TRAVELANDLEISUREASIA.COM / AUGUST 2017 97
were headed toward the potlatch site, the remnants of a
longhouse—a traditional family dwelling where up to 40
people would have lived. “Longhouse is a new term,”
Willie told me. “To us they were just houses.” All that was
left was a beam and some fire-cracked rock. “Deeper
down,” Willie said, “you’ll find the ash and fish oil, the
evidence of everyday living.”
The site was lush and green, the silence softened by
the faint buzzing of bees. I tried to picture the ceremony
that ended so badly that day. A member of the
community, who is rumored to have been a Christian
convert, had informed the police. The authorities forced
the Kwakwaka’wakw to surrender their masks and
carvings or go to jail. If entire tribes gave up their
potlatch paraphernalia, individual members would have
their sentences suspended. The objects from the raid
were only recently returned to the community.
“People lived a dual life,” Willie explained. “I had an
uncle who became an Anglican priest and also
potlatched—he was a hereditary chief.” We remained at
the site a while longer, and I tried to imagine the
informer sitting among their people, torn between her
two worlds.
Back in Vancouver that evening, I dined at a
restaurant called Salmon n’ Bannock, which has we got
game written proudly on its sign. Inez Cook and Remi
Caudron opened the place when they realized there was
no indigenous food on offer for the tourists who came to
the city for the 2010 Olympics. Their remedy is a menu
that includes bison, sockeye salmon, bannock (or
unleavened bread) and even oolichans like the ones I saw
glittering in the sunlight on the dock in Port McNeill.
I met a friend at the restaurant, an academic who
works at a local university, and explained to her that the
oolies on the menu were wondrous fish that were
probably being plucked from the maws of angry sea lions
up in Kingcome as we spoke. When conversation turned
to aboriginal tourism, she was skeptical. “I don’t know if
there is really such a thing as cultural tourism,” my
friend said as we ate the oolies, which were oily and
smoky and delicious. “Whose life, after all, gets marked
as ‘culture,’ and whose remains unmarked?”I
spent the night across town at Skwachàys Lodge,
which advertises itself as a “fair trade gallery,
boutique hotel and an urban aboriginal artist
residence.” The building, owned and operated by
the Vancouver Native Housing Society, contains
24 shelter-rate apartments for aboriginal people at risk
of homelessness. There are 18 hotel rooms on the top
three floors, which has walls hung with works by a team
of aboriginal artists. My suite was near the smudging
room, where cedar, sage and sweetgrass are burned
during traditional cleansing rituals.
The next morning I caught a flight to Haida Gwaii, an
archipelago of around 150 islands that sits at the north of
B.C.’s coastline, just south of Alaska. The islands are
separated from the mainland by the capricious waters of
the Hecate Strait, named after a British vessel that borethe name of the Greek goddess
of magic and witchcraft. It’s a
region where weather slips
around from hour to hour, and
rain might appear six times in
a day. Even the name of the
islands has shifted—they were
known as the Queen Charlottes
after their “discovery” by the
British in 1787. In 2010 they were renamed Haida Gwaii,
or “Islands of the People.”
The Haida are one of the most celebrated, and perhaps
infamous, tribes of the Pacific Northwest. They’ve been
dealing with the vagaries of the chilly Pacific for
thousands of years and were known for their lightning
raids up and down the coast, the islands acting as their
launching points and fortresses. They are said to have
traveled in canoes wrought from a single cedar, each
warrior rubbed down with grease and charcoal and
wrapped in the hides of sea lions and elk to keep the
elements at bay.
At the time of first colonial contact, in the late 18th
century, there were around 10,000 Haida, and the
remoteness of the islands meant it was tougher for
missionaries to spread the word to Haida Gwaii, though
they did eventually make the journey. As did smallpox,
which decimated the Haida in the 1860s. The population
dipped to a mere 500 in 1900. Nowadays, signs of
resilience are evident across the archipelago. When I was
there, the carving house at the Haida Heritage Centre at
Kay Llnagaay, an ancient village site, contained two new
totem poles, the curving beak of an eagle emerging from
fresh cedar shavings.
I was staying in the town of Skidegate, on Graham
Island, the archipelago’s second largest. At my lodgings,
Jags Beanstalk, I was met by the proprietor, Jags Brown.
A rangy man with salt-and-pepper hair, Brown is a
member of the Juus Xaayda clan; his Haida name is
Yestaquana. When he was young, he became one of Haida
Gwaii’s first Watchmen, a group that protected the
community’s ancient sites. On his early travels around
Gwaii Haanas, the island’s national park, he would find
bones and other moss-covered remains of smallpoxABOVE: Wooden masks
carved by the
Kwakwaka’wakw First
Nation on display at the
U’mista Cultural Centre
in Alert Bay. OPPOSITE: A
path leading into the
forests of Naikoon
Provincial Park in
Masset, Haida Gwaii.