Discovery

Rager meets with the Windsor House band administrator, chief, and council. They agree to a number of actions to revitalize the village: reopen the school which Indian Affairs should never have closed; lobby the province to place a resident police officer with a holding cell in the village; open and subsidize the co-op sawmill; repair a dozen houses suffering with mold; establish an Indian development corporation to own and operate the Indian Affairs-owned and operated tourist camps; and, in the longer term,

relocate the village onto the mainland so an airstrip can be built to lower freight costs, and provide year-round passenger and medical travel. (Years earlier, Indian Affairs decided to build the village on two small islands where an airstrip could never be built.)  

The band administrator, makes a final point:” Look at all the land and water around here. That’s where we come from. Even though the government wants us gone, it’s not going to happen. We have traditional camps; we use those camps to hunt, trap, and fish. We have burial sites. We have sacred sites. We go back a long way. The land is us, John. The government has no right to tell us anything. The village is just a place that can be moved. Do you understand – the land, water and river, everything you see, is our home?”

What follows is an excerpt from Part 2, Chapter 2, where Rager, before leaving the village, decides to visit the Oblate priest, Father Benoit, a man who has lived in the village for forty-eight years and speaks Ojibwa fluently. During their meeting Rager asks the cleric about a strange event the nun had written about in her letter where in 1972 a member of the Anglican community predicted the ‘end of the world’ on Easter Sunday. When the prediction failed, the Anglicans who represented half the village left to establish a new community.

As with Rager, I too did visit a resident Oblate priest who had lived forty-eight years in the village and much of what is written about the “end of the world” incident is based on that discussion.

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Photo by MAURO FOSSATI on Unsplash

“What do we know about people?” the priest began. “What do we really know? In many ways, each of us is a mystery and we can only guess what each of us is thinking. We talk and we listen to each other, we try to connect, and more often than not, we fail. But there are times when one man can affect what others think and come to believe. They almost have a power to control people. They do it through what – their own beliefs, their own will, or is it through something deeper, through reaching out to what the people themselves want to believe?

“A prophet is like that: he works with a willing audience, much like a magician who plays tricks works with those who want to believe. Perhaps it is best to say that after all the changes in their lives, the Anglicans who had moved into Windsor House were ready for what was to happen. They wanted to believe; they wanted the world to end.

“It started in October, 1972. Noah Anderson was his name – he was ‘the prophet,’ a thirty-eight-year-old trapper, a bachelor, an Anglican; a man with no brothers or sisters, a man who lived in the village, but more often lived with his elderly parents in an outpost camp. He was someone who kept to himself; someone you might see now and then in the village trading furs or buying supplies. He was a man who did everything alone – trapping, hunting, and fishing – and was never known to have been with a woman, at least not that I know of. From what I was told, he attended church on a regular basis, or as much as he could, but he was never someone considered overly religious. I suppose that is why when it happened, when he experienced his vision, it shattered what the people had come to believe about Noah. It made them think that what he experienced, perhaps, was true.

“This is what he told everyone:

“‘I was alone, hunting on the Attawapiskat River. I turned off onto the Martin Falls Drinking River. At one point, the river changed direction and began to flow towards a great light. I found that I no longer had control over the boat. Suddenly it was the river that had control, and it pulled me towards the light.

“‘After some time, I heard a voice calling me, “Noah, come to me, my son…Draw closer, do not be afraid, my son...Come to me…Come.” Soon, I saw a man standing on a hill with a great multitude of people sitting at the base of the hill listening to him. The man was clothed in a long white robe with a golden girdle around his breast. His hair was long and dark, his eyes radiant. On his feet were bronze sandals and there was a halo around his head. In his right hand he held seven stars. The man looked at me and saw that I was terrified. He repeated the same words, “Noah, come to me my son. Do not be afraid. I am Jesus Christ, the only son of God, the savior who was sent to save the world.” And so, I let the river pull me towards him until I reached shore, where the people parted and let me sit.

“Jesus spoke to the multitude. He said the world would soon enter a period of tribulation when seven angels would descend from Heaven onto Earth. Each angel would carry a bowl of wrath. The first bowl would unleash foul-smelling sores onto men; the second would destroy the seas and oceans; the third would turn rivers and lakes into blood; the fourth would turn the sun into a ball of fire; the fifth would unleash Hell – a deep, fathomless pit full of dragons, serpents, and demons where Satan sat on a throne in the middle of a burning lake; the sixth would unleash Armageddon, when good and evil, angels and demons, would enter into a great battle; and the seventh would unleash an earthquake that would destroy all the cities and nations.

“Jesus said that after Armageddon he would descend triumphantly from Heaven, leading a great host of angels to judge both the living and dead. Those who were saved would live for eternity in a new Jerusalem – a city of gold filled with jewels, where there would be no desire or sin, no beginning or end, no time, only spirit – with God the Father, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end, sitting in his golden throne triumphant. Those who were dammed would spend eternity in hell with Satan. Jesus said that the period of tribulation would begin on Easter Sunday, April 2, 1972.’….

Noah eventually convinces all the Anglicans in Windsor House that on Easter Sunday the world will end. Father Benoit prevents the Catholics from believing in the prediction by quoting from Mathew 24:36, where Jesus says,” But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son but the Father only.”

In his discussion with Rager, the cleric explains the underlying cause of the event in the following way, “History is full of such events where people who have experienced a crisis – perhaps a plague, famine, war, or an event or series of events where they lose all control over their lives – turn to a supernatural explanation. It is not the first time this has happened and it will not be the last. ‘Beware of false prophets’ is not without precedence, especially when the false prophet believes in what he or she is saying. If you research the literature, you will read stories of ‘crisis cults’ and ‘false prophets’ going back millennia. I believe it was the same with Noah. The Anglicans had experienced great changes in their lives and no longer lived a traditional life, but were reliant on government. In a way they had experienced the end of the world, and they turned to a supernatural explanation. Noah’s vision gave them that explanation.”

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