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Overview and Context

This set of notes surveys the excerpted narrative from Richard Van Camp’s Godless but Loyal to Heaven, focusing on the frame of the two interwoven stories told by a great-grandfather and the post-apocalyptic world they depict. The text blends Indigenous storytelling, environmental catastrophe, mythic horror, and a call to ecological and cultural memory. The Tar Sands of Alberta appear as the prime engine of ecocide, awakening the Wheetago and forcing the Known People to confront annihilation, trauma, and survival through ritual, memory, and collective action. The excerpt situates a near-future northern Canada where scientific, mythic, and spiritual vocabularies collide as a warning about industrial extractivism and its consequences for people, land, and kin.

Setting and World-Build

The narrative unfolds in a desolate north, where the Tar Sands have rendered the landscape lethal and altered the climate, drawing on a blend of science fiction, horror, Western, and Aboriginal storytelling tropes. The environment is not inert; it is a character with teeth, hunger, and memory.
The oil boom and tar extraction are portrayed as ecocide, a force that summons or awakens monstrous forces (the Wheetago, Hair Eaters, Shark Throats) and fractures Indigenous social and linguistic orders.
The Known People (an Indigenous group, with references to Dogrib and Apache languages) live in a world where old songs, rituals, and technologies (Decapitators, dream medicine, tattooed weapons) fight against encroaching decay.
The North is both a physical place and a site of memory, violence, and resilience. The story repeatedly links ecological devastation to violence against bodies, kin, and the land.

Key Concepts, Terms, and Figures

Tar Sands: The extractive industry at the center of ecocide, whose expansion is framed as a catalyst for the return of horrific forces.
Wheetago: A term used for the looming return of cataclysmic forces tied to the Tar Sands; the text uses mythic language to describe ecological revenge.
Shark Throats: A class of monstrous beings mentioned as part of the post-apocalyptic ecology that preys on humans.
Hair Eaters: A race of cannibalistic, zombie-like beings linked to the land’s desecration; their song or cry has subsonic power and a strong, disturbing influence on humans.
Known People: The Indigenous group in the story who carry traditional knowledge, songs, and warrior ethics that protect them against the Hair Eaters.
Four Blankets Woman: A pivotal elder with deep knowledge of medicine, ritual, and the four winds; she tattoos tongues to block hearing, braids the roots for wick, and orchestrates the plan to fight the Hair Eaters.
Thinksawhile: A younger ally—a boy with computers—who contributes a modern, technical approach to stopping the horror; he represents the fusion of traditional knowledge with contemporary technologies.
Thinksawhile, the Dream Thrower, and the Decapitator: Devices and roles in a ritual economy of violence and salvation. The Dream Thrower orchestrates a dangerous plan that may require sacrifice.
Decapitator: A long harpoon with a cross-axe on the hilt used to deliver a precise, ritual杀 that cripples the Hair Eaters by severing critical limbs.
Deeyá, Deeya: Apache chants used to command the spirit world away from the living, an important linguistic ritual with cultural specificity.
Rabbit (Gah) Medicine and Other Medicines: Indigenous healing practices that empower the group against the Hair Eaters.
Butterfly Test: A magical tactic discovered by the Known People to deter or destabilize the Hair Eaters; butterflies are bait or deterrent that cause the enemy to scatter.
Dream Thrower: A médiative/cultural process that intertwines present and future; the idea that a dream-based intervention can alter outcomes, even at a grave personal cost.
The “One Sun” and ghost marks: Symbols of a memory-keeping culture; Kakiniit (ghost marks) preserve memory of a past order and ritual.
North orientation and burial practices: The Known People bury bodies and limbs pointing north as part of a cosmology and respect for the dead.
Language as power: The narrator notes speaking Dogrib, while Apache becomes a shared tongue among the Known People as a practical adaptation to crisis.

Plot Summary: The Wings of This Prayer (Key Segments and Points)

Framing voice and two stories: The Great-Grandfather’s narration frames two interconnected tales. The first tale concerns a family in the Tar Sands who confronts a monstrous, systemic force brought on by ecological devastation; the second tale continues in the voice of a survivor-future narrator who records how the Known People resist and survive.
The mother’s death and the ice-water ritual: The mother is gravely ill in the Tar Sands environment. She begs to be killed; water jars repeatedly brought to her transform into ice as a sign of the cold, lethal environment and perhaps a spiritual freezing of life-force. This moment foreshadows the brutal, ritualized violence against the Boiled Faces (Hair Eaters) and the demand for decisive action.
Rise of the Boiled Faces (Hair Eaters) and the trapper myth: The old trapper’s teeth and the thawing of a signed “boil” motif connect the human past to a present where the land awakens the dead or transformed. The ferocity and irrational hunger of the Boiled Faces echo the industry’s violence—an allegory for extraction’s dehumanization.
Ritual response: The Known People devise a detailed, one-on-one ritual for killing Hair Eaters. They use the Decapitator to disable and dismember in a precise order to avoid their grabbing arms and to render their bodies inert. The sequence is specific: cut the right arm (the reaching one) first, then the left, then the right leg, then the left, finally removing the heart, burning it, and scattering ashes. The ritual aims to disorient the body and sever its lifeforce; the top blade is detached for reuse, and the heart’s combustion is key to breaking the soul’s hold.
Spiritual and ritual discipline: After decapitation, the Known People chant in Apache and bury limbs far apart, weighted with stones, to prevent the undead from regrouping. They insist that the Known People bury everything and all bodies facing north. The ritual acknowledges a possibility that spirits remain and may need to be turned away.
Language, memory, and cultural unity: Despite banishment (three of the narrator’s group), Dogrib remains a living language, but Apache becomes a common tongue to communicate across the Known People. Chanting slows the Hair Eaters, suggesting music and language as protective powers.
The Butterfly Test and captivity: The Known People discover that the Hair Eaters are terrified by butterflies. The group bottles the zombies and discovers that one butterfly can trigger a cascade causing all Hair Eaters to flee. The idea of the Butterfly Test is a mix of humor and dread: humans laugh at the vulnerability of their enemies and imagine testing them in this way.
Human and animal losses: The zombies kill dogs first, leaving humans blind and deaf to them; the bond with dogs is a source of resourcefulness and knowledge about storms and danger. The text emphasizes the intimacy of hunter-dog knowledge and mourning for lost animals.
The wider apocalypse and future warning: The narrative expands to death lakes in the ravaged south, death cults, and armies of Hair Eaters. The future is a curse; there are no human trails left. The speaker was born fleeing this threat and pledges to keep living for the reader’s future self.
The Dream Thrower’s gambit and sacrifice: Four Blankets Woman sacrifices or offers something—an ambiguous “Dream Thrower” cost—so that the plan can proceed. The elder’s actions and tattoos mark weapons and wings and unify the community under a shared purpose.
The mission to undo the damage: Thinksawhile proposes a plan to undo centuries of harm, likely by stopping the Tar Sands at their source and preventing the awakening of the old man’s body (the “beginning of the end”). The plan requires a profound exchange and a high personal cost.
The future voice to the reader: The protagonist writes to the reader (in your time) to warn that the Tar Sands can be stopped, and that the reader can change the course of history. The message emphasizes intergenerational responsibility and the power of memory, ritual, and action.
Final injunction and time-crossing prophecy: The narrator explains that the Tar Sands have expanded their range to the limits of the known world and are crossing time to reach those who live in a time before a cosmological “sun twins,” where creatures have different physiologies. The call remains: wake up, stop the Tar Sands, and do not unleash them. The closing appeal is to readers to enact change in their era to avert a cataclysmic future.

Characters and Roles (Major and Minor)

The unnamed narrator (voice of the Known People in the present frame): A survivor who records ancestral memory and carries forward the knowledge of ritual combat, language, and survival. He is intimate with the land and its terrors and bears the weight of a foreboding future.
Four Blankets Woman: A powerful elder who carries “four winds” knowledge, tattooing tongues to mute the Hair Eaters, braiding medical roots for flame-wicking, and coordinating critical choices (e.g., the Dream Thrower decision). She is both healer and strategist.
Thinksawhile: The youth who operates a computer and provides a modern counterpoint to the traditional ritual knowledge; he participates in the plan to stop the Hair Eaters by using technology, cunning, and cross-cultural methods.
The Dream Thrower: A role or concept representing a visionary act that can reshape fate; in practice, this requires sacrifice and a willingness to risk life for a greater good.
The Decapitator: A weapon with a long harpoon and a cross-axe hilt used in a staged ritual to sever the Hair Eaters’ bodies and spirits.
The Dogs: Loyal animal companions who disappear early in the catastrophe but symbolize traditional knowledge, tracking ability, and loss.
The Old Trapper (the body torn by the tar sands): A figure connected to the land’s history and the land’s resistance to colonial extraction; his teeth and the ice-grown water waterings become a symbolic motif of the land’s suffering.
The Hair Eaters, Shark Throats, and Boiled Faces: Enemies that personify the ecological violence—gorgeous but deadly beings whose presence warns about the consequences of extraction and cultural decay.
The Butterflies: An emblem of hope and a practical deterrent against the Hair Eaters, representing small, natural forms of resistance that can disrupt overwhelming violence.

Symbolism, Motifs, and Thematic Threads

Tar Sands as ecocide and omen: The tar extraction project is not simply economic; it is a spiritual and ecological trauma that awakens malignant forces. It becomes a symbol for colonial violence and the harm inflicted on land, people, and memory.
Zombies (Boiled Faces) and ritual countermeasures: The Hair Eaters’ brutality is countered through meticulous ritual destruction, including dismemberment in a specific order and the burning of the heart, underscoring themes of control, sacred violence, and regeneration through sacrifice.
Language and song as power: Chanting (Deeyá, Deeya) and singing can calm or destabilize the Hair Eaters, showing language as a protective technology and a carrier of memory.
Light, water, and ice imagery: Ice water in the mother’s case and the water glasses turning to ice symbolize the freezing, erasure, and reversal of life; water becomes both a life-giving and life-ending element.
Animals as memory and wisdom: Dogs, butterflies, caribou, wolves, whales, and horses appear as living archives; their behaviors reveal ecological truths and moral lessons about resilience and empathy.
Intergenerational knowledge and responsibility: The narrative describes how knowledge travels across generations—through stories, songs, tattoos, and hands-on ritual work—emphasizing responsibility to future generations to protect the land.
Time travel and ethical duty: The narrator’s address to readers from a future vantage point suggests a moral imperative to act in the present to avert catastrophe that is predicted to cascade backward and forward in time.

Language, Style, and Narrative Techniques

Mixed-genre blend: The text fuses science fiction, horror, Indigenous myth, and environmental protest literature to create a hybrid mode of storytelling that emphasizes both wonder and warning.
First-person plural and intimate tone: The use of “we” and “our” builds a communal, ancestral voice that reinforces collective memory and responsibility.
Lyrical, sometimes cadenced prose: The writing combines ecological detail with ritual vocabulary and mythic diction, yielding a hypnotic cadence that mirrors chants and spells.
Hyper-specific ritual choreography: The Decapitator sequence is deliberately enumerated and symbolic, turning violence into ritual pedagogy rather than random brutality.
Self-reflexive frame: The authorial presence (Richard Van Camp) appears as the author of the text and narrator in a meta-sense, linking the story to real-world Indigenous communities and publishing context.

Connections to Foundational Principles and Real-World Relevance

Indigenous epistemologies and environmental ethics: The story foregrounds Indigenous knowledge systems—relationships with land, language as power, and ceremonial practices—as essential instruments of survival in crisis, contrasting with extractive economies’ dehumanization.
Environmental justice and anti-extractivism: The Tar Sands myth acts as a critique of resource-driven economies that place communities at risk, illustrating the harms of ecocide and the need for stewardship and policy change.
Storytelling as a form of resistance and memory: The narrative demonstrates how myths, songs, and oral histories can preserve identity, warn future generations, and mobilize communities to action.
Ethical implications of sacrifice and communal risk: The Dream Thrower’s cost and the Four Blankets Woman’s decisions raise questions about collective duty, the price of salvation, and intergenerational accountability.

Key Numbers and LaTeX-Formatted References

There are two (2) interwoven stories framed by the great-grandfather. $2$
Three (3) of the narrator’s group were banished. $3$
Four (4) Blankets Woman and her four winds explain a multi-wind approach. $4$
Seven (7) suns onward, the butterfly passage is described as a mechanism for safe passage. $7$
One (1) atom is referenced as a threshold crossing in time. $1$
One million butterflies are invoked for a mass ecological test; the scale is given as $10^6$ butterflies.
The narrative contends that the Tar Sands expansion is a global-scale threat that can cross the ice of time, a time-crossing event framed as “before the sun twins,” suggesting a cosmological scale beyond a single human lifetime. A symbolic unit here is the notion of “one” beginning the end: the body of the old man waking up signals apocalypse. $1$ (as a symbolic unit for origin)

Thematic Prompts and Study Questions

How does Van Camp use mythical creatures (Hair Eaters, Shark Throats) to critique real-world environmental harm? What do they symbolize beyond literal monsters?
In what ways do the ritual steps surrounding the Decapitator reflect a code of ethics for dealing with danger? How does ritual violence function as a form of protection and preservation?
What is the significance of language (Dog rib, Apache, common tongue) in uniting disparate groups under shared purpose? How does language act as a tool for resistance?
How do the figures of Thinksawhile and Thinksawwhile’s computer intersect traditional knowledge with modern technology? What message does this synthesis convey about crisis response?
Reflect on the Butterfly Test: what does it reveal about small, seemingly fragile interventions that can disrupt large-scale violence? What are the ethical implications of relying on such tactics?
Consider the ending directive to readers in your time. How does the text frame responsibility across generations, and what practical actions might this imply for present-day environmental policy and Indigenous rights?
Identify and discuss at least three motifs (e.g., water/ice, songs/chanting, burial north) and explain how they reinforce the central warning about ecological catastrophe and resilience.

Connections to Earlier Lectures and Real-World Relevance

If you’ve studied Indigenous storytelling as a form of knowledge transmission, this text provides a vivid case: memory, ritual, and myth become active tools for environmental justice and survival.
In discussions of climate justice and extractive economies, the Tar Sands as a trigger for social and spiritual collapse offers a narrative that complements policy-oriented readings with a human, ethical dimension.
The blending of genres mirrors contemporary approaches to ecological humanities, where literature, anthropology, environmental science, and Indigenous knowledges co-create a more holistic understanding of crisis and resilience.

Summary through Key Passages (Representative Paraphrase Quotes)

“Two stories my great-grandfather told me” establishes a lineage and a frame for the narrative’s mythic and ecological warnings.
The mother’s plea—“Kill me now. Kill me now or I'll kill you all before the sunrise”—grounds the violence in intimate, familial terms and foreshadows the brutal measures required to survive.
The Glissements: Glasses of water turning to ice, a sign of the land’s cold, unforgiving hunger and the disjunction between care and cruelty in crisis.
The Decapitator sequence (right arm first, then leg, and heart burning): a ritual grammar turning deadly violence into a disciplined, culturally encoded act of defense.
The Butterfly Test and bottle-caging of zombies: a counterintuitive tactic that frames creativity and humor as strategic in war against annihilation.
The Dream Thrower and the plan’s cost: sacrifice as a necessary condition for salvation, underscoring the moral gravity of collective action.
The closing imperative: a direct call to readers in a future time to do what is necessary to stop the Tar Sands, indicating that literature can be a call to action, not merely a reflection.

Practical Takeaways for Exam Preparation

Be able to articulate how the Tar Sands narrative works as a critique of extractive capitalism and colonial violence—ecocide as an engine of mythic return and communal trauma.
Explain the ritual logic of the Decapitator sequence and how it reframes violence as a controlled, cultural practice rather than mere brutality.
Discuss the role of memory, language, and ritual in building resilience against a technologically mediated apocalypse.
Identify the major symbolic motifs (water/ice, songs, butterflies, animal allies) and explain their function in shaping the story’s ethical and existential stakes.
Reflect on the text’s stance on respecting land and kin as a pathway to possible futures, and how this stance might translate into real-world environmental justice work.