of dip-net fishing. With his fair complexion, blue eyes and battered ball cap, Keener may not look like an aboriginal, but he is the genuine article. The product of a broken home, he was raised by the tribal elders, who passed on a wealth of traditional knowledge. Simply walking through the forest with Keener is an education. Lighting up another of his ever-present cigarettes, he points out a red Oregon berry. It’s used to produce a wine-coloured dye on buckskin and to make a tea that stops bleeding in women. Farther on, he shows us a choke cherry–the juice is used as a tonic for cleansing the system and its seeds are used to make beads. He grabs hold of a Balsam fir. “You can make an antiseptic from the blisters of the tree.” He opens up one of the blisters and squeezes out a milky sap. “If you put a bit on your tongue it will go numb.”

Farther down the trail he points to a hillock in the bush. “There’s a gravesite here,” he says. “We traditionally buried our people sitting up facing the east, but the priests told us this was sacrilege. They made us bury our dead lying down.” Keener claims that the entire area is rife with ancient artifacts and calls it “the richest archaeological site in B.C.” He estimates that there are about a thousand gravesites in a nearby stand of poplars. “There were 300 to 500 cache pits on the ridges above the river; places where my ancestors stored dried meat, berries and fish.” As we imagine the scene as it used to be, a pair of bald eagles soar past and Keener calls out to them, “Hello grandfather! Hello grandmother!”

There is a lot of wildlife in the area, including black bears, whose grunting and snuffling sounds Keener sometimes imitates near the tents at night to give the tourists a thrill. One bear became a pet. “I called him Buddy,” says Keener. “He came by as a yearling and returned every year for six years. I remember when I was building a sweat lodge, he sat and watched me from a few feet away.” Other bears are not so genial, like the stubborn, young black bear that showed up when was taking a British tour group down to the camp. ”He was on the trail and wouldn’t let us past. He wanted a fight.” Keener got out of the truck and held his black jacket up over his head to make himself look as large as possible, then shouted and growled and charged the bear. The beast turned and fled. “The sweat was just streaming off of me,” recalls Keener. “My legs were shaking so badly I could hardly stand up. But when I turned around these English tourists had their video cameras out and were shooting the whole thing. They started applauding. They thought it was all just part of the show.”

That evening some of us accompany Phillips into the sweat lodge. Back at the campsite, a woman arrives selling handmade dreamcatchers and Native youths pass through on their way to the river. They are going to fish off the rocks with dip-nets and flashlights. Considering the power of the current, this sounds like a dicey undertaking. A few hours later, after our salmon feast and another round of stories, we retire to our tepees. Nora freaks out when a mouse runs across her sleeping bag and opts to change tepees. There are no mice in mine, but I have to contend with a more daunting obstacle–Leonard’s wheezy snoring. I awaken the next day with a sore back, but the morning sun and the arrival of Ralph Phillips and his wife Winnie with a hot breakfast soon chases the stiffness away. As we begin to pack up our gear, I take a last look down into the gorge at the raging river. I wish we had more time to spend here. It has been a unique experience.