The Haida are playing a vital role in preserving totem poles that symbolize the history and mysteries of B.C.'s Queen Charlotte Islands
By Tom Koppel
IT IS SEPTEMBER on a small sheltered cove near the remote southern end of the Queen Charlotte Islands, off the coast of British Columbia. Dense, moss-bedecked rain forest sweeps around the crescent-shaped beach like an amphitheatre. Looming over a grassy clearing are serried ranks of carved, cedar totem poles. Some lean crazily, others have fallen down. All have been bleached grey by more than a century of sun and rain, their sharply hewn lines and shapes softened and rounded by decay. Entire chunks have broken away from many poles, obscuring the figures of eagles and ravens, of beavers and frogs and killer whales.
At the base of one pole, Tom Greene Jr., a dark-haired and muscular Haida tree faller, prepares to put to rest the remains of one of his people. Standing waist-deep in a slab-sided pit, his shirt soiled from digging, Greene lowers his eyes. In his hands is a small wooden box containing human bones. Above him towers a massive, decaying mortuary pole carved in the likeness of the mythical sea grizzly. A cavity atop the pole once held the corpse of a high-ranking man. The bones probably fell from the pole, or were scattered by animals, to lie for decades until unearthed by Greene and his colleagues during an archeological excavation.
Nearby, the rest of the crew, a mix of Haida and non-natives, have gathered for reburial of the bones. After observing a minute of silence, Greene places the box in the pit and says a prayer to "our Creator." His voice cracking, he expresses the hope that "You can accept what we are doing here today, with the pride and honour that I feel." Tears etch tiny rivulets down the rime of mud on his cheek. The only sounds are the plaintive squawk of gulls and the eternal lapping of the tide.
WE ARE AT THE VILLAGE of Ninstints, called Sgan Gwaii by the Haida. Once, this was a major settlement, home to hundreds of people with a bold and vibrant seafaring culture. Once, the poles were painted black and red and white; they stood before great longhouses with gabled roofs and massive beams. Once, huge sea-going war canoes set out from the gently shelving strand to plunder less aggressive tribes. Then, in the 1860s, the worst in a series of smallpox epidemics ravaged the Haida and the village was gradually abandoned.
Today, all that remains of the houses are a few corner posts and rotting rectangles of fallen beams, weeds and turf growing over them. But the poles still project a haunting spirit of place. Cracked and crumbling, the carved faces of birds and beasts gaze out at the sea through blank totemic eyes.
For all the decay, Sgan Gwaii is still the best-preserved traditional Haida village, probably because of its isolated location on small Anthony Island, also named Sgan Gwaii by the Haida. An official UNESCO World Heritage Site, the village attracted more than 1,600 visitors during the 1995 summer season. I have come to spend time with the crew of 15 camped out in tents for two and a half weeks of archeological research and preservation work on four of the poles. Weighing up to four tonnes each and ranging from four to 14 metres tall, they have been leaning more precipitously each year. If allowed to topple to the ground, they would quickly rot. By erecting heavy steel cages around each pole and excavating to free the base, the crew can pull each one upright.
Diggers with trowels excavate carefully between vivid red strings that serve as reference lines. Down on the beach, others hose down, screen and pick through the detritus for anything the diggers may have missed. Day by day, centimetre by centimetre, the archeologists roll back the veil of time uncovering one telltale artifact after another: iron nails and kettle fragments; pieces of clay tobacco pipes; metal parts of a harmonica; bright blue trade beads; Chinese coins with square holes in the middle and tiny metal thimbles. All bespeak a thriving settlement in the early to mid-19th century, when traditional materials and goods of wood, stone and bone were giving way to foreign ones introduced through trade.
Sgan Gwaii is particularly special to the Haida. "For me," says Tom Greene, "being here is like walking back in time and appreciating how our people lived. Look at the culture, the artwork, the poles with their superbly detailed carving and depth and design." Perhaps because he carves a bit himself, just sitting among the poles provides a personal "humility check, a real good one," as well as a deeply spiritual feeling. He looks forward to bringing his wife and children down here some day.
Barbara Wilson, a Haida who is the cultural resource manager for Parks Canada, takes a break from documenting the work on videotape and helping to screen the diggings on the beach. She studied and practised filmmaking in Montreal,Toronto and New York before returning to the Queen Charlotte Islands to immerse herself in the cultural life of her people. The work here is important, she tells me. "Because ours is primarily an oral history, the various diseases (that nearly destroyed the Haida nation by the turn of the century) all but wiped it out." So much was lost, she laments. "But by using archeology, we can at least look at the artifacts and get a little better idea of, let's say, the economic values that were at play." The poles, she adds, "are a reminder of the past and a promise for the future," especially for Haida youth.
Emotionally and visually, the pole project is dramatic. But it follows an equally significant five-summer archeological survey of Gwaii Haanas (southern Moresby Island and offshore islands). After a long struggle by the Haida and environmentalists to protect the area, in 1988 Gwaii Haanas became a national park reserve. (It is a "reserve" because of unsettled land claims.) Since then, local archeology has been administered jointly by Parks Canada and the Council of Haida Nations. The summer field program has trained a small corps of Haida in archeology, provided much-needed employment and contributed to the ongoing Haida cultural renewal. It has pinpointed hundreds of previously unknown archeological sites and many thousands of artifacts. It has pushed back the date of earliest known human habitation on the islands to more than 9,000 years. And it has shown how an ancient shore-dwelling people adapted to extremely rapid changes in sea level since the last Ice Age.
The work teams up Haida trainees with non-native professional archeologists. After a day or two of training, beginners like Greene and Ernie Gladstone are right into the measured pace of excavation, switching from trowels to fine brushes as objects are revealed. Greene is thrilled to unearth the most esthetically pleasing find of the dig, a harpoon head probably made of whalebone. Gladstone, who is usually desk-bound as manager of services and facilities in the park, jumped at the chance to be included in the dig. "You start scraping that dirt, and it's almost addicting," he grins. "You don't know what you're going to find next." The most striking artifact he discovers is the rusted barrel of an ancient flint-lock pistol.
Other Haida are more experienced. Sean Young has worked on the summer survey and is a third-year student majoring in anthropology and history at Malaspina University College on Vancouver Island. Young's interest in archeology was sparked by the illustrated books on ancient Egypt he read as a child. He already knows mammal bones and human anatomy, stone tools and how they were made. With solid grades in his courses, he plans to go on to a Master's degree in archeology, then return to the islands and pursue it as a career.
This new, high level of participation reflects not only Haida demands, but also a major attitude shift among non-native archeologists. Until recently, involving native people in archeology on their traditional territories was mainly a response to political pressure, says Martin Magne, a senior archeologist with Canadian Heritage, the federal department responsible for Parks Canada. Previously, artifacts, ancestral human remains, even the best-preserved totem poles from Sgan Gwaii and other decaying villages were carted off to distant museums, where the Haida had little access to them. Today, human remains are controlled by the Haida, and all artifacts come back to the Queen Charlotte Islands Museum in Skidegate after six months of study, radiocarbon dating and analysis.
Much of that analysis falls to Parks Canada archeologist Daryl Fedje, who directs the pole dig and summer survey work. Tall and bearded, Fedje has poked around in the coastal wilderness so long that he has many friends among the Haida and he slips away with them to fish every break he gets. Somehow, though, he still finds the energy to boot up his laptop computer in the lantern-lit reading tent at night, when everyone else is bagged out. Fedje's main research interest concerns much earlier times than those represented by totem poles, most of which date back to the first half of the 19th century. The survey was launched in part to determine which sites might need protection from campers and souvenir hunters. But it has also revealed a highly distinctive pattern of ancient human habitation in Gwaii Haanas, a pattern dictated by changing sea levels.
At the peak of the last Ice Age around 18,000 years ago, so much water was locked in continent-spanning ice sheets that worldwide sea levels were more than 100 metres lower than today. About 14,000 years ago, great snouts of ice pushed out through mainland river valleys and inlets onto the coast, bulldozing everything in their paths. At the end of the Ice Age about 13,000 years ago, most of today's Hecate Strait, between the Queen Charlottes and the British Columbia mainland, was low-lying, sparsely vegetated tundra and steppe raked by frigid winds off the ice.
The immense weight of the kilometre-thick Cordilleran ice sheet depressed the Earth's crust on the mainland. This caused the crust to bulge upward at the Charlottes: imagine the islands as the corner of a water bed with someone sitting at the centre. When the climate began to warm around 15,000 years ago, mountainous icebergs calved off into Dixon Entrance, north of the Charlottes, and global sea levels rose. As the ice retreated from the coast, the crustal bulge under the Charlottes subsided. These effects added up to one of the fastest rises in ocean level (relative to the land) in the world, says Heiner Josenhans, a marine geologist with the Geological Survey of Canada. The sea rose 120 metres over a 1,500-year period, submerging large parts of the islands; then, around 5,700 years ago, the water level dropped about 15 metres to its current stand.
Fedje and his colleagues realized that they couldn't just look for traces of people along the current shoreline. Ancient shore dwellers would also have left artifacts and tool fragments on former beaches sculpted by wind and wave where the sea level remained stable for centuries. These are now raised terraces far back among the Sitka spruce, 15 metres above the present sea. Digging small test holes, boring with hand augers and examining exposed soil, survey teams found 14 raised-terrace occupation sites. At Richardson Island in northern Gwaii Haanas, Fedje led a small dig on one terrace in the rain forest that proved to he rich in stone tools 8,000 to 9,000 years old.
Fedje's archeologist wife, Joanne McSporran, and their children pitched in as volunteers on the survey, which also scoured the current seashore. At Echo Harbour on Moresby Island, they found some 2,000 artifacts and stone tool fragments exposed on a short stretch of beach. "There were so many artifacts," McSporran laughs, "that when they were flagged with red surveyor's tape it looked like the beach had chicken pox." They even dug in the inter-tidal muck and weeds, "working like stink" knee-deep in water until the rising tide poured into the excavations, and still found a wealth of artifacts. Among the oldest discoveries was a 10,200-year-old sea otter bone. With artifacts extending right down to the lowest tide of the year, the area was likely inhabited still earlier, when the sea was lower.
But how to get at any older artifacts? Searching underwater is a "needle-in-a-haystack" task, says Fedje, but the team has tried anyhow. Last summer two Haida divers and two underwater archeologists from Parks Canada spent several days excavating in shallow water off Richardson Island. They groped in near-zero visibility within a box-like plastic caisson (to prevent soft deposits from slumping into their pit) and used a suction system to bring up loosened sediments for screening on the beach. They found a stone club and some flakes from tool making, although these could have been washed down from the artifact-laden beach. But below this was a coarse rocky layer, and underlying it were more artifacts, such as fragments of stone tools, that may well be older. The divers also located a promising drowned beach terrace a little further north at Klunkwoi Bay, in water about 10 metres deep. They hope to return for a proper excavation. Any artifacts found at that depth would push back known occupation in the islands at least another few hundred years.
However early the first people appeared on the shores of Gwaii Haanas, they would have experienced a world in a state of flux. Between 9,000 and 10,000 years ago, says Fedje, "the sea level was just roaring up there." As the sea rose, the entire shoreline configuration and ecology changed rapidly. Lakes near sea level became brackish lagoons, then salt arms of the sea. The courses of rivers and locations of beaches also shifted, and with them the shorebird colonies, the salmon runs, the spots to build fish traps. "The places where people lived would not have been at all the same as where their grandparents had lived. And with the sea rising as much as a couple of metres per generation, they'd have to keep pulling their canoes ever higher on the beach."
How would people with an oral tradition recall such events? Perhaps as a Flood of biblical proportions, which figures large in Haida legend.
Captain Gold (a.k.a. Richard Wilson) has been the summer watchman at Sgan Gwaii village for years, living in a rustic longhouse-style cabin with a spectacular view of wave-battered rocks and islands. Like his brother Bert Wilson, who supervised the survey's Haida archeology crew, he has also worked on archeology and co-authored papers with Fedje. Weaned on Haida oral history, he recalls tales of drowned offshore lowlands that were covered in grass when the first tree appeared. This fits well with the geologists' picture of a Hecate Strait that was largely dry when the first pines colonized it around 14,000 years ago. Then the waters rose quickly.
"There's one old story about a village that was very close to the shore when sea levels were much lower," says Captain Gold. Children mocked a strange woman who appeared one day, and the elders warned them to stop, lest some harm befall them. "And sure enough, she turned out to be a supernatural being, Flood-Tide Woman. She raised her skirt, moved back behind the beach, sat down, and the tide came up to follow her. The children kept mocking her, so she kept doing it. Pretty soon she was up beyond the village, then up into the forest, then up into the mountains. The tide kept rising, and soon everything was covered and everyone drowned. Except for a few people who were lucky enough to be in canoes. Once the sea began to drop, those survivors repopulated Haida Gwaii."
BACK AT THE POLES, the dig continues. When the excavation reaches bottom, a pole, carved in the likeness of an eagle, is pulled up straight with winch-like come-alongs attached to the corners of the steel cage. Gradually it is ratcheted into a vertical position. To keep the pole upright, wheelbarrows of large stones are hauled up from the beach. Tucker Brown, a huge, jovial Haida who designed the cage and come-along system, eases the stones down to Greene in the pit. Greene then wedges them around the base of the pole, where the wood is still remarkably sound. "It'll still be standing long after you and I are ancestors, Tom," Brown quips. "After we've both turned to fossils."
When the pit is half-filled with stones, Ernie Gladstone leads another solemn ceremony to rebury the human bones found around this pole. The bantering stops. Everyone is invited to place offerings in the little cedar box with the remains. In go bits of traditional dried salmon, pinches of tobacco, a ring of cedar bark, an apple, even a sandwich. Gladstone adds the rusted gun barrel, which may have belonged to the person whose bones are now returning to the earth. Closing the lid, he climbs down into the pit. Barbara Wilson says a few words in Haida. She and Tom Greene hug and wipe their eyes. The box is passed down to Gladstone, who asks for a minute of silence, then speaks before the box is covered over and the rest of the pit filled in: "I want to thank our spirits for allowing us to disturb them while we do our part in preserving our culture for our children. May they rest in peace here once again."
Nobody talks. People fidget and wander off in quiet contemplation. Standing in the shadow of the poles, I think about the people who lived here a century and a half ago, whose lives were so different from our own. Looking back much deeper in time, I imagine an ancient post-Ice Age world. To the east, towards the British Columbia mainland under what is now sea, would be dry lowlands covered with sedges and dwarf willows, with mosses and horsetails and crowberry bushes. Then the first trees would appear, marching gradually across the landscape. And somewhere out there -- perhaps -- would be a band of people, digging clams and hunting seals along the shore. As the sea encroaches, they would move with their hunting and gathering grounds slowly, unconsciously westward and upward, generation by generation, until they reached the shores of Gwaii Haanas as we know them today. And each generation would pull its canoes ever higher on the beach.
