Free Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson

turn.
    But he gave no answer then.
    First he made a trip back to the Skeena river, which he had not seen for three years. The first thing he did there was to find his uncle and beat him up. He beat him thoroughly and methodically, without rancour – as any Raven would, simply repaying old injuries.
    Then he visited his parents and told them his intentions, at which his mother, a well-known seer, went at once into a trance, exclaiming, ‘O Raven, Raven! You bring light to the world but will die in the dark. It will end in tears.’
    ‘Okay,’ Porter said.
    He had often heard his mother pronouncing in this way, and common sense told him that people mainly did die in the dark and all things ended in tears.
    Just two months later, on a date that happened to coincidewith his seventeenth birthday, he enrolled in the University of Victoria.
       
    At Victoria the preferred course for the new intake of Indians was forestry studies. Forestry was a major industry of British Columbia, and one well suited to future native management. At the muscle end of the business, large numbers of Indians were engaged in it already.
    Porter became engaged in it. The first required subject was botany, which he liked well enough. But after a few weeks he discovered biology, and decided to specialise in it. Switching studies so early was discouraged, but care was being taken not to disaffect the Indian students and his application was reluctantly approved. This was when his career took off. He learned with exceptional rapidity. He learned in all directions.
    It took him no time to find out that although the meeting with Brother Eustace might have been an act of God, the reason for the delight was probably an Act of the US government.
    The US government, in a settlement of claims with the Indians of Alaska, was planning a cash payment of half a billion dollars, plus a further half billion in royalties, plus 15 per cent of the territory of Alaska. This bounty was to be administered through Indian corporations.
    The Canadian government, with similar problems ahead, was thinking on different lines. Rather than separate the Indians, and pay them, it was better to integrate them. Full partnership in the common weal was surely of higher value than dollars, or royalties, or title deeds to portions of Canada. To do the job successfully it was necessary to select the brainiest and immerse them in the value.
    Porter appreciated the value, and knew why he was getting it, but for the time being he kept his head down in biology. Before he was twenty he took a first-class degree in it, and as the outstanding student of his year was urged to go at once for his doctorate.
    Instead he dropped the subject and immediately began studying another, 2000 miles away, at McGill.

    Although he was wayward, this was not a wayward action. There were good reasons for his choice. McGill was in Quebec, at the other side of the continent, but it had old connections with Victoria, which had indeed started life as a far-western affiliate of the older university.
    But the main reason was Quebec itself, and Montreal. Ethnic issues were high on the agenda there – French separatism the principal one but with Indian questions also to the fore. These were the questions he planned to study.
    In his last year at Victoria he had started numbering Canadian−Indian claims against the government. There were 550 of them, few properly documented, all poorly prepared. In the absence of a written language, oral traditions had to be relied on, and the Department of Indian Affairs did not rely on them.
    Porter addressed himself to this. He broke the problem into two. In the first part he aimed to demonstrate the reliability of tribal records, and in the second to get the ones relating to claims admitted as evidence.
    He began reading anthropology. He not only read it but famously added to it. (His Amended Syllabary of Tsimshean , unique as an undergraduate publication, won him a gold