rebel heart: The Trickster Factor
Rick Ouellet

What is it that drives our beliefs? Using my own evolution I can trace a direct line from a time when I believed all I was told from both the Christian and indigenous mythologies, to a time when all has fallen away from me, except the obvious influence of the trickster in one of its many forms. In the battle for lost souls that ensued after the discovery of the vast populations of heathens that flourished in the New World, the buzzword was salvation. The salvation of those souls was relentlessly pursued even if it required the death of the earthly body connected to it. Researching the story of the atrocities committed in the name of God or Christ in the Americas requires a strong stomach and a faith that modern followers can act in conjunction with the higher spiritual purpose they find in the Bible.

In my youth I attended church on Christmas and during the summer at a yearly gathering of First Nations people at Lac St. Anne, in Alberta. The old wooden church was built in the 1880s and shaped like a cross, but the gathering has been going on since long before the old world met the new. During the pilgrimage, people lined up to pray for those who had passed on at a special altar at the front of the church. Time stood still once you entered the door and were transported to another realm. I remember the dark, almost windowless, interior. The flicker of candles provided the only light and the rafters creaked along, shaking with the sound of elders singing in Cree. In my young mind I saw the potential the church held. I wanted to do good, I wanted to be good. In fact I wanted to be Pope. Little did I understand that the probability of that happening was non-existent.

Part of my confusion was my acceptance of the childhood trickster tales that my grandparents told me, as truth. In those stories a character called Watsisis appeared as the First Human and proceeds to see all that is to be seen. Along the way, through adventure and misadventure, Watsisis creates aspects of the world (mountains, animal adaptations, food), and when Watsisis has seen all, the world is to end. There exists a whole range of similar trickster tales with the main characters for these tales commonly being Coyote and Raven. As I aged, I began to see the difference between the Christian and Amerindian approaches to understanding mythology. I could not find a place in Christianity because it had been the basis for the construction of this society, which has long taken biblical truth as a means for continued repression of indigenous knowledge. The trickster lesson seemed basic enough; Watsisis required that we, like him, needed to change the world in order to survive. Things cannot stay the same.

I was confronted with a test of my beliefs after I entered a giddy period of my life following the birth of my son. I took a job at a sawmill and began to use the union as a buffer to avoid seeing my mistake. One fateful day, against all my effort, we broke the one-day production record and received jackets. I took mine and put it on a crude man that I carved with a chainsaw using pick axes as arms. My foreman gave me a verbal reprimand, chastising me for rejecting the opportunity to advertise the sawmill's logo through their gracious gift. This foreman had been quite a partier in his past; his job, like mine, protected by the union. Apparently he experienced a mythological revelation and subsequently turned his life to biblical teachings. I was on night shift the next week and I made another crude figure of a man, placed my jacket on him, hauled him to the roof of the sawmill so all could see, and placed a quickly fashioned cross to lay over one of his arms.

The next day I was called into the office only to see my foreman smiling brightly, "Thank you," he said. "I'm famous, everyone knows me now." Our walls broke down and we came to a place of respect and understanding and I learned that sometimes the mythologies of Christian and indigenous peoples can be compatible. A few months later the birth of my daughter allowed me to become the first man in Alberta to receive paternity benefits, and thankfully the giddy period was over.

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