Nature Power. Harry Robinson

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.