Richard Van Camp
A Dogrib (Tlicho) Dene from Fort Smith, NWT, Richard Van Camp is an internationally renowned storyteller and best-selling author. He is the author of the novel The Lesser Blessed, a collection of short stories Angel Wing Splash Pattern, and two children's books with Cree artist, George Littlechild. His new baby book Welcome Song for Baby: A Lullaby for Newborns was the official selection of the Books for BC Babies program and was given to every newborn baby in British Columbia in 2008. Richard's new short story collection, The Moon of Letting Go, will be released through Enfield & Wizenty in 2009 and so will his comic book, Path of the Warrior, with Cree artist Steve Sanderson through the Healthy Aboriginal Network. His new novel, Blessing Wendy, will be released in the fall of 2010 through Orca Book Publishers. Richard was awarded Storyteller of the Year for both Canada and the US by the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers.
You can listen to four of the short stories in Angel Wing Splash Pattern ("Mermaids", "Sky Burial", "The Night Charles Bukowski Died") narrated by Ben Cardinal as well as "the uranium leaking from port radium and rayrock mines is killing us..." narrated by Richard himself at: www.richardvancamp.org
You can contact Richard at: rvancamp@shaw.ca.
Author Interview: Kateri chats with Richard
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Interview with Kegedonce Author Richard Van Camp
by Celu Amberstone
An interview with Richard Van Camp by June Scudeler on his spoken word recording of "the uranium leaking from port radium and rayrock mines is killing us" featured in Redwire Magazine's Summer 2003 issue and on Spirit Magazine's "Roots and Rights" CD featured in their fifth issue "Rhythms of Peace and Resistance: The Music Issue."
JS: How did this spoken word project happen?
RVC: I was invited by Redwire magazine to contribute a spoken word poetry piece for their Summer, 2003 issue. And to do that I had to go to RezTown Lighting and Sound, which is run by a gentleman named Lenny Fisher here in Vancouver. And I showed up, and Lenny has a home studio and Peter Morin showed up from Redwire. I went into...there's three parts of the house. There's the studio where I was and then there's the kitchen where Peter was and then there was the mix board with all the computers where Lenny was. It was a very grey day, which matched the mood of the piece. I did three takes for the recording. The first one was me and it didn't work and the second one was half me and the third take, which you hear, is someone speaking through me. And who it is is a man from my hometown who was about to lose his only daughter to cancer and she actually passed away just a little while ago and I grew up with her. She was my first kiss.
You see, Fort Smith, where I grew up, is located on the Highway of the Atom, and that is the old transport route that the American soldiers used to transport uranium on, after they barged down the Slave River and Great Slave Lake. Uranium came to our hometown, it came to Fort Smith. Not even ten years ago, there were people finding rocks of uranium in people's back yards and gardens. There's a part of the town that we like to call the "Circle of Death." And what that means is if you have a home in that circle, you're gonna get cancer. A lot of fine folks who've lived there within that circle have gotten cancer. There have been so many people who've have raised speculation but for whatever reason, nobody ever does a full-scale investigation. Well, my dear friend who passed away, she lived in that circle of death. And that time I did the recording, I really sensed that her father...what you hear in my voice is his worry for his daughter and that's why it escalates like that and that's what can happen to me sometimes when I'm writing. It's almost like I'll leave and somebody else comes in. I was very...awestruck after that third reading. And I remember going around the corner after that third reading and I was just shaking after that reading. And I saw Peter and he had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. It was almost like he meant to light it three days ago and I remember his cup was paused at mid-air, a cup of coffee, and it was steaming. It was like he was frozen and he said, "I think we got it." And I said, "Yeah, I think we got it too", and I went in the back room and Lenny looked at me and gave me the thumbs up and we just went "Wow! That's it! We're done." I was gone, probably, within an hour of arriving.
But I remember feeling really jolted for the rest of the day because it was almost as if I picked up on worry here in Vancouver. It was recorded in Vancouver but it was liked I picked up the worry of a father in my hometown, up in Fort Smith. I'm always in awe of the process of writing and reading when I read my work. The Dogrib people are a people of prophets and we've had many prophets in our time. June Helm actually wrote a book called Power and Prophecy Among the Dogribs and she talks about the Dogrib prophets and she documents them very well and what they saw and what they did.
I'm definitely not a prophet; however, there was one night, a long time ago, before I wrote this story, when I was on the Penticton Indian reserve and I was at a friend's house and she was out on the rez--way out in the country and it was quiet, probably the quietest place I've ever stayed. It was wonderful to have that kind of peace outside. That night I had a dream I was standing at the foot of a hill, like a cliff, hey, like a bluff was above. I was standing there alone and I could hear something thundering towards me. It was almost like I was listening to a buffalo stampede and I was so scared I froze. I froze because I also couldn't wait to see what was going to come jumping over that mountain or that bluff towards me or over me. I remember praying that whatever it was would surge over me, even if they were falling and they wouldn't land on me. I remember I waited with great anticipation because I couldn't wait to see what was going to show itself. It got closer and I could feel it rumbling underneath my feet, when all of a sudden it was like I rose so I could get a better perspective and all of a sudden a huge stag--it was almost prehistoric how huge it was--stopped at the top of the bluff and looked at me. But what was peculiar and what was sacred about this animal, maybe it was a spirit animal, was that the antlers came out of the middle of its face and there was a heart-the heart of the antlers was an actual heart--and it had a beautiful rack of antlers, antlers I'd never seen before. All of a sudden, in the middle of the confluence of the heart opened the bluest eye. It was a single eye and it opened and that's when I woke up. That started me inside on a spiritual journey towards writing the "the uranium leaking from port radium and ray rock mines is killing us" which is published in Angel Wing Splash Pattern (published by Kegedonce Press).
Because it can take me years to write a story and without writing it down I'm writing it inside of me. It's feeling its way through me; it's growing inside of me but it takes something very special to release it. How the story was written was I was at the University of Victoria going for my undergrad degree. One afternoon I walked into my friend Pam Warner's house and I stopped two seconds after I walked into her house. It was immediately horrible. It really did feel like there were people standing there around me, screaming as loud as they could but I couldn't hear them but I could feel the energy of somebody yelling. I left; I said, "I can't be here. Is this haunted?" and she answered that it was. I asked her "Were people killed here?" and that really scared her and I said, "I want to go home. I don't want to be here. This is very haunted" and so I left and she left; she got scared; she went to stay at a friend's place for a while and I had to go home. But literally, as I started to go home, that story started to come. "the uranium leaking from port radium and rayrock mines is killing us" started to purr through me. It was ready to be told now. Maybe those spirits in that house helped me get what's on the page. I could say there's probably a year between that dream of the stag to me actually writing it and then, how many years later, I finally spoke it for the CD. So, we're probably talking about a six-year journey. So that's the whole story behind "the uranium leaking form port radium and ray rock mines is killing us."
JS: There's not any significance to blue, just the eyes?
RVC: Blue eyes have always scared me because Elders have glaucoma-what is that when you have to go for laser surgery? Cataracts. When I was a Handi-bus driver in Fort Smith, a lot of the Elders had cataracts and I was always scared to look in their eyes. That blue that I saw in the heart of the stag's antlers was such a piercing blue that I can still see it. Also, there's a little saying about eyes and that's, I think, might be the Heiltsuk of Bella Bella who believe that when you're about to eat a fish, you have to poke its eyes out or else you'll go blind later on in your life. That's where the blue came in as a theme because we give our power away through our eyes. We have to be very careful with where we look and how we look and your eyes can betray you really quickly. You can read a lie in someone's eyes; you can read lust in someone's eyes. If you know what to look for, you can spot pretty quick what someone's up to with their eyes. With couples, I always watch how a woman looks at her man. That tells me everything. That's why those blue eyes were important to me in that little piece.
JS: Was it a human eye or an animal eye?
RVC: It was the biggest eye I've ever seen, big! Maybe it was a spirit eye. I don't know. It was the biggest eye and the brightest eye.
Mahsi cho!