94 AUGUST 2017 / TRAVELANDLEISUREASIA.COM
“And there’s excitement?” Willie asked.
Don raised an eyebrow. “Oh sure.”
Willie came to the guiding business in an organic way.
In 2013, he started a water-taxi service between Alert
Bay and neighboring Telegraph Cove, and en route he’d
tell passengers about Kwakwaka’wakw life. Back then,
the creaky remains of the notorious First Nations
residential school in Alert Bay, which housed aboriginal
children from 1929 to 1975, were still standing, and
visitors were sometimes moved to tears when he told
them about the abuses that took place there. But there
was so much more: the totem-pole ceremony; the death
protocol; family crests. You can look at a totem pole and
appreciate the art, Willie explained to his passengers, but
true appreciation comes from an understanding of its
meaning. As he put it, “Wouldn’t you rather see B.C.
through fourteen thousand years of history?”I
nside the U’mista Cultural Centre, in Alert Bay,
which was set up to protect the heritage of the
Kwakwaka’wakw community, I walked among
the masks—a collection of painted wooden
beaks and faces peering forth into the dimly lit
exhibition room. In this culture, masks function not only
as decoration but also as a form of historical and legal
documentation. They also serve as tools of social
instruction. Willie and I stopped in front of Gwalkwamł,
or the Deaf Man, a one-eared mask with a downturned
mouth and wisps of black horsehair. “It shows a head
chief of a clan,” Willie explained. “He didn’t want to hold
a potlatch, and the clansmen weren’t happy about that, so
they killed him.” The mask, worn during retellings of the
story, became a warning.
Back at the dock in Alert Bay, brightly colored houses
huddled alongside boats ranging from weathered to
freshly painted. As we left the harbor, Willie offered me
pâté of wild sockeye salmon from the Nimpkish River,
and I ate as much as I could before we began cresting
waves. Over the roar of the engine, I asked him why
interacting with tourists was important. “We need to be
vocal,” he said. “We need to talk about our evolution and
bring people closer to our reality.” Oral-history cultures,
I was reminded, need audiences. “Every time we tell this
truth,” he said, “it’s strengthened.”
We pulled up to a red-ocher pictograph on a rock face
on Berry Island, and Willie cut the engine. The image
depicted Baxbakwalanuksiwe’, a crucial figure in
Kwakwaka’wakw spirituality. Bestowed with the power
to transform himself into multiple man-eating birds, and
adorned with mouths all over his body, his imposing
presence on the rock meant burial sites were nearby.
We finally put down anchor in a small inlet on Village
Island, or Mimkwamlis. It was here, in 1921, that
government agents raided a potlatch and arrested the
hosting chief and 44 other members of the community.
Of those arrested, 20 did time in a B.C. prison for the
offense. We walked inland on a damp soil path that gave a
little under each footstep, surrounded by the smell of
blackberries ripening from their springtime red. We