I thought on a day full of sorrow, when the future of America and even the world seems in doubt you might like to come with me on a trip to one of the most beautiful parts of Naⱡmuqȼin. If you stay to the end of my travalogue which is filled with many side trips you will find hope for the future among modern people who truly believe they are descended from animals. The leader of the animals, who was called Naⱡmuqȼin, after many great deads and an epic adventure died by standing up too quickly and hitting his head on the sky. He fell stretched out and his body became the Rocky Mountains. This is part of the creation myth of the Ktunaxa people.
My daughters all identify as Ktunaxa as do my grandchildren. My daughters are among the few people left on the face of the Earth who speak the language. There are a hundred native speakers left in Canada according to the last census. But my daughters are teaching it to their children. It is a language isolate. There is no other related language known to exist, nothing even close.
Truthfully, there are many things about the Ktunaxa that are quite unique.
“recognizing the importance of family, unity and co-operation, effective communication, love and kindness, respect, safety and security, inclusion, education and learning, healthy and balanced living – and take pride in our heritage, language and culture. We value natural law and practice stewardship of the land, water, animals, and plants.
The vision of our Ktunaxa ancestors continues to guide us through traditions, customs, language, and beliefs. We strive to govern effectively and maximize our lands and resources for the benefit of all living things and future generations, in accordance with our values and principles.”
That is a statement of principles for the ʔaq̓am band, the largest in Canada. But it speaks eloquently for all Ktunaxa.
And thing is they mean it. In 1974 the Ktunaxa of Idaho went to war with the United States to prove it. They wanted housing and money to care for their elders so they declared war and blockaded Highway 95 on each side of Bonner’s Ferry in Idaho. And it all ended without a gunshot and with a peaceful negotiated agreement. This sums up everything the Ktunaxa believe.
Now you might wonder how my daughters ended up Ktunaxa when I am a WASP. I am kind of a dirty blond and have steel blue eyes and pale skin, unless I spend time outside when well I turn rather brown. I have an entire meticulously researched family history that goes back to the Orkney Islands and Outer Hebrides and Denmark. The Bush family, forgive my ancestors, are first cousins several times removed.
I am going to simplify a very long story and simply say that if you go by DNA alone I am more Ktunaxa than anything else and if you use cultural ancestry I am a lot more Ktunaxa than anything else. Not that I knew that until I was in my early twenties.
By this point I had two 6 year old girls (twins) and was happily living with my baby mommy a beautiful Chinese girl who I will call J1. I have a problem with names that sound remarkably alike (part of my birth defects) and to my ear the four women who unite me to my daughters have names that sounds remarkably alike. So I refer to them as J1, J2, J3, and J4. They suggested it, apparently me butchering their names annoyed them. Now they think it is hilarious so it persists.
One day J1 and I had a couple of friends over, J2 and J4. In the midst of dinner it became apparent to all of us that J1 and J4 were hopelessly in love and had been for some time. I have no idea how things would have gone if J2 wasn’t there. She somehow negotiated an amicable split between me and J1 that left J1 and I life long friends and coparents. But I was always the primary parent and J2 was always there and one day she kissed me. It was like a cattle prod had been applied to my heart.
J2 was and is 100% Ktunaxa. Suddenly I wasn’t just lving with a Ktunaxa I was living as a Ktunaxa and so were my daughters. Then J2 started introducing me to people who totally believed they were related to me, aunts, uncles, cousins. By the way, J2 thought from the first time we met that I was Ktunaxa.
Now we need to pause here and say my daughters have put severe limits on what I can say about them. It is only recently that the younger girls agreed to allow me to mention them at all.
Also, that I am dense as a fence post.
As a kid, starting about the time I was ten, my parents developed a summer ritual. We would take a long road holiday travelling all over North America. Then for the rest of the summer I would go off to play with my Haida/Tlingit friends on Prince of Wales Island in the Alexander Archipelago. I always stayed with “Uncle” Joe and “Aunt” Sue who lived in Hydaburg and weren’t related to any of my friends.
My uncle and aunt taught me all manner of useful skills. Among them was kayaking. They were obsessed with kayaking. I have no idea why.
He was Haida, she was Tlingit and their children were grown and gone so they probably weren’t young. But they would take these epic sea kayak trips. Sea kayaking is pure endurance sport. At first I rode with Sue in a two man kayak. But by the time I was twelve I had my own kayak. We did most of the Inside Passage at one time or another. My daughters and I go every year on a long sea kayaking holiday on the coasts of BC and Alaska. Sadly Joe and Sue passed away just before I first had DNA testing.
Now interestingly J2 loved to kayak, though she was into to the adremalin rush of white water. It is very different and it took me a while to adjust. A sea kayak is far longer and much narrower. White water kayaks are short and broad. J2 and I would kayak whatever white water we were close to at the time. The kayaks went everywhere with us. And one day she finally thought I was good enough to kayak the WigWam.
The WigWam flows through an amazing purple canyon. It is stunning visually and I have have never seen pictures that do it justice. I’d say everyone should do it but you can’t really enjoy the view because the water can kill you in a moment. And there is really no way for you to get out if you are hurt in the wrong place, or your kayak breaks. There is also no way for rescue to reach you in any sort of timely way. There are no roads in and out and a helicopter can’t get near the canyon never mind in it.
The following YouTube video will give you the idea. Notice the kayaker with the camera on their head never has time to look around. The second video shows what it is like when the water is lower. Though they are packrafting which is somewhat easier. The 2nd video is close to creeking water. Creeking is the most extreme form of kayaking and requires a lot of extra equipment and even specialized kayaks. The first video is what we call the big water experience. It would seem more dangerous but really isn’t.
And J2 and I taught our daughters to do this. We must have been crazy.
Anyway so many Ktunaxa claimed to be related to me that I asked my parents if I had any Ktunaxa blood. They utterly denied it. My reluctance to push harder became an issue between J2 and me, one of way too many.
Shortly after we split, I met my wife of nearly thirty years. We realized quite early on that we were infertile. We kept having miscarriages. Eventually we tried IVF and after several failed attempts we succeeded in having two beautiful twin girls (non identical this time). But now we were broke (IVF isn’t cheap), exhausted by two high needs babies, and drowning professionally and then J3 got sick. Which is when J2 showed up and started taking over. Then J1 and J4 got involved. My daughters all mean it when they say they had 4 moms but only one father.
In any case the four Js became great friends. Such great friends that they decided when J1 and J4 wanted kids that I would provide the sperm and J4 the eggs but J2 would be the surrogate. When the doctor told J1 and J4 that two of the fertilized eggs had implanted and did they want one aborted they chose, as I and my wife had, to keep both. Once again they were girls.
But along the way something started happening to me. I can’t explain it, though I can remember realizing I was becoming a physical coward. So I pushed back doubling down on the risk and taking all of my daughters along with me. And also including J2 who was the only of the Js prepared to go along on these adventures.
Despite my best attempts the fear and anxiety grew worse and were joined by an astonishing inability to concentrate and memory lapses. Medication had no impact at all. And now I was having physical symptoms, loss of feeling in my legs, and shaking. Then the twitching started. I would fling things across the room without meaning to and suddenly kick things without any warning.
They quickly ruled out Parkinson’s. And MS an Alzheimer’s. Next up was Huntington’s Disease. Which required genetic testing. I have the mutations that lead to Huntington’s, I just don’t have enough of them to make it likely I have Huntington’s and then I developed other symptoms, insane sweating, dizziness, visual hallucinations, savage muscle cramps, crushing fatigue, and so on.
I have had about a dozen diagnoses and none of them have held up over time. My doctors are confident they have eliminated every fatal disease known to mankind. Which doesn’t tell us what it is, just what it isn’t.
It was the geneticist that tested for Huntington’s that told me that there was evidence I had African and Native American ancestors.
My curiosity about all this would ultimately lead me to being part of a research project looking for disease markers in Alaska Native/American Indian populations. But in there somewhere I sent off a DNA sample to each of the big players in ancestral DNA testing. There was some agreement. They all said I was some admixture of African, Native American, and Northern European and unknown (likely archaic hominid).
Skip forward to two weeks ago. I am just headed off to visit my daughters who all live in the traditional homeland of the Ktunaxa in southeast B.C, specifically in the Elk River Valley. My colleagues finally had enough data to make a statistically robust call on my DNA. When all the researchers agreed to be tested early in the project they concluded I had a lot of Native American ancestors. So in a few years I went from thinking I was WASP through and through because my family told me so, to thinking I was a hybrid, to thinking I was probably mostly native. It was a mind f***.
Then I got the latest analysis. I am 75+ % Alaskan Native or American Indian, about 13% Northern European and 6% African. The rest, who knows. Their best guess is I am 50% Ktunaxa and 25% Haida/Tlingit. But they won’t bet that as their data base improves I won’t turn out to be even more aboriginal. They think I have close ancestors who were either Navajo or Apache.
So my daughters who fell in love with J2 and her stories of my and their Ktunaxa roots had it right all along. You need to know they think this hilarious. The Js think it is deeply moving. I have never really belonged anywhere and have never stopped wandering looking for who knows what even as my body made it harder and harder. Well I always felt at home with my Haida/Tlingit aunt and uncle and my Ktunaxa aunts and uncles and cousins even when I thought they were crazy. But cultural identity programming is very hard to throw off.
Anyway, I just spent two weeks in Fernie, B.C. It is unquestionably the oddest Mountain Resort Town I have ever seen. Unlike all the rest Fernie would exist with or without one of the world’s finest ski and snow boarding resorts. Most residents don’t actually work at the resort or for the resort, many don’t even have anything to do with tourists.
At Fernie’s City Hall there are free electric vehicle chargers, and electic vehicles charging. And everywhere you go, year round there are bicycles of every kind. There are free pick up and drop off sites for bikes and bike lock ups. You may be beginning to get the idea. In the winter on the historic Main Street you will meet people cross country skiing. Cross country is huge in Fernie. And everybody seems to own kayaks or canoes. We met any number of people paddling Sturgeon Nosed Canoes or Sturgeons modified into kayaks. The Sturgeon is the classic canoe of the Ktunaxa. They look truly odd.
My daughters and I went canoeing and kayaking and they watched me like eagles watch their young on a maiden flight. But each day I grew stronger and more certain and more courageous. And near the end we went creeking on the WigWam. The water was actually still a little high.
And every day one or all would take the time to introduce a bit of Ktunaxa into my life. For example, the creation myth I began with says that Naⱡmuqȼin took a great monster he had slain and gutted it and from the monster’s parts he created all but one of the races of humans. But the monsters blood fell from his hands on to the grass and became the red people and they have been here ever since. It seems likely this creation myth has been influenced by white settlement and a knowledge of the outside world.
And here comes the punchline. It is called the Goat Fell Complex. Anthropologists believe the tools found throughout the Creston and Cranbrook areas tell them the Ktunaxa have been in the, Columbia, Kootenay, Elk, St Mary’s, Bull and WigWam river valleys continuously for 11,500 years. New digs suggest it may have been longer than that and originally over a larger area. Maybe the Ktunaxa really have always been in the most beautiful part of the Rockies.
But what you may ask is the relevance of this. Simply this, during the Ktunaxa’s long history in South Eastern British Columbia the climate has changed many times and by large amounts. And in the tools and artifacts of the Goat Fell Complex you can see the Ktunaxa adapting to those changes. They didn’t die out, they didn’t move, no the Ktunaxa adapted. Whatever they faced the Ktunaxa overcame.
All the Ktunaxa I have met are radical environmentalists and think very, very long term. They have been negotiating a land claim with the Canadian Government for decades. Slowly and persistently they are moving towards regaining control of some their territory. That is the Ktunaxa way, negotiate, negotiate, negotiate. But never give up.
The Ktunaxa’s battle over Qat’muk, the birthplace of the Grizzly spirit should be an inspiration to all environmentalists. They have lost every battle but they have never quit.
www.ktunaxa.org/...
So, North America’s greatest survivors have overcome by adapting and negotiating. I am not yet able to fully embrace my Ktunaxa heritage but I believe my daughters chose very wisely indeed. We should all try the Ktunaxa way.