For twenty years Abe Williston flew all over the world. Now, at the controls of a small airplane owned by Michael Redsky, he was headed back to Kenora, Ontario, returning to close friends he'd left behind as Native culture was being sacrificed on the white man's altar of bureaucracy. Would there be something to keep him from leaving a second time? The memories of forgotten friendships held no answers.
Set in simpler times against the background of Northwestern Ontario’s Lake of the Woods, ALTAR and THRONE explores the friendships between Natives and whites, tested by a world turning more complex as cultures collide.
Ed Zaruk lives and writes in Quesnel, B.C.
Through Story Teller Eyes. By Annie Gallant
Jack Redsky, a member of the Fish clan and full-blooded Ojibway, looked up to see the float plane disappear over the trees. Sharing the realm of the eagle, it reminded him that the coming of the white man to the Lake of the Woods had changed life for his father and grandfather, some for good, some for bad, but mostly it just complicated things.
As a heritage from these two men, Jack had been entrusted with the legends and values that had served his nation from times unknown. Even as the white man’s society eroded his culture, Jack learned carefully the lessons taught him about how to deal with change.
“Be like a tall tree,” his grandfather had said. “Bend when the wind blows. A tree that does not bend will fall. Bend, but keep your roots in our sacred Indian soil.”
Abe Williston loved Northwestern Ontario from the air. Vast panoramas of trees and rivers stretching to the horizon under an ever-changing sky, swamps with bone-white tree snags reflecting the afternoon sun, the Lake of the Woods with its thousands of islands. Now, descending with mechanical problems, it all disappeared as he made a forced landing on the lake near the Long Grass Reservation. Tying his float plane to a tree in the middle of nowhere, he tested the knot. If he had to break down anywhere, this was probably not a bad place to be.