Skip to content
Back To Index

Dane-zaa Creation Story: A Dreamer’s Performance Transformed

by Robin Ridington, University of British Columbia

 

(password dzfn)

 

In 1967, I recorded the last Dane-zaa Dreamer, Charlie Yahey telling his culture’s creation story in the Beaver language. As he spoke into my tape recorder, he knew that he was creating a performative document for future generations. On the recording he said, “the world will listen to my voice.” Dane-zaa Dreamers, he said, “Dream ahead for everybody.” Over the intervening years, that recording and many others of the Dreamer’s songs and oratory have become important parts of the Dane-zaa soundscape.  Initially people asked me for cassette copies of the recordings they could play in their vehicles and homes. Later, I made CD copies, and more recently MP3 versions of the recordings on DVD. Today’s Dane-zaa songkeepers and storytellers agree that in the recordings we made, Charlie Yahey was speaking to people who would live after him.

Aku, Charlie, Bella
Three elders: Aku (Ray Acko), Charlie Yahey, and his wife Bells (Anachuan).

 

Dane-zaa who grew up speaking the Beaver language understand his words, as did the generations that went before. Younger people no longer speak Beaver and can only hear the obvious authority of his voice. In 2010, translator Billy Attachie and I worked together to write down a time-coded translation of the story that would make it accessible to people who did not grow up with the language. I then put the audio together with video images I took of the Dane-zaa environment. Underlying the original audio I mixed recordings of contemporary Dane-zaa singers and drummers, as well as video clips of people dancing to the Dreamers’ songs. Finally, I added Billy’s translation as a scrolling text synched to the Dreamer’s voice. I have called the result a transformed performance of the Dreamer’s story. One evening in the summer of 2016, the Doig River First Nation invited me to show the completed video in an outdoor setting during their cultural days celebration. We billed it, “the world premier” of the Dreamer’s performance for an audience that included both elders and youth, forty years after Charlie Yahey’s death in 1976.

The Dane-zaa creation story reflects themes that are commonly found in what Mircea Eliade (1964) called “shamanic cosmology,” in which upper and lower realms are connected through a common center or axis mundi. He writes:

The pre-eminantly shamanic technique is the passsage from one cosmic region to another – from earth to the sky or from earth to the underworld. The shaman knows the mystery of the break-through in plane. This communication among the cosmic zones is made possible by the very structure of the universe. [Eliade 1964:259]

In a paper on shamanic cosmology, Roger Walsh adds:

The shaman’s universe is three tiered, comprised of an upper, middle, and lower world, and the upper and lower worlds may themselves be multilayered. What makes shamans “cosmic travelers” is their experience of being able to traverse these multiple worlds and levels. [Walsh 1961. 259]

By these definitions, Dreamers like Charlie Yahey are clearly shamans. In their dreams they experience travel along yagatunne, the trail to heaven. When they return to their bodies on earth, they bring back stories and songs from people who have gone before them. The Dane-zaa creation story connects the three cosmic realms described above. It is a version of the widely distributed “earth diver” story. As Charlie Yahey tells it, the Creator draws a cross, creating a center, on a primeval body of water. He then sends animals down to find earth. Muskrat eventually surfaces with “the world” under his nails. The Creator tells this small world to grow and creates plants and animals, men and women, to live on it. When the white people come into Dane-zaa territory they bring agricultural crops for their food.

CY Making Drum OS CYP 18
Charlie Yahey making a drum.

 

The story goes on to describe a “bad creator,” like the “left handed twin” of Thomas King’s, The Back of the Turtle (King, 2014; Ridington, 2015). Charlie Yahey’s story describes the bad creator making giant animals that hunt humans. They are overcome by Tsayaa, a culture hero, who cuts some of them into little pieces to become the fur bearing animals we know today.  Others, he places beneath the earth. In Charlie’s story, the white people have discovered that they can drill into the ground for grease of the giant animals and use it to propel their vehicles. By exhuming bad energy from a previous episode of creation, they make the world smaller and less self sufficient. The video footage shows pump jacks and compressor stations, some of which are placed in giant fields of canola on former Reserve land the Dane-zaa still call, Suu na chi K’chige, the place where happiness dwells (Ridington and Ridington, 2013). The people at Doig who were present at the video’s “world premier” told me they felt that Charlie Yahey had returned to be with them again. They experienced the video as a transformation of Charlie Yahey’s original performance. As he suggested in the recording, his story has journeyed to a very different world from the one in which he grew up.

References Cited

Dane-zaa Creation Story told by Charlie Yahey https://vimeo.com/121211703 (password dzfn)

Eliade, Mircea. 1964. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

King, Thomas. 2014.  The Back of the Turtle. Toronto: Harper Collins.

Ridington, Robin. 2015. Got Any Grapes?  Reading Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle. Canadian Literature 224:163-68.

Ridington, Robin and Jillian Ridington. 2013. Where Happiness Dwells: A History of the Dane-zaa First Nations. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Walsh, Roger. 1991. Shamanic Cosmology: A Psychological Examination of the Shaman’s Worldview. ReVision 13:86-100.

 

More from this Volume
Bonjour/hello : de la présidente/from the president

J’ai eu l’honneur d’assumer la présidence de la CASCA dans une année mouvementée … and…

Mot de l’équipe / Editors’ Note

Bienvenue dans le numéro d'automne de Culture, le bulletin d'information semestriel de la CASCA! C’est…

Invisibilité et discrétion ? Conflits énergétiques et destructions socio-environnementales en Alt Empordà (Catalogne, Espagne)

Par Sabrina Bougie, étudiante au doctorat en anthropologie, Université Laval, Québec   La multiplication des…

Les Défis de l’Adaptation Culturelle(s) : Réflexions sur la Communication et la Sécurité en Temps de Crise

Emilie El Khoury, Ph.D, Post-Doctorante, Centre for International and Defense Policy (CIDP), Queen's University  …

Our members in the News/ Suivez nos membres dans les médias

At the University of Toronto, Associate Professor Girish Daswani appeared as a guest on a…

Des membres de la CASCA se distinguent/CASCA members stand out

University of Toronto Scarborough Anthropology Associate Professor Christopher Krupa has been awarded the 2023 Society…

In Memoriam: Megha Sharma Sehdev (1981-2023)

Dr. Megha Sharma Sehdev was a brilliant and creative scholar of law, violence, and care…

Beaver, Bison, Horse: The Traditional Knowledge and Ecology of the Northern Great Plains

As one of North America’s most unique ecologies, the Great Plains have fostered symbiotic relationships…

Conjuring the State: Public Health Encounters in Highland Ecuador, 1908-1945

The Ecuadorian Public Health Service was founded in 1908 in response to the arrival of…

Savoirs, utopies et production des communs

Savoirs, utopies et production des communs Martin Hébert, Francine Saillant et Sarah Bourdages Duclot (dir.).…

L’Europe et l’histoire des sans-histoire

L’Europe et l’histoire des sans-histoire Traduit de l’anglais (États-Unis) et présenté par André C. Drainville…

Autochtonie et question éducative dans les Outre-mer : Une enquête comparative en Guyane et en Polynésie française

Autochtonie et question éducative dans les Outre-mer. Une enquête comparative en Guyane et en Polynésie…

Éloge du raisonnable : Pour un réenchantement raisonné du monde

Éloge du raisonnable : Pour un réenchantement raisonné du monde Raymond Massé Presses de l’Université…

Petite

Petite Francine Saillant Academia, Louvain-la-Neuve, 212 pages, ISBN: 978-2-8061-3596-4 Petite, une enfant exploratrice, se frotte…

Recent Articles
Past Volumes

Contact

Membership

Our members are first to receive information about jobs, awards and conferences.

Back To Top