Long before Noah found a job, long before George Kelly begat Johnny No-Cash, and long before Jacques Cartier bumbled his way along the rocky shores of the St. Lawrence, the village of Minaki was already established.
When I walked along the town at night, I was intrigued by the obscure but undeniable fact that this was an ancient community; older than London, older than Rome. You could walk along canoe portage trails a few miles out of town and crunch your way across thousand-year-old pottery shards. Just north of here, you could climb a high ridge and find a row of mossy boulders arranged in the shape of a gigantic snake. Why was the snake here? Nobody knew, not even George Kelly. Or if he knew, he wasn’t saying. I’d met archaeologists who’d told me that this settlement was probably about ten thousand years old. It started when the Pleistocene era ended and the ice sheet that covered most of the northern hemisphere receded and made way for the rise of human civilization and early settlements like this one.
In most modern libraries, the great bulk of historical literature focuses on the rise of humanity in northern Europe and how Europeans brought civilization to the rest of the world. Recently, of course, it has become unfashionable to discuss history in such a lopsided manner. Political niceties must be observed, and smatterings of applause must be offered to the various non-white races that occupied this or that region before the men in leotards and funny hats arrived. But these are token gestures, and most Canadians, let’s face it, think that if the aboriginals had been so smart, they would have invaded Europe and figured out some clever way to exploit Europeans, rather than standing by while Europeans invaded their land and exploited them. When the going gets tough, and when government policy gets written, Canadian lawmakers don’t take the aboriginals seriously. They sit in Parliament and declare Canada to be a nation of ‘two founding races’, neither of which is the founding one.
In Minaki you could walk along the river at night, where the current rumbled through the black granite under the bridge, and feel the palpable presence of another history, the untold one. Whenever I went to Winnipeg to visit friends and family, I sifted through libraries and government catalogues to acquire whatever materials were available about that untold history. I kept them in a box under my bed and sifted through them each morning, reading them as you’d read the morning newspaper, eating my meals with some faintly photocopied, obscure anthropological journal propped up next to my cereal (Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere, 1926).
The publications tended to have low-end production values, and I couldn’t find one comprehensive text that gave me an overview of the whole epoch, as did, say, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But that made the investigation more interesting. Each new article prompted a new question. Where were the boundaries between the Indian nations? Who are the Muskego Cree? Who is this man-eater they call the Windigo? What’s the Bearwalk? The Shaking Tent? If the Chipewyans live in the Northwest Territories, then why in god’s name do they speak the same language as the Navajo?
It was only a hobby, obviously. But just as some readers sharpen their wits on the New York Times crossword puzzle each morning, I fiddled with these fragments of confusing and sometimes contradictory history. It was like being a detective or a jungle explorer. Each shard of evidence led down into a deeper and more complicated level than the one before. It was like stubbing one’s toe, brushing away the earth to find that the protruding rock was in fact a piece of carved stone, which turned out to be part of a statue, which turned out to be part of a lost civilization.
Minaki was part of the southernmost region of the Shield, occupied by the Ojibway, who were traditionally hunter-gatherers, spending most of the year travelling around in smallish family groups, living on wild rice, blueberries, smoked fish, and wild game. Their shelter was the birch-bark wigwam and their vehicle was the birch-bark canoe. Each member of the group specialized in different tasks, and being weak or young or old or handicapped was not necessarily an insurmountable problem. Some of the most respected bow and arrow makers were lame or blind. In winter, the group hunkered down and stayed warm by banking snow against their wigwams and sleeping in blankets of woven rabbit fur. It sounds like a hard life. But they worked when the weather cooperated and spent their leisure time playing games, preparing long meals, telling stories, and sewing deer-hide clothing – soft, beautifully beaded shirts and moccasins that for the most part can be found today only in museums. In the summer, the scattered family groups gathered in one large tribal assembly on some windswept point or island for the mid-summer Feast of the Midewiwin.
I’d talked to white people, old people here in Minaki, who remembered summer evenings long ago, when they went to bed listening to the far-off pounding of the Midewiwin drum. The drum was built with much ceremony by a Midewiwin priest. The priest was invariably an old man, because it was impossible to progress to the eighth level, or Sky Lodge, in less than six or seven decades of study. He built the drum over a period of four days. It was important to do it in four days because four was a holy number, corresponding to the circular quadrants of nature, the four winds, the four directions, and the four seasons of the year.
The drum was made of four materials. On the first day he built the body, using a hollowed-out tree, which represented “our plant brothers and sisters with whom we must learn to live in a respectful way.” On the second day he attached the head, which was made from deerskin, representing the community of wild animals. (The skin of the deer was also believed to impart an agility and grace to the drumbeat.) On the third day he filled the drum half full with water, to symbolize the blood of Mother Earth. And on the fourth day the old priest opened a plug and blew into the drum, symbolizing the breath of life. He then carved a living root into the shape of a loon’s head, and with this drumbeater, he ‘sounded the drum’s voice’ four times.
The sound was carried by the wind in four directions and summoned the people to the lodge to begin the healing ceremony. As the singing and the drumming drifted across the water on a mid-summer night, one can imagine the local missionary rolling his eyes in dismay, and the early cottagers thinking that it sounded like a wild party. But the building of the drum was a ritual of what the Catholics call ‘transubstantiation’, that is, a process by which a material object (such as bread) is transformed into the body of Christ. To the Ojibway, the sound of the drum drifting across the lake on a quiet summer night was the thumping of the Creator’s heart.
The Midewiwin priests recorded these sacred teachings on birch-bark ‘instruction scrolls’, which prescribed the methods for living a healthy, balanced life, and they stored the scrolls in secret places. The author and artist Selwyn Dewdney (whose son Christopher is likewise an author) became one of the first white people to learn about the scrolls when he visited a man named Jim Red Sky on Lake of the Woods. It was 1960, and Jim Red Sky lived in a remote log cabin accessible only by canoe. According to Dewdney, Jim Red Sky was a large husky man with an “air of serenity I had sensed in many of the elders I had interviewed across the country.” Inside that old log cabin he and Jim Red Sky talked about the Midewiwin, a religion about which Dewdney knew very little. Eventually, Red Sky produced seven scrolls from beneath his bed. Jim Red Sky was an educated man, and conversant with the Bible. But he maintained “there’s that much and more in the Midewiwin.”
Red Sky was one of the very last of the great Midewiwin priests, and after he died, he gave the scrolls to Dewdney, who gave them to the Glenbow Museum. Years later, Dewdney produced a definitive and hard-to-get book on the subject called Sacred Scrolls of the Southern Ojibway. I acquired Dewdney’s book and hunted down other, more antiquarian texts, like The Ojibway Indians Observed, by Fred K. Blessing.
As I studied these books, I sometimes thought about the birch-bark scroll that Martin and Lillian had discovered. I liked the idea that it was written in code, and that it was still out there somewhere, hidden in a crevice on some unnamed cliff facing east.