Classic Poem

[Speech of the Salish Chief]

Where once we hunted, white men have built many long-houses;
but they are uneasy as mice within them.
They have made slaves of waterfalls
and magic from the invisible dust of rocks
and are stronger than grizzlies —
but their slaves bully them,
and they are chickadees in council.
Some of you say: give them time, they will grow wise and find peace.
Others say: the sun slides into the saltwater;
they must follow the Indian into the trail of darkness.

Before the tall ships tossed their shining tools
to us, my uncle was our carpenter.
With saw of flame he laid the great cedars low,
split the sweet-smelling planks with adze of slate,
bowed them his way with steam and thong,
shaped the long wind-silvered house
where fifty of my kin and I lived warm as bear and lusty.
He made it tight against the rain's long fingers,
yet panelled to let in the red-faced sun.
He hollowed the great canoes we rode the gulf in safe as gulls.
My uncle knew the high song of the cedar tree;
he had a Guarding Power with Brother Wood.

The tides bore in unasked our kelp-float flagons;
our wood-drills gave us fire, earth and stones our ovens.
Red roots and yellow reeds entwined themselves within
our women's hands, coiled to those baskets dancing
with the grey wave's pattern or the wings
of dragonflies you keep in the great cities now
within glass boxes. Now they are art, white man's tabu,
but once they held sweet water.

The wild lilies grew their pungent bulbs unprompted,
the vines unfurled their green shoots for the plucking.
The children dried our currants from the saskatoon,
made cakes of blackberry, jam from the lush salal.
My father and I were hunters for the longhouse.
He taught me to bend a yew-bow, with snakeskin tape it taut,
whittle arrows wind-light from the cedar,
feathered and jasper-tipped.
At night we would return with deer from the mountains
or ducks glistening from the still shore-coves.
Sometimes, gliding hushed on the sea,
I would raise my lance, my slate blade shining,
hurl it home into a fat black porpoise;
or with my horned harpoon hook Brother Seal.
Then all the longhouse would make music,
there would be roasting of the spicey fern-roots,
there would be sweet small plums,
the shell-spoons would dip and glitter from the carved feasting bowls.
There were bright days when all my village paddled,
racing the wolfhead canoes to a rippled beach.
The heady seasmell rose from glowing stone-pits;
then we held crab- and clam-feast,
lay in talk till the beachfires came alight
in the seas of the sky.

Salmon was bread.
When in the Tide of Thimbleberries the first silverback
threshed in our dip-nets, my father's drum
called all the village.
The red flesh flaked steaming from the ceremonial spit.
My father gave thanks to the Salmon Power,
and everyone tasted bird-like. Then we young men
ran to the water with trolls and seine-nets.
The bows of our canoes returning were flecked like mica.
With flying fingers the women split the shiny ones,
hung them on cunning cedar racks;
our friends, the air and the sun,
sealed the good oils for the winter storing.
Salmon was bread.
But my brothers could fashion bone-hooks
strong as the wolverine's jaw to gaff the great river-sturgeon.
Every year came the cod and the sea-trout to their hands,
their nets boiled with shoals of the candlefish.
It was not till your time, sir,
I saw a Salish go hungry.

There was something, I do not know,
a way of life that died for yours to live.
We gambled like fool-hens but we did not steal.
My father spoke to the people always what was true.
When there was quarrel, he made us speak it out in reason,
or wrestle weaponless on the clean sand.
We kept no longhouse for warriors, we held not state on others.
Each in his village had his work, and all made certain all were fed.

It is true the Kwakiutls would come like sea-wolves
riding their war-canoes, raiding for slaves,
and we could resist only as wrens flying.
My grandmother fell by the woods' edge
as she ran from their arrows.

The Kwakiutls were warriors and were quickly gone;
they went looking for braves more worthy to conquer.
With the long years they dwindled.
It was our people who grew like the grey geese.
When we paddled to others it was only to visit;
our young men lived to be old.

Each summer the salmon came, the deer were plump in the river groves.

Sometimes a young man would be many months in the woods thinking, alone as a heron,
and learning the powers of the creatures.
I lay and watched the little grey doctor, the lizard;
I studied the spirit of bear; I came by their songs.
When I was chief I carved Brother Bear on my houseposts,
took the red earths and the white and painted his strength.

It is true we saw marvels in each life,
and wished to learn the eagle's dignity, the beaver's wisdom.
It is true my village held no ceremonies of blood-drinking,
and we did not think of Jehovah.
These, and Hell, the white man brought us.
Once our kindred gathered from many villages.
Like dolphin they came arching over the waves.
My father stood tall on the house-roof, called each by name,
threw down a soft cloak of marten and mink,
white rug of the wild goat's wool,
or shaggy leggings of bearskin,
tossed down for the catching red capes of the cedar bark,
blankets woven with the woodpecker's colours,
tanned shoes of deerhide, and root-mats
brown as the last cloud in the sun's downgoing.
The men made jokes, there was squirrel-laughter of women,
we boys ran races over the hot sea-sand.
After, by the full tide's brim,
the Dance.
My father put on the great-eyed mask of his Power;
with his secret kelp-whistle he talked owl-talk as he swayed.
My uncle held his drum close to a tidepool,
rubbed the skin cunningly with his hands,
made the downy whoosh of the owl's wings in the night air.
There was one who drew frog-talk from cockle-shells
hidden in the pool of his fingers.
The old men sang of wise chiefs that had been, and their spirits,
the songs dying slowly as wind, then swelling
as the board-drums beat tremolos, as the carved rattles clacked,
as the shell hoops spoke to the ritual sticks.
Once there was a silence; no one stirred; I heard my heart beat.
Then, like an arrow's thud, one beat of a drum, one . . .
another . . . another . . . a fourth —
and suddenly all the drums were thunder
and everyone leaped singing and surging in the last dance. . . .
That was my first potlatch. . . .
In those times we drank only our sounds and thoughts,
giving unhurt to those who gave.
When your fathers took our food and left us little coins,
when they took our songs and left us little hymns,
the music and the potlatch stopped.

Comfort was in the dogwool shirt of my youth,
the tassels of flying squirrel
tailing like smoke from my shoulders,
not the trader's cast-offs in my aging.
Comfort was the winter's bear-haunches safe in the rafters,
when as a child I darted laughing under the reed hangings,
with a little fist of hazelnuts clutched from the cedar chest.
Comfort was waking beside my wife
on our bed of musk-sweet rushes.

Before even the Captain's cloud-canoe, before I was chief,
the Sechelts held a great gift-giving on the tiderim.
Something, flung gleaming through the air, fell in the water.
I dived; my fingers clutched a gun, a flintlock.
Spaniards had made it;
the Nootkas gave its height in otter skins.
Now it was mine; I shot the deer my arrows fainted to reach.
With other years came other traders
and stronger fire unsealed from iron tube and bottle;
I gave my only son the flintlock.
He walked into the whisky-house they built in our village;
He drank its madness;
he killed his cousin, my brother's heir.
The white men choked my son with a rope.
From that day my life was a walking backwards.
What trails we would have stumbled on alone none now will know.
In a moon of heat the tall priest came;
with his magic twig of fire he lit the dried grass
and spoke in the raven's voice of Hell,
unrolled a painting bright as the sundown,
showed us our dead in Hell's flame.
In fear we let the little wisps of our marvels
lose themselves in the black cloud of his god.
And ever the whites came crowding our shoreline
like summer smelts, and the deer fled.
My grandsons, my hunters, went to grease logs for the skidders;
one died under a felled tree,
the other black and gasping with smallpox.

I had yet two daughters; their eyes were chaste.
To one a sailor gave rum, and a glass necklace,
and the secret rot of his thighs; she died barren and young.
The other went to a trader, to be his woman;
when he had turned her away,
before she spat out her lungs with his plague,
she bore him my only grand-daughter.
In my old age the child grew tall, fair as a waterfall.
The factor married her; he made her give up our people.
There are white chiefs now in Vancouver who carry her blood,
but it is a long time now and they do not know,
or they are ashamed.
These are all my descendants. . . .

When the measles passed from my village, ten of us lived
to bury our ninety, and I, their Chief, was blind.
We left the longhouses for the burning,
the burial grove and the carvings to loggers.
They sent me over the Sound to sit
dark and alone by the smokehouse fire of my cousins.
One night I felt with shuffling feet the beach-path.
I walked into the saltwater,
I walked down to the home of the Seal Brother. . . .