"I first became interested in Indian matters as a poet," wrote Norman Newton in his 1973, "and then I was most interested in what might be called 'the matter of British Columbia'. I had written two novels about early British Columbia and Mexico, and I had discovered in the process a rich store of myth. Thus I had started with myth and poetry and had ended in social consciousness -- a not unusual route, especially in our time, when prevalent social relations have become anti-mythical and anti-poetic.

"The British Columbia of my previous conception -- a vast undeveloped province, an administrative unit in a federal system governed politically by Ottawa and Victoria and economically by the United States -- began to change. I began to see the province as it had been: a collection, on the one hand, of ancient coastal and river-oriented village states, some of them of great age, varying from small to tiny, and, on the other, of larger less well-defined inland territories exploited by nomadic or semi-sedentary tribes.

"The British Columbia of my time was another country which had settled down atop the old one, squashing its contours, but not obliterating them entirely. Some of its cities, towns and villages lay over old sites, some did not; some of its roads followed old trails, some did not; some of its industries exploited resources known to the ancient inhabitants, other exploited resources unknown to them.

"Were our sins, in a sense, finding us out? Were we paying, in a growing sense of purposelessness which produced an agony something like that of dismemberment, for our violation of the land? When did I first become aware that something was wrong at the root of things, something I had no name for?"