The Dene Files w/ special guest Richard Van Camp on Story, Healing and Dene Medicine

A few weeks back author, mentor, and friend, Richard Van Camp reached out, and said he had an idea for a show. 

He talked about the “Saturday Night Request Show” that had once aired here in Denendeh and how he wanted to do something similar but for something other than music – a request show to verify Dene Stories. 

Specifically, Dene Medicine Stories. 

I believe that stories take us on journey’s, when we let them. A good Story has a spirit of its own and if we are lucky, if we are listening, and if we are open to having our lives changed, then Stories will take us there. 

“So I heard from somebody,” Started Van Camp “and I really want this be true, and I really want this to be true, and I really hope somebody in Deline can confirm it, but I really need help, because I don’t know who else to go to. 

Like any good storyteller, Richard set the stage, and definitely moved me from the hustle and bustle of my working life. He got my attention and immediately, I was listening. 

“As you know,” Camp began, “a long time ago, Deline had a very powerful prophet named (Louis) Ayah. I feel that a great storyteller can help you find your way. And your great grandpa, George Blondin, changed my life forever in 1991 when he came to visit us at Arctic college, there was a course there that I was taking with Bella T’seleie and my Uncle James Washi and James Marlowe – so many people now who I see as leaders. 

“He said that Ayah, when Ayah was a little boy, kept having these visions that kept coming true, and one of his most mind blowing was his entire life, he had the same vision, and he said, I’ve seen two birds so powerful they never have to flap their wings. And I’ve seen white people and Dene people working together to take black eggs out of the earth and put these eggs into the bellies of these birds. And I’ve seen these two birds. They never flap their wings. They follow the sun to where the sun goes at night, when we sleep. And I’ve seen these two birds fly over people who look just like us, the dead a people. And I’ve seen these two birds drop these black. Eggs on the people who look just like us, and I’ve seen a fire so bright it leaves only their shadows on what’s left of their homes. We must never help the white people when they come north looking for the black eggs in our earth. He saw that his entire life. It was the recurring nightmare throughout his entire life. Now he passed in 1941 and of course, the detonation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened in 1945. So, he passed four years before his worst nightmare came true. 

“The lesson is,” Richard’s voice changed, and I was shocked to realize I was on the edge of my seat by this point, “we didn’t listen. And when you learn history, you learn that uranium came out of Port Radium and Rayrock mines, and we’re still feeling the effects of that, of of helping. You know, the soldiers and the military developed that technology, and the majority the uranium that was used for Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from the Congo, and the United States. 

“But,” shares Van Camp, “I heard a story. I’m not going to tell you who told me, I’m just going to tell you what I was told. I had heard a story, and I really hope somebody in Deline can verify this, because I think the world needs to know this. So the story I heard was one day, a plane landed in Deline, and some government officials came out, and they visited with Ayah when he was still alive, and they showed Aya photos of what was happening overseas during the war, and they actually asked Ayah to stop Hitler’s heart and the story I heard was that Ayah prayed about it, and in his response, to paraphrase, was ‘my medicine is not to stop human life. My medicine is to help human life. So I have to say no. But what I’ve been told is that no German boot will set foot on Canadian soil. And the other is the man you’re worried about is not meant to be here much longer.’ And they left.”

“That story has haunted me,” concludes Van Camp. “That story has inspired me. So I’m really hoping, brothers and sisters of Denendeh somebody listening can call and say, Actually, that’s not true. Or they can call back and say, Actually, it is true. And I remember when the plane touched down, is it true? Is it false or was it a misunderstanding?”

In his essay Radioactive Intimacies: The Making of Worldwide Wastelands in Marie Clements’s Burning Vision, author Lou Cornum reflects on the work of Marie Clement, saying “although not directly addressed in the play, in 1998, as Clements points out in a timeline distributed to the audience at performances and printed in the published play’s front matter, six residents from the Dene territory traveled to Hiroshima to “pay respects on the anniversary of the detonation of the atomic bomb.” They traveled, unaccompanied and unacknowledged by anyone from the Canadian government, “to draw a cosmic circle between the events and connect their two communities in a shared discourse of mourning and experience.” In this instance, Indigenous peoples actively chose to move across a line previously governed by the lethal desires of war. In understanding their role in the destruction overseas, the Dene people went beyond the obfuscation of the widespread system of violence the atomic bomb activated. Dorothy Purley, a Laguna Acoma Pueblo woman, has also made several trips to Japan to establish her link to the devastation of the nuclear blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These trips are transgressive insofar as these Indigenous subjects travel between and inscribe their own sense of worth onto spaces that have been relegated by the American state as wastelands. In creating this bridge of solidarity between two supposedly expendable locations, the travelers not only bring attention to the network of violence brought on by nuclear weapons but also show ways in which victims of the apocalypse can make meaning and establish relationships out of the rubble of history.”

Research like Van Camp and Clement’s is a wider part of how we weave together dissparate narratives held previously by the intellectual imperialism marked by colonial society – breaking down the monolithic stories that hold us apart from one another, under brave should like Van Camp and Clements share a different side to the same story. Not necessarily a better story, as these stories are still the collective heartache we all share, but just like resetting a bone that was not properly healed, or the clearing of an infected wound, sometimes we have to clear out was is harmful, to bring in what might heal.