First Nations Pipe Ceremony over Okanagan Lake

Union of the Sacred Pipes

Little Shell Chippewa Turtle Mountain Band
Prepare for a Pipe Ceremony 

In the hills around Okanagan Lake Valley is a place called Bear Creek.  As I hiked through these rocks, the echo of fast rushing water vibrated like thousands of flutes playing to the rushing waterfalls that all flowed into one giant lake.  

One day I mediated on a large rock in the middle of the Creek - the only access being to jump a log jutting into the water.  Opening my eyes to father sky, I watched crows chase a golden eagle.  The eagle flowed upward in ever expanding circles, and the crows followed, but the eagle flew higher and higher.  A fine mist rose from the rocks and powerful medicine herbs waved in the gentle breezes.  The sweet smell of Lavender and the pungent tang of pine filled the air. When I stopped and listened closely I heard the footsteps of the ancestors passing through the canyon - stepping from stone to stone - as they followed the game trails.

One day a white brother came to visit from Texas - a police officer - who loved the culture as I do, and wanted to share the pipe with some of the Native brothers.  We climbed a trail through a ravine of rocks to an old sacred clearing.  At the entrance to the clearing--a circle of rocks covered by moss and surrounded by juniper and Saskatoon bushes--we stopped and I offered tobacco, asking the ancestors to welcome our visitor.  The winds stopped, and a peace settled over the clearing, inviting our entrance.  We sat together, on the ground, waiting for some brothers who were pipe carriers to join us.

One by one each brother showed up from his journey.  One brother traveled from a rain dance ceremony; another brother came from the sweet grass fields in Montana; a third brother came late, joking that as he had traveled the shortest distance he came on Indian time.  My friend from Texas offered a medicine bundle from his home region and asked for prayers for his family.  He explained that he had spent a lot of time studying and learning the culture of the Cheyenne, the Apache, the Arapaho and the Hopi nations, and to him it was a great honor to come to this sacred ground where lay the bones of ancestors who had traveled here before, and join with this group of pipe carriers for other Native nations.

Together we sat down in a circle and opened our medicine bundles.  Father sky peered over our circle like a bright blue blanket streaked with orange and fringed with white clouds. Wisps of white floated around us as the spirits of many ancestors, gathered around our group as we prepared to share the sacred pipes.

We began by filling our smudge bowls with sage and sweet grass, which we lit and fanned with eagle feathers until the smoke drifted towards Father Sky.  Each of us reached into the smoke and brushed our arms and legs and heads with smoke to cleanse the hardships of our travels and prepare ourselves for the ceremony.  The pipe carrier facing the North started the traditional song of offering to the ancestors, and one by one we joined into the song, lifting our voices to invite the ancestors to travel across the spiritual realm and join us in our ceremony.  As one, we bowed our heads in the circle, sharing prayers for our loved ones and the great nations, asking for blessings for all mother earth’s living and spiritual beings.  We offered prayers for the animal kingdom, the plant world and the mineral world.  The pipe carriers lifted their pipes, pointing the stems to each of the four sacred directions requesting blessing for the circle, and then the pipes were lit. As we passed the pipes, we shared the stories and teachings of our ancestors, and laughed together at the antics of trickster and the pranks he had played on our friends and elders over the years.

When we fell silent, each of us settled into the peace and harmony that had fallen over the sacred circle.  In the darkness the voices of a thousand crickets hummed in harmony, and beyond our circle the coyotes howled to the night spirits.  Grandmother moon rose into the sky and shone her light over our circle.

When the pipes were out, we packed our medicine bundles.  Standing, we joined hands, offered prayers for a safe journey for the travelers, and returned to each a hug of friendship and a common wish for a future reunion of the pipes.

John Wisdomkeeper

Sus' naqua ootsin'

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Monsters In Your Head

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Black Magic ventures into a shapeshifter's world

The Famous Big Foot Pic

Everybody’s had a monster. In childhood, it might hide under the bed, or out in the woods behind the house, or lurk beneath the surface of an otherwise calm and placid lake. When I first started looking into some of the Canadian roster of scary creatures, I saw some that already were familiar.   

The first and most famous is Big Foot or Sasquatch (or, variously, the Floridian Skunk Ape or the Jersey Devil, etc.), who legendarily has quite a large territory here in the Americas.  A similar creature is also is said to exist in Asia, as the Nepalese Yeti or Abominable Snowman. Farther west, there are the Mongolian Almas. In all iterations, however, these guys are tall, hairy, large – and by many accounts smelly.  

This is explained as a surviving close cousin, a beast still living, now hiding in forests and on mountain tops.  Sometimes its identified as surviving Gigantopithecus or the later Neanderthal. These mysterious creatures are said to have a world-wide – but extremely thin -- distribution.  As genetically isolated and small as these populations would have to be, and beset as they must be on every side by us--the most lethal predator this planet has ever produced--I think we human-beans are imagining things. We are--however powerfully--simply retelling ourselves some very old, very scary stories.

Disney Company's Jungle Book

Don’t get me wrong. I’m as much of a creature fancier as anyone. I was pleased to learn that there are plenty of monsters in Canada, aided by the indisputable fact that there still are huge wide open spaces without a lot of us. I recently learned that the Dene and Tlicho tribes of Great Slave Lake both have a legendary man-animal called "Nakan." This creature is closer to man in appearance than ape, at least on my amateur's scale.

I've just learned about another Nahnni Valley cryptid, the Dene's Nuk-luk, who sounds like the same sort of ape-man. He shares with the Tlicho's Nakan bad, skunk-like smells and, he sometimes wears raggedy clothes. On the person-hood upside, he has a house which he’s dug underground. In fact, that’s the way you find where Nakan hides in winter. Like hibernating bears, on cold days –and there are plenty of those in NWT -- you can see their breath rising from ground level breathing. You may be hungry enough to assault with intent to kill some sleepy bear, but a Nakan—well, it’s best to leave these awful beings alone. 

They are tremendously strong, have beards and lots of hair, and want to bring you into their sex life--no matter which sex you are! They most often steal women, but sometimes children too, “because they have none of their own.” I’m not sure why Nakan—or Big Foot for that matter--never seem to have any females. It’s not very mammalian for an animal to reproduce by budding or cell division.

My personal explanation for these man-amals is that they are black bears, standing up on their back legs in order to get a better look-see. Frankly, bears would be sufficiently terrifying for someone like me, who, at 6, suffered from screaming nightmares which involved bears searching for me--snuffle, snuffle, snuffle--while I shuddered under my bed.

Canadian monster lore is a well-stocked larder, thanks to so many 1^st Nation traditional stories. Some characters, however, like the familiar werewolf, or his more versatile shape-shifter cousin, Loupe Garou, are European imports.

Wendigo or Wittigo is a nasty character from Ojibway, Cree, and Assiniboine legends. Universally, among 1st People, the three worst sins are greed, gluttony and selfishness. If you behaved like that, not sharing food with your kin, you might turn into a Wendigo. The Wendigo are very tall, with yellowish rotting skin—and a taste for dining upon the flesh of their best old ex-friends.

Of course, starvation, not unheard of in Hunter-Gatherer societies, could lead to episodes of cannibalism. Making that choice, however expedient, would nevertheless cause a person to transform into the loathsome, man-eating Wendigo, worst of all terrors.

Opopogo—a famous water creatures--lives in Lake Okanagon in BC. He’s Canada’s Loch Ness/Lake Champlain type snaky monster,  reputed to be 40-50 feet long. Some witnesses say this guy has horns, too. Some say he's a member of the plesiosauria family, now surviving in remote fresh water lakes. 

Now, the 1^st Nation’s people had a legendary hostile spirit who was said to live in this lake, one who did not enjoy having them disturb his peace while they paddled across. It was traditional 1st Nation practice, if they had to cross the lake, to sacrifice something as they set out, a chicken or another small animal, in order to appease this angry power. Today's informants, however, say that this "monster" was a spirit, not a creature from the “primitive survivor” category of the cryptozoologist's version of the animal family.

This guy's got attitude

Whether Opopogo exists or not – the jury is still out – images of him, horns and all, may be seen on hockey jerseys for the team out of nearby Kelowna. 

Opopogo Opopogo Opopogo Opopogo Opopogo… ! How it trips off the tongue! Any monster with such a phonetically enchanting name deserves to be better known, don’t you think?

Last and not least is Waheela, a gigantic wolf with a huge head, sharp teeth, a wide splayed foot, and a reputed height at the shoulder of four feet.  Covered in long white hair, Waheela enjoys ripping the heads off people who trespass in his territory--the Nahanni River basin in the Mackenzie Mountains National Region--which is aptly named "The Valley of Headless Men." This dire-wolf like beast seems to be a relative of the Inuit's Amarok, who is gray and hunts at night. Amarok catches and eats foolish or desperate hunters who might still be outside their villages. 

Perhaps these are all simply cases of the monster hiding inside our own heads, what psychiatrists describe as "projection."  That’s probably what, the X-Files, Scully would say to Mulder, although he probably wouldn’t be listening. Imagine the way he’d just go on muttering aloud about historic sightings! His iteration would certainly go on for a long time, because any catalog of monsters just has to begin 'way far back in our collective history.  And, really, folks, we're the scariest animal that ever walked onto this planet?  Like Pogo said a very long time ago "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

    

~~Juliet Waldron

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