Say the Names
this land emerging
from mist; ravens, bears, clamshells
stories—found and lost
I’m not good at names, or bad at them. I haven’t gone through life stuffing my quiver with an arsenal of names. I remember people’s essence—hare-brained, hair-trigger, loving, serious. I remember people because I’ve worked with them or shared food with them. I always remember if I’ve joked with them. And sometimes a name seems special, or relevant. But I never expected a name to save my life.
On a late-summer evening, fourteen years after moving to Tofino, I tucked my toddler daughter into bed and set out on a sunset paddle. By then Marcel and I had moved the floathouse back to the Tofino Harbour from Maltby Slough. The evening was perfect, the water glassy and the sky gathering colour with every minute. I caught the ebbing tide, whooshing away from the floathouse with a satisfying flourish. Nearing the cormorant rocks in the middle of the harbour, a boat passed me, heading to the village of Opitsaht. I waved, recognizing the passengers. When they didn’t wave back, I took off my paddling hat and sunglasses and waved again. This time I was identified and given a wave in return. When I was in my motorboat people knew me instantly, so it irked me to go unrecognized when I was in my kayak. Kayaking was my life—know me, know my kayak. I had to remember that it was also, to some, a mild form of eccentricity, regarded with gentle puzzlement: why paddle when you can drive? Many boaters can’t tell one kayak from another and in the marine community kayaks are known, somewhat predictably, as speed bumps. It didn’t matter to me if people knew my name, but I did want them to know that I wasn’t just a stranger, or a speed bump, that the kayaker was me.
But in some ways I was accustomed to being unrecognized. In the summer of 1990, when I first arrived in Tofino, I met Carl, the Tla-o-qui-aht man who would become my partner for the next seven years. And as we got to know each other better, he introduced me to his family. Arriving by boat at the village of Opitsaht, I was often swarmed by giggling troupes of children calling out: “What is your name? Why are you here?” And no matter how many times I stopped to say hello, say my name, say who I was visiting, I was still often greeted this way, year after year.
Those years were an education. When I’d arrived in Canada three years earlier, my notion of First Nations people was limited to the carvings of Bill Reid and the contents of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. I had no context for an actual living, breathing, present-day culture.
But 1990 gave me a crash course.
Night after night I lay awake, examining the slant of my partner’s cheekbones and the heaviness of his long black hair. In a state of mild culture shock, I wondered who I was and how we had come to be together. By contrast, my partner had a strongly defined sense of self. A proud canoe carver and charter boat operator from a large family, he knew what he stood for and what he wouldn’t stand for. He told me of injustices endured by First Nations people at the hands of European settlers and church representatives. I learned how this injustice had carried through to the present day.
That was the summer of the Oka crisis. Even without my new perspective on life, the notion of building a golf course on a burial ground seemed deliberately provocative. Golf, of all frivolous things! Ancestral remains were an issue in Clayoquot Sound, too. Burial caves had been looted by non-Native old-timers, claiming an interest in history. Burial islands had become the domain of summer homes, small cabins cropping up amid the ancient spruce trees, in whose high branches were lodged the remains of ancestors, preserved in moss-draped wooden boxes.
Tofino at the time was a hot-button place, having lived through the heated environmental protests of Meares Island and Sulphur Passage. The logging of Meares Island was prevented through a concerted effort by First Nations people and environmentalists, thus in many ways these two groups—with a mixed array of aims, from preservation to land rights—wound up on one side of a fence, while the logging fraternity squared up along the other.
Add to this restless mix a long history of Saturday night fights between Natives and non-Natives outside the Maquinna bar and you have the basis for the kind of explosive behaviour of September 8, 1990, at the intersection of First and Campbell streets in Tofino.
On that day in September, what started out as an information protest about the army at Oka, and the stoning of Mohawk women and children there, erupted into a geyser of aggression. The protest was planned as a peaceful affair but turned into a volatile mess of beer-drinking hecklers shouting racist epithets, and hyper-charged people in trucks trying to ram the protestors, about 75 percent of whom were non-Native. Two children narrowly escaped being run over. Innocent tourists were threatened. Communication was reduced to “Fuck you, fucking asshole!” Even Old Ben, one of my favourite Elders, is forever etched in my mind’s eye, waving his stick above his head and yelling to the hecklers in his frail voice, “Why don’t you come over here and tell me that?”
What shocked me was the rapidity with which the situation ignited. My small town had flown from peace to war in five minutes. The aggression was supported by a self-righteous anger that had no clear foundation and yet it was there, simmering under the surface in a way I hadn’t perceived. I saw with sudden clarity what my partner meant when he told of the prejudice he and his family had faced in their lives. And the words of Hesquiaht chief Simon Lucas—who had spoken beautifully at the close of the protest—echoed through my head:
“You only see us with one eye.”
Following that summer, we settled into a shared life. Our small apartment filled with things my partner and I had made together—a table, shelves, small carvings. I drove the boat and helped with the winter beachcombing of logs. I dug clams, picked oysters, ate duck soup, fish-head soup, herring roe and many other traditional foods. I began to learn Tla-o-qui-aht words, kept a dictionary, listened to the soft nuances of the language.
At around this time I was reading The Songlines, by Bruce Chatwin. In it, he told of Australian aborigines, for whom the world is not alive until they have walked through time—along dream tracks dating back to creation—singing each landmark into existence along the way. I identified with the aborigines. I, too, was awakening to a new world, its features coming alive for me as I did so.
I attended potlatches and regular family dinners. Slowly, I began to meet the large group of people who made up my new family. And without exception they were friendly, welcoming, kind. When spring arrived I felt like a changed person. But who was I? I didn’t know yet.
And then I experienced a different kind of baptism.
When they came, the deaths were brutal, shocking, relentless. My partner’s beautiful eleven-year-old niece died in a tragic accident. Until that moment, my exposure to death included the natural demise of an elderly grandmother and a high-school acquaintance killed in a car crash. I grappled with the split-second ending of this young life, wondering how my partner’s sister could ever survive the loss of a child. It didn’t seem possible that her daughter, so young and lively, was dead.
My dreams changed, becoming troubled. One morning I awoke to an image of slaughter, a heap of animals dead on the rocks at an island. What woke me was the phone ringing. Another message of death—this time the death of a nephew. Again, I failed to make sense of it. This young man had just graduated high school, voted most popular student. This young man, whose life was just taking flight, had deliberately planned its end.
And then there was another nephew, this one killed in a conflict. I hadn’t been prepared for another death, so soon and so violent. I felt reborn, but not in the positive sense of that phrase. For me, the passage was from light into darkness, the darkness of things that shouldn’t be. If I had been searching for a song-line, by now it could be the comfort of Mozart’s powerful Requiem.
By this time I had also learned that grief could be a community affair. No hushed whispers or darkened doors. No leaving people alone or giving them space for reasons of privacy. Here, one’s presence in a grieving household was considered a mark of utmost respect. Human company was known to be the best possible medicine. Visitors came from all over to sit with the grievers in living rooms packed with rows of chairs.
I became proficient in the culture of death, the protocols required. When word of a death reached our ears, we went to the Co-op and filled bags with essentials: coffee, bread, cheese, ham and mayonnaise. Hundreds of people would pass through the grieving household, requiring nourishment. And then there were the coffins. For a family facing an unexpected death, or several deaths in a row, the cost of a coffin is crippling. Even in winter, when work was scarce, we would empty our pockets and hand over what we had: crumpled fives, tens—sometimes even coins. Rent seemed trivial compared with the need for a coffin. Time, also, seemed irrelevant on these occasions. One’s own plans became unimportant, replaced by the need to help wash dishes, pass out food, or simply sit in silent solidarity with the gathered crowd.
The deaths continued apace. A rash of suicides culminated with that of an eight-year-old boy. In what was another first for me, a young man died of AIDS. A young woman vanished without a trace, last seen at a party, still lost even now.
I began to see my new community as a people in perpetual crisis. There never seemed to be time to heal from one event before the next one struck. The paralysis of grief affected everyone. Death cast long shadows, in the darkness of which it was impossible to function. By comparison, John Jewitt, a blacksmith from the ship Boston who had been a slave of the Mowachaht tribe two hundred years prior, remarked on the robust health of the people, their strength, toughness, and the astonishing paucity of deaths. In the three years that he spent with them, from 1803 to 1805, only five people died out of fifteen hundred. I read his diary with a bitter sense of wonder. So much had changed.
While I was stuck in my newfound state of bewilderment, Tofino was also changing. In 1993 close to a thousand people were arrested in defense of Clayoquot Sound. Multinational logging corporation MacMillan Bloedel fell to its knees, while tourists from around the world arrived to see the place that had achieved such international media attention. By now, I saw the world with a built-in set of contrasts—the world I’d grown up in and the world I was only just beginning to know. I also saw two communities rapidly diverging.
Tourism spawned a housing boom in Tofino. In the equivalent of an old-fashioned gold rush, land mongers, developers and speculators rushed onto the peninsula. Land was no longer a place of story and connection. Many buyers were strangers, separated from our small community by their wealth and newness. By contrast, the Native community, so entrenched in family and historical connection, was collecting for coffins. The cultural divide was already conspicuous. The wealth gap was making it more so—resentment in the making. Taking a minor key, my song became one of unease. What did the future hold?
Carl and I separated after seven life-changing years. His own life continued to be wracked by tragedy—the loss of a grandson, the loss of a daughter, the loss of his father. With his father went the family home and I no longer had a place to visit in Opitsaht. Deprived of my usual way into the community, I felt shy, uncertain how to proceed. I also realized that my honest, funny and curious Opitsaht welcome of “What is your name? Why are you here?” was what many Tla-o-qui-aht people felt every day in Tofino, minus the elements of honest, funny or curious. For them, the element is invisibility, or worse, hostility. And one day I learned how that felt.
It was now 2006. Stage after stage, my life had been changing. I’d spent several years living alone on a floathouse in a remote bay; met and joined households with Marcel, a man who also lived afloat; become pregnant; had a child; and eventually come full circle, mooring the floathouse back in the Tofino Harbour at the same dock where I first started out. As with all new parents, free time was precious, packed with things that needed to be done. But on that beautiful evening I had only one thing to do: enjoy the moment.
Gliding out of the harbour on the ebbing tide, I passed close to Grice Point, the sheer rock bluff where tides are measured. Twenty feet up on the bluff a group of Native boys was partying. I could tell by their whooping cries that they were high—very high. They noticed my kayak and made a joke. Then they guffawed and came to the edge of the bluff, looking down at me, still laughing.
“Throw the rock,” one shouted. And quick as winking, the second boy hefted a boulder into his arms, grunting at the effort. The third boy hung back.
So close to the bluff, I was an unmissable target. The rock just had to be dropped and it would strike either my boat or myself. If it hit me, my skull would not survive the impact. If the rock hit the kayak, it would destroy the deck, capsize and sink the boat. I began to sweat, tightening my grip on the paddle. Fear for my daughter swirled with the eddies. Those volatile seconds had the power to change her life, too. To the boys on the bluff, I was a faceless kayaker, just as they—daily—were faceless to non-Native people in Tofino. Two communities living side by side, unknown to each other. But there was a difference here. I wasn’t just a kayaker, or a speed bump. I was a person and I knew these boys. They’d been children when I first moved to Opitsaht, bright laughing faces greeting me at the dock or on the road. My voice carried strongly up the bluff as I greeted one of the boys by his name. There was a silent pause and the other boys turned to him.
“How come she knows your name?”
I never heard the reply because they moved away from the edge. Instead, I heard the dull thud of the rock as it fell to the ground—dropped, not thrown.
For the Australian aborigines, a tjuringa is a sacred stone, engraved with the part of a song-line that belongs to you. In recent years I’ve retraced the steps of my song-line, going backwards to find my way forward. I haven’t yet found the perfect words to engrave, but what stands out is the importance of names. Names are the only way we have of showing recognition. It is difficult to crush someone with a rock if you know their name. Likewise, it is harder to diminish people—treat them as lesser or treat them with disrespect—if you know their name, their circumstances, their lovable traits, their weaknesses.
If cultures are to cross the gulf that separates them, in Tofino and elsewhere, it may be best to begin with individual relationships, the recognition of people as people. And as we say each other’s names, so we sing them alive, awakening our own selves along the way.