The video you’re about to watch premiered at the 2021 MidWest WeirdFest, an independent
film festival organized by my friend, Dr. Dean Bertram, which takes place very year at the
Micon Downtown Cinema in the city of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. This is the first video of mine that
has ever played on the big screen, and I’d like to thank Dean for that very exciting opportunity.
To learn more about Dean’s festival, please head to MidWestWeirdFest.com.
The script for the video you’re about to watch is an abridged version of the first chapter of
my book ‘Mysteries of Canada: Volume I’. To get yourself a copy of that book, please check out
the link in the description. Without further ado, here is ‘Second Sight in Northern Canada’. Enjoy!
Ever since the 18th Century Enlightenment, Western thinking has been dominated by
rationalism- the idea that our perception of truth ought to be defined by reason and
the scientific method as opposed to tradition or divine revelation.
This way of thinking has benefited mankind enormously- in a material sense, at least- having
paved the way for technological advancements which have allowed us to work more efficiently, explore
the world and beyond, and enjoy a better quality of life than our ancestors could even dream of.
For all the good it has done us, rationalism is not without its shortcomings. The idea that we
can come to a complete understanding of reality through reason alone hinges upon the assumption
that we are equipped with the tools necessary to perceive everything that is real. But just as an
insect lacks the equipment to comprehend things like music, math, and spoken language, perhaps we
human beings lack the capacity to comprehend all reality through the narrow prisms of reason and
our five senses through which we view the world. In other words, there are probably some facets
of reality which we may never be able to fully understand or explain through reason alone.
One mystery which defies rational explanation is a phenomenon called ‘Second Sight’- a supposed
extrasensory perception, or ‘sixth sense’. People endowed with Second Sight are said to have the
ability to receive information, usually through dreams or visions, of distant or future events.
In many cases, they have no control over these visions, which come upon them unexpectedly.
These visions are often distressing, as the information they contain
frequently involves the death of someone known to the seer.
It has been suggested that there is a higher prevalence of Second Sight
among members of certain ethnic groups. This ‘gift’ is most often associated with
the Gaels of the Scottish Highlands, who call it “Da-Shealladh”, or “Two Sights”.
It is also known throughout the rest of Scotland, as well as in Ireland,
Wales, and Cornwall- regions of the British Isles with high populations of ethnic Celts.
Another ethnic group which may be similarly blessed with this gift of prophecy are the
Dene of Northern Canada. United by ancient blood ties and a common language family, the Dene are
a First Nations ethnic group comprised of roughly 21 different tribes, whose ancestors are believed
to have migrated from Siberia via an ancient bridge of land and ice about 12,000 years ago.
Few parapsychologists, as students of extrasensory phenomena are known,
have explored a potential connection between Second Sight and the Dene people. Judging from
a handful of stories from Canada’s Northern frontier, however, perhaps they ought to.
One of the first northerners to write about Second Sight among the Dene
was a Canadian frontiersman named Poole Field- a former North West Mounted Police officer
who served during the Klondike Gold Rush. In the early 1900s,
Poole Field established a trading post in southeastern Yukon, at the confluence of
the Pelly and Ross Rivers, from which he sold goods to the local Dene in exchange for furs.
In the spring of 1908, Field’s store was visited for the first time by a Kaska Dene shaman named
Little Doctor, who was famed throughout the region for his gift of prophecy. At the time
of Little Doctor’s arrival, Poole Field’s partner was missing. He had taken his steamboat downriver
to Dawson City in order to purchase fresh supplies, but had failed to return on schedule.
Many of the native trappers who relied on Field’s goods were beginning to get anxious,
and at their insistence, Field gave Little Doctor some tobacco as a gift
and asked him to see what had become of his partner.
Little Doctor proceeded to have a number of dreams by which he predicted the arrival of
Field’s partner and the cause of his delay. Although he had never seen a steamboat before,
he was also able to describe the missing craft in perfect detail,
down to the passengers aboard and the amount of freight being hauled.
His predictions later proved to be perfectly accurate. When Field asked the medicine man
how he came by the information, Little Doctor explained that, while he slept, his spirit had
left his body and travelled downriver, allowing him to see the steamer with his own eyes.
Another incident of Second Sight on the Canadian frontier took place in the winter of 1922,
at Fort Fitzgerald in Northeastern Alberta. One morning, while she was thawing a frozen
loaf of bread over her cast-iron oven, Jean Godsell, the wife of a prominent fur trader,
was approached by the fort’s interpreter, a Chipewyan Dene man named John James Daniels.
The native cryptically informed the woman that, before noon that day, they would be
visited by two unfortunate Indians who had run into bad luck in the subarctic wilderness.
He neglected to offer any explanation as to how he came by the troubling news.
Sure enough, shortly before the sun reached its zenith, Mrs. Godsell was
approached by an RCMP constable who asked if she would like to accompany him on a hike to
the shores of nearby Slave River to greet some approaching Indians he had spotted. Mystified,
the woman slipped on her parka and snowshoes and accompanied the Mountie to the riverbank.
There, in the distance, she saw the serpentine figure of a dog team heading towards them,
mushing over the frozen river ice. As the natives neared the fort,
it became clear that something was terribly amiss. The dog team had no driver. Suddenly,
to her horror, Mrs. Godsell made out two tiny fur-clad figures struggling through the snow
at opposite ends of the train. She recognized them as the young daughters of a local Chipewyan chief.
The two girls had accompanied their father on a trapping venture earlier that fall.
The load strapped to the sled was their father’s frozen corpse.
Astounded, the fur trader’s wife looked to John James Daniels, who shrugged his
shoulders and mumbled that he had seen this exact scene in a dream the previous night.
Another case of Dene clairvoyance took place in the summer of 1945, at the Horse Lake First Nation
Reserve northwest of Grand Prairie, Alberta. One night, a Beaver Dene widow dreamt that
she was in a canoe on a river in the middle of the wilderness. The man paddling the canoe was a guide
whom her late husband had known in life. Guiding the paddler was the ghost of her husband, who had
drowned in the Wapiti River many years earlier. After a day on the river and a night under the
stars, her husband’s spirit led her to a particular section of riverbank.
There, near the shore, sprawled a human corpse. The woman’s husband then took her
to the opposite shore, where another body lay entangled in a pile of driftwood.
The dream reminded the woman of an incident which took place about a month earlier,
near the headwaters of the Wapiti River in the British Columbian Rockies.
Two Dene trappers named Archie Belcourt and Josie LeTan had been tasked with guiding a survey party
through the area. While attempting to cross the Wapiti on horseback, they were swept from
their mounts by the spring current. Although the survey party searched for their remains,
no trace of their bodies could be found. The Beaver woman suspected that the spirit
of her late husband had led her to the bodies of Belcourt and LeTan.
After securing the assistance of the paddler from her dream, she headed to the site of the drowning
and paddled downriver. She followed the instructions she received in her dream,
spending a day on the river and a night under the stars.
She and her companion continued down the river the following morning and paddled for most of
the day. Around dusk, the Indian woman suddenly exclaimed: “This is the place I saw in my dream.”
The party headed over to the shore, where they found a skeleton. Although the wolves had been
there first, the party was able to identify the body as Belcourt’s from a large metal belt buckle
they found nearby. Some distance downstream, on the opposite side of the river, they found the
half-submerged body of Josie LeTan wedged between two logs, just like in the Indian woman’s dream.
From the journals of Robert Campbell, a 19th Century explorer whose Dene guide
foresaw the events that would take place during a future journey up the Pelly River,
to the tale of Shonkelli, a Dene medicine man from Fort Churchill, Manitoba,
who correctly predicted that a priest aboard an inbound supply ship had drowned in Hudson Bay,
Northern Canadian literature is replete with stories affirming the uncanny clairvoyance
with which many Dene seem to be endowed. Whether attributable to outrageous coincidence or to some
mysterious genetic trait, the mechanism of which eludes our understanding, these incidents bear
testament to the mantle of mystery and romance that enshrouds the land of the midnight sun,
and to the ancient notion, so foreign to the rationalistic philosophy that
dominates modern thought, that there might be more to reality than meets the eye.