Showing posts with label NWT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NWT. Show all posts

Thursday, June 29, 2023

St. Lawrence River--a world changes forever

 

While researching a new historical bride story for Quebec, I realized that once again I have bumped up against a landscape which has totally changed since my childhood. My parents and I lived for a time on Skanaeateles Lake in New York State, when the midstate area was still a bustling industrial region. Post war, people looking for work came down Route 20 past our house. In 1953, many of these travelers were aiming to turn north and head to Massena, New York, where ground on the long debated seaway (since before World War I) had at last been broken. 

This project was first proposed in the 1890's, as a way to open the vast interiors of Canada and the U.S. to maritime trade. Miles of rapids would be eliminated, rapids which the first travelers into the Northwest territories had navigated by portage, and, later, in the 19th century, by a series of canals. The canals were too and narrow to accomodate large modern ships, so there was a trans-shipping industry with much loading and unloading, in which smaller ships carried ores, coal and grain from Canada and the American midwest, to the nearest deep water port. Of course, the largest visual cue for anyone airborne surveying the territory between the Atlantic and Lake Eire was the magnificent drop at Niagara Falls.  

When I was very small, my parents took me through upstate New York, way up past my family's homestead near Schuylerville, NY to the shores of the St. Lawrence. From the American side, I saw many lovely islands dotting the river, some with "castles" built upon them. There were also terrifying rapids, and, in between small boats, some fishermen, some sightseers, out for a day's work or pleasure on the river. My mother told me stories about  one of her great-aunts who had spent her summers working as a cook on one of those pretty touring vessels. 

Eisenhower was president when the project began; he was still president when, in 1959, the seaway was, with much fanfare, completed. Young Queen Elizabeth arrived on HMY Britannia to do some official ribbon-cutting and sail on a small section of the newly completed Seaway. At last the interior of both Canada and the U.S. were open, cutting costs for the shippers and making the Great Lakes, and all the rich commodities both north and south of the border, available to ocean going ships.



Well, fanfare of trumpets for Progress, which was the watch-word for the optimistic 1950's! 
I don't want to omit, though, that there were also many severe individual losses, as old family farmlands, small historic river towns, and even some of those "thousand islands" were demolished, as grand mansions, fertile fields and fecund wetlands alike vanished beneath the water. A long established way of life beside this great river was forever lost. Generations of families who had lived tranquil, seasonal lives here, lost their land and homes through Eminent Domain.

One group who probably lost more than anyone to modernization were The People of the Flint, a group of Iroquoian (Six Nation's) people. Most of the those on Kahnawake reservation now are Mohawk, but others once belonged to their southern brothers, the Caughnawagas. Still others were refugees, fleeing the European take-over of their heritary lands.

Forty thousand three hundred and twenty acres were originally granted to the Iroquois. Today, thirteen thousand acres remain. The rest has been taken by non-native encroachment and abetted by mismanagement by the same government officials who were entrusted with the job of enforcing the original treaty. They were aided by surveyors who modified old maps at the expense of the Kahnawake people. Modern cessations were also forced upon the tribe to make way for a railway, hydro-electric dams, highways, bridges, and, finally, the Seaway. This has permanently severed the ancient relationship with the land and the river enjoyed by these original inhabitants. The people have suffered in many ways as their old seasonal continuities, energetic, subsistence lifestyle, and food ways were lost along with access to the river.

Moreover, it didn't take long for the unintended consequences to appear. Invasive, destructive new species arrived in the Great Lakes and in the St. Lawrence. Now, Zebra and Quagga mussels clog freshwater intake pipes for the large midwestern cities that ring the lakes. Sea lamprey kill many sport (and regional food staple) fish. They have also been known to attach themselves to swimmers. The Round Goby, arriving in Black Sea bilgewater from Eurasia, poisons river bottoms with botulism, which then infects the environment and kills native diving birds. The Goby also has a nasty habit of chowing down on juvenile native species of the prized sportfish and on that original First Nation's staple, the once-plentiful White Fish.  A reedy invasive, Phragmites (Phragmites australis ssp australis) look pretty, but these now grow in thick mats and smother native plants--including the smaller native Phragmite species--upsetting the wetland food chain necessary for many North American foundation species of plants, fish and animals. 

This great Seaway, built at an (estimated) cost of 5 1/2 Billion dollars of today's money, has proved, like many past public works, a blessing for some and a curse for others. Capital wealth has been generated, certainly. The pay-off has been huge for the company owners, for stockholders as well as the workers who, (before our heavy manufacturing base collapsed) benefited with high standards of living in midwestern cities like Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Toledo and Sarnia. 

Once again, the old adage, "Man proposes; God disposes" has proved both true and apt.

~~Juliet Waldron  
All my historical novels





The barge image above
Image: Wikipedia (public domain)
US government agency DOT
By 20px|link=User:Kcida10|Kcida10 Kcida10 (talk) (Uploads). - https://www.transportation.gov/fastlane/new-years-eve-ends-seaway-navigation-season, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47277919




Saturday, October 29, 2022

Windego, and other Monsters




Fly Away Snow Goose


WINDEGO: An evil spirit of the northland, a monstrous creature who comes prowling in winter, hungry for human flesh; it is remorseless, pitiless. 

If the year was a lean one, winter was a hard time for the hunter/gatherers who lived in the NWT. The People would leave their summer camps in small groups and scatter into the vast emptiness, away from the lakes and rivers where they'd all come together as a tribe to trade and celebrate the fat season of summe. Our of necessity, they'd change their tribal, summer way of life to retreat to live in isolation, hunting and trapping the range around them, away from others who were now engaged in the same thing. Sometimes, it did not go well; the hunters were not lucky; the game was scarce or had changed from their accustomed paths of migration. 

Then, the spectre of starvation haunted the isolated camps, and sometimes people were driven to desperate measures in order to survive. A man who had eaten his family in order to stay alive, was said to have "gone  Windego." Such a primal sin was viewed with horror, so a monster was created to explain this counter-cultural behavior. A few of those stories came to be written down in early colonial times, but the oral versions were well known to those who were exposed to the fierce winters, who sometimes had experienced, first-hand, hunger and the awful struggle to survive. 

It is said the Windego eats his own lips and checks, so his skull is always partially visible, and he arrives surrounded by a stench so horrible that it even overpowers the bitter winter wind.  People, driven to this extremity, were believed to have been taken over by this dreadful being, and that was the reason they had committed the unholy crime of cannibalism.  In fact, during the 19th Century, early Canadian psychologists defined "going Windego" as a "culturally based" disorder.

(Thunderbird--well known to the Northern First Nations--
among the Tlicho, Thunderbird was referred to indirectly, as "Father."
He's one of the good guys.)

Today, the Windego is, in some quarters, viewed as a cryptid. Wikipeidia defines cryptids as "animals that cryptozoologists believe may exist somewhere in the wild, but are not believed to exist by mainstream science." Cryptozoology primarily looks at anecdotes and blurry photos, the sort of  claims rejected by the scientific community. These monsters now feature in YouTube videos in all manner of ghastly forms, but this vision of the Windego is of only passing interest to me.

"Windego" appears to me--not as a myth created by "superstitious 1st Nation's People," --but as an acutely observed form of human personality disorder. I didn't figure this out on my own, but by listening to Buffy Sainte Marie's song called "Priests of the Golden Bull." 

She makes a connection with the storied monster and the unfettered greed and disregard for the cooperative behavior which holds together our societies. Look around. The Dark Triad personality, (where a subject possesses a toxic combo of Narcissism, Michiavellianism and Psychopathy) is having a good run these days among CEO's, Tech Bros, politicians, and the sort of "religous" figures who live in gated mansions and always need their followers to send more money. 

In a world where it's considered smart to get rich while ignoring the human suffering or the irreparable harm pursuit of this quarter's profits causes a community -- or the arm done to the water, the air, or the planet -- Ms. Sainte Marie sees the ever-hungry, cannibalistic Windigo. The "Greed is Good," mentality is on display everywhere. 


Take a look at ever so many modern companies, their successes measured by how many jobs they've eliminated, or how they've stolen pension funds from retirees in the course of a merger, or how many rural communities they have destroyed, for instance, building a petrochemical refinery or an industrial pig farm next door to a small town which doesn't have the clout to fight back. 

"Gentrification" in cities raises rents until the essential workers--those who run the store checkouts, clean the buildings and streets, teach and/or care for children and seniors, can no longer afford to live close to where they are employed. Other casualties include small entrepreneurial businesses of all kinds, from restaurants and local bars, to independent bookshops and corner convenience stores.





Today's Windego doesn't just live in the deep woods. These days, he (or she) is seen as a "celebrity," on our television screens, and all over the internet and Twitter. Many are even elected to high public office. Worst of all, their "Not my brother's keeper" attitude is now held up to young people as the smart way to live. 

Instead of dwelling on psychos and cannibals, instead, let's take this time of All Hallows, All Saints and All Souls to find some peace and to give thanks: to remember our ancestors, our friends, mentors, and family who have passed beyond the veil. Let's also remember our honored dead, the kind of people who served and helped, rather than injured, the common folks of our communities and our country. 


~~Juliet Waldron 
All my historicals may be seen @






 






Sunday, October 29, 2017

Magic in Deline, NWT



Our author posts this month, both for the  Books We Love Canadian Historical Brides’ blog and for this, are supposed to have a Halloween theme. I dug around and found ghost stories here and there in the NWT, but didn’t find them particularly interesting. I’ve had a few encounters with strangeness over the years myself, but thought that for this blog, too, I’d take a pass on the ghosts.

The 1st Nation’s people of NWT/Nunavut have their own burial customs--from air burial to various strategies devised to handle permafrost—as well as tales of restless, unhappy dead. However, for me, the religious aspect of the old holiday is more  interesting. Now, in the NWT, the spirits of nature still manifest powerfully in the minds and hearts of the inhabitants, so here I’ll retell a pair of stories which are more spiritual rather than “ghostly.”



Some of the most inspirational and deeply moving stories I've encountered are told in Deline. Near a  town of about 600 souls, is Great Bear Lake, a body of water still so pure that you can drink straight from it. (That, to me, is MAGIC on our ever-more polluted planet!)

Deline has occasional UFOs, which were said to be buzzing around during the mid-1990’s, but I'd rather talk about a local hero/prophet. This man died in 1940, but left a monumental legacy behind. His name was Eht’se Ayah and he possessed traditional Shamanic powers. As one instance, he could “see” people coming to visit days before they arrived in town. He was, more importantly,  a brilliant religious teacher, affirming the generosity, charity and spiritual inter-connectedness with all life which abounds in the Athabascan belief system and marrying it to the best of the dominant culture's Christianity.  


Shrine to Prophet Ayah, Photo by Angela Gzowski for UpHere magazine
                              http://uphere.ca/articles/visions-deline


It is upon his alarming prophetic vision that  recent actions to preserve Great Bear Lake were founded. He dreamed that Great Bear would be the last source of freshwater in the world, and that "people from the south" would come in desperate hoards to fish and drink during the planetary destruction of the end times.  The power of this vision was the historic catalyst for the concerted action which culminated in the setting up of Tsá Tué Biosphere Reservea UNESCO biosphere Reserve.

According to the New York Times writer
“It is the first time that an aboriginal government in Canada will represent everyone in the community, aboriginal and non-aboriginal alike. Taken together, the UNESCO and self-government announcements reinforce Deline’s ability to control what happens to Great Bear Lake.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/07/travel/great-bear-lake-arctic-unesco-biosphere-canada.html

Okay—but where’s the "magic" in conservation? Stay with me! The people of Deline are Sahtuto’ine, meaning Bear Lake People, or, commonly, North Slavey. They have a sacred story from the days long before Eht’se Ayah, told by the Sahtuto'ine forever, and one which the Prophet surely would have heard as a child.




 Once, very long ago, there was a fisherman who was also a shaman. One day, a fish bit a hook from his line but then broke free. In those days, each hook was very valuable, so he wanted to retrieve it. Because of his shamanic connection to the prey animal upon which his life depended, he was able to transform himself into a Burbot and swim down deep into the lake in order to search for the missing hook.



When he arrived at the bottom, he discovered a miraculous secret: a huge beating heart lay at the bottom of Great Bear Lake! Around the heart, a throng of fish of every kind--the Inconnu, Pike, Walleye, Lake Trout and Grayling--were gathered. The fish rejoiced and thanked this unsuspected, holy presence. 

This enormous heart, the fisherman realized, was the living source of all the freshwater in the world. And to this day, upon the continued beating of this heart, all life, everywhere on our planet, depends. 



~~Juliet Waldron

http://www.julietwaldron.com
See all my historical novels @


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