MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Winter Spring 2019

38 MLCM WINTER/SPRING 2019 words :: Jon Turk illustration :: Dave Barnes The beachcomber bent down to pick up a nondescript piece of driftwood and broke into a broad smile when she found a bent, rusty nail embedded in the board. Iron. Somebody in that strange and alien world across the sea, the people who miraculously fly through the air, had been careless enough to discard a piece of iron. Didn’t they know that iron made the best arrowheads? In November, 2018, a self-appointed American missionary, John Allen Chau, paddled his kayak toward a remote island in the Indian Ocean with a simple message to the Sentinelese tribe—perhaps the most primitive and isolated people on Earth. When he approached shore, he shouted, “My name is John. I love you and Jesus loves you.” A warrior shot and killed him with an iron-tipped arrowhead. Let’s travel back 400-500 years to the time when Europeans colonized the Western Hemisphere, displacing local inhabitants who had been living there for centuries. In his book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging , Sebastian Junger documents that during this conquest, thousands of frontiersmen and even some women abandoned their settlements and joined the Native American tribes. In addition, many of the European women who were captured Shooting Arrows at Time BEYOND