When I met Harry, Matilda had been dead for about ten years. Alone in his rented bungalow beside the main highway, he had no close neighbours, other than his landlords and good friends Slim and Carrie Allison.
In addition to our fifty-year age difference (I was twenty-seven), I had been raised on the other side of the continent, in small-town Nova Scotia. Growing up in a professional family of Anglo-Scottish ancestry, I had spent the better part of my life in school. But my formal education, especially a degree in music at an Ontario university, had left me cold. The oral music-making with which I had grown up—guitars, fiddles, banjos, accordians and pianos played “by ear” in most households—had no place here. Indeed, “playing by ear” was frowned upon. And so-called “world music,” such as the Indonesian gamelan, West African drumming or South Indian percussion, was scarcely mentioned. This vision of culture needed rethinking, and in 1975 I switched to anthropology and “ethnomusicology.”
Two years later, Victoria-based anthropologists Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy offered to introduce me to some elderly Native singers in Vernon and Chase. We left Vancouver early in the morning on August 13 and headed east towards Penticton along the Hope-Princeton Highway. Michael M’Gonigle, my future husband, was also with us. At Hedley we stopped to visit with Harry Robinson, who entertained us all evening with a long story about Old Coyote. After leaving Harry’s, we drove on to Vernon and Chase to see Mary Abel, Aimee August and Adeline Willard, all singers who would later devote many hours of their time to teaching me the ways of their music. During this trip, I experienced a still vital oral culture that bore little relation to anything I had known. Here were songs and stories that were integral to living communities. They were not written and did not require extensive technical skill, yet they were more deeply embedded with meaning than all the classical études and finger exercises of my last ten years.
For the next few years I spent time in B.C.’s southern interior meeting Native singers and sharing their songs. At the same time I discovered the writings of anthropologist/political activist “Jimmy” Teit, a Shetlander who had worked in the same area some sixty years earlier. Wherever I went I carried copies of his handwritten notes, his photographs and his cylinder song recordings.
A FRIENDSHIP
Although Harry was a singer, he could not hear well, making it difficult for him to participate in my music project. He had invited me, however, on that first overnight visit, to come again and stay for as long as I wished. So I did, finding it a refreshing break to sit at Harry’s table and listen to a stream of stories. During these visits, we spent our time running errands in Hedley, Keremeos and Penticton. In good weather, we took trips to local landmarks, such as Coyote’s rocks, old pit-house sites, rock painting sites or whatever appealed to us. Then, from late afternoon or early evening until midnight, Harry told stories.
Our fullest year together was 1980–81. I had rented a cabin in the Coldwater Valley near Merritt to facilitate my field research on songs. Only an hour from Hedley, I visited Harry regularly. He was in excellent health, so we took many trips together. In January and February we travelled Harry’s favourite route south to Omak, in Washington State, where we spent long nights as guests at a sacred winter dance. A few weeks later I picked him up and transported him to my Coldwater cabin, where we spent a week tracking down old friends and relatives in the Nicola Valley. On the long weekend in May, Michael and I took in one of Harry’s favourite events, the annual Keremeos rodeo.
In between visits, we wrote letters back and forth, sometimes as often as once a week. Even though writing was not easy for Harry, he enjoyed it, much as he enjoyed his storytelling. “I could not Help it for written a long letter,” he wrote to me on one occasion, “because Im storie teller I always have Planty to say.” Harry liked letter-writing for other reasons, too. He was a meticulous planner, and he could read and reread, write and rewrite his letters, planning every detail thoroughly. He also believed that letters helped to prevent misunderstandings between friends. In one letter in 1981 he urged me to “take time and figure out. It’s better to be a good friend for last 4 years. We should keep that way because one of these days Im going be missing. Im old.”
Letters helped Harry fill the void left by Matilda’s death. They occupied his time and gave him an outlet for emotions that he would otherwise not express.
I always Happy when I get a words from you. I don’t think I can have any Better friend than you. Your the Best friend I ever known. (Letter, February 28, 1981)
In the summer of 1982, Harry was hospitalized in Penticton for a leg ulcer that had bothered him for some time. Because of his mistrust of the medical staff and his hatred of Western medicine, Harry discharged himself, ordered a taxi and returned to Hedley. He notified us of this in a letter of September 12.
The hospital is no good for Indian like me. Maybe is all right for some Indians Because they don’t know. Got to be in there a long enough to know how bad it is the Hospital.… I depend on whiteman doctor for 11 month but they don’t do. Today is 9 days since I come out of Hospital. Still the same. My ankle not too Bad but not good. So I thought the chance I have I will switch to my own Indian ways. if the Indian doctor can’t do it like the white man doctor, then I will know nothing can be done about it.… The Indian doctor is Different than the White doctor. he can do it ones or he can never [do] it ones.
Harry’s frustration with hospitals and doctors was partly because he believed plak to be the cause of his ulcer.
They call that “plak” in the Indian word. But in English they call it witchcraft. And they could dig that to the river or to the creek or to the lake, wherever is water. Go over there and take a bath, you know, early in the morning. After take that, they hold ’em and talk to ’em just like I do now with you. Talk to ’em and then they tell ’em what his wish. He wish for that person to die or he wish for that person to get hurt. But not die. Just get hurt. Or he wish for the man or woman to get bad luck at all times.
Within two weeks of discharging himself from hospital, Harry hired a couple of young friends to drive him to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, to see an Indian doctor whom he thought might be able to help him. It was a long and strenuous trip.
We travel on that road, we musta pass 30 to so trucks to every mile. Im a Def but I can Heard the Hinde wheel singing a song I used to sing, Oh Mollie. Wendy, do you remember that song I sing?… I see the Indian Doctor. He works on me at Sunday night and tell me not to expect to get Better right away.… tell me to use medicine everyday for about 2 weeks or more. (Letter, September 24, 1982)
When his leg failed to respond to the Indian doctor’s treatment, Harry became very discouraged. We suggested that he try a ninety-year-old Chinese herbalist we knew in Vancouver. He agreed, and so Michael and I drove to Hedley with our week-old son, Leithen, to pick him up. In Vancouver, we delivered him every other day over the course of a month to Dr. Lee and his daughter. In the middle of Harry’s treatment, just as his sore showed signs of closing, Dr. Lee died. Dejected, Harry returned to his home at Hedley to treat his leg on his own. The fight against this malady—hours and hours of changing bandages and applying ointments—consumed Harry.
By the fall of 1983, he was so weak that he stayed in bed almost constantly. In a short letter of September 23, he explained that “I might make it or may not. I was so weak and so