Suquamish

Jerome V. Lofgren

Description

A fast-paced psycological thriller set in the native village of Suquamish. Charlie Frankson, the shaman from Finger Point, Alaska comes for rest but encounters turbulance.
Charlie Frankson was given a riddle by the old man of Suquamish. When is a man his mother's daughter? When is a woman her father's son? The solving of this riddle lead to the inner healing of a sexually damaged man.

Sujets

• Thrillers
• Christian radicalism
• Indigenous peoples of the Americas
• Chief Seattle
• Unconscious
• Sexuality
• Gun politics
• Fire
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 29 mai 2001
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781469758992
• Langue: English

Extrait

Suquamish
 
Jerome V. Lofgren
 
 
Authors Choice Press
San Jose New York Lincoln Shanghai
 
Suquamish
 
All Rights Reserved © 2001 by JVL Alaska, Inc.
 
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.
 
Authors Choice Press
an imprint of iUniverse.com, Inc.
 
For information address:
iUniverse.com, Inc.
5220 S 16th, Ste. 200
Lincoln, NE 68512
www.iuniverse.com
 
ISBN: 0-595-18387-5
ISBN: 978-1-4697-5899-2(eBook)
 
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
PREFACE  
INTRODUCTION  
CHAPTER ONE  
CHAPTER TWO  
CHAPTER THREE  
CHAPTER FOUR  
CHAPTER FIVE  
CHAPTER SIX  
CHAPTER SEVEN  
CHAPTER EIGHT  
CHAPTER NINE  
CHAPTER TEN  
CHAPTER ELEVEN  
CHAPTER TWELVE  
CHAPTER THIRTEEN  
CHAPTER FOURTEEN  
CHAPTER FIFTEEN  
CHAPTER SIXTEEN  
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN  
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN  
CHAPTER NINETEEN  
CHAPTER TWENTY  
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE  
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO  
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE  
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR  
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE  
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX  
CONCLUSIONS  
 
This book is dedicated to The members and friends of the Suquamish Nation.
 
PREFACE  
Suquamish has always been a place of conflict, grinding, explosive conflict of earthquakes and eruptions. It is one of God’s caldrons. It is a place where the ore of life is ground up then heated under tremendous pressure until the dross is boiled away. The golden metal of souls purified, souls empowered remain. It is a place where the molten lava is produced deep beneath Suquamish by the grinding of the pacific tectonic plate against the North American plate.
Seas covered Suquamish for more than 4 billion years. At the close of the Jurassic period 135 million years ago, the plates collided with such force that the Sierra Nevada, Coastal ranges and Cascade mountains were shoved up. The plates continued to collide sending shock waves eastward over the continent causing the interior plains to lift and fall, to be flooded several times creating vast inland seas. Oil and coal beds were formed from marshy vegetation. Then 60 million years ago, the greatest collision took place buckling the floors of the inland sea and sending the Rocky Mountains into the sky.
Fossil-laden rocks that once were the mud flats of ancient inland seas rose several miles into the sky. Fossil remains of the once terrifying Tyrannosaurus Rex, the ponderous Stegasasaurus and Triceratops dinosaurs, became the perching places for modern-day golden eagles and peregrine falcons.
The ongoing collision squeezed molten lava up between the grinding plates to produce volcanoes such as Mt. Rainier that hovers over Suquamish like a sleeping giant whose periodic stirrings warn that it is not dead but is taking a little rest before roaring back to life.
A million years ago glaciers three-miles thick covered Suquamish. Puget Sound was carved out between the Olympic and Cascade Mountains by the grinding advances and retreats of these oceans of ice. Like giant millstones, they ground the basalt, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks into sand and gravel interlaced with sediment slabs of blue clay. Then about 12,000 years ago, the glaciers retreated depositing long ridges of drift that reached into the sound like hairy fingers.
Grasses crept over the gravel and rocks. Soon reeds and sawgrass populated the mashes. Birds came in search of food—mallards, cranes, and little sandpipers.
The birds exploded into the air in panic at the sound of dull thunder that rolled over the plains and up the valleys. The woolly mammoth had arrived in Suquamish. In the Olympic Mountains, the saber-toothed tiger and the cave bear fought over territory and food.
On the hairy ridges of glacial drift, droppings were deposited by passing mallards and snow geese en route to their summer nesting grounds in the far North Country. In the droppings were cedar seeds that germinated in the warm, wet soil heated by the summer sun.
Over the centuries, alder, birch, pine and hemlock joined the cedar seedlings. When humans first entered Puget Sound, the ridges and valleys were filled with huge grandfather trees like the cedars that were fifteen feet at the stump and several hundred feet tall.
Clams riding the incoming tides wiggled into the beach sands and mud flats. Razor clams and geoducks multiplied beyond count.
Fish found the plankton-rich waters of the sound ideal. Salmon, trout, lingcod and halibut with a host of other marine creatures surged into the emerald waters.
When the natural forces had done their work and Puget Sound was stocked beyond imagination with trees, food and minerals, the human creature from the far north entered the scene creeping and paddling along the shoreline, following the salmon to their spawning grounds.
One day a small hunting party arrived at the mouth of Agate Pass. They drew their dugout canoes up the gravel beach to a place of smooth sand that was surrounded by giant cedars. Their wanderings ceased. They had found what they and their kind had been searching for since their ancestors left central Asia. Salmon were in abundance, the swift silver and the mighty king. There were giant geoduck clams with huge siphons so long that a single clam fed a family of four. There was cedar bark for shelter, clothing and fuel.
The medicine men and women, after consulting the oracles and spirit guides, declared the place to be good and called it Suquamish. In the Salish language, Suquamish means “The place of clear water” that was born out of the conflict between salt water and fresh water. It was where the spirits of their ancestors who lived in the Orcas and Salmon had told them they should live. So they settled at Suquamish, as did their children and their grandchildren, for thousands of years, years beyond their ability to record.
Conflicting forces of nature made a good life possible for the Suquamish Indians. Fall rains broke the back of summer drought; winter cold froze the rain into snow and ice that fell upon the cedars sending many of the ducks and geese south and the warm spring sun brought them back to Suquamish as the forests and streams freshened and bubbled with life.
Seasons came and went during the succeeding millenniums. Salmon returned to spawn. Ducks flew by in flocks so dense that the sun was darkened. There were skirmishes between tribes over fishing and hunting grounds.
These conflicts were but preliminaries to what lay ahead. It began with rumors of strange white-skin men, rumors that were brought to the Suquamish longhouse by cousins who lived at the mouth of the Hoh River. The Suquamish medicine men and women were also seeing visions of their coming.
In May 1792, the Suquamish fishermen saw the white sails of Captain George Vancouver’s “Bird-ship” as the ship was eased into the sound on the incoming tide. They did not know that Captain Vancouver named their sound after his navigator, Lt. Peter Puget. When Captain Vancouver went ashore on Blake Island to meet with the native leaders he was met by a friendly young boy. He immediately took a liking to the boy. With the coming of the white man, the great conflict of people and cultures began.
At first, the Suquamish people viewed the intruders as curiosities. But as the white people came in increasing numbers and stayed, the Suquamish people saw the white people for what they were—a threat to their way of life. By then it was too late.
Chief Sealth, who was a lad of five when he met Captain Vancouver on Blake Island, had seen the future and understood the white man’s lust for the grandfather cedars, the lush valleys where herds of deer grazed and the gold of the sacred mountains. The white man lusted after brother salmon and the clams of the shore—all were in abundance beyond imagination.
Chief Sealth had come to know the blackness that was in the white man’s heart. He also knew that his people were powerless to prevent the white man’s progress. When the Point Elliott treaty was signed in 1855, the Northwest Indian tribes were far from being conquered.
While it is believed that most Indians, given the events of the day, were pragmatic enough to see that the “Bostons,” as the white men were then called because the vast majority of the original immigrants were from the Boston area of New England, were powerful people growing in numbers.
In 1855, the Indian population, estimated at 7,500, dominated the settlers by three-to-one. Clearly, Governor Stevens needed the Indians’ goodwill and realized both the threat of bloodshed and the subsequent slowing of the white settlement would occur if the U. S. Government did not deliver on the promise to compensate the Indians for their land.
“We have to do this to avoid conflict,” Stevens said.
Chief Noah Sealth was variously described as “runted” and as standing over 6-feet tall in his moccasins. He was called both ugly and a man of strong features that indicated character.
Historians are unanimous in saying the Chief disdained Western clothing and wore a breechcloth and blanket. He also was a man of his word and had a powerful, persuasive manner of speaking.
He was a Chief by virtue of the position his father held in the Suquamish Tribe. Sealth spoke only in Duwamish, the language of his mother’s tribe. He refused to use the Chinook trade jargon. No word of English is known to have passed his lips.
Governor Issac