Vancouver in Myth
E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake, in her own words
The White Wampum, Canadian Born and Legends of Vancouver by E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake)
Braves who are to be fathers must swim in the seas for as many days and nights as it takes for their children to be born, so that they may be the clean fathers, and personify the clean fatherhood, that their tribe rarely gets but greatly esteems.
In some tribes, the fathering of twins is an ill omen and not a good one; and their sire must – to avoid great misfortune falling upon his people – go alone into the wilderness not, as the medicine man says, for ten days, but instead for ten years. Eventually, the two boys of their great father, defying the whole tribe’s tears and certainty that their paramount chief is dead, travel after their tenth birthday into the distant snowy lands where they find a small dwelling-place, a gently smoking fire, and the man who a decade previous had gone into the wild parts of the land for their sake, and for the sake of the tribe.
These are stories in which young lovers are transformed into fish to search for the maiden’s mother, who was cruelly killed by a suitor’s evil magic.
They are stories in which the spine of a terrible sea-serpent (as dire a mythic beast as any, created by the god as an omen of the wickedness of greed) has terrible magical powers, the ability to paralyse enemies. So great is the power of this piece of spine, that it is given only to the most brilliant warriors. One warrior, on his deathbed and perceiving that all his descendents are female, does not wish for this magical item to be buried with him or given to an inferior fighter who would not deserve its power. Thus he has his daughters give the chunk of vertebra to a pair of French sailors on a Russian whaling ship, promising as they do that they will give the spinal piece to the greatest warrior in the world: the emperor Napoleon.
And how do the tellers of these legends account for the fact that, eventually, Napoleon was indeed defeated? The piece of serpent spine was meant to guarantee victory in battle, to paralyse and render insensible one’s enemies. How was it that Napoleon was beaten in the end? He lost the vertebra, of course, quite naturally – just before the battle of Waterloo.
Emily Pauline Johnson, also known by her adopted Mohawk name as Tekahionwake, was the product of a particular time in Canadian history and of a particular cultural situation. Johnson herself had a Mohawk chief for a father and an English mother. She could write of both heritages as being hers, although very cleverly, she uses the device of other people – people of more indisputable and unmixed origin – telling her stories as the centrepiece of her collection of Vancouver legends. Some of her poetry spans the cultural divide. It is patriotically British, patriotically Canadian – such an identity coming into use at that time – and also patriotically Iroquois, or Haudenosaunee, or of the Six Nations: whichever term she would have acknowledged and used, one of whose constituent nations was and remains the Mohawk.
Some of the stories in Johnson’s collection of legends are comprehensible. There is a flood, or Deluge, story, as every culture has at least one. The story about how the world was submerged by flood and rebuilt atop the back of a turtle is akin to many other North American ancestral stories about how the continents came to be.
And there are others which are charmingly peculiar, which are truly Vancouver tales. Stories which say that this particular action (the need to distract from the presence of an evil stone made of an immortal witch) led to the creation of a cathedral of trees to which people still flocked in Johnson’s own day.
The idea being that the four men, these men being giants, who did the bidding of the god – they were always called the four men, and recur often – selected noble-hearted people who lived near where the witch was entombed in stone, and made of them trees. They were trees because trees are wonderful and unwarlike things, as spiritually important and emblematic as Hindu tradition holds cows to be – and are fitting memorial for honest souls.
And one story about the failed harpooning of a great walrus, a king among walruses, being mostly a discussion of a hidden stream or river or body of water. Water which must be around Vancouver somewhere, yet was not found by the great huntsman who attempted to spear the walrus and failed. But the huntsman later found his elk harpoon in the side of the same beast when it was killed in a fire. A fire which startled also whole tribes of beaver, who fled the blaze and never returned to the body of water from which the great walrus body was recovered.
This rock, this pillar, this natural feature: it all can be explained in story and myth. These are charming stories, and they are written lyrically, with curiosity, and with the kind of superstition that makes things less antiquarian and more real, less scientific and more narrative, less studious and more like myth as it was really told.