Just barely out of high school, I was visiting with my father at his girlfriend’s trailer in Switzer Village in Juneau, Alaska. My father, the late Andrew Hope – Xhaastánch of the S’iknaxh.ádi clan of Sxh’at Khwáan, Wrangell – was an intellectual. He had eclectic tastes. Van Morrison was playing as my father was sipping his wine. I always told my friends that my family skipped the hunting and gathering part of our heritage and replaced it with books, but we still kept our time with the Elders. If the Elders weren’t around, we used books, and that wasn’t a bad stopgap.
While I was visiting Dad, he showed me this book that was on the coffee table. He handed me A Story as Sharp as a Knife by Robert Bringhurst. He just kept repeating, “This is awesome. This is awesome.” I read it and reread it. I’ve been walking through with it in my mind ever since.
A few years after that, my dad invited Robert to come to Juneau and to share with Native teachers, to visit a few classrooms, and to do a public reading. I think Robert and my father were intellectual kinsmen. They shared grief. They both seemed to recognize that we’re sitting on one big mass grave, a sacred site littered with cigarette butts, beer cans, and numbing, drug-riddled indifference. My dad did his best to offer up the antidote of genuine intellectual food and the spirit medicine of culture. He died without ever quite shaking his grief, but knowing that he did his part.
I brought Robert to my old English teacher George Gress’s classroom. The students had that very familiar and still disconcerting glaze in their eyes. It was a morning class. Robert started right in with a tone of seriousness that never seemed to lighten up – it was only later that I detected a wry sense of humour in his writings, such as how he found that a vibrant, combative, sensuous woman’s voice refused to fade away, and so he needed to create, wholly new in some way, polyphonic poetry in The Blue Roofs of Japan – and so he spared the high school students the usual awkward ice-breaker. He told the students, “I’m going to talk to you about literature. You might not like literature, but it’s like not liking food or air. If you don’t use it, you get sick.” I don’t know if the students got the message. Maybe some of them did, from the look of hunger in the room at that moment. He was identifying an essential nutrient that all of our bodies were desperately missing.
Those nutrients weren’t missing so much from my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ Indigenous lives, though their intellectual achievements remain boxed into the folkloric corner, deeply misunderstood and often painfully rewritten. It can be excruciatingly frustrating to try to undo such misunderstandings, though Bringhurst has given us a path into the stories, an alternative to the dominant narrative themes of our times – pivoting from emotionally wrought and inward-collapsing Romanticism into the curious and investigative world of humanism. Sometimes Bringhurst may even take a step further into animism, where the mythworld really has room to breathe. Everything is alive, and we know this by being out in the world – in our case a rainforest archipelago of vast, innumerable mountains and waterways – and by telling stories that come out of that world. Occasionally we reach the knife-edge of our lives, like a Haida hunter finding just the right moment to paddle into the closing end of the horizon, and we learn something new, like how we belong to a community that reaches beyond our species. We learn, you might say, what-is, and the particular what-is of this Raven Creator bio-region, as my dad called it. Robert taught me this; the stories and the land thoroughly support his findings.
During that first visit, we were invited to Richard and Nora Marks Dauenhauer’s house on Marks Trail in Douglas. Richard and Nora are two fine poets. Richard was raised in the scholarly tradition while Nora – Kheixwnéi – was raised in the old-growth Tlingit tradition, and they form a great team. While Robert, Richard, my buddy Darell, and I were walking along Marks Trail, I clumsily asked a question about comparing Shakespeare with the great Native American oral poets, such as the master Haida mythteller Skaay. Robert might have just been enjoying the birds, but he was compelled to answer an eager young man. He said, “Shakespeare liked to roll around in the mud of metaphor. Skaay is much deeper. His metaphors are the whole story.”
It took me awhile to start to sense the metaphor in the stories. It wasn’t until I began to read to my daughter, Betty, Taliiraq, the stories of Skaay and Ghandl that Bringhurst edited and championed, along with storytellers such as Hanc’ibyjim, François Mandeville, Catherine Attla, Anna Nelson Harry, Robert Cleveland, Nora Norton, Cyrus Peck, Asatchak, and plenty more besides. Betty and I like to play out the stories, especially the part where the Mouse Woman feeds her guest a dish that never stops feeding, a single, renewable berry or a piece of fish. Sometimes we act out the whole story. When I was reading one of the stories, maybe Spirit Being Going Naked, Betty blurted out, “The people in the stories can hear you telling it.” I thought there couldn’t be finer literary criticism of this immensely enjoyable, expansive, and generous literature.
Later, when I reminded my now-five-year-old daughter of what she said about the Haida story, she thought about it at dinner. After dinner, she told me, “Maybe the spirits are in the air, and they fly down into the page and magic happens, and they live in the book.” I agreed with her, with fatherly pride but seriously respecting her vision of the old-time stories. Thanks to Robert Bringhurst, the ethnographer John Swanton, the listener Henry Moody, and the storytellers Skaay and Ghandl, they are books so finely made – not the least in the typographical sense – the spirits choose to live in the book.
In Skaay’s story, Spirit Being Going Naked had a hard life. He was even turned into a Gagiit, One of the Lost. It wasn’t until he saved the village of the Voicehandler, the creative force of Haida Gwaii, that he was helped and found out what happened to him. Here is Bringhurst’s rendering of that episode:
And he covered his nose
with the flap of the robe he was wearing.
Then he called him over.
« Come and sit beside me grandson. »
This one went to him.
That one pressed the red end of his stick to this one’s nose
and pulled it down.
Then he pulled the sea-urchin spines, the pine needles and greenling
bones from his body.
After drawing out the needles, bones and spines,
he washed him off.
Then he brought out a comb
and raked it down from the top of his head over and over.
Then he combed him on the other side too.
Spirit Being Going Naked had the stink of One of the Lost.
That’s the reason Voicehandler had to hold his nose, they say.
Spirit Being Going Naked had been going around, only mutely aware of the grief he was carrying, not even knowing that he was One of the Lost. He had to be cleansed by his grandfather before he could get back up on his feet and move on with renewed spirit. That’s how it feels to be in the company of Robert Bringhurst’s books, and to know him as a friend and a teacher.
We invited Robert to the Sharing Our Knowledge Clan Conference in 2009, a conference my father conceived and organized until his death. Robert’s keynote speech was entitled, “The Reincarnation of Stories.” Robert showed us how old art forms could be renewed by giving the example of Bill Reid. He said, “My teacher, Bill Reid, was not a speaker of the Haida language. But he went into the museums as a young man and he learned the language of Haida visual art, and learned it well enough to speak it fluently. That is, he learned to make new things in the old way. He had an aptitude for fusing form and spirit – for making the forms so exact, so precise, so tense, so eloquent, that the spirits wanted to live there. And they did.”
Robert Bringhurst was an apprentice to Bill Reid. The apprentice could do what the master did. My daughter knows this from those beautiful books he edited, books to feed all of us unendingly, if we take care of them. It’s there, too, in his poetry, and in his pleas to listen to the old-timers of our human heritage.