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| Spiral Stairway to Heaven (courtesy of StockCake) |
As retold by Barbara Juster Esbensen in Ladder to the Sky: How The Gift of Healing Came to the Ojibway Nation (Little, Brown and Company, 1989), this story was first written down in 1850 by the Ojibway chief Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, who later took the name George Copway. I quote a few lines lifted from the narrative:
In their own language, the Ojibway, or Chippewa people, are known as Anishinabe -”original people”... Long ago, in the old, forgotten time, Gitchi Manitou, the Great Spirit created only strong, healthy people... Nobody was ever sick in those days. Nobody died. When somebody grew old, Manitou sent one of the shining spirit-messengers down the magic vine that grew in the very center of the Ojibway lands.
The vine grew in the earth, but its far-off top was looped around a star. The shining spirit-messenger would carry the the old one up and up and up through the vine's great leaves - up into the sky itself. There, the old ones lived forever, watching over their beloved people and the campfires twinkling below.
The Ojibway people were forbidden to touch this magic vine. It was a living ladder connecting the earth with Manitou's great blue sky home. Other spirit-messengers also came to earth from time to time to see that everything was going well. These spirits came down the magic vine from the North, the South, the East, and the West - from every corner of Gitchi Manitou's kingdom. They took the form of [humans], and they would walk through a village or a camp and speak to every person living there - no matter how young, no matter how old.
In Ladder to the Sky, beautiful illustrations (by Helen K. Davie) show the magic vine as a spiral creeper connecting the earth with a subtler dimension beyond the sky. One is immediately reminded of the famous story of Jack and the Beanstalk. This is just one example of the powerful symbolic resonances that underlie the unique, yet universal, nature of all traditional folklore.
We are grateful for Chief Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh's exceptional foresight in “setting down Ojibway history, customs, and legends because he was afraid this valuable information would one day disappear entirely.”
Unfortunately, the Temuan have yet to produce a tribal scribe - someone “of the blood” who can document the ancestors' tales for posterity. And by the time they do, there will be no elders left to tell their stories.