The Haida Way
Langara Island 2001
A potlatch is similar to a court case in that both are prohibitively expensive; both involve lengthy speeches and the vigorous examination and debate of the actions, rights and legal responsibilities of the participants. One has food, singing and spiritual rites; the other, not so much. — Eden Robinson
I caught his profile in the periphery of my vision between examining rooms.
“I need to talk to you.” I said. “Wait for me in my office.”
“Did you have a good time in Orlando?”
There was apprehension in his eyes. It turns out that I didn’t have a good time in Orlando, not just because it’s a plastic shrine to a cartoon escapist fantasy, not because it’s miles from anywhere in a southern state that hasn’t yet heard of public transport, and not because the conference was totally banal, but something else.
“Like what?” He asked.
“Have you ever heard of rice burritos?” I asked.
“Can’t say I have.” He said.
“Me neither.” I said. “But I can assure you, Kevin, it’s a real thing.”
“A rice burrito.”
“Uh huh.”
“So if you didn’t think you’d like it, why did you request it?” Kevin asked.
“I didn’t.” I said. “It was just after I ordered my steak that the waiter inquired as to my nationality.”
“Why?”
“Because the hotel had instructed the kitchen that the Canadians, on your restricted budget, would have to get by with rice burritos.”
“How were they?”
“How do you think they were, Kevin?” I asked. “They’re fucking rice burritos.” He left quickly, turning to reassure me that this wrong would be redressed. A week later, he called me in the office.
“Have you ever been to Langara Lodge?” He asked. I had heard about Langara Lodge. It was a 5-star fishing resort on the northernmost island of the Queen Charlottes, which is what we still called them then.
“No.” I said.
“Do you want to go?” Kevin asked. I immediately thought of our new fishing fanatic colleague Mikie, just down the hallway.
“Can I bring a friend?” I asked.
“Sure.” I told him I would be right back and went down the hallway to knock on Mikie’s door.
“What?” He looked busy.
“You ever been to Langara Lodge?” I asked.
“No.”
“Do you want to go?”
“Yes.” He closed his door. Which was how Mikie and I managed to find ourselves outside a private hanger at Vancouver Airport, jammed into an old DC-4 with a dozen cardiologists, droning our way north to Langara Island.
On landing in Sandspit, we were taken two by two, as into the ark, in a helicopter over the main northern island of Graham to a slow hover landing on the first island that Europeans had discovered in the archipelago. In 1774, Juan José Pérez Hernández, on his ship Santiago, named it after the Spanish naval commander Juan de Lángara. Thirteen years later, Captain George Dixon named all the islands after his ship, the Queen Charlotte, King George III’s wife and friend of Marie-Antoinette.
Two lovely young ladies in survival suits escorted us to our cabin, and after offloading, we walked over to the great room of the main lodge. It was here we were presented with a dilemma.
“You have two choices.” The lodge owner said. “(1) You can keep what you catch and run the risk that you might not catch much at all, or (2) “You can ‘catch and release,’ and we’ll send you home with a generous Styrofoam cooler of vacuum-packed salmon… and you contribute to saving the species.”
Every cardiologist, to a man, opted to roll the dice on Mother Nature and return to the hunter-gatherer past they never had. It was at this point that Andy, one of the heart docs, offered a bet of $100 that he would catch a bigger fish than you. This is where the legend begins.
“They’re a bit like crabs in a bucket, these cardiologists.” Mikie observed. “Always trying to climb on top of each other.” I watched him raise his hand. “Dr. Winkler and I elect to save the species.”
And so it went. There was a lot of giving going on. We were giving the species a chance at survival, Andy was giving the other cardiologists a chance to give him a hundred dollars, and I was giving Kevin a chance at redemption for the Trial of the Rice Burritos. It was a Langara Lodge potlatch, except that it really wasn’t. Mikie and I didn’t yet know what we going to give Mother Nature, although we did know it would be all of it.
This wasn’t my first trip to the Charlottes. In the autumn of 1991, my wife and I packed up our white Mazda half ton truck and drove north. We didn’t go alone. Robyn’s parents squeezed into the extended cab behind us, excited to be part of the adventure. Her father, Ron, was a stone mason, and had come over from New Zealand with her mother Patty, to build the magnificent fireplaces in our new, still not quite finished home. Ron needed a break from the brutal cut and macerated toll the hard golden white quartzite flagstones were inflicting on his hands, and Patty, after three months living with her oldest daughter and son-in-law, needed some new scenery. The gigantic turkey she baked for four hours was supposed to go a long way to feeding us on the camping trip over the next fortnight.
Our first overnight stop was Alert Bay, a Kwakwaka’wakw village on Cormorant Island, home to the world’s tallest totem pole. We arrived off the ferry to a row of beach fires, each blaze ringed by salmon filets pegged to cedar planks. The old native men in charge offered us lunch, and we were humbled. Robyn drove us to the campground adjacent to the most magical spooky cedar swamp— impaled by monstrous moss-covered trees, or rather their ghosts, for these first-growth giants had been dead a long time. In 1921, the Government of Canada, passed Section 116 of the Indian Act, and crushed the Kwakwaka’wakw potlatch custom of dance, song, and wealth distribution. The bureaucrats confiscated wooden masks, copper shields, dance regalia, and other items. We arrived just after the tribe had regained their possessions and viewed the returned artifacts in the island’s cultural centre. On one later visit, Robyn and I almost bought the beautiful former Anglican Church here, now transformed into Alert Bay Lodge.
We spent our next and final day on Vancouver Island in the Fi-Lo-Mi of Port Hardy’s Fishing-Logging-Mining culture, dodging elk, admiring the chainsaw carving of a bear and her cub at Jessie’s B&B, and posing in front of dead 700-year-old Sitka Spruce ten feet in diameter (the tree had been 200 feet high). Port Hardy was named after the British Vice-Admiral in whose arms died Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, 1st Duke of Bronté—at the Battle of Trafalgar with the Franco-Spanish fleet on 21 October 1805, although you wouldn’t expect your average resident to know that.
We rolled onto the MV Queen of the North next morning, for an 18-hour trip through the Inside Passage to Prince Rupert. Fifteen years later, with 101 people on board, she failed to make a planned course change, ran aground, and sank, because fourth mate, Karl Lilgert, was distracted by an affair he was having with Quartermaster Karen Briker, who had forgotten how to turn off the autopilot. The natives of Hartley Bay rescued everyone except Shirley Rosette and Gerald Foisy of 100 Mile House, whose bodies were never found. By comparison, our passage was relatively uneventful.
To catch the ferry to the Queen Charlottes the following morning, required an overnight camp near the terminal. We visited the Kazu Maru memorial, a Japanese fishing boat from Prince Rupert’s sister city in Japan, Owase, found adrift here six years before we arrived. It’s original owner, Kazukio Sakamoto, had perished at sea. His wife said he would have been happy to know his little craft was part of a park honoring mariners.
The MV Queen of Prince Rupert had been prematurely launched by accident in 1965; the first of two bottles of champagne launched against the hull had simply bounced off. It took 8 hours for it to cross the Hecate Strait.
The Haida had paddled their large war canoes across this channel to plunder coastal villages for slaves and booty. The mainland tribes didn’t know how to navigate the shallow waters, especially susceptible to storms and violent weather, and couldn’t follow. In an ironic twist of history, the strait was named after HMS Hecate, a 4-gun Hydra-class paddle sloop that sank the American brigantine Chatsworth in 1856 off the coast of Africa, also a slaver.
Our Mazda truck rolled off the ferry into Skidegate, making landfall beside an old Ford Fairlaine with a freshly caught big skate on its hood. The village used to be a trading hub for sea otter pelts and once boasted a proud forest of ancient carved totem poles, but no longer. We drove on into, or should I say by Queen Charlotte City, there was so little of it. The small harbour produced clear Sitka spruce lumber to fabricate allied warplanes in World War I. By a fluke of good fortune, we ran into a good friend and brilliant pathologist, John Whitelaw, whose birdwatching obsession had landed him in our path. We followed him down to a river canopy of big trees and fast, turbulent water.
“You see that bird?” He asked. We saw the bird sitting on a stone in the stream, a small chirpy chunky greyish brown round-bellied thing with water rushing over his feet.
“That’s an ouzel.” John said. “Watch this. He’ll pump himself up and down and then launch himself into the rapids.”
“Why?” I asked.
“He’ll come up with a salmon egg in his mouth.”
“Bullshit.” I said. On cue, the squat songbird dove into the white water. Within two seconds he was back on the rock with a big orange sphere in his mouth.
“Why don’t they drown?” Robyn asked.
“They have nasal flaps.” He said.
The next morning, we pointed the Mazda north through Graham Island. Our first stop was a trail that led down to the Yakoun River, where a unique Sitka spruce had grown for centuries. The Haida called it Kiidk’yaas which meant ‘ancient tree,’ and considered it sacred. They told a ‘Lot’s wife’ legend about a young boy who disrespected nature causing a terrible storm to descend on his village. Only he and his grandfather survived. As they fled, the grandfather warned the boy not to look back, but when he did, was immediately turned into the mythical tree. All four of us fell under the spell of this rare genetic mutation, the one-of-a-kind magnificent Picea sitchensis ‘Aurea’ Golden Spruce. We had no way of knowing, six years after our viewing, that a 47-year-old unemployed forestry engineer named Grant Hadwin returned to the Charlottes and purchased a chainsaw and other felling equipment. Early on the morning of January 20, 1997, he swam across the freezing Yakoun River and made a series of deep cuts in the Golden Spruce, designed to leave Kiidk’yaas standing but weakened, so that it could be blown over by the next strong wind. The tree fell two days later. Back in Prince Rupert, he sent a fax to the media and the Haida nation claiming responsibility for the act, as a protest against the logging industry. The Ted Kaczynski of the canopy, he thought he was fucking for virginity. A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
Hadwin was arrested, ordered to return to Haida Gwaii to stand trial, and released on bail. He planned to travel to his trial date by crossing Hecate strait in his kayak. His broken watercraft pitched up on a nearby island five months after he left Prince Rupert. The fate of its owner remains unknown.
Like the second Golden Bough that grew back after the first was torn away by Virgil’s Trojan hero Aeneas, a group of UBC botanists had already grafted a Kiidk’yaas cutting onto an ordinary Sitka spruce. They offered the Haida the sapling to replace their loss, but the young tree died in before it could be delivered. The only remnant harvested from the original forms the body of the Six String Nation guitar, together with other artifacts from every province and territory of Canada. There also used to be a white raven here, which must have been a splendid sight, if it ever perched on the Golden Spruce, instead of the electrical transformer that killed it. The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife; as you go along you have to be careful or you will fall off one side or the other.
At the top of Graham Island, through a Ta’an forest of tree branches made of moss, our family of adventurers settled onto the wide expanse of Agate Beach Campground. Below the cliffs, we combed the shore for driftwood and foreign flotsam marooned on this side of the Pacific by the Kuroshio current. Some Albertans, set up in their RV nearby, spent every holiday here, canning enough salmon to last them over the winter. The first night gave us a feast of Dungeness crabs, which put ort Coleman stove to good use. The next day they gave us halibut, rockfish, salmon, and geoducks. Everywhere we went in Haida Gwaii, someone would bring us fresh seafood at the end of the day. Patty’s turkey sat quietly decomposing in the back of the truck, until it screamed for a decent burial. Our time in Naikoon below the cliffs was magical—foraging in the big driftwood, collecting agates, digging the beach for clams at low tide, and sitting by the heat of campfire at night. Ron fed the squirrels by hand, to the disapproval of the screeching Steller’s Jays.
“They’ve found dung-eating fungi underground in the ancient peat in this park.” I said. “Sixty thousand years ago, right where we’re standing, caribou and woolly mammoths grazed on what was then tundra and meadows.”
We drove through the town of Masset on our way back south. Here the Haida had ninety per cent unemployment while every three days, the largest barges on earth, the Haida Monarch and Haida Brave, each carrying 15,000 cubic metres or 430 truckloads, left with the finest timber on earth. A culture is no better than its woods.
A third ship in the BC Ferries fleet, M.V. Kwuna, carried our Mazda the twenty-minute voyage from Skidegate Landing to Alliford Bay on Moresby Island, the larger but less inhabited southern island of Haida Gwaii. We drove to the Sandspit airport to arrange a helicopter ride to see the Skedans totem poles the following day. A Canadian Airlines flight from Vancouver landed beside us. The pilot who emerged from the plane was an old friend who travelled with me in China on my circumnavigation hitchhiking world trip eight years earlier. Brian attended our wedding in 1986. His gift was perfect—an old Japanese glass fishing float from the Queen Charlottes, symbolic of how Robyn had also crossed the Pacific to her new life on Vancouver Island. That was the last time I saw him.
We drove the only road on the island, a 25-mile gravel route south to the abandoned logging town of Moresby Camp. Once built here to devour the forest were now remnants of rotting plywood and random cedar shingles and shakes and old metal stovepipes, devoured back. We camped overnight at the head of Cumshewa Inlet.
The morning of our helicopter flight broke bright and clear and quiet down the east coast of Moresby Island to the old totem poles in the peninsular Haida village of Skedans on Louise Island. Its other name, Koona Llnaagay, means ‘Village at the Edge.’ It was diminished in a sort of understated way. There was no hint of the colourful grandeur that once was. The large cedar poles bleached and buffed by the element to a silver-gray slowly decaying as they fall…
The helicopter pilot slipped off his sunglasses.
“Hard to believe that these people were the Vikings of Beringia.” I said.
“Actually, the Haida think of the Vikings as like Haida.” He put his sunglasses back on. “The people that carved these poles were aggressive sea warriors of the first order. They ruled this side of the North Pacific for over ten thousand years.”
“Why were they so belligerent?” I asked.
“Haida warfare was motivated by revenge, insults or disputes over property, territory, resources, trade routes and even women.” He said. “Sometimes there were more than one of these reasons, the result of decades-old disputes. They raided every coastline to plunder coppers and Chilkat blankets and other objects of wealth, but mainly slaves, who enhanced their productivity or were traded to other tribes. They brought their medicine men along to ‘destroy the souls of enemies.’”
“How good were they?”
“Very good.” The pilot paused. “Craftsmanship and trading skills and seamanship made them fearless on the open ocean in the huge war canoes, each hollowed out of a single red cedar and manned by sixty warriors. To shatter the hulls of enemy canoes, they hurled fifty-pound stone rings tied to cedar bark ropes retrieved quickly for subsequent throws. The perilous Hecate Strait provided their island fortress with immunity to reprisal, and their fortifications were reinforced with stout palisades, rolling top-log defences, heavy trapdoors and fighting platforms supplied with stores of large boulders to hurl at invaders. Haida were unexcelled at long-range lightning attacks and hand-to-hand combat. They fought European merchants, other Indigenous communities as far as a thousand miles away, and each other. Their weapons were multi-functional daggers and other tools; they wore elk tunics under rod-and-slat armor. Battles between a subtribe of Haidas and another community sometimes resulted in the annihilation of either one or both groups involved. The women fought as savagely as their husbands. Every warrior was a gaagiixiid, a wildman. They would burn the village to the ground during a battle. And they would burn the slaves of the chiefs who died in battle on his funeral pyre.”
“They were no sissies.”
“No sissies.”
“So, what happened to them?” I asked.
“We happened to them.” He said. “There were 30,000 Haida living in more than a hundred archipelago villages at European contact in 1774. In March of 1862, the steamship Brother Jonathan arrived in Victoria from San Francisco with a lone passenger infected with smallpox. The disease quickly spread to First Nations trading encampments on the outskirts of the city. The colonial government made no effort to vaccinate these natives nor to quarantine anyone infected. In June, police disbanded the encampments and forced 20 canoes of Haidas (many already infected) back to Haida Gwaii, escorted by a gunboat. The smallpox finished off what typhoid, measles, and syphilis had started. By 1900, there were only 350 Haida left in the world.” But no sooner came the white man There was with him his disease and his alcohol and the scourges, erstwhile unknown.
“And then?”
“And then we colonized them.” He said. “Our missionaries shamed every Haida family into destroying the totem pole histories that wove them together, by chopping down the ‘graven images’. We forced their children into residential schools as far away as Alberta and erased the next generation’s memory of language and culture. In 1885, the Canadian government confiscated the ceremonial transformation masks considered sacred representations of an individual’s soul and spirit animal, and banned their potlatches.”
“A good thing?” I asked.
“Depends who you ask.” The pilot said. “Missionaries and government agents considered it a worse than useless custom contrary to ‘civilized values’ of accumulation. For the Haida, giving away or destroying wealth had been the only proper demonstration of a leader’s virtue and power for thousands of years. We do not inherit this land from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.
The potlatch was not a potluck, it was a gift-giving feast and the bedrock of Haida governance—an ancient rigorous system of resource management in a practice of competitive exchange with political, spiritual, kinship, social and economic consequences. It was a codification of their rule of law—coming-of-age namings, business negotiations and transactions, marriages, divorces, adoptions, deaths, end of mourning, transfers of physical and especially intellectual property, initiations, civil and treaty proceedings, redressing of wrongs, monument commemorations, and honouring ancestors. The Haida definition of bankruptcy was different from ours. Every present received at a potlatch had to be returned at another, and a man who did not give his feast in due time was defaulting on his debts.
Only rich people could host a potlatch. Tribal slaves were not allowed to attend. It took years of preparation to amass enough food and wealth to feed invited guests and distribute gifts to pay for the witnessing of events. The winter potlatches were days of feasting, dancing, songs, speeches, jokes, and games and storytelling. The ceremonies would go on for days.”
I had always wanted to visit Haida Gwaii. There was a purity in its ancient world, shrouded in the mists of time. Nurse logs and thick salal and huckleberries, the ground absorbed and remade whatever fell, and tree fungus reflected the remaining echoes off the water. Surrounded by growth, nothing died here. The largest subspecies of black bear and the smallest subspecies of stoat roamed in the vastness of her giant Sitka spruce and hemlock forest home, clad and carpeted with moss. Bald eagles and ravens, and seabirds and falcons flew the steepness of her cliffs.
Children of the eagle and raven clans built their longhouses and totem poles and teeming crests and masks and magnificent dugout canoes. They believed that their primordial ancestresses, Foam Woman, Creek Woman, and Ice Woman, arrived twenty thousand years ago, from somewhere in Beringia. The Haida have the same main deity myths about the trickster Raven, as the Koryaks in Kamchatka. Their oral history speaks of living alongside glaciers and the appearance of first tree on Haida Gwaii, a lodgepole pine. And of the arrival of the red cedar 7,500 year ago, which transformed Haida society to centre around this arborvitae coastal ‘Tree of Life.’ When a Haida boy hit puberty, he would eat duck tongues to help him hold his breath underwater and Steller’s Jay tongues to help him be a strong climber, and go on vision quests, as I was. On our return to Sandspit, we could barely make out our white Mazda truck, for the mud.
Ten years later, Mikie and I were giving away all our fish. We had flown into an advantage that provided us with an entire fishing boat of our own and attended to by the lodge’s best fishing guide. All our cardiology colleagues in nearby boats harangued their captains to converge on us. Screamer knew where all the fish were, all the time, the value of which gave Screamer even more time to let himself go. The heart docs watched him light a thumping great modified Molotov pyrotechnic and lob it into a rock island seal colony, to an unmusical accompaniment from his onboard sound system. Rage Against the Machine blared out into Dixon Entrance. Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me… Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me… The other boats backed away, a long way.
The result of the fishing derby was all karma. In our time on the water with Screamer, Mikie and I pulled in a dozen world class Chinook salmon and let them all go. The cardiologists didn’t catch anywhere near what we would have in our Styrofoam boxes. Andy had chartered a floatplane to take him back to Vancouver so he wouldn’t have to pay out his failed bet. For years after, whenever I would refer him a patient, I would send them to Vancouver with a tin of salmon and instructions.
“Tell him that’s what they look like.”
There was one other potshot at our potlatch. At our final dinner that salmon ’chanted evening, the plate my waiter set down under my nose was vaguely reminiscent of another place and time. I looked down in horror at a rice burrito. The room burst into convulsions of laughter and Kevin, seated across from me, just grinned.
On my way home through Vancouver International Airport, for the first time, I stopped in front of The Spirit of Haida Gwaii, the Jade Canoe, a sculpture by Haida artist Bill Reid. The 20-foot-long bronze cedar dugout carries Mouse Woman, Grizzly Bear and Bear Mother, their two cubs Good Bear and Bad Bear, Beaver, Dogfish Woman, Eagle, Frog, Wolf, a reluctant conscript human paddler, a Shaman, and one more passenger. The voyagers are diverse and not always in harmony, yet they depend on each other to survive. Nature’s unpredictability is represented by the cunning trickster, Raven, holding the oar that steers the canoe.
