Pilgrim in the Palace of Words Read online

  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 i
t.”

  “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.

  13

  May You Walk the Trail of Beauty

  We set off down the trail on our skis. It had snowed heavily the night before and a wonderland of fresh powder lay before us. We’d planned this trip carefully. Two days of food, sleeping gear, loads of warm clothes, all stuffed into our backpacks. It was about fourteen kilometres to the hut — a rustic wooden cabin deep in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. We’d spend the night there, build a fire in the cast-iron stove, have a few drinks and laughs, and then ski out again the next morning.

  I was with a friend of mine, a lanky musician named Mark. The trouble is, neither of us had done a whole lot of cross-country skiing. We had only the most rudimentary knowledge and no map. But Mark said he’d been here before, and it wasn’t a particularly difficult route. We started off well. Someone had skied ahead of us so that we simply followed their tracks into the dark forest. It was very still. The snow muffled sound. Our skis whispered and shushed underneath us, and our breath came in clouds.

  The world was incredibly simplified here. The tree branches were black against the sparkle of snow. The shadows were watercolour purple, and a slate-grey sky hung above the treetops. Both Mark and I collapsed into our own thoughts. In single file we set up our rhythms, gliding down the quiet trail and into the heart of the mountains.