Back in the mid-to-late 90s I was on a jag of reading "bad history" (the horror, the horror!), absorbing all I could of the nightmare of humanity's past (trying to awaken). During this time I read Peter Matthiessen's IN THE SPIRIT OF CRAZY HORSE, right after "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" and "American Holocaust." As I read along I began to sense something strange about this book. Mostly it is a legalistic recounting of the horrid injustices done to the Lakota, the American Indian Movement, and in particular, Leonard Peltier. But it is also an attempt to tell the history of the People through the aspects of the culture still living and viable in the modern world. A recurrent theme, popping up over and over again, to the point I had to stop, go to the index, and re-read the segments where RUGARU, or THE BIG HAIRY MAN, was discussed. What was Bigfoot-- as the author and his interviewees clearly meant to say this spirit/creature was--doing in this book? Rugaru, just as the Bigfoot we know more familiarly, creeps on the margins, or at the heart of things in this book, as a sub-text that emerges as the main message: Humanity is out of touch, out of balance, crimes against nature and people must be righted, and our ways of life changed to their proper states.
See, Bigfoot (or Sasquatch, or Rugaru, or...) isn't some phenomenon originating in 1950s or 1960s popular culture; it has been here for thousands of years, most likely brought over by (or preceding) the Native Americans as they crossed from Asia during the prior Ice Ages. Personally, I learned about Bigfoot in the usual way of my generation, through Leonard Nimoy on "In Search Of," and then through John Green's books in the paranormal section of the public library. I was obsessed, at around the age of nine or ten, with such things, be they ghosts, ESP, cryptid creatures or monsters, UFOs or demons--I was down with it. But in the years interceding my mental use of Bigfoot became increasingly of a humorous nature. It was just simply funny, seen on the cover of The Weekly World News. Bigfoot had the air of something rebellious in it, too: it lived outside of human parameters and society, stank to high heaven, and loved to mess with logging equipment. Bigfoot was the first Earth First-er! Sasquatch was a Rebel. Bigfoot began to appeal to my associates in the ARMCHAIR ANARCHISTS SOCIETY, to the degree that we formed a splinter group, THE CHURCH OF BIGFOOT SCIENTIST. Even as we laughed, joked and chanted "Rugaru, Rugaru!!!" around the campfires, something was slowly changing in me, I was beginning to suspect there WERE perhaps eyes looking back at me from the dark forests, wondering about our absurd behavior and myriad empty beer bottles. And then we encountered something brown and tall, moving through heavy forest brush several miles in to old logging company land way back in the hills above Blue Lake, CA. We only really saw it's head moving quickly through the branches, its body obscured. It could, perhaps, have been an elk; but I've never seen the dogs we had with us respond this way to anything, and they were used to bear, deer, cougars and foxes. They positively freaked out. The thing quickly disappeared down into the deep thickets, but we could hear its treads retreating. There was something strange about it, an unexplainable feeling in the experience.
I referred back to Matthiessen's book again, haunted by his evocation of the BIG MAN, the spirit of the woods, of earth's justice, of something beyond current culture and the hegemonic dominance of cheezoid and crass corporate consumerism. As I began reading the books about Sasquatch, eventually consuming about 50 of them, the myth and legend began to become a plausible reality. No, it wasn't just a joke: this thing has been leaving tracks, making appearances, and maybe abducting human females and children, for centuries. The reported characteristics are so consistent that eventually one has to take out Occam's Razor and admit it: the simplest explanation, simpler by far than "myth" and "hoaxing," is that THERE IS SUCH A CREATURE, and it is alive and well out there in the world beyond our imaginations as well as within them.
"Along the way I learned a little of the Indians' identity with land and life (very different from our 'environmental' understanding) and shared a little of their long sadness about the theft and ruin of ancestral lands--one reason, they felt, why That-One-You-Are-Speaking-About had reappeared." (pg. xxiii)
"I told Sam about the footsteps in the creek heard on the night before the shoot-out by Jean Bordeaux and Jimmy Zimmerman and Norman Brown, and he nodded, saying, 'That was a sign, a warning.' 'There is your Big Man standing there, ever waiting, ever present, like the coming of a new day,' Pete Catches had told me two years earlier, here on Pine Ridge. "He is both spirit AND real being'--he had slapped the iron of his cot for emphasis--'but he can also glide through the forest, like a moose with big antlers, as if the trees weren't there. At Little Eagle, all those people came, and they went out with rifles and long scopes, and they couldn't see him, but all those other people at the bonfire, he came up close to them, they smelled him, heard him breathing; and when they tried to get too close, he went away. He didn't harm no one; I know him as my brother. I wanted to live over there at Little Eagle, go out by myself where he was last seen, and come in contact with him. I want him to touch me, just a touch, a blessing, something I could bring home to my sons and grandchildren, that I was there, that I approached him, and he touched me. It doesn't matter what you call him; he has many names. I call him Brother, Ci-e, and that's what the Old People would call him, too. We know that he was here with us for a long time; and we are fortunate to see him in our generation. We may not see him again for many, many generations. But he will come back, just when the next Ice Age comes into being.'" (pg. 559)
If you want to study this subject further, here is a great article we found in researching this blog entry: "Attitudes Toward Bigfoot in Many Native American Cultures," by Gayle Highpine.
"Rugaru," as a neologism or pidgin term is certainly derived from Native interactions with French frontiersmen and traders. The root terms would be "loup" and "garou," meaning basically "wolf-man," "werewolf," or a lycanthropic shapeshifter. It would seem that this was the French folks' interpretation of the Native's "big hairy man."
Leonard Peltier was recently denied parole, AGAIN. It would seem he is the scapegoat the FBI and government require. Matthiessen's book proves pretty damn conclusively that he is NOT guilty of shooting those federal agents. To take action start with the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee.