Listening for First Nations voices behind The Corleone Christ

The Corleone Christ opens with a vast crowd at the Lincoln Memorial, and at the head of it, Wohali Lightfoot — a First Nation Cherokee shaman riding a white painted stallion. He is a symbol of peace, resistance, and of an ancestral sovereignty; ownership that long predates the institutions gathered to watch him. Then the rifle shots come, and the story turns.

Writing a figure like Wohali carries a responsibility I take seriously. It would be easy to reduce him to a device — a spark for the plot, a victim for the agents to investigate. I wanted the opposite: a presence whose meaning the rest of the book has to reckon with, rather than move past. Indigenous resistance is not a backdrop in this trilogy. His emerging, true life story is one of the fault lines the narrative weaves.

So much of the research for these scenes was really an exercise in listening — reading people’s stories and histories of land and removal, hearing the long memory carried in communities that have outlasted the policies designed to erase them. I am not writing from inside those communities, and I have never tried to pretended otherwise. What I have tried to do is build a story that refuses to look away from the truth. When we all left Africa together, sovereignty was a right all humanity possessed through our heroic journeys of discovery. Everyone had the right to own what land was found. These ancient rights of sovereignty never spoke of the evil European, man made story imposed upon a Christian God, giving precedence and power of land ownership to white people over First Nation people. Jesus Christ Himself never taught in a such language, of slavery, the theft of First Nation children from their parents, Kings, or man made Empires.

The image of the white stallion and the Cherokee shaman stays with me as at the centre of it all: an image of peace offered in good faith, and the violence that meets it. That tension is the engine of the book, and it is the question this journal keeps circling back to. Have a look back to my Cover Art Source Image photograph of man and horse relaxing together. It spoke to me of the beauty in Wohali’s and the stallions relationship, sometime before they painted the stallions messages of resistance and the healing the planet; before Wohali transformed and dressed himself for the events at the Lincoln Memorial.