A dark shadow appeared in the water. From high above, the ocean seemed green and still, but the shadow cruised below the surface, moving at a good clip. The pilot dipped the plane toward it. “Humpback whale,” he said, turning to me. As he spoke, the whale broke the surface. A spout of water shot up like a geyser. The creature must have been twenty metres long, as big as two buses parked end to end.
We circled toward the underwater beast, and four or five more whales materialized, breaching the waves behind the first one. The pilot glanced at me and grinned. My mouth had formed a silent “Oh.” I’d never seen whales this size before.
We were flying in a floatplane, a Cessna, one hundred kilometres off the Alaska Panhandle, heading across the open ocean to a chain of islands known as the Queen Charlottes or, more properly, Haida Gwaii — the land of the Haida.
The Haida are celebrated for their totem poles. They were great artists, these Haida, and they lived in one of the most remote places on the planet — on the very knife edge of North America.
The pilot took the plane down farther, and we sailed over a rocky outcropping, the first sign of land. On it several hundred sea lions wallowed in the rare sunshine. They stampeded off the rock and into the water at the sound of the airplane. Ahead of us the mountains of Haida Gwaii swelled into view, and a few minutes later we landed, skimming across the water to stop at a place called Rose Harbour at the extreme southern end of the island chain.
An inflatable Zodiac bounced out through the waves to meet us. Rose Harbour used to be an old whaling station, but the only person who lives there now runs tourists from here out to the Haida ruins. We clambered out of the plane, standing for a moment on the float before stepping into the boat. In the relative safety of the harbour I was handed a survival suit to put on. It looked like a large orange snowsuit. I struggled to get it over my clothes and finally sat down, feeling ridiculous, encased in something like a full-body life jacket.
Still, this was the only way to get there, and should we be hit by a sudden squall, or should I tumble into the ocean, I’d have a few minutes at least before the dark waters of the North Pacific sucked my life away.
The Zodiac launched out of the harbour and into the swells. We had twelve kilometres of ocean to cross before we reached our destination.
An eagle glided from the black line of spruces, soaring across the beach and over the water toward us. We were approaching the island, skipping across the surf. Overhead, the eagle circled and flew in front of our boat, as if guiding us into shore. When the Zodiac finally beached on the rocks, I lumbered awkwardly and gratefully off the front and onto solid ground again.
This island is called SGaang Gwaii in the ancient Haida tongue — the Wailing Island. On stormy days waves the size of four-storey buildings surge through a hollow in the reef. In the winter the rushing waves give off an eerie, wailing sound, a mournful, haunting noise like the breaths of past spirits.
I managed to get my survivor suit off, not an easy task and not a graceful event to watch, and left it sitting, almost human, on the beach. A small trail wound into the forest, and we set off on it, almost immediately finding ourselves lost in a grove of old-growth cedars, among the tallest trees in the world. Their trunks were carpeted in moss, and a reverential silence accompanied our footsteps. This was untouched northern rain forest, and it reminded me of a giant green cathedral.
Before long the trail led into a clearing. A small wooden cabin sat there. This was the watchman’s home. All the abandoned Haida villages have watchmen, guards who watch over the old totem poles. They’re keepers of the spirits, these watchmen, and they know these islands better than anybody.
A young man stepped out of the cabin. James was the watchman here and wasn’t at all what I had expected. He was about twenty-five and wore a hockey jersey and big basketball shoes. James clomped onto the porch of the cabin and waved us up. There were various forms to fill out, since this is a protected place, a United Nations World Heritage Site, in fact. James didn’t say much to begin with, though the forms made it clear he would guide us to the village site and that we couldn’t deviate off the trail. We weren’t to touch anything and we were certainly not to take any souvenirs. The poles we were about to see were fragile. Many of them were almost two hundred years old. They were wind-worn and cracked, and in a few more years they would be completely gone.
James finally spoke up. “How many of you have seen the poles in Vancouver?” he asked.
I put up my hand like a dutiful student. I’d been to the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver only a few days earlier. The poles there were well preserved. They even had some of their original colour still on them.
“Those poles were taken from this village,” James said, not pleased.
I put my hand down quickly.
“The totem poles,” he went on, “are meant to be here. They’re not meant to be kept in museums. They’re supposed to decay. When a totem pole falls over in one of our villages, we don’t put it back up. It comes from a tree, and it’s meant to return to the earth.” He took a deep breath and shook his head, easing up a little. “It’s hard now. We want to preserve our history, of course, but we must respect the old beliefs. So please, you’re welcome to take photographs, but you must only walk where I tell you to. You have to do what I tell you.”
James wasn’t particularly tall, but he was barrel-chested, a strong guy who could kick the crap out of most anyone if he ever felt the need to. He got up and signalled us to follow him. Down the steps we went, back into the forest. SGaang Gwaii is a small island, and I realized that we had come in on the far side of it. We were going to walk across the island from one beach to another on the other side. It didn’t take long. Through the trees ahead we soon saw the ocean again, and as we came out of the forest, the old village appeared.
All along a grassy pitch, just up from the beach, were the totem poles, many slanting over with the weight of years. Twenty-six poles still stand at SGaang Gwaii llaana, and they’re all that remain of the great village that once stood here.
This was the village of the Ganxiid Haida, the Red Cod People. (The underlined letters are voiced uvular stops, sometimes written as gh or xh, and they’re sounded way back in the throat.) The Red Cod People were terrifying warriors, pirates really, who launched their war canoes from here, raiding up and down the coasts of British Columbia and Alaska, even going as far south as California.
They weren’t to be messed with. When the first European ships arrived offshore, the Ganxiid battled them ferociously. In the space of five years the Ganxiid destroyed two of these ships and got into vicious scraps with two more.
James led us to the remains of one of the houses. It was only a tumble of fallen cedar timbers now. In front were four or five slanting totem poles. James halted in front of one of them. A column of mythical spirits gaped at us, and even though the pole tipped precipitously, even though its cedar grain was weathered and cracking, exposed to two centuries of fierce sea winds, the mastery of the carving was evident.
“This is the pole of Chief Xoyah’s clan,” James said. “Do you see? It’s a sort of family crest, though we don’t really know much about this chief, really. Xoyah, in Haida, means Raven.” He looked at us seriously. “That’s probably not the chief ’s real name.
It’s his group.”
“His clan name?” I asked.
“No, his group.” James paused for a moment. “There’s not really an English word for this. Look, all Haida are born either Raven — Xoyah — or they’re Eagle. An eagle in Haida is Gud.”
“So that’s like a person’s tribe?”
“No, no. Look, in this town, SGaang Gwaii llaana, half the people would be Raven and half would be Eagle. Even in one house, even in one family, you’re going to have some people who are Raven and some who are Eagle.”
I must have looked pretty confused. James was doing his best, though. “If a young woman is a Raven,” he continued, “then she can only get married to an Eagle. All her children will be Raven, though. They don’t take this from their father. It comes through the mother’s line.”
I still didn’t completely get it.
We moved over to another group of totem poles. “This one,” James said, “is a mortuary pole. Do you see at the top there?”
I glanced up. There was no figure at the top. Instead it had a sort of hollow carved out of it.
“Up there,” James said, “they would have stored the bones of an important person, one of the elders, maybe a house leader. And these carvings would have been his or her personal crest. Some people say you read totem poles like books — you know, from top to bottom or whatever — but that’s a load of bullshit. They’re more like a coat of arms — either the symbols of a family or the personal crest of a single powerful person.”
I studied the figures carved into the pole carefully. The only one I could identify with any certainty was the small human being near the bottom. The rest were animal spirits. I really wanted a good crack at figuring out these symbols. I wanted to do a sort of Joseph Campbell analysis of them, but I didn’t even know where to start.
“Can you tell us what all these animals are?” I asked hesitantly.
“Well, some of them are real creatures. Some even come from the mainland. This one —” James pointed at a figure halfway up the pole “— is a grizzly bear. But we have no grizzlies on Haida Gwaii.”
“And this one?” I indicated a large figure below the grizzly. It seemed to be holding the human in its arms.
“First you have to know that some of the animals are mythical spirit beings. Many of these spirits lived under the water. This one is a sea wolf. The old Haida believed it was a creature that lived at the bottom of the sea, and when people drowned —”
“So you mean … like this guy?” I pointed at the little human figure. Maybe it was meant to be inside the belly of the sea wolf or perhaps lying on its chest.
“Yeah, like that guy,” James said. “The people who drowned would be caught in the fur of the sea wolf, and they couldn’t get themselves untangled. On this totem pole you can see that the grizzly bear has come down to shake the sea wolf and free the drowned person from his fur. Maybe it means that this mortuary pole is for someone who drowned. I don’t know for sure.”
I nodded sagely.
“On the other hand,” James continued, “like I said, don’t go thinking the totems tell stories. This one is about as close as you’re going to get to any kind of story. Probably the grizzly bear was the person’s personal animal, and that’s why it’s depicted as coming down to free the soul from the sea wolf. It’s usually not like that, though.”
I scanned the beach. There had been seventeen houses here, each holding an extended family of maybe twenty or thirty people. The houses were important things, too. They each had their own names, wonderful ones like “House That Is Always Shaking,” or even more poetically, “Clouds Sound Against It (as They Pass Over).” The house at the far end of the beach had the impossibly fine name of “People Think of This House Even When They Sleep Because the Master Feeds Everyone Who Calls.”
Names are important here — marking a particular identity within a clan or the moiety groupings of Raven or Eagle. This obsession with identity is a key to understanding the Haida and their totem poles. The totem poles aren’t stories. They’re signatures, ubiquitous markers that say, very clearly, “We were here.”
The Haida did have stories, of course. At the turn of the nineteenth century an anthropologist named John Reed Swanton showed up with pen and paper and set about taking down Haida myths. He transcribed them in Haida phoneme by phoneme, sounding out the unfamiliar words, making sure he got each one exactly right.
The translations show them to be works of great virtuosity. One of the elders Swanton interviewed, a man by the name of Ghandl, had lost his sight to smallpox. This brings to mind Homer and his great epics, and the comparison is apt. Haida tales can go on at length, even being told over several nights of sitting. There are stories of heroes and monsters, and a creation myth in which the beings of the world emerged from a cave — a consistent theme among many First Nation creation stories.
So are these structural archetypes? Are they fundamental components of human myth-making? That’s the conclusion the structuralist camp offers, but it’s a view that’s largely fallen out of favour with academics. Now there’s post-structuralism, deconstructionism, and postmodernism, and what they’re all saying is that the differences between cultures and languages far outweigh any perceived similarities.
And it’s true. The Haida myth stories are, for the most part, unlike anything I’ve ever read before. They’re called qqaygaang or qqayaagaang — both of which come from the root qqay, “to be old or full or ripe.” The infix aa changes the mode of the verb so that it emphasizes a state or a condition over a process or an action. Qqayaagaang, it seems, are things that continuously ripen with the telling.
A storyteller is a nang qqaygaanga llaghaaygaa, and Ghandl was one of the best. His stories float on a bed of the surreal. The Haida are a people who live on the edge of three worlds. In fact, in the old Haida pronunciation, the name of the land Haida Gwaii is called Xhaaydla Gwaayaay — land on the boundary between worlds. Out in front of the villages is the great Pacific Ocean. Killer whales — sghaana — are the primary visible forms of the spirits of this place, and when a Haida paddles on the ocean, he’s literally a tiny island floating over the roof of heaven. The dark temperate forests behind the villages form another edge of the spirit world for the Haida. The deep inlands of the islands were once places where the Haida never went. They were the place of the spirit bears and the deer and all manner of mythical creatures. And above the villages was the third world — the sky — the spirit place of the Eagles and Ravens.
Humans in the old Haida language are called xhaaydla xhaaydaghay — surface people. It means that they live on the edge, on the shiny bubble surface between three different spirit worlds. The human territory is at the boundary where the earth meets the ocean and where the sky meets the land. A few strokes on the paddle, a few steps into the woods, or if it were possible, a few flaps of the wing into the sky, and one would be in the spirit world.
In reading the Haida myths I often have the sensation of dreaming. A canoe cuts through the ocean waves in one passage, then a line later it floats through a great cedar house. Creatures morph from shape to shape, sometimes in mid-sentence. A bird becomes a girl, a spear metamorphoses into a rope, a tree transforms into a ladder leading to another world.
This is different. The Haida are a people living on a thin sliver of reality, the knife edge of inhabitable land between the vast open ocean and the cloud-capped mountains. And they’re truly original.
There are fifty-three aboriginal languages spoken in Canada, and almost half are found along the coast of British Columbia. The Haida were once a singular people, remote and isolated on a chain of islands far off the coast. They traded with (and raided upon) the peoples of the mainland, but they were distinct. They were something unique.
We tend to lump the aboriginal nations together in a kind of television image of the “Indian,” but they actually differ considerably more than we think. They’re a lot more different, say, than the French are from the English. To compare the different First Nations is more like contrasting the English with the Turkish. They have distinctly different languages, different customs and religions, whole different ways of being in the world.
Part of the problem is that the English language has borrowed words from various nations and used them to apply to all indigenous peoples. Teepee, for example, is a Sioux word, but we use it to apply to any sort of animal hide structure. Moccasin, tomahawk, powwow, and toboggan all come from the Algonquian family of languages, which includes Cree, Mi’kmaq, Blackfoot, and many others. Kayak comes from the word qajaq and is Inuktitut, the tongue of the Inuit.
They’re all different, but in our rush to understand and to label we seem to have all aboriginal peoples living in teepees, wearing feathered headdresses, going to powwows, smoking peace pipes — all the stereotypes. The first order of business is to throw away that mental baggage. Each First Nation has its own story, its own House of Being, its own Palace of Words.
Words, we have to remember, don’t label things. They label meanings. A canoe in Haida is t’luu, and it’s really quite a different thing than the canoes used to paddle in the Great Lakes and on the rivers in central Canada. Totem comes from the Ojibwa word ninto:te:m, and though James used the word totem, the old Haida would never have employed such a word. For them the poles were called gyaaghang or zhaat, depending on their use, depending on whether they were clan poles or mortuary poles.
The poles, of course, are complex symbolic systems in their own right. They don’t tell stories exactly, as James told us, but they do identify the people and the clans quite precisely. Their figures, their symbols, are derived from the stories of the Haida’s own particular spirit world.
Like many First Nations, the Haida experienced great tragedy with the arrival of the Europeans, and I’m not talking about the battles between the Red Cod People and the European ships. No, many of the other Haida villages had far more amicable first encounters. However, with the white men came disease. Typhoid, measles, and syphilis all took their toll, but by far the most deadly disease was smallpox.
The variola virus that causes smallpox has now been eliminated on Earth, except for a few vials hopefully carefully protected in a few select laboratories around the world. Smallpox, of course, is highly contagious, and for a people who had never had contact with the disease, it was catastrophic.
The first sign is a fever. A person’s temperature rises quickly after the initial infection, and in a few hours he’s immobilized by a temperature that soars to well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Then come the “spots.” Raised bumps appear on the skin, growing until they cover large parts of the body. The lumps are hard, as if small pebbles are lodged under the skin, and this is when the disease is at its most contagious. Survivors, and there were very few among the Haida, would have borne the scars of these bumps for the rest of their lives.
When the first Europeans sailed through the straits, there were about twelve thousand Haida living in hundreds of villages up and down these coasts. Within a couple of decades the population dropped to about six hundred desperate souls. In fact, their numbers dipped so precipitously that it looked as if the Haida and all their meanings might be wiped off the face of the planet.
On SGaang Gwaii the population plummeted from three hundred or four hundred to about fifty and finally to five ragged survivors, all in the space of a few years. All along the island chain of Haida Gwaii, the few survivors fled their villages, and by the end of the nineteenth century, congregated in two safe places: Skidegate, in the great fjord that runs between the two main islands, and Masset at the tip of the northern island.
To this day Skidegate and Masset are the only villages where the Haida still live in any great numbers. Some say there are now only two Haida dialects, one in the north and one in Skidegate, but that’s actually not quite right. It’s a bit more complicated than that. At Skidegate the descendants of villagers all up and down the southern islands, including SGaang Gwaii, banded together. They held on to their ancestries so that today the elders actually speak a tumble of different dialects. In Skidegate there are at least six ancestral chiefs among the population, that is, the chiefs from six different villages. They’re all in one place now, the survivors. This is what remains.
We sat on a log on the beach in front of the abandoned village. A mist had come in off the ocean. I looked at James. As I said, he was a big guy. Except for the hockey jersey, I could well imagine him in a war canoe, thumping at the gunnels as it rushed toward the beach of an enemy village.
“So,” I asked, “what are you?”
“What?”
“Are you a Raven or a —”
“I’m an Eagle,” he said without hesitation.
“And do you speak Haida?”
“Well, they teach it in the schools now. The elders come in and teach the kids right from kindergarten. But that was after me. I only had it in grade eight, so I only know a few words. Not much.”
In truth the Haida language is on the edge of extinction. There are only a few hundred people still fully fluent. But a concentrated effort is underway not only to teach the children but to assemble a sort of language bank before it’s too late. The elders meet and argue over the ancient words, as there are many dialects and accents. The spelling, too, is problematic, and there are at least four different writing systems in place.
The very last speaker of the dialect of the Red Cod People died in 1970, so the tongue of the Wailing Island is already gone. I had assumed that James was from this place. “No,” he told me. “I have a one-month shift here … living in the watchman’s cabin.” He glanced up at the sky. It was hard to tell if it was going to rain or not. “I’ve only been here for three days, so I’ve got, what, more than three weeks left.” He heaved a sigh. “There’s not much to do.”
Funny. I had the impression there was nothing James would like more than to shoot some hoops with his friends, maybe play some video games. This was a job for him, a responsibility, and he didn’t seem to be taking a great deal of pleasure in it. That wasn’t to say he didn’t have the greatest amount of respect for the place. It was just that, back in Skidegate where he lived, there was a here and now.
Seeing James sitting there on a clump of driftwood, his back to the ancient totem poles, distractedly tossing rocks into the water, all this reminded me that cultures, and languages for that matter, are pretty abstract entities. The world, in reality, is made up of individuals, and the way that individuals actually fit into these cultures and languages is sometimes problematic. James was a good example.
Post-structural theory talks about the individual as a “subject” caught in the “object” that is culture. One of the big problems with the old theories about culture say the post-structuralists, are that they’re very much bogged down in Western preconceptions. A Western preconception that really stands out is that we tend to think in dualities: this and that, us and them. We think in terms of individuals as separate from cultures. But the fact is, they’re not divisible.
What’s needed here is a collapsing of René Descartes. The French philosopher, of course, was the one who uttered the immortal “I think, therefore I am.” He was contrasting himself, his own consciousness, with the great outside world, the ghost in the machine, if you will.
But the post-structuralist line of thinking says that he got it all wrong. Consciousness doesn’t come first. Consciousness, after all, has to be conscious of something. It’s a sort of chicken-and-egg thing. We’re immersed from the very beginning in our culture’s sets of symbols — its beliefs, its ways of seeing and encoding the world. It’s the water we swim in. We can’t escape it because it precedes us, envelops us. It’s the world we’re born into no matter what sort of mental gymnastics we attempt to avoid it.
The world has already been defined for us through our language and through all the other semiotic systems of our culture. Such symbols might change over time, certainly, but we’re quite inseparable from them.
So what happens to the person who’s caught between two cultures, or three, or four? That’s where things really get interesting. I suppose the post-stucturalists would say we’re making arbitrary divisions again. A person exists within a world, not a world made up of two cultures but of a single blended culture — one with televisions and totem poles, one where you fish for Salmon and surf the Internet. This is life in the twenty-first century, the world that James lives in.
A long fjord separates the two main islands of the Queen Charlottes. It’s called Skidegate Inlet, and I’d come here to go sea kayaking, skimming over the spirit world in a Haida canoe.
So I found myself up at dawn one morning, standing at the dock with fog hanging over the inlet. Out in the water I could hear a small skiff puttering into shore to pick me up. A tall man, his feet in gumboots, jumped out to greet me. This was Patrick. His long black hair was tied in ponytail, and he spoke with a French-Canadian accent. He wasn’t Haida. Patrick turned out to be, of all things, Mohawk.
He was taking me to a small island owned by another man, his friend and mentor, Louie Two Elks. Louie, who was going to be my kayaking guide, wasn’t Haida, either. He was Métis, part Cree and part I wasn’t sure what, but I thought it might be Italian.
So here I was in Haida Gwaii, land of the Haida, about to go on a kayaking trip with two Native guides. One was Cree and the other was Mohawk. Now that seemed weird. But things don’t always fit into the neat conceptual boxes we build for ourselves. What exactly does it mean to be Haida? The answers aren’t always so straightforward.
“How many days you staying at Louie’s place?” Patrick asked as we set out across the inlet.
“Three days.”
Patrick nodded. A man of few words, he turned back to the tiny outboard motor and puttered out to a chain of three tiny islands. Louie Two Elks lived on the middle one. The island was perhaps four hundred metres from edge to edge. You could walk around it in a couple of minutes. Patrick steered the boat around the edge of the island and there, on the little beach, was Louie. He was about a third of a metre shorter than Patrick, but he also had his long hair tied back in a ponytail.
Louie waved to me from the beach and then helped to pull the boat in. I couldn’t help but see that Louie was wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt, and when I commented on it, his face lit up in a big grin. “Did you see The Motorcycle Diaries?” he asked. “I’m a big fan of Che.” And that made sense. Louie was a bit of a rebel himself.
He took me up to his cabin, actually quite a nice little house. Louie had been living here with his family and Patrick for twenty years. “We’re completely off the grid,” he told me. They didn’t get their power or their water from anywhere except nature. On the roof was a set of solar panels. Out back was a big rainwater tank, and for the winter, Louie had rigged up a system for heat — all of it very neat and tidy.
“When I first came out here,” Louie said, “I got a job on a tramp steamer going up the Inside Passage of Alaska. Well, I’d never been on the ocean before and I got real sick. You know, some people, they get sick …” Patrick nodded at the story. I was sure he’d heard it a thousand times. “Some people get seasick for a day or two and then they get their sea legs. But a certain percentage of people … they just stay sick. There’s nothing you can do. They never get over it. And that’s what happened to me. Finally, they just dropped me off at the Queen Charlottes, and I’ve been here ever since.” He looked at me and chuckled. “Me, I’m a freshwater Indian.”
Louie, as near as I could tell, was from northern Saskatchewan. His grandmother was full-blooded Cree, and though he was born Louie Waters, he was given his Native name in a ceremony a few years back.
“Two Elks,” he told me, “is perfect because, to me, it means I walk in two worlds, the white one and the Native one.” In fact, Louie had eventually married a lovely woman named Joy. She was non-Native, but a few years later they adopted two full-blooded Cree kids. Then along came Patrick, who had wandered out from Quebec, and they sort of adopted him, too. He was something between an uncle and a brother to the kids.
Louie, besides occasionally guiding kayaking trips, lived largely off the land, hunting and fishing. Sitting on the deck of the cabin on the first evening, we watched the Salmon jump out of the water. They passed by here for most of the year, each according to its season. The spring Salmon arrived first and then the coho. After that the chum Salmon made their run until finally September brought the sockeye. That was one of the secrets of Haida civilization. For thousands of years they had lived here, hunting and fishing, and the food was so plentiful that it allowed them lots of time to develop their consummate arts and storytelling.
Lounging on the deck, Louie and I got to know each other. He told me about the guy on the next island over. This man had a commercial greenhouse operation, a large, almost industrial complex with a barking dog and lots of no trespassing signs. He was the polar opposite of Louie’s eco-friendly little slice of paradise. A few years back this guy searched some legal papers and discovered he actually owned the rights to Louie’s little island. Within days Louie received an eviction notice.
Well, Louie was already into his second decade there and wasn’t about to move. Across at Skidegate the Haida heard about Louie’s impending eviction and came over to rescue him. One of the elders, Chief Skedans, a full ninety-two years old, was the first to help.
Chief Skedans arrived and looked around at Louie’s little island. “I think,” he said, “there was an old Haida village here once.” In fact, that’s pretty much a sure bet. Just about all the islands, at one time or another, had villages. At any rate, Chief Skedans claimed the island as Haida, and after that the guy next door couldn’t face the prospect of a legal battle to prove otherwise. Even the Canadian government doesn’t try to tackle land claims like that.
Louie told me that the Haida were in a different position than most of the other First Nations in Canada. Land treaties were never signed here. There was never an agreement with the provincial or the federal governments. The islands were too remote. So with a declaration by Chief Skedans, Louie’s island became Haida territory — as simple as that.
But there was more. Chief Skedans offered to adopt Louie’s family. This was a great honour, and Louie still gets quite moved when he talks about it. An ancient potlatch ceremony was held, and Chief Skedans, who is a Raven, formally adopted Louie Two Elks’ family. They would now be Haida, or at least Joy Waters and the children would be.
Now think about that for a second. If Louie’s wife and kids became Raven, that meant Louie himself would have to be an Eagle, because a Raven can only be married to an Eagle and vice versa. Therefore he was the sole one in the family who couldn’t be adopted because Chief Skedans was Raven and couldn’t speak for the Eagle moiety.
“So,” Louie said, laughing, “I’ve been here for more than twenty years. My wife is Haida. My children, who are Cree, are also Haida. And me, I’m still not a bloody Haida.” Louie’s eyes twinkled at the telling. “I actually went out and bought me a little pipe carved with the figure of an eagle. I guess I thought I could become an Eagle on my own. And on the first day I had it, I dropped it and it shattered. That told me it wasn’t up to me. You can’t just say, okay, they’re Raven so that means I’m an Eagle.
“But I do go out in the winter and feed the young eagles,” he continued. “Kind of trying to pile up the karma, I guess. That doesn’t make me Haida, but, you know, I’m happy just to be the Haida’s honoured guest here. That’s enough for me. It’s all about respect, you see. It’s all about respect.”
Professional linguists are having a hell of a time placing the Haida language. Some want to claim that it’s part of the Na-Dene family of languages, but that might only be because the Haida have borrowed a lot of words from their mainland neighbours (the Tlingit, for example, whose language is definitely Na-Dene). Another group of linguists say that the Haida tongue is a language isolate, one of those very rare languages that don’t seem to be related to any others on Earth.
The Haida themselves think they’re unique. They believe they’ve always inhabited these islands. Through the long years they’ve certainly traded with many of the mainland cultures. As artists, they imported beaver teeth for chisels and porcupine hair for paintbrushes. As cooks, they traded for sheep and mountain goat horns to manufacture bowls, ladles, and spoons. Raw copper came from Alaska and abalone shell from Oregon and California. On their totem poles and in their storytelling, many of the spirit animals were actually mainland creatures like the grizzly bear, the beaver, the mountain goat, and the wolf.
So the Haida were never completely isolated. In fact, their most important cultural ceremony is one found up and down the coast — the famous potlatch.
When Louie’s family was adopted by Chief Skedans, a potlatch ceremony was held. Louie sat me down one night and showed me the videotape of it. There were songs and dances, and Chief Skedans, old and wise, appeared in his finest headdress. It was a fantastic ceremony, and along tables in the back of the hall were piles and piles of everything from towels to toys for the kids.
These were the material goods to be given away in the potlatch, and that’s the whole point. Whoever puts on a potlatch gives away huge amounts of wealth. That’s something completely counter to our own sense of economics. Why would you hold a party in which you give away everything you own? It doesn’t seem to make sense.
Ah, but it does. It works precisely according to logic far outside our own, but logic all the same. Very basically, wealth and power for the Haida aren’t determined by how much is acquired in a lifetime. It’s the opposite. Wealth is displayed in how much one is willing to give away. Rather than our system of “conspicuous consumption,” the Haida display their wealth, power, and respect in the community by a system we might call “conspicuous disposal.”
Even that’s a bit of simplification. All across Haida Gwaii there are potlatches for various sorts of events. There are potlatches for the election of a new chief and there are potlatches for naming ceremonies, sometimes the naming of a person, sometimes even for the construction and naming of a new house. At all of these occasions the person putting on the potlatch gives away vast amounts of wealth. They usually give it away to the members of the opposite group so that Chief Skedans, being a Raven, would give it away to members of the Eagle group.
It’s a sort of legal payment given for the act of “witnessing” the ceremony. Like a signature on a legal document, the other group is called upon to verify the ceremony. And this is what they’re being “paid” for. It all seems to balance out, it all seems to even up over the years, so that it’s a tightly knit, perfectly functioning economy.
That’s the case now and it was the situation before the arrival of the white man. However, potlatches were actually made illegal by the Canadian government from 1885 to 1951. Obviously, white authorities couldn’t understand what the Haida and other West Coast people who held potlatches were up to and therefore figured they were up to no good. It’s a perfect example of cultural misunderstanding, and it’s only now that some of the more ceremonial objects from the potlatches are being returned to First Nations people, sometimes from museum collections as far away as New York and Sweden.
It occurs to me now that when Louie was talking about respect he was really speaking about understanding. To respect something is to give an honest attempt at understanding it. It’s as simple as that.
The word potlatch actually comes from a Nootka word. The Nootka were a people who lived on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The root is ppaatlppiichi’atl, which means “to transfer property in the context of a public feast, to buy status.”
The Haida use a different word for it, in fact, a number of words depending on the exact ceremony performed. A waahlghal is employed when a house is built, though it’s also used for adoptions, like that of Louie’s family. Unfortunately, it’s one of the many words that have almost been lost. Even the Haida today will probably just call it a potlatch so that waahlghal is all but a dead word.
But I didn’t want to let that word go. It’s quite something to hold a word like waahlghal on your tongue, a word with such meaning. In the rugged mountains and fjords of Haida Gwaii, there are, as I’ve said, only a hundred or so elders who still speak this language with any fluency. That means these words, each and every one, are as rare as diamonds. They’re jewels we need to hold on to, if only to present them to the light and let them sparkle once more.
Like the weathered totem poles, they deserve respect.
Louie, like James the Haida watchman, lives in a strange world, one that didn’t exist before. To press a point, I might call it a postmodern world. Two hundred years ago it would have been quite easy to say what was Haida and what wasn’t. The people in villages spread across Haida Gwaii, though they spoke different dialects, were all definitely Haida. Everyone else wasn’t.
Now it’s not quite so simple. Today the Haida live in a blended world. Most of them speak English and no more than a handful of Haida words. They live in modern, centrally heated houses. The dense forest has been logged and scarred, and the totem poles are mostly gone.
The Haida, at least in terms of defining the boundaries of their ancestral lands, are better off than most First Nations peoples of North America. Living on remote islands has left them with a clear sense of what is Haida land and what isn’t. But what is the Haida world? It’s not the old world. That’s gone. Bits and pieces remain, especially in their great art, but for the individual … what is it to be a Haida in the twenty-first century?
After Louie’s family went through the potlatch ceremony, after it was formally welcomed into the Raven moiety, Chief Skedans took it upon himself to commission a totem pole. That’s a rare event and not something that’s carved for tourists or on some pretense of showing off their culture. This totem pole was to mark the new family clan that had been created. It was carved by an artist with the Haida name of Skil Q’uas, and it now stands proudly on a promontory at the edge of Louie’s little island, looking out to sea.
Louie took me out to it. From the bottom up there’s a killer whale, a grizzly bear, and a mountain goat. These are the totems or symbols of Chief Skedans’s clan. At the top is the figure of a moon, Chief Skedans’s personal symbol, and tucked under the paw of the grizzly, almost around at the back of the totem, a little carved frog seems to clamber up the cedar trunk.
Louie chuckled. “We always say the little frog is for Patrick. French Canadian, you know.”
There are other figures and abstract lines on the totem pole, and I found out later that in the crest of Chief Skedans’s clan there are two types of clouds and a rainbow. At the top of the whole thing is a stylized raven, and as if that isn’t enough, a real raven appears to sit atop the pole, gazing at the ocean, conspiring to trick the universe with another one of his stories.
The canoe slipped easily through the water. Louie sat in the back, steering with his knife-edged paddle. I worked the front. The canoe was painted black and had a stylized raven near the bow in white. In Haida this is a t’luu, exactly the same as the ones that have been used here for thousands of years.
We paddled up Skidegate Inlet. Along the shoreline Louie pointed out how the tops of hemlocks bowed over while Sitka spruce stood straight. Cedar, he showed me, had needles that were soft like lace. Where there were alders and sometimes even crabapple trees the soil had been disturbed. That meant there had been a village once.
Louie told me many things about the land. He revealed how spruce pitch, a sort of gooey tar from the Sitka, would have been used to heal battle wounds. “It sticks the skin together like stitches,” he said, “and it’s sterile.”
He held up his paddle. It was sharpened at the end to a point. “Do you see this?” He waved it at me menacingly. Water droplets arced around it. “The Haida used these as both paddles and weapons. I’d use it still if a bear showed up on the beach. Did you know,” he continued, suddenly fixing upon this idea, “that the bears here are a sub-species that are different than any other ones in the world? They’re a kind of black bear.”
“Yeah?”
“But much bigger than the mainland black bears, especially their jaws. They’ve developed huge jaws to bite into the clams and mussel shells they find along the beaches.”
Louie certainly knew a lot about this place. I began to see that not only had Louie (or his family and his island, anyway) been adopted by the Haida but that Louie himself had adopted the Haida ways — their land, their ideas, their understandings.
We dipped through the placid water for several hours, switching sides when it got too tiring. The old Haida could go on for days like this. The little canoe we were in would have been the kind they used every day, the sort they puttered in to their neighbour’s place to borrow a cup of spruce pitch. But there were bigger canoes.
“A five-hundred-year-old cedar,” Louie said, “could be carved into a canoe that would hold thirty or forty guys. These were the war canoes, the ones they paddled in on their raids along the coast.”
“Does it ever get rough in the straits?” I asked.
“In the winter, yes. The winds come in off the Pacific and churn up the straits pretty good. Between here and the mainland of British Columbia … whooo boy!”
“Hecate Strait?”
“Yeah, it’s supposed to be one of the most dangerous stretches of water in the world. Some people say it’s like rounding Cape Horn in South America. Different currents and weather patterns all colliding —”
“But the Haida used to go across it in canoes?”
“In their war canoes, yeah.”
“But still, crossing the ocean in an open canoe?”
“The Haida were tough guys — that’s for sure. Here, steer into the beach for a second. I want to show you something.”
We entered shallower water and hopped onto a rocky stretch of land, pulling the canoe a little way out of the water. “Look at this,” Louie said. He showed me how the front of the canoe was cut away. It didn’t have the rounded hull of a normal canoe but was concave at the front. “That’s for ploughing through the surf. It handles really well in the ocean swells but then —” he pointed at the back of the canoe “— if you’re going up still water, you just turn the canoe and the rounded end becomes the front.”
Ingenious, I thought. That was what happened when you lived in the same environment for a few thousand years. You got to know it well.
At the east end of the inlet, where the bay meets Hecate Strait, the actual town of Skidegate rises from the beach. It’s where most Haida still live. It’s not a reserve. It’s a town like any other.
I walked up the highway to Skidegate on my last day in Haidi Gwaii. It began to rain, but I had one more thing I wanted to see. The rain grew harder. I hadn’t planned on that, but I plodded wetly up the road. In the trees, ravens cawed, and large, dark clouds had come down to touch the sea.
Near the edge of Skidegate there’s a large carving shed. In it is one of the treasures of the modern Haida — a massive war canoe named Loo taas, “Wave-Eater,” another jewel.
It was pouring now. With every step my sodden boots sloshed and my coat was soaked through. Up ahead I could see that the doors of the canoe shed were thankfully open. I dashed toward it and found myself in a long room, well lit, constructed entirely of cedar. In the rain it smelled wonderful, and there, like a centerpiece in the hall, was Loo taas.
The canoe, just as in the old days, had been carved from a single tree. It was eighteen metres long, as big as a whale. In the middle it was two metres wide, so it could comfortably hold as many as twenty burly paddlers. Along the hull it was painted masterfully, and I knew this was the work of Bill Reid, the greatest modern artist of the Haida.
Reid’s work is now so well-known that one huge piece sits in the Canadian embassy in Washington, D.C. Another is the centrepiece of Vancouver International Airport, and many smaller pieces are found in museums and galleries around the world. Almost single-handedly, Reid has taken the great Haida traditional forms and patterns out to the world, and his work is indisputably magnificent.
I was alone in the carving shed for a few minutes before a young Haida woman came in. “Go ahead,” she said. “You can touch it if you want to.” Evidently, the look on my face was of reverence, and she found that a little comical. She slapped heartily at the side of the canoe. “They paddled this one all the way up from Vancouver, you know. That’s seven hundred kilometres of open ocean. I think it can handle you poking at it.”
She chuckled again and introduced herself as Kim. She was in her mid-twenties, about the same age as James. She took me around the huge canoe slowly, showing me how a carved channel just under the gunwale served to keep waves from splashing into the boat. She explained how a carved notch in the front was used for ropes, as well as for steering the canoe, like a sighting on the barrel of a rifle.
“One time,” she said, “we took it out in the bay and loaded it with the heaviest guys in Skidegate. They tried to tip it over but, you know, they couldn’t. It’s pretty sturdy.”
The rain continued to pelt down, so I stayed in the warmth and continued talking with Kim. She was born in Skidegate, and I asked her what it was like growing up here.
“It’s weird,” she said, “we’re just like anyone else. We go off to the big cities to university. We email one another. We do all the things everyone else does. But that Haida thing … it’s always there.” She glanced at the floor. “Some people don’t like it. You know, it’s always hanging over us. People expect us to be such and such a way.” She studied me for a moment. “But I like it. I go up into the woods sometimes and I walk the path of the ancients.”
Those were her exact words: “I walk the path of the ancients.” That was beautiful. I asked her about Haida names, and she laughed. “Yeah, it gets complicated. I was born with both a Haida name and an English name. You know, to make it easier for you white guys.” She waved her hand at me, and I smiled. “Then you get another Haida name when you grow up. Sometimes, if something important happens, you even get another name after that. I got another name when I got arrested.”
“Arrested?” I must have looked alarmed, but she only chuckled again.
“Naw, it’s not what you think. I was at a blockade on the south island. We were blocking the loggers from going in. Right after that they made the whole area a national park, and now the logging companies can’t touch it.”
“You did that?”
“Yeah, I was real young, but I got a new name for that. I’m very proud of it.”
The rain had let up a little. Kim phoned a friend of hers who ran a company called Eagle Taxi, and a guy turned up in a battered van to take me back to the ferry landing.
I flew out of Haida Gwaii later that day. Beneath me a mist lapped around the islands, and the old propeller plane whirled out over the ocean. I didn’t see any more whales, but I left the islands with something more than I had come with, something like understanding.