One summer a few years ago, I took a sailing trip around Haida Gwaii (formerly known as the Queen Charlotte Islands), off the west coast of British Columbia, where our group visited some of the Haida people’s magnificent, monumental, painted-cedar totem poles on the exquisitely remote archipelago. There they were, in various states of decay. In the last few decades, however, many of the poles have gone into museum collections. (Others have gone into private collections—an entirely different phenomenon.) I will admit that at the beginning of my ten-day trip, I was emphatically in favor of what might be called the poles’ “museumification.” By mid-trip, after learning about the poles’ meanings and purposes, I modified my stance. (“Well, a few definitely should be in public institutions. The rest, okay, they can stay here.”) By the trip’s end, after meeting numerous Haida and learning directly from them about the poles, and having undergone a true education, I had made a complete reversal, thinking all of them should stay exactly put, in the beautiful, mystical cedar forests of Haida Gwaii.
For seventeen years, while I worked as a reporter for an antiques magazine, writing about shows and auctions, it was business as usual for me to discuss in casual terms the astronomical prices people were willing to pay for items made by what Canadians call citizens of the First Nations. Once, for example, while I was covering an auction where a basket, woven in the early twentieth century by a Tlingit woman living in the Pacific Northwest, sold for $63,250, I actually asked the auctioneer if he was disappointed with that result. He was. His official pre-sale estimate had been $80,000 to $90,000. But as we agreed, collectors of this material like items fresh to the market, as close as possible to the original source, and this had come from a dealer.
A New Jersey couple, known bargain hunters, were the basket’s buyers. No doubt, they were committed to taking care of it. Nonetheless, although it’s awkward to admit, considering what had for so long been my reportorial beat, I habitually converted prices into what more practical things the same money might have bought: a car, someone’s college tuition, years of groceries for a family of four.
Understandably, I am more willing to acknowledge I also silently cheered whenever a public institution managed to outspend the private collectors. That’s because a museum purchase meant it had the potential of being shared by us all. So imagine how I surprised myself when, sailing around Haida Gwaii, I began to question how I felt even about museum purchases, at least where certain ethnographic material from the Pacific Northwest was concerned. In Haida Gwaii I realized I didn’t even want a museum to have what I was seeing.
One may legitimately argue that only the Haidas’ opinions matter here. Who am I anyway to weigh in on this subject? But if we sincerely believe we are all one family, that thinking goes right out the window or, to use a more suitable metaphor, over the side of the boat with the scraps from the kitchen.
Awakening each morning, seeing eagles in the sky and, with luck, a black bear scavenging on the shoreline, I found myself in the perfect situation for my new attitude to take form. I also had the perfect teachers. In Skedans Village, Hot Springs Island, Rose Harbour, Scudder Point, and Windy Bay, our Haida guides were the so-called watchmen who literally watch over this land of their ancestors. These otherwise regular guys, with jobs on the mainland in the cold months of the year, led us along paths carefully delineated by lines of white clam shells. We were instructed not to step beyond them into the forest, which is populated by their ancestors’ spirits.
In each place we saw remnants of the Haidas’ summer houses and the poles that once soared above them. These communities had been abandoned starting in the mid-nineteenth century, after European diseases devastated them. We could still see their carved totems—eagle, bear, raven, killer whale, frog, beaver—but the poles facing the water were gray, weathered, like the cedar shingles one customarily sees on houses on Cape Cod. Deeper inland, where it was damp and shady, they were covered in furry green moss. What is more, while some poles were upright, others were leaning, still others had toppled. It seemed a shame; at least it did at first.
In the late twentieth century, some poles were removed to museums on the mainland, where the idea was, they would be studied, exhibited, and preserved. Prominently, Haida artist Bill Reid orchestrated the removal of examples. Surely someone of his heritage and profession had given ample thought to such an enterprise and its consequences. Surely he could not have been wrong.
Reid, who died in 1998, is buried on one of the islands we visited. His bronze sculpture Spirit of Haida Gwaii: The Jade Canoe is on view at the Vancouver airport. Considering what I have learned about his life, accomplishments, philosophy, politics, and persona, it’s hard not to see him in sharp contrast him to George Gustav Heye, an investment banker whose family money came from petroleum and who founded the Museum of the American Indian in New York in 1916. Standing six-foot-three and weighing in the vicinity of three-hundred pounds, Heye smoked big cigars while driving his limousine ninety miles an hour (his chauffeur having been relegated to the passenger seat, as the story goes) in cross-country searches for objects for his collection. In the antiques trade we call that the “Hoovering” style of collecting, as in the vacuum cleaner brand.
There’s no denying much of what Heye and others collected would otherwise have been lost. That’s why you may think, as I once did, it’s important for institutions to bring the poles inside. Otherwise, dust unto dust. Right? Well, here’s the point initially lost on me. As I learned from the watchmen, the poles’ seeming state of neglect is not neglect at all. Even if the Haida hadn’t been ravaged by the epidemics, the way I was seeing the poles was exactly as those who carved them and raised them up in great celebrations had designed them to be seen at this stage in the poles’ lives. They were meant to dissolve back into the earth, replenishing it. From the fallen ones, new trees sprout and grow straight up out of them: a complete, interdependent, ecological system. In fact, some poles are literal mortuaries, containing remains of the dead. Others are memorial poles, meant to honor people buried elsewhere, but they, too, were intended, just like life itself, to be only temporary. Seen from that new perspective, suddenly the furry green moss, especially in the sunshine, looked luminous to me, life-giving.
As crucial an element in the Haida ecosystem as the cedar forest is the region’s salmon. Not coincidentally, the $63,250 Tlinglit basket bought by the New Jersey couple was made to carry salmon, and seven such fish were woven into the geometric pattern ringing it. Like the Haida, the Tlingit people historically depended on the salmon for sustenance. They still do. Indeed, salmon culture was on display at an amazing lunch of local foods I enjoyed on this trip.
They were all made by a Haida woman, Roberta Olson, whose business is Keenawaii's Kitchen. There were fresh and smoked salmon dishes of course, but also a dried version, called gilgii, and a medicinal fish oil a few drops of which Roberta offered as an addition to any dish of the meal. There were as well things like a gorgeous salad of tomatoes and blueberries—the work of an obvious artist. Only later did I find the modest Roberta on the Internet, where I discovered she and her cuisine are quite famous, so much so that, a month after we were there, she cooked lunch for Prince William and Princess Kate Middleton, serving it to them in the same space where we had eaten—her modest home.
The royal couple’s visit was part of Britain’s ongoing historic reconciliation with the Haida Nation. There is still more work to be done. The name Queen Charlotte Islands was officially changed to Haida Gwaii in 2009, although many non-Haida persist in calling it by its former appellation.
About four months after I returned from Haida Gwaii, I was in London and went to the British Museum. I hadn’t gotten much past the front door when, lo and behold, I saw two poles literally towering above the museum goers in what is called the Grand Court. I made a beeline for them, as if to greet old friends. I found, however, that seeing them so far removed from their original context made me sad.
One was Haida, the other Nisga’a. “Raising poles involved tens or even hundreds of people,” the signage for the Haida example said. If I hadn’t known better, I would have taken the statement’s past tense as fact. But the truth is, new poles are being carved and raised by Haida today. I had seen a brightly painted, newly raised one at the Haida Heritage Center in Skidegate. And I had heard about another going up in Masset. One of the British Museum’s poles had come from a spot very close to that village, Kayang, in 1903. At the time, the signage said, Kayang had already been devastated by the introduced diseases and abandoned. I later looked this pole up on the museum’s website. It was acquired from Charles Frederick Newcombe (1851-1924), a “physician, botanist and ethnographer collector” who in the 1880s emigrated to Oregon, then Victoria, with his family. I also learned Newcombe started to collect Haida artifacts for multiple museums in order to “preserve” them. These include museums in the U.S. as well as Britain and Australia. The Nisga’a pole had been sold to the museum in 1933 by Canadian ethnographer Marius Barbeau, an early proponent of recognizing totem poles as art but also someone who believed they were a post-contact development, a theory now thoroughly debunked.
The two poles in the Great Court have been on permanent display there since 2008. It’s undeniably true that without the museum component many people would have to travel, as I did, a great distance to see the poles—not an easy or inexpensive thing to do. Alternatively, we would have to rely on other people’s photography, and to be sure, photography does have its limits. When I got back to my London hotel room after my museum visit, I looked at the photos I had taken all over the building. Everything had come out fine, with the sole exception of my images of the poles. They simply weren’t there. Who can explain it? So odd. So uncanny. I was reminded the watchmen took special delight in telling us myths the totems on the poles represent. Some are heroes, some villains, not a few are tricksters capable of supernatural feats. I’m not one who usually subscribes to such things, but in this case, I must chalk up the disappeared photos to the spirit of the Haida.
For seventeen years, while I worked as a reporter for an antiques magazine, writing about shows and auctions, it was business as usual for me to discuss in casual terms the astronomical prices people were willing to pay for items made by what Canadians call citizens of the First Nations. Once, for example, while I was covering an auction where a basket, woven in the early twentieth century by a Tlingit woman living in the Pacific Northwest, sold for $63,250, I actually asked the auctioneer if he was disappointed with that result. He was. His official pre-sale estimate had been $80,000 to $90,000. But as we agreed, collectors of this material like items fresh to the market, as close as possible to the original source, and this had come from a dealer.
A New Jersey couple, known bargain hunters, were the basket’s buyers. No doubt, they were committed to taking care of it. Nonetheless, although it’s awkward to admit, considering what had for so long been my reportorial beat, I habitually converted prices into what more practical things the same money might have bought: a car, someone’s college tuition, years of groceries for a family of four.
Understandably, I am more willing to acknowledge I also silently cheered whenever a public institution managed to outspend the private collectors. That’s because a museum purchase meant it had the potential of being shared by us all. So imagine how I surprised myself when, sailing around Haida Gwaii, I began to question how I felt even about museum purchases, at least where certain ethnographic material from the Pacific Northwest was concerned. In Haida Gwaii I realized I didn’t even want a museum to have what I was seeing.
One may legitimately argue that only the Haidas’ opinions matter here. Who am I anyway to weigh in on this subject? But if we sincerely believe we are all one family, that thinking goes right out the window or, to use a more suitable metaphor, over the side of the boat with the scraps from the kitchen.
Awakening each morning, seeing eagles in the sky and, with luck, a black bear scavenging on the shoreline, I found myself in the perfect situation for my new attitude to take form. I also had the perfect teachers. In Skedans Village, Hot Springs Island, Rose Harbour, Scudder Point, and Windy Bay, our Haida guides were the so-called watchmen who literally watch over this land of their ancestors. These otherwise regular guys, with jobs on the mainland in the cold months of the year, led us along paths carefully delineated by lines of white clam shells. We were instructed not to step beyond them into the forest, which is populated by their ancestors’ spirits.
In each place we saw remnants of the Haidas’ summer houses and the poles that once soared above them. These communities had been abandoned starting in the mid-nineteenth century, after European diseases devastated them. We could still see their carved totems—eagle, bear, raven, killer whale, frog, beaver—but the poles facing the water were gray, weathered, like the cedar shingles one customarily sees on houses on Cape Cod. Deeper inland, where it was damp and shady, they were covered in furry green moss. What is more, while some poles were upright, others were leaning, still others had toppled. It seemed a shame; at least it did at first.
In the late twentieth century, some poles were removed to museums on the mainland, where the idea was, they would be studied, exhibited, and preserved. Prominently, Haida artist Bill Reid orchestrated the removal of examples. Surely someone of his heritage and profession had given ample thought to such an enterprise and its consequences. Surely he could not have been wrong.
Reid, who died in 1998, is buried on one of the islands we visited. His bronze sculpture Spirit of Haida Gwaii: The Jade Canoe is on view at the Vancouver airport. Considering what I have learned about his life, accomplishments, philosophy, politics, and persona, it’s hard not to see him in sharp contrast him to George Gustav Heye, an investment banker whose family money came from petroleum and who founded the Museum of the American Indian in New York in 1916. Standing six-foot-three and weighing in the vicinity of three-hundred pounds, Heye smoked big cigars while driving his limousine ninety miles an hour (his chauffeur having been relegated to the passenger seat, as the story goes) in cross-country searches for objects for his collection. In the antiques trade we call that the “Hoovering” style of collecting, as in the vacuum cleaner brand.
There’s no denying much of what Heye and others collected would otherwise have been lost. That’s why you may think, as I once did, it’s important for institutions to bring the poles inside. Otherwise, dust unto dust. Right? Well, here’s the point initially lost on me. As I learned from the watchmen, the poles’ seeming state of neglect is not neglect at all. Even if the Haida hadn’t been ravaged by the epidemics, the way I was seeing the poles was exactly as those who carved them and raised them up in great celebrations had designed them to be seen at this stage in the poles’ lives. They were meant to dissolve back into the earth, replenishing it. From the fallen ones, new trees sprout and grow straight up out of them: a complete, interdependent, ecological system. In fact, some poles are literal mortuaries, containing remains of the dead. Others are memorial poles, meant to honor people buried elsewhere, but they, too, were intended, just like life itself, to be only temporary. Seen from that new perspective, suddenly the furry green moss, especially in the sunshine, looked luminous to me, life-giving.
As crucial an element in the Haida ecosystem as the cedar forest is the region’s salmon. Not coincidentally, the $63,250 Tlinglit basket bought by the New Jersey couple was made to carry salmon, and seven such fish were woven into the geometric pattern ringing it. Like the Haida, the Tlingit people historically depended on the salmon for sustenance. They still do. Indeed, salmon culture was on display at an amazing lunch of local foods I enjoyed on this trip.
They were all made by a Haida woman, Roberta Olson, whose business is Keenawaii's Kitchen. There were fresh and smoked salmon dishes of course, but also a dried version, called gilgii, and a medicinal fish oil a few drops of which Roberta offered as an addition to any dish of the meal. There were as well things like a gorgeous salad of tomatoes and blueberries—the work of an obvious artist. Only later did I find the modest Roberta on the Internet, where I discovered she and her cuisine are quite famous, so much so that, a month after we were there, she cooked lunch for Prince William and Princess Kate Middleton, serving it to them in the same space where we had eaten—her modest home.
The royal couple’s visit was part of Britain’s ongoing historic reconciliation with the Haida Nation. There is still more work to be done. The name Queen Charlotte Islands was officially changed to Haida Gwaii in 2009, although many non-Haida persist in calling it by its former appellation.
About four months after I returned from Haida Gwaii, I was in London and went to the British Museum. I hadn’t gotten much past the front door when, lo and behold, I saw two poles literally towering above the museum goers in what is called the Grand Court. I made a beeline for them, as if to greet old friends. I found, however, that seeing them so far removed from their original context made me sad.
One was Haida, the other Nisga’a. “Raising poles involved tens or even hundreds of people,” the signage for the Haida example said. If I hadn’t known better, I would have taken the statement’s past tense as fact. But the truth is, new poles are being carved and raised by Haida today. I had seen a brightly painted, newly raised one at the Haida Heritage Center in Skidegate. And I had heard about another going up in Masset. One of the British Museum’s poles had come from a spot very close to that village, Kayang, in 1903. At the time, the signage said, Kayang had already been devastated by the introduced diseases and abandoned. I later looked this pole up on the museum’s website. It was acquired from Charles Frederick Newcombe (1851-1924), a “physician, botanist and ethnographer collector” who in the 1880s emigrated to Oregon, then Victoria, with his family. I also learned Newcombe started to collect Haida artifacts for multiple museums in order to “preserve” them. These include museums in the U.S. as well as Britain and Australia. The Nisga’a pole had been sold to the museum in 1933 by Canadian ethnographer Marius Barbeau, an early proponent of recognizing totem poles as art but also someone who believed they were a post-contact development, a theory now thoroughly debunked.
The two poles in the Great Court have been on permanent display there since 2008. It’s undeniably true that without the museum component many people would have to travel, as I did, a great distance to see the poles—not an easy or inexpensive thing to do. Alternatively, we would have to rely on other people’s photography, and to be sure, photography does have its limits. When I got back to my London hotel room after my museum visit, I looked at the photos I had taken all over the building. Everything had come out fine, with the sole exception of my images of the poles. They simply weren’t there. Who can explain it? So odd. So uncanny. I was reminded the watchmen took special delight in telling us myths the totems on the poles represent. Some are heroes, some villains, not a few are tricksters capable of supernatural feats. I’m not one who usually subscribes to such things, but in this case, I must chalk up the disappeared photos to the spirit of the Haida.
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