Hummingbird brings news

Creator scratched his chest and rubbed his fingers together and there appeared Hummingbird.
"Fly north, south, east, and west and tell us what you see," said Creator.
"All is well," reported Hummingbird upon his return. "The earth is most beautiful, with water on the west side."

This quote is from the North American Apache creation myth, and I find it most fitting to our current situation. Dragon wrote some time ago about dragons in the Chinese mythology - but it turns out that the native indians of the Vancouver and British Columbia region, the Haida, have a hummingbird as one of their totem animals.

For the Haida, hummingbird - also called Sah Sen - is a symbol of love, beauty and intelligence. It's also believed that seeing a hummingbird before a big event is a good sign for it has the ability to guide people, and hunters ask for it's help before setting out. As you might imagine, I've been reading up on the region quite a lot for the past few weeks, and I find the subject of native inhabitants facinating as I've never lived in a place where people with radically different culture used to live. The Haida story is all too familiar one - they used to live happily on their own until the Europeans came, and the combination of the Europeans diseases and oppressive religion pretty much destroyed Haida people and their culture. Currently there are few thousand Haida left, and UNESCO has named on their remaining villages on the SGaang Gwaii (Anthony Island) a world heritage site.

I'm looking forward to going to Vancouver, and I hope I can return with the same news than the hummingbird in the Apache myth.