hello friends, fans, foe and lovers,
ah, the burning crosses in our video preview. no, we're not satanists, maybe a bit hedonists, but bloody hell, who wouldn't be given the opportunity? haha. i don't think we're nihilists, maybe a bit anarchist, probably left wing, and definitely Indigenous.
so, what's with the burning cross you say? is it about something sinister? devious? a plot against organized religion? i don't think so, we're not that bloody clever. haha. the real deal is, a couple years ago i was filming a documentary about a group of First Nations, or Indigenous people, or aboriginal people, or as they like to say in the United States, "native americans," haha, sorry about the laugh, but Indians in the states are always so serious about that, whereas up here we refer to ourselves as "Indians," or a variation of that. haha.
anyway, this documentary was about a particular tribal group that was replacing the "pitch," headstones with granite slabs, proper memorial stones, because the pitch gravestones were 50 to 100 years old or more. a pitch headstone is increasingly tough to find as well, because we've plundered our forests so bad here in the interior of british columbia, the entire province actually, has been over logged for more than a century. i'm getting off topic a bit, so a "pitch," headstone is one where a tree has died, or has an excessive amount of pitch, the tree dies and all the pitch, thanks to gravity sinks to the bottom of the tree and then the top of the tree eventually breaks off in a thing called "windshear," where the dried up, empty part of the tree breaks off in the wind over time. people have died from it, i mean imagine a 2000 pound tree falling on you. boom, your dead.
so, because our people didn't have money and still don't have money for fancy grave stones or memorial markers, we'd go find a pitch stump, carve it up, bring it down the mountain and use it as a memorial stone. i mean think about it, they weigh a ton and are bloody solid because the sap hardens and acts like a preservative. which is why they last so long, i mean, an ordinary stump would only last a few decades at best and begone, concrete would crumble and so we were left with an extraordinary amount of these crosses and grave markers piling up beside the cemeteries throughout the interior of BC as we replaced hundreds of these pitch headstones with granite ones.
of course, we wrote down as best we could the names of the people, they were from our bands, our families or long lost ones and families we never knew or heard of, because think about it, a century ago our people were going through unbelievable turmoil and changes. settlers and immigrants were landing in canada en masse and the indigenous people were being pushed off of their traditional lands onto tiny, shitty, useless reserves and forced to exist on rations and handouts from the colonial oppressors. not too mention all these horrible diseases we had never encountered before that were ravaging our people, something simple like the flu lead to complications, worse infections and death. then there was small pox, bronchitis, typhus, and more and more. whole bands and even nations were dying, so they were moving all over the place trying to escape these new, horrible ways to die.
as we were going about, i noticed quite a few cemeteries along train tracks, and i asked why? well, apparently, people would come to the train tracks with their ill trying to get a ride to a hospital or a doctor, and many died along the tracks, or the trains would be so full of ill people or dying or dead that when there would be too many, they'd simply stop somewhere and dump bodies into a mass grave. if they could, families would come back and put up pitch headstones, but more often than not, these places only had one large ominous cross in the cemeteries. maybe with a date and the name of a chief or someone of note who had passed away. it was all quite sad really, thinking about all these aboriginal people that were dumped along the train tracks into mass graves and given these anonymous silent burials. i'd notice chiefs far from other territories that no one knew or could remember, perhaps they'd died trying to find medical attention for their nation or family or themselves. and as we pulled these gravestones out of these cemeteries, they began to pile up and i remember my chief and some others wondering what to do, and i said, 'let's burn them," because we didn't want people to steal them.
deep down i also think i wanted to rid ourselves of the yolk of colonialism and conquering, european religion was rammed down our throats for well over a century, we had residential schools, we've had abuses of all kinds in these horrible places that took generation after generation of children away from their families and forced them to stop practicing their culture, their language and their traditions in some misguided attempt to "remove the indian from the child." my own family has been deeply affected by the residential school system, both my parents went as did their siblings, and life has never been the same for them, or normal for me.
so i said we should burn them and almost without word or ceremony that's exactly what we did, we dragged all these pitch crosses and headstones out and set them on fire. and because they were full of pitch, boy did they go up in flames, the heat burned fast and fiercely intense and hot. in a way it was a relief to watch them go up and so i started filming and taking pictures, and then my chief called me over as i was wandering around one particular cemetery and told me to look, because as the headstones were burning, the names of the people would briefly appear as the years of debris burned away, so i tried taking as many photos as i could. some of these headstones were so old that on the surface, there was nothing we could get from them, no names or anything, we would even trying to rub a pencil on wax paper to get something from them and we would get nothing. but some of them, as they burned, the names and dates would appear, only for about thirty seconds and then would be gone. so we got some documentation and would fix unmarked headstones with their names. for me it was cathartic, a relief really, that we were taking back our family and traditional names where we could and freeing ourselves from this forced religion that had done so much damage to our people. everyone one was quiet and i often wonder if they felt the same thing, it was powerful and something i'll never forget.
which leads us to the whole point of this endeavour, it was to remember those who had passed on before, with proper stone memorials, the by product was perhaps wiping away clean the lasting vestiges of a religion we never wanted in the first place. so now you know the story about the burning crosses in our video preview, and perhaps now we could move on and get back to the music if you don't mind too terribly?!?
regards,
chris bose.
ps: as an artist and aboriginal person, i'm pretty goddamn tired of explaining and justifying myself all the time. been doing it my whole life, and quite done with it. perhaps you should explain yourself to me?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7tLpysqAnY&list=UUX6ugt96BuSUAPvoWFogX-w
