Midden
Bay is not a name you will find on the maps, but it represents a real
place, a Salish village on the frayed eastern coast of Vancouver
Island, facing the Gulf of Georgia. It was not easy to find on the cold
and misty December night when we turned off the Island Highway fifty
miles or so north of Victoria and followed the winding side road around
placid coves and then into a forest where the only landmark we had been
given was an Indian cemetery at a crossroads. We found the cemetery —
white wooden crosses gleaming suddenly out of a tangle of brown bracken
— but turned the wrong way and ended in the cul-de-sac of a sluggish
development : roads roughed in, tumbling billboards, a couple of
derelict trailers. We retraced our way to the cemetery, took another
direction, and knew we were on the right road when the hardtop ended
and we began to bump over the potholes of a decaying gravel road. We
passed Indian houses, slowing to avoid children and pups dashing into
the gleam of the headlights, and came down to the water's edge, the
black bay sucking at the banks of mingled soil and broken oyster shell
that betokened an ancient settlement, the houses lit with bare bulbs,
cars parked along the ice-glazed earth road around the beach. Behind
the houses loomed a long dark building — no windows but sparks spurting
out from the three wide openings in the corrugated iron roof. We nudged
our Volkswagen in between the big, battered old cars and the new
station wagons, and as we turned off the engine the hard thud of the
drums beat in our ears. The spirit dances had begun.
When the Indian Act of 1951 was passed, and the
infamous clause prohibiting potlatches and spirit dances was finally
removed from the statute books, an injustice that had lasted as long as
most living Coast Indians could remember was furtively rectified. This
did not mean that the ceremonies started up again, for they had never
come to an end, but at least nobody risked going to prison for
performing them. Nor did it mean that potlatches and spirit dances came
into the open. Experience had taught the Indians of the Pacific Coast
the wisdom of keeping their customs to themselves. Even today,
twenty-five years after the ban was lifted, many people who live quite
close to Indian villages have no idea that the traditional ceremonials
have returned to assume once again their centrality in the pattern of
native life. The woman who kept the lodge where we would be returning
to sleep the morning out traded regularly with women from Midden Bay
for their Cowichan sweaters and other craftwork, but she was quite
unaware that dances went on regularly there — sometimes two or three
times a week — throughout the winter. We had come to know of them only
by chance, and it was by oblique arrangement that we received a barely
stated invitation from a chief's wife who was herself an initiate. We
were to turn up, and if anyone questioned us, we were to mention her
name; she would be there, but it was clear she did not intend to
sponsor us in any open way. And it might be a good idea, the message
went, if we left our cameras and tape recorders at home.
Thus, by the time Inge and I pulled open the heavy
wooden door of the dance house at about eleven o'clock that December
night, we had a good idea how important a part spirit dances had
resumed in Salish life. Even so, we were not prepared for the scene
that greeted us. The house was made of sheets of plywood nailed on a
frame of rough cedar; it was somewhat over two hundred feet long and
more than fifty feet wide. Six-tiered bleachers of worn planks ran
along two sides and both ends, and these were well occupied. In the
long open floor of the house three great fires blazed, six-foot logs
piled crisscross in squares to the height of a man so that they became
gigantic cubes of flame and embers, out of which the smoke and sparks
drifted up to the smokeholes and billowed around the house,
occasionally half-blinding one. At least another hundred people — men
with tambourine-shaped drums in their hands — stood on the trodden
earth floor, so that altogether there must have been between eight and
nine hundred people there. (We were afterwards told that as winter
involvement and attendance increased each year the house became more
crowded, so that by the end of March between fifteen hundred and two
thousand people might be present, coming from villages all over
southern Vancouver Island and even from the lower Fraser valley and
from the State of Washington over the border.)
We stood diffidently just inside the doorway,
waiting, as seemed appropriate, to be recognized. A man almost as big
as the King of Tonga, with a drum in his hand and his face painted
black with a mixture of charcoal and grease, came forward, said we were
welcome, and led us to the bleachers on the right of the house, nearest
the door; the chief's wife never made herself known. We climbed to
places on the top bench and saw at once that the house was divided
between the initiates with their black faces and their attendant family
groups on the left-hand side of the room, and the noninitiated
spectators and witnesses on the other. A few smartly dressed Indians
from the United States were sitting next to us in our little strangers'
enclave; we were the only white people there.
The drumming had just ceased when we entered, but as
soon as we sat down there was a kind of coalescent flowing of the men
on the floor towards the initiates' bench. A black-faced girl with a
tartan blanket slung over her shoulders began to stand up, assisted by
women on each side of her, and all at once, with a spontaneity which I
afterwards learned was more apparent than real, the drums began to beat
in a distinctive rhythm, and the song — the girl's personal spirit song
— emerged (that is the only word that really expresses the process) in
a kind of surging chorus, as she started the dance that the spirit had
given her, which would take her around the hall and the great fires.
She danced with her torso bent forward, gaze fixed on the ground as if
in trance, disregarding the spectators, her hands extended, and fingers
weaving in patterns that reminded me of the mudras of Asian dancing. In
her dance she was followed by a little cluster of attendants, members
of the extended family to which she belonged, the women raising their
hands upward and addressing strange high-pitched calls to the
spectators, as if appealing to us for witness, and as they went they
handed out silver quarters to the drummers — for every participant in
any Pacific Coast Indian ceremony must be rewarded.
As the dancer spun round the third fire at the
head of the house, the drums thudded more loudly, people in the
bleachers joining in with their own drums and keeping the rhythm, until
there must have been two hundred drums beating and the sound reached a
thunderous crescendo that seemed to carry the singing on its crest and
filled the house with an extraordinary atmosphere of occult power,
which we felt even on that first dance and more intensely on each
occasion as the evening went on. Finally the girl danced back to her
place on the bench and sank down on it, wailing loudly. It was the
spirit calling from within her, and as she wailed, the spirits of the
women around her were activated, and they gave strange mewing calls
like seagulls.
The drums and the singing had ceased as abruptly as
they began, as if some invisible conductor had waved his staff. All
suddenly became relaxed, the crowd of drummers dissolved into pairs of
men chatting as they strolled over the floor, children clambered over
the bleachers, women wandered off into a little room in the corner of
the house and came back with paper cups of coffee and pieces of
home-made cake as if it were a church social. And then, out of all this
casualness, there came another sudden gathering of the drummers, the
next black-faced girl rose from her place, a different song surged up,
and she made her turn of the room. Five women danced in this way;
the drum and song rhythms were similar, and so was the general shape of
the dance, yet in each case the hand movements and the stance, like the
song, were quite distinctive, expressing each dancer's special spirit
helper, and I was reminded of the Samoan women's dance, the siva, which is regarded as the
supreme expression of any woman's personality.
Inevitably, as all this went on, we were
apprehensively assessing the attitude which these hundreds of Indians
engaged in their native ceremonies might display towards us, strangers
and aliens as we were. Those from south of the border, among whom we
sat, were friendly enough, but though they were also Salish they shared
neither the dialect nor the dance traditions of the Cowichans, so that
they were almost as much outsiders as we were. And we had heard, as one
does everywhere in British Columbia these days, of militancy among the
native peoples. The lodge keeper had told us how, only a month before,
the people of Midden Bay, incited by "agitators from the States," had
closed off all the local roads in pursuit of their land claims. And
yet, though we stayed among them until far into the morning, we were
aware of no special feelings towards us of any demonstrable kind.
Certainly nobody made any gesture of hostility, and later we were in a
special way included in the events enacted that evening. For most of
the people, we seemed to be merely members of the crowd of witnesses,
and we were careful to do nothing that might draw us out of the
anonymity of such a role.
The men's dances were perhaps more closely
traditional than those of the women. The women had worn no distinctive
garments and used no ceremonial instruments. But as the dances went on
the black-faced male initiates sat shaking their rattles, which among
the Salish are staffs about three feet long, carved and painted, with
crests on their tips (I noticed the head of a bald eagle and that of a
serpent) and half way down rings of mussel shells (once it would have
been deer's hooves) that give a thin, dry clatter when they are shaken.
When a man's turn came to dance, he would give his rattle to an
attendant who plied it as he followed the dancer around the fires. The
men dancers wore embroidered dance leggings and jackets of dark blue
serge, from which hung dozens of little bone appendages in the form of
miniature paddles. They danced with knees and elbows rigidly angled,
performing a percussive stamp and nodding their heads up and down
vigorously; the most vigorous were those who wore wigs of human hair
that came down over heads and shoulders, almost to their waists, like
great candle-snuffers with tufts of feathers at the tops, and
completely blinded them so that their attendants had constantly to push
them away from the fires. These were initiates possessed of warrior
spirits. When the men returned to their seats, they too wailed, but the
spirits aroused in the men around them growled like bears.
These were all men and women who had actually gone
through initiation and performed their novice dances at some time in
the past; they were now validating their status as full-fledged spirit
dancers. But all at once, in the middle of the men's dances, an
uninitiated girl was spontaneously possessed. She was sitting among one
of the families on the dancers' side of the house when she sank wailing
into a trance and was immediately lifted and carried over to the
spectators' benches, neutral ground. Women clustered around her,
speaking to her, stroking her, wailing softly, until a strange, tall
figure appeared and knelt before her. He was an old man with the
asexual look of those elderly actors who play young women in Kabuki,
his grey hair long, plaited around his head, tied with bits of red
ribbon. It was too far off to see what this ritualist actually did, but
it appeared to be some kind of communing with the spirit, for he made
passes, and then raised his head and twice gave a strange falsetto cry,
after which he immediately threw a blanket over the girl's head. She
remained under that blanket for the rest of the night, for a bit of
stifling is considered a good thing in such situations, and when her
family left early in the morning she was led out, still completely
covered, for her protection but also for those of others, since
supernatural forces were hovering around her. Her initiation would
begin at once, and while she was kept for days in seclusion on a meagre
diet, her attendants would listen to the spirit speaking through her in
cries out of which they would compose the song that henceforward would
be hers alone. People who are conscripted, as it were, into the
fellowship of dancers often have to go through severe hazings, as they
did in pagan days, but those who are spontaneously possessed are
treated with special gentleness.
Now began the part of the ceremonial without which
none of the dances we had seen would be regarded as valid. The only way
of validation is through giving on the part of the initiates' families.
Men and boys began to come into the house carrying cardboard cartons,
which were piled in a long row in front of the initiates' benches.
Then, one by one, the family groups began their round of the bleachers,
the black-faced dancer making the gifts, and an elder in each group,
expert at the gradations of rank, pointing out each recipient.
Blankets were — in keeping with tradition — the
principal gifts, and a person's status was made evident by the kind of
blanket he received. High rank (which usually means you have made rich
gifts in the past) merited five-point Hudson's Bay Company blankets,
low rank (which means meagre giving in the past) merited only hideously
flowered flannelette sheets, We ranked at the level neither of blankets
nor the silk scarves with rhinestone jewels knotted in the corners
which formed the second round of gifts. Still, we were witnesses, our
presence helped to validate the dances, and we were rewarded during the
later rounds, when crockery and fruit were given out; we had to accept,
for refusal of a gift would have publicly shamed the dancer and his
whole family, and ourselves as well. Gift after gift was sent up, hand
over hand, to our place at the top of the bleachers; when we counted
them afterwards, we found that we had collected one gold-and-white cup
and saucer, one large rose-patterned ironstone plate, one glass mug,
one Pyrex dish, four oranges, and fourteen apples. Such gifts indicated
that our presence and our behaviour had been accepted. They also gave
some means of judging the quantity of goods changing hands that night,
for we were only minor recipients among the three or four hundred
people who sat on the spectators' benches. One gigantic woman sitting
just below us went out with three large cardboard cartons filled with
her presents, and the combined families must have spent several
thousand dollars in such gifts alone.
Nor were these the only transfers of property, for
every occasion like this is used as an opportunity for the public
settling of ceremonial debts, and the floor was taken up for at least
an hour, while the families went round with their gifts, by men making
orations in ceremonial Old Salish as various obligations were
straightened out by the handing over of prominently displayed bundles
of bills, whose amount was always declared on spread fingers raised
high for everyone to see. Several hundred dollars changed hands in this
way in addition to the gifts made to the witnesses on the right-hand
benches.
It was after the giving that two isolated dances
took place, and these in their different ways were the most moving
episodes of the night. A small boy led in a young man in a strange garb
of jerkin and leggings of grey and white wool, with many tassels, and
head-dress coming down over the face, rather like that of the warrior
dancers except that it also was made of much-tasselled grey and white
wool. He carried a tasselled spear jingling with shells on whose point
someone had struck a big red apple.
He was a novice dancer in a state of possession, and
according to Salish beliefs a highly dangerous figure who had to be
watched carefully lest he go berserk and start attacking people with
his spear. This young man, however, did nothing but wander vaguely
around the floor until the drums began to beat; this threw him into his
dancing frenzy, and he covered the circuit of the house twice in a
series of extraordinary sightless leaps, like some blind primitive
Nijinsky, bouncing up and down with knees and feet tightly together, as
if he were made of rubber, and giving a great deal of trouble to his
small attendant who had to keep him from jumping into one of the fires.
At last he sank down on a bench at the far end of the house, well away
from the actual initiates, and there the spirit wailed in him like a
wolf for a good hour before he finally settled into a silent trance.
Nobody took any notice of all this. It was obviously what a respectable
traditionally minded young man was expected to do in Salish society.
This performance of a young man beginning his career
of spiritual possession was balanced by the other late dance, which
clearly marked an end. An ancient woman had been sitting in the middle
of the dancers' bench, and now she was being helped to her feet by her
daughters and granddaughters. She was almost skeletally fragile and
dressed in a pink sequinned gown and a rhinestoned headband with a few
white eagle feathers stuck in it, as if she had got ready for one of
Pierre Berton's early Hollywood films on the Canadian West; her cheeks
seemed to have been dusted with wood ash, for they had an unnatural
greyness. She was so weak that she had to be supported in her slow
walk, and all that remained of her dance was the continual movement of
her hands and fingers in the gestures that expressed her spirit. Yet it
was in one way the most dramatic dance of the whole night, for the
drummers came down out of the bleachers to join those on the floor and
make an avenue of sound through which the old dancer progressed, with
hundreds of voices shouting out her song, and her attendants scattering
handfuls of coins among the drummers and the singers. It was obviously
a farewell, for we felt no doubt that this was the old woman's last
dance, and that she and everyone else knew it. But it was also the kind
of assertion of continuity, for here was a person who had been a child
in the last flourishing of the old native culture, and by supporting
her in her dance the rest of the people were not only proclaiming their
continuity with the past but also celebrating the revival of the old
ways.
Somewhere past three in the morning the crowds on
the bleachers began to thin as people set out on the way home to other
villages, and we went out with them. We were elated by what we had
seen, above all by what we had heard and felt in the vast vibrations of
sound that surged about the great house. The Salish contend that
attendance at the spirit dances can cure many sicknesses that are in
some way or another psychosomatic. But it seemed to us not merely a
matter of individual cure, but of the cure of a whole people from the
alienation of those intermediate generations when they lived between
two worlds, their native culture almost completely destroyed and the
culture of the white man temperamentally alien to them.
It seemed as though time had taken a spiral, and now
these Coast Indians were in possession again of the heart of their
culture, the spirit dance cult, which expressed their collective Salish
identity, and at the same time emotionally supported each individual as
the old communal Indian life had done. Quite apart from the sense of
occult power produced by the drumming and the singing, one recognized a
feeling of confidence and pride among the hundreds of people gathered
in the dance house. Here they were in their own world, secure, and that
was perhaps why they could accept the two of us without either the shy
embarrassment or the nervous hostility that so often mars relations
between Indians and whites. It was a sign of the reverence with which
the people of Midden Bay regard their revived pagan ceremonies, that —
despite cynical forewarnings by local whites — we saw no one in the
great house who was either drinking or even mildly drunk, and when we
went outside there was none of the drinking in cars that accompanies
white dances in Vancouver Island village halls.
Next morning we went down again to Midden Bay to see
in the daylight what the village looked like. It was little different
from other Vancouver Island Indian villages. The cemetery at the
crossroads was a rough field where gaudy, plastic flowers were the only
decorations. The houses looked ill-maintained, the gardens grew only
rubbish, and if it had not been for some expensive station wagons and
pick-up trucks, one would have thought Midden Bay one of the poorest
places in Canada. This was not really so, for the Indians here were
relatively prosperous, many of the men earning well from fishing and
most of the others having regular work in the local sawmills. It was merely
that they had different ideas on how money was well spent; that night
of ceremony and giving suggested to me that they might be right.
"Strength
in your weeping,
Tears that come seeping,
Down the old canyons,
Back to the sea."