If you escort a patient or prisoner and there are bunk beds, the custodian always takes the lower bunk. The old woman had a fancy wicker-woven hat festooned with flowers (see "Kwakiutl woman" above). Slade's Mom is wearing a hat in every photo above, even as a tomboy with the pigs. The police boat was summoned, and Viv was to escort her. The hospital's doctor decided to send the old woman down to Essondale, the mental asylum near Vancouver, for assessment. She thought the cannibal god crests on the totems were trying to eat her. Her psychosis involved Baxbakualanuxsiwae. So the troubled old woman went back to the active days of the Hamatsa cannibal cult. village until 1946, two years after Viv arrived. The potlatch was banned by whites in 1913.Īn old Kwakiutl woman suffering mental problems was brought to the hospital. The 22-year-old was immersed in an ancient culture that went back thousands of years, with powerful underground beliefs. Curtis were taken in 1914, just 30 years before Viv nursed in Alert Bay. Slade's Mom went looking for adventure, and she found it. Headhunter? Look what's strung around his neck She nursed the wounded on the shore of the Pacific theater, and one day - under the effect of morphine - said from her deathbed, "If I'd been older, I might've been at St.
Slade spent those precious last months at his mother's bedside, learning everything she could tell him about the past.īecause Slade's Dad saw action at WWII turning points on the Atlantic, in Europe, and in North Africa (see CRUCIFIED and SWASTIKA), his wartime experiences overshadowed Slade's Mom's. Who we are individually depends on our personal life stories and the stories of our ancestors. Four months later, she succumbed to pancreatic cancer. Her first words to him at the hospital were "Is this the beginning of the end?" It was. In January 2003, Slade's mother collapsed in her home.
KAMIKAZE - the companion novel to SWASTIKA - is Michael Slade's World War II revenge thriller. Special X will have to stop a killer before he hits too close to home. That crewman is the grandfather of Corporal Jackie Hett of the RCMP's Special X squad. First he'll kill the crewman's family then he'll kill the American airman in a fittingly gruesome way. Tokuda plans to satisfy the bushido oath he made to his ancestors years ago at the ruins of their Hiroshima shrine. The keynote speaker will be one of the crewmen of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing Tokuda's entire family. Genjo Tokuda - a Hiroshima survivor and head of the yakuza crime syndicate - is lured to Vancouver for the Pacific War Vets Convention.