In the Valleys of the Noble Bey - John Zada Page 0,31
to fit the bill.
A few of the beings nowadays equated with the Sasquatch are the Gagiit of the Haida, a human who has succumbed to fatigue, cold, or hunger to become a ghostly wilderness dweller; the Kooshdaa Khaa of the Tlingit, who is likened to a land-dwelling otter and is believed to be the embodiment of a drowned or lost relative; and the Wendigo of Algonquian-speaking peoples—a troublemaking spirit of the woods that can possess people and cause them to perpetrate acts of insatiable greed, murder, and cannibalism.
There may be something to these linkages with Sasquatch. After all, much indigenous oral history and traditional knowledge has been shown to be accurate—long antedating the same scientific or academic “discoveries.” But is it possible that the Sasquatch—simply one indigenous version of the wild man, whose name was Anglicized by nonindigenous people—has become so prominent and universal a story in its own right that it has come to be mixed up with and grafted onto other unique aboriginal traditions? Could the deluge of media coverage and the long-standing pop-cultural aspects of the Sasquatch story have influenced some indigenous people, and also Sasqualogists, to see more of “Bigfoot” in some supernatural beings than is actually there? Several such creatures don’t overlap much with Bigfoot apart from being humanoid or semi-humanoid.
Muddying the waters is the fact that common forest creatures are, in certain native stories, imbued with human qualities. Some can transform themselves into humans. The idea of a creature that bridges the human and animal spheres is in a sense commonplace.
When I ask Alvina if she can tell me more about the Thla’thla, she replies, “Maybe you should go to Old Town.”
I ask what that is.
“It’s the name we give to our old village site on the island,” she says. “It’s just south of here, down the main road near McLoughlin Bay. It’s where the Thla’thla is seen the most. Who knows, if you spend enough time there, you might see one yourself.”
The next day I phone Ian to tell him that I’ve left my mini camera tripod on his boat. He tells me his assistant is going to the Heiltsuk Elders Building in Bella Bella that day for a meeting and suggests I pick up the tripod from her there.
When I arrive at the single-story cedar lodge, I find a gathering in progress. Alberta representatives from the energy multinational Chevron are giving a presentation on a liquefied natural gas project in Haisla Nation territory, up the coast. The project will transport natural gas that has been extracted by fracking along a pipeline to a coastal facility, near the port town of Kitimat, that will cool the gas into a liquid for shipping in supertankers to buyers overseas. Chevron’s presentation about tanker safety is meant to win over the Heiltsuk, who vehemently oppose the project.
It’s an exceptionally tense scene. Six clean-shaven men, dressed in loafers, impeccably ironed button-down shirts, and slacks, some wearing spectacles, sit rigidly in front of microphones at a large table at the front of the hall. On a large screen behind them, a PowerPoint presentation churns out fancy diagrams and blueprints of various supertankers. The men brag that these new, state-of-the-art ships, some over a thousand feet long, are virtually accident-proof. Not only are the boats built to international safety standards, they say, but they also have double hulls that can withstand huge impacts. They add that the ships will be driven by local pilots familiar with the tricky coastal passages they must navigate. Over and over they tell the audience that there is nothing to fear. Even if an accident were to occur, the gas, they say, would simply evaporate from the water. Presto! No mess! This isn’t oil.
The audience looks restless, gloomy-faced, and unimpressed. A palpable sense of fear and foreboding hovers over the room. After an endless succession of blueprints, diagrams, graphs, pie charts, and factoids plugging the virtues of the indestructible superships, the PowerPoint ends.
“Does anyone in the audience have questions?” the panel asks, with a hint of trepidation. A flurry of hands shoots up. A microphone is brought to the floor. One by one, audience members make their voices heard:
Greed is running this boat. All you people want is to come here and take what you want—and then just leave! We can’t even watch Hockey Night in Canada anymore without being bombarded by oil company commercials saying how great they are!
An older woman takes the microphone and stands. Her lips begin to quiver as she