How do you ‘sex up’ the story of the Highlands?

‘WIDE brown plains, distant, slender, flat-topped buttes; still more distant giant mountains, blue sided, sharp peaked, snow capped; odour of sage and smoke of camp fire; thunder of ten thousand buffalo hoofs over hard, dry ground; long drawn, melancholy howl of wolves breaking silence of night, how I loved you all!”

James Willard Schultz was a master storyteller. For his 90 years he captivated audiences with tales of Blackfoot Indians and his beloved Rocky Mountains. I came across his autobiographical accounts as a 12-year-old when I borrowed one of my dad’s books called, simply, Boy Trappers in the Rockies. I was immediately spellbound. Then Schultz was writing under the pseudonym, W.B. Anderson – a man on the run, he had fled from Montana state authorities following allegations which were later discredited.

Born in Boonville, New York, in the years preceding the American Civil War, Schultz travelled to St Louis and from there, up the Missouri River to begin a life as a fur trapper and trader amongst the Blackfeet Indians. His gift was his ability to retell all those campsite stories which have so enthralled the generations for whom the days of the frontier had long passed with the killing of the buffalo.

But you can still read riveting accounts of his time living as one of the Pikunis (a southern branch of the Blackfoot confederacy). They gave him the name Apikuni (Scabby Robe) and he took as his wife a Piegan girl called Nahtaki (meaning “pretty woman”).

Apikuni lived a fascinating life as an Indian and his stories set the records straight, for in them he describes the “noble savage” who was almost certainly more a victim of the white man “raiders of the northwest plains” – a view contrary to the early Hollywood versions of “how the west was won”.

DID you see the epic film, How the West Was Won, when it was shown by Channel 5 over the weekend? The 1962 Ford blockbuster, which stars John Wayne, James Stewart and Gregory Peck amongst a star-studded cast, is described as a “family saga covering several decades of westward expansion in the 19th century – including the Gold Rush, the Civil War, and the building of the railroads”. With Spencer Tracy reading the narrative how could anyone fail to be bowled over?

It’s one of the ultimate stories about how America was born. And is said to have inspired a generation of film directors who also sought, through their own various narratives, to give more faithful accounts to that story.

Our own Richard Attenborough, in his 1999 biopic, Grey Owl, tells the story of the Canadian fur trapper turned conservationist who claimed to be a Native Iroquois American. Grey Owl (a part played in the film by Pierce Brosnan) was later exposed as a phoney – having been born Archie Stansfeld Belaney, and reared by two maiden aunts in Hastings, England. He was 18 years old before he saw the true North American wilderness.

Grey Owl, and Apikuni before him, were masterful storytellers who, to various degrees, embellished their own involvement in the bigger narrative. Alas, fact is stranger than fiction and truth always prevails – in the end. Both men, though, were passionate and sincere in their endeavours to represent the true story about the oppressions visited upon Native Americans and, not least, the threats unleashed by westward industrial expansion on the environment. Each, in their own way, informed the modern conservationist movements.

America, of course, remains the dominant global culture and we all, to some extent or other, bought into the glitz and glamour of the American Dream. There are few stories we in the world are more familiar with than the countless Hollywood retellings about America. (It is, in some measure, a story shaped by Scots).

I THOUGHT I could tell a few stories of my own but I did not reckon on a blether with Catherine Munro, from Lower Westerdale, who phoned me the other night. Catherine shared a whole host of stories with me – she’s a fount of knowledge about people and places here in the Far North. And she has a good sense of humour too!

She tells me she reads my weekly column – see, I knew there was one – and reveals her nickname is “Never in Withoot”. It seems after a period of caring for her late husband she has found a new independence. She’s 81 years old, I’m told, and still likes to get out and about in her car. Believe me, she has plenty stories to tell.

It reminds me how we all – each and every one of us – have our own stories to share. More than that we are all the authors of the next chapter in our own storylines.

I do wonder, though, what other people in other countries around the world know about or make of our Scottish nation’s story. After all we don’t have a Hollywood dream machine churning out endless interpretations of that rich heritage.

How do you “sex up”, for example, the story of the Highlands? Novelist Neil Gunn reflected how “the people were not only cleared from the glens, hunted and dragooned or shipped abroad like cattle, but those who remained, after being cowed into a mood of utter subjection, were by the most subtle and insidious means... made to despise their language and tradition...”

Frantz Fanon, a Martiniquo-Algerian writer, who specialised in post-colonial studies, held the deep conviction, according to accounts in the fascinating James Hunter book, On the Other Side of Sorrow, that “any people wishing to regain control of their own destiny had best begin by retrieving their own past from those who have sought to impugn and devalue it”. In this country we are all too familiar with processes of anglicisation that sought to impose a supposedly superior culture onto our own. How many times when you grew up were you told to “speak proper”? (The inference being we had to aspire to “proper” spoken English and that our native tongues, dialects and traditions were inherently inferior...) How else would you explain the past demise of the Gaelic language?

Of course our story is ongoing. And we Scots will have an opportunity to write the next chapter of that story when the SNP Government’s referendum on independence is presented to the people.

It seems the Westminster parliament wants to hijack that referendum and impose its own one. Strange how both the Conservatives and Lib Dems had promised a UK-wide referendum on our membership of the European Union but now seek to deny us that right to express our will through the ballot box.

In the meantime, by means of devious and cynical skulduggery, they plan to thrust their own Westminster unionist referendum on Scots – something that was in neither party’s manifestos...

Do they think we are daft?

So I would say tell your stories, share them, explore them and keep them alive. Remember who we are. Who we are proud to be. And remember, too, “on the other side of sorrow” you can write the next chapter.

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