It’s all there in Mac Masticant’s Guide to the Snow Peoples. The sled made of Leper’s Oak is propped up on a chopping stump to facilitate the necessary crush of water. ” Though not as the Americans (sic) would have it ” writes historian JM Pulsey, of the Ontario Institute of Culture.   ” It was a measure of a child’s committment to his famililial vision and bloodline. That was water boarding in its most nobel aspect.”  The distinction that Pulsey and his instars ( now known in Canadian academia as the School of New Congeniality) are laboring these days to make is that many practices now considered uncivil began in Canada as rituals for proving love and fidelity, or were simply viewed as tokens of appreciation.   “As late as 1954, boys in Saskatchewan were still water boarded on their fourteenth birthdays, and not, as you would think, as  a male rite of passage, but rather as a tribute to their paternal grandmothers.”  It was the paternal grandmother who was said to bear the water sign, the sign of the Pike, and whose water ( read ambiotic fluid) possesed the origins of universe.  ”To think how far we have drifted from the original sentiment that lay behind this procedure.” writes Pulsey.  “One can not help but lament what we have lost”  Brachment. 10/8.