The Interpreter

Robert Moss

Description

A vivid narrative of the clash of cultures on the colonial New York frontier, The Interpreter tells the story of a master shaman and his twin apprentices—the Mohawk dreamer called Island Woman and the young immigrant Conrad Weiser—who become critical players in their two peoples' struggle for survival. Island Woman will grow to become mother of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk nation and a revered atetshents (dream healer). Conrad, transported to North America with the Palatine German refugees from the wars in Europe, helps lead his people's rebellion against the abuses of colonial governors and magnates. Sent to live among the Mohawk, he learns their language and their dreamways, is able to build bridges between communities, and later rises to fame in Pennsylvania as an indispensable Indian interpreter.

In the Mohawk language, the word for interpreter, sakowennakarahtats, speaks of a person who can transplant something from one soil to grow in another. The Interpreter is such a book. Through its pages, we are able to find ourselves in another time, and in other worlds. We accompany the Four Indian Kings on their 1710 visit to London to see the Queen; they were not kings in their own matriarchal society, but they included Hendrick, the redoubtable warrior who later instructed Ben Franklin that he must urge the colonists to unite in a confederacy on the Iroquois model. We travel with Vanishing Smoke, the Bear dreamer, on his journey into the afterlife. And we learn, with Island Woman and Conrad, how we can travel across time as well as space in shamanic lucid dreaming, and guide souls to where they belong.

In his new preface, Robert Moss describes how his Cycle of the Iroquois—Fire Along the Sky, The Firekeeper, and The Interpreter—began with dreams and visions in which an ancient Iroquois arendiwanen (woman of power) insisted on teaching him in her own language, until he was obliged to learn it.
Preface: Birth of Three Novels of the Iroquois

Prologue: Tent People

PART ONE: PROMISED LAND

1. The Four Kings

2. Weiser’s Crossing

3. Island Woman

4. Homecoming

5. The Divided One

6. A Council of Birds

7. Death of Vanishing Smoke

8. Conrad’s Problem

9. War Magic

10. Ghost Warrior

11. Cave of the Mother

12. Revolt in the Pines

PART TWO: SHAMAN’S APPRENTICE

13. Longhair’s Country

14. Sweat

15. Dreaming True

16. Captain Kidd’s Legacy

17. Moshup’s Beach

18. The Fall of King Hendrick

19. Shape-Shifters

20. The Peacemaker

21. Dream Lover

22. A Stiff-Necked People

23. Tobias’s Ladder

24. The Relocation of Souls

PART THREE: THE FALL

25. Into Pennsylvania

26. Brother Enoch

27. Eagle Peak

Sources and Consequences

Sujets

• Historical fiction

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 26 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438443539
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for Robert Moss and the Cycle of the Iroquois
“Before the European invasion of North America, advanced systems of knowledge had been amassed over the centuries by indigenous people. One of the most remarkable aspects of the Iroquois tradition was the process by which they worked with dreams. Robert Moss has made these dreamways available to contemporary readers, who will be inspired by the spiritual insight and practical advice that is still applicable today.”
—Stanley Krippner, PhD, Professor of Psychology, Saybrook Graduate School, coauthor of Personal Mythology
“Robert Moss opens ancient and modern pathways into the realms of the soul, giving us insights into our deep humanity and into our American heritage.”
—David Spangler, author of Everyday Miracles: The Inner Art of Manifestation
“Robert Moss offers us powerful and much needed medicine for our time, combining well-researched and fascinating Iroquois legends and history, the wisdom of his ancient and contemporary guides, and his own truths and teachings to inspire us to once again walk the path of soul and spirit, remembering and honoring our dreams.”
—Rita Dwyer, past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams
“Robert Moss participates in Native American cultural knowledge directly—via his own dreams. His experiences delving into the Iroquois spiritual world along with his use of fascinating historical materials combine to make a rich literary feast.”
—Charles Stewart, PhD, Department of Anthropology, University College of London
“Robert Moss is a writer of considerable skill. In The Firekeeper , he shows a talent for accurate historical detail and an ability to recreate the past, both as it was and as it might have been. To read The Firekeeper is to be transported to another time and place, and leave it measurably enlightened.”
—James A. Michener
“ The Firekeeper by Robert Moss depicts with accurate and exciting detail the time of the French and Indian War. Through the fictionalized lives of historical individuals, Sir William Johnson and Catherine Weissenberg, and memorable, almost mythical characters such as the Iroquois shaman Island Woman and Ade, a former slave, the narrative springs to life. The characters, even the minor ones, are clearly drawn in this fast-paced tale, and the pages keep turning as we learn about the lives of the original inhabitants of this land, and of the early European settlers. This fascinating historical novel offers just the right mix: an involving story which imparts a deeper understanding.”
—Jean M. Auel, author of The Clan of the Cave Bear

BOOKS BY ROBERT MOSS
The Cycle of the Iroquois Fire Along the Sky: Being the Adventures of Captain Shane Hardacre in the New World The Firekeeper: A Narrative of the New York Frontier The Interpreter: A Story of Two Worlds
Dreaming and Imaginal Realms
Conscious Dreaming: A Spiritual Path for Everyday Life
Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life beyond Death
Dreaming True: How to Dream Your Future and Change Your Life for the Better
Dreamways of the Iroquois: Honoring the Secret Wishes of the Soul
The Dreamer's Book of the Dead: A Soul Traveler's Guide to Death, Dying, and the Other Side
The Three “Only” Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence and Imagination
The Secret History of Dreaming

Robert Moss
THE INTERPRETER
A S TORY OF T WO W ORLDS

Cover art courtesy of the Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1977-35-3 Acquired with a special grant from the Canadian Government in 1977.
This is a work of historical fiction. Any resemblance to living persons or contemporary events is coincidental.
© 1997; 2012 by Robert Moss
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
All rights reserved
First published by Forge Books under Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.: 1997 First Excelsior Editions paperback printing: 2012
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by means including, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Excelsior Editions is an imprint of State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Kelli Williams Marketing by Kate McDonnell
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moss, Robert, 1946– The interpreter : a story of two worlds / Robert Moss.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4352-2 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. Weiser, Conrad, 1696-1760—Fiction. 2. Pennsylvania—History—Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775—Fiction. 3. German Americans—Fiction. 4. Indian agents—Fiction. 5. Mohawk Indians—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6063.O83I58 2012
823'.914—dc23
2011049253
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This story is for my father a Scottish soldier whose love reached beyond death

Men do mightily wrong themselves when they refuse to be present in all ages and neglect to see the beauty of all kingdoms.
—Thomas Traherne
*
We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard of, must be possible in it. This is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most inexplicable.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
*
Whenever a knight of the Grail tried to follow a path made by somebody else, he went altogether astray.
—Joseph Campbell
Preface
Birth of Three Novels of the Iroquois
Because of a hawk and a white oak and my need to get away from big cities, in 1986 I purchased a farm in rolling horse country in the upper Hudson Valley of New York. I had no idea how completely this move would change my life. But there were clues from the very beginning in the irruption of the dream-logic of a deeper reality into my ordinary world. The first weekend my wife and I saw the farm–much of it still primal woodlands where the deer drifted in great droves–I knew in my gut this was a place I needed to be. I sat under an old white oak behind the derelict farmhouse, feeling the rightness of the place but also that I needed a further sign if we were to make the move to a new landscape far removed from the people we knew and the fast-track life I had been leading as a bestselling thriller-writer.
A red-tailed hawk circled overhead, a female (to judge by the size), her belly-feathers glinting silver-bright in the sunlight. She proceeded to drop a wing feather between my legs. Sometimes you can't escape the sense that something from a deeper world is poking through the veil of consensual reality, like the finger of an unseen hand. Or a wingtip.
An early snowstorm in October the following year, soon after we had finished the renovations and moved into the farm, isolated us from the modern world behind downed maple limbs and huge snowdrifts. With power gone for three days, well water was no longer available and we heated snow in buckets over the fire in the great hearth of the family room in order to flush the toilets. We read stories by candlelight, and made them up, and joked about living like the first settlers on that land, the Dutch pioneers who had used my study as their “borning room” and whose pre-Revolutionary bodies were buried in a simple graveyard on the hill on the northern side of the house.
I had impressions of presences from earlier times as I walked that land. When I sat with the white oak, I felt I could see the passage of those who had come before, indigenous and immigrant, across seasons and centuries. I saw a strapping native warrior with a great tattoo like a sunburst on his chest. In my dreams, I observed and then sometimes seemed to become a powerful man who sometimes wore the red coat of an English general of an earlier time, but at other times appeared in a great feathered head-dress, like a native chief.
I decided to take an interest in local history and played with the idea of writing an historical novel set in my new neighborhood. I frequented used bookstores, and in one of them–the old Bryn Mawr bookshop in Albany–that benign shelf elf that Arthur Koestler called the Library Angel came into play. In the local history section, my hand fell on a thick blue-bound volume, one of a collection titled Sir William Johnson Papers . Sir William Johnson? Never heard of him. I opened the book at random and found myself reading a letter from this Johnson, involving Indian affairs. His prose flowed in rolling cadences. I heard the voice behind the text, and felt sure that I knew that voice.
Intrigued, I took the book home. I was soon deeply immersed in researching the life and times of an extraordinary Anglo-Irishman who came from County Meath to the American colonies in the 1730s in hopes of making his fortune on the New York frontier. Leaders of the Mohawk people, who were no slouches at diplomacy and war, recognized in Johnson a plausible, capable young man with a magnetic personality and set out to recruit him as their agent and interpreter to the British and the colonial whites after he started farming in the Mohawk Valley. Though Johnson rose to fame as King's Superintendent of Indians and one of the architects of the English victory over France in the French and Indian War–whose outcome ushered in the American Revolution–he started out more Mohawk (and of course more Irish) than English.
It was understandable that I had never heard of him. I grew up in Australia, and American history was almost completed ignored in my school education.