NATURE POWER
In the Spirit of an Okanagan Storyteller
Harry Robinson
Compiled and Edited by Wendy Wickwire
This book is dedicated to Harry Robinson’s always-attentive neighbour, Carrie Allison, and to his around-the-clock caregivers in his final years: Colleen, Diane, Heather and Stella.
CONTENTS
You Think It’s a Stump, but That’s My Grandfather
Power Man, Power Woman, They Each Have a Different Way
When They Get Together, They Just Like an Animal
A Power Man, He Knows What’s Coming to Him
III: POWER TO DO THE DOCTORING
Go Get Susan, See What She Can Do
Sing Your Song and Take the Sickness Away
Grab the Sickness and Send ’Em Out
You Can’t See Me, but Just Listen
The Indians, They Got the Power
Big Man Puts the Power on a Hedley Boy
She Was Dead at One Time but She Come Alive
Phonetic Transcriptions of Okanagan Words
Harry Robinson was a perfectionist. Whether sharpening his knives or keeping a record of births and deaths in his community, Harry carried out his tasks methodically and with great precision. It was his way. Knowing this about him, it was with some apprehension that I put the first copy of his long-awaited book, Write It on Your Heart, in my local Vancouver mailbox on November 1, 1989. With even greater nervousness, I approached his bedside in Keremeos a week later.
“It’s all right,” he said approvingly, “except for one thing.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“You said you would put all my stories on a book, but you’ve left a lot out.”
For the next hour, we discussed the logistics of putting his words into print, especially the hundreds of thousands of words that had passed from his lips over many years onto my reel-to-reel tapes. It was just not possible to capture all of his words in one book! This bothered Harry, and so I promised him that day to do my best to get more of his stories into book form.
Nature Power, a collection of Harry’s stories about the spiritual relationship between humans and their nature helpers (shoo-MISH), is a partial fulfillment of that commitment. Unfortunately, I will never have the pleasure of presenting Nature Power to Harry. In the early morning hours of January 25, 1990, scarcely two months after that November visit, Harry died.
Harry had been frail and bedridden for some time, but his round-the-clock home-care workers, Colleen, Heather, Diane and Stella, had described him to me in my regular check-in calls as “comfortable.” In the third week of January, however, things changed. It started with an unusual pain in Harry’s lower abdomen. Fearing that he might be forced to go into the hospital—an institution he hated—Harry kept his pain to himself. Only when it had become unbearable did he finally complain. An emergency X-ray undertaken at the local Keremeos health clinic on Wednesday morning revealed that his artificial hip had become dislodged, and by now it was badly infected. Harry died early the next day in his own bed, surrounded by his photos, wall hangings and other precious pieces of memorabilia.
His friends and relatives assembled at Chopaka for his funeral five days later. A great tree had fallen, taking with it roots that extended deep into the Okanagan earth.
TWO WORLDS
I first met Harry Robinson in August 1977 at his home just east of Hedley in the Similkameen Valley. On the surface, our two worlds could not have been more different. Harry was a seventy-six-year-old Okanagan Indian who had been raised in the traditional ways of his people by his mother, Arcell, and her parents, Louise and Joseph Newhmkin, at the small village of Chopaka in the Similkameen Valley. A member of the Lower Similkameen Indian Band (one of five Okanagan bands in southwestern British Columbia), Harry spent his boyhood riding and tending horses, bringing in the cattle, fencing, haying, and visiting rodeos and stampedes. At the age of thirteen he began attending the local school at Cawston, but after five months of walking the six miles there and back, he quit and turned to ranching full-time. Harry married Matilda Johnny, also from Chopaka, in 1924. Although they had no children, they ran a very successful ranching business together. By the early 1970s, Matilda had died and Harry had become too old to run the ranch, so he sold it.
Ranching was Harry’s life. “It’s kinde important words,” he wrote to me, “should be on book.”
I get to started feed stock from 2nd jan. 1917 till 1972. 50 years I feed cattle without missed a day in feeding season rain or shine. snowing or Blazirt. sunday’s. holirdays. funeral day. any other times I just got to feed cattle feeding seson in winter. from 115 days up to 185 days. just Depend’s in weather of winter to feed cattle every day. that is I Been doing for 50 winter’s that should