I have been brung here to the museum as an expertan authority on the Indians, no less. I have the book I wrote with Professor Boas in my hand (with the rumpled newspaper clippings tucked away inside). And all the past days of travelling, I have been studying its detail. The Social Organization and Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians , by Franz Boas. My name is there, in the acknowledgments. I am indebted to without whose assistance Truth is, I know the book as a priest knows his cursèd bible. I have been reading it over and over like some schoolboy learning his dates in history, till I am so filled up with clans and family relations, with storiesmyths, as Boas calls themmanners, ways of cooking, hunting, the powers of chieftains, men of medicine, and the rest, that I am ripe enough to be rotten with facts. I am to aid in cataloguing the Indian artefacts heremost of which I have collected for them myself, these past fifteen years or more, and many of which do fill up the glass cases, the walls and columns of this place.
How did this black armour come to be at the centre of my troubles? It is what Professor Boas will want to hear about. He will demand every detail. His own assistant, tried as a cannibal, no less! Disgusting Orgies! as it was written in the newspapers. George Hunt accused of assisting at savage hamatsa cannibal dances where human bodies were consumed! I imagine Boas crowing with glee when first he did hear of it. Hell poke me, like a boy with a stick at a clam, till he has drawn all nourishment from its telling. Hell glory in it, so he will. He will dissect me, measure me up like one of his skulls.
Yet the events what led up to the trial are still so scrambled in my head. Davids death coming at the same time as the charges laid against me. The ritual they did accuse me of and the rituals of Davids funeral all tangled together. Davids death the beginning of it all. Big Mountains suit of armour at the heart of those charges what was laid against me. A mess. A tangle indeed.
When I think on that, and on all my failings, and as I look to find some gleam of somethinglife? mercy? spirit?in those black glass eyes, I realize it all does begin with yet an older tale.
It was full forty years ago and more, back when I was still a young man. At eighteen, I had come into my own by getting married. My wife was an Indian of high Kwagiulth stockKwakiutl, as Boas always writes the wordfrom one of the noble families back then in my village of Fort Rupert, at the north end of Vancouver Island, and I became a noble Indian myself by marrying her. My mother was of a tribe from further north, but my father was a white man. He was factor for the Hudsons Bay Company at Fort Rupert when I was growing up, before the company pulled out, bringing poverty on the people thereabouts. All of which is to say I am a half of each race, white and brown and maybe neither for being both. Growing up with such a mash of languages, I hardly know at times what dialect I am speaking in.
I
had a friend whose name was Making-Alive. Some time after I was married, Making-Alive says to me, Get up here to my village and we will teach you the ways of being a man of medicine, now that you is become a chieftain among the people, though you still be but a breed.
I did not believe in the ways of the men of medicine. Shamans, as Boas calls them. The words from out of Siberia or some such, and the Indians on our coast the same as the peoples of that far continent. It is all too strange.
Anyhow, I thought here is the perfect chance for me to learn their tricks and fraudery, and, after, to expose them for the liars and the cheats they areme being half-bred to reason, as I might put it. So up I goes to Making-Alives village and learned all these tricks and words and games of making medicine.
Some months after I had finished my learning, I was away in my canoe trading for the Hudsons Bay Company. It was night and I had thrown my anchor stone. I lay in the bottom of the boat and sleep was close on me, or else it had come. Now perhaps I slept and dreamt, or else it was in truth that a killer whale come up then right by my canoe. It lifted up out of the water, and hung over me, the ocean falling off its body like a waterfall. All those tons of its flanks in black silhouette against the stars, fins as wide as my canoe was long.
It spoke then, saying its name was Lagoyewiléwhich means Rolling Over in Mid-Ocean. Then it changed itself into a huge man with great long arms and slick black skin like that of a seal in the ocean at night, and after that it turned to a killer whale again. So are the ways of spirits.
Its voice sounded like a wave breaking inside a cave. It told me that I would do my first healing the day after. Then it told me all the rituals I would need. I calls them rituals now, but I did not know that word then, long before the anthropologists came up the coast calling them such. Back then, they was just things as must be done.