Che'wah'ko

Yesterday I strained my way up Magee Peak via the Magee Trailhead. I had attempted this hike in June from a different, less steep but significantly longer trailhead that skirted some alpine lakes, but the snow was still too deep, and I felt the prudent thing to do was turn around lest I slip off the mountain and no one was there to witness it. The local Native American tribe had named this peak many years before the Anglo name “Magee” took hold. It was named Che’wah’ko. The Pit River story is that this peak was the origin of most of the animals in the world; salmon, bears, deer came streaming down the mountainside and spread about the world. In 2020 and not being Native American, I cannot hold this story in my heart because it is not my story, but I appreciate the beauty  and sacredness of it, and it made the steep, unforgiving hike up to the peak have more meaning than a pretty landscape of geological interest. I pondered this story as I came down the mountain. I was too busy telling myself to “keep walking” and “You can do this” and “I’m glad no one can see me right now” and “You have done much more difficult hikes than this” and “One step at a time” going up the mountain, there really was no time for reflection; it was all about getting up the mountain. On my descent, I did have time to think, and I asked myself the question: “If the Pit River tribe believed this mountain peak to be the spring of animal life that ran down the slopes to find their homes in the world, what did that mean to the Pit River people? Does that mean the world as they knew it? Or does it mean the world as they know it now?” I have to imagine that their world was this valley and the canyon and the peaks that surrounded them. The animals in their story must have been the animals that they saw roaming, that they ate, that were a part of everyday life. I then pondered how people can translate a story that is built upon a certain area, a certain context, a certain world view and somehow impose that on the wide world with so many other contexts, landscapes, and world views. I guess people have been doing this for a very long time. Except no one has imposed this myth of creation into my reality. It is something I had discovered in reading. It is not a story I hold as truth, nor do I discount the magic of it. If I had not opened my eyes to a different perspective, it would be a peak with pretty scenery. My hike would just have been a hike that left my legs wobbly. I probably would not have even gone there had I not known that this place held such significance to the people that knew this land first. 

 Every day I navigate this world, a world of busy opinions, limited world views, stubborn adherence to beliefs that have been imposed/blue printed into the brains of people. Everyone thinks they are God, and their opinion stands as the ultimate word, and we have our great and all powerful leader of our nation to model that sort of blind thinking. Here it is, people, we may all be hiking up Magee Peak, and every single person can call it that, but our opinions do not change what it was a hundred years ago, nor do they change how it stands now. Our opinions are a whisper in the wind, no matter how loud we roar them in obnoxious egotistical syllables. My suggestion is that we listen to the stories, we read about them, we make our understanding of our time and place as varied and broad as we can, so that we are not limited to the pain of the upward struggle and the rigidity of one world view. Another suggestion might be to go up the mountain in the first place and be humbled by it.