Snoquask: The Last White Dancer

The twentieth century found the North American continent stripped of most of the thousands of indigenous knowledge systems that centuries of healers, philosophers, and mystics had assembled. Of the various cultural regions on the continent, none was more fertile than the Pacific Northwest Coast. Over the millennia, conclaves of adepts would gather every winter in what today would be called "think tanks" to reconsider the premises of knowledge and its potentials. In terms of time, talent, and effort, perhaps no other region on the planet invested so much in the sheer accumulation of knowledge. But knowledge is the most fragile of resources. After a century of outside social and linguistic domination and deadly new diseases, local knowledge bled out into an unrecoverable obscurity. Snoquask asks the reader to consider the possibility that one person might still hold the key to an entire knowledge system, and that this person must then choose to die with this knowledge or pass this on to his enemies. Such is the dilemma of the Last White Dancer. Bruce Caron weaves his in-depth research on the ethnography of Coastal Salish culture with his inside knowledge of the people and geography of the Puget Sound into an adventure that offers all the components of a great story-love, pathos, humor, suspense, and a very real sense of place.