image In the longhouse of the Kwakiutl villagers; crew members are anointed with water and feathers as they stand in front of the huge totem pole © Greenpeace / Robert Keziere
the warriors of the rainbow How Greenpeace adopted an ancient North American How Greenpeace adopted an legend In the summer of 1969, a rusted, red ancient North American legend pickup rattled up the driveway of Bob
The Kwakiutl’s hereditary crest has graced many a Greenpeace vessel.
and Zoe Hunter’s farmhouse, south of Vancouver, Canada. Bob Hunter, a newspaper columnist, sat on his front porch writing his first non-fiction book, The Enemies of Anarchy, about technological culture and Earth’s degraded ecology. Hunter squinted at the pickup as it stopped in a stir of dust. A wild-looking hippie, with long blond hair and beaded moccasins, stepped from the cab. Hunter’s newspaper column – examining ecology, peace, psychology, and progressive ideas – often attracted strange visitors. Hunter stepped from the porch. The young man approached, carrying a small book, which he handed to Hunter. “This is for you,” he said. “It will reveal a path that will affect your life.” Hunter looked at the title: Warriors of the Rainbow, Strange and Prophetic Dreams of the Indian People. On the cover, an Indian warrior sat below an eagle and a buffalo. The visitor explained that these were animal spirits appearing to a chief, who had gone into the wilderness to seek spiritual guidance. “Yeah, okay,” Hunter said to the stranger. “Thanks.” The mysterious visitor departed without idle conversation. Hunter watched the red pickup bump down the gravel driveway. He thumbed the volume, finding references to peyote ceremonies, Buddhist teachings, and quotes from the Bible, Koran, and Bhagavad-Gita.
18 THE GREENPEACE chronicles
Pictures of the authors revealed a smiling Aleut from Alaska, William Willoya and a Stanford University biologist Vinson Brown. Hunter filed the book on his shelf and returned to his work. Two years later, the fishing boat Phyllis Cormack, christened ‘Greenpeace’, stood ready to set out for the Alaska bomb test site. On the night before departure, Hunter selected books to take on the voyage. When the little volume Warriors of the Rainbow fell from the shelf to the floor, he casually stuffed it into his bag. On 18 September 1971, the third day out, the Phyllis Cormack stopped at the Kwakiutl village at Alert Bay. Lucy and Daisy Sewid, the chief’s daughters, met the crew at the dock and escorted them to a ceremony in the longhouse. Kwakiutl families blessed the ship, and fisherman donated salmon. The following morning Hunter filed a column describing the closed canneries and abandoned fish boats along the coast. He noted that the Kwakiutl had lived from the bounty of the sea for thousands of years before giant factory trawlers arrived with drift nets, and the North Pacific perch, herring, yellowfin sole, crab and shrimp began to disappear. Hunter saw in the depressed fishing economies a warning from the environment that humanity had reached the limits of industrial resource harvesting. Hunter dug into his duffle bag and found the Warriors of the