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Sea lions gather on
a rock near Windy
Bay, off the coast of
Haida Gwaii.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 coloured
houses huddled alongside boats ranging from weathered
to freshly painted. As we left the harbor, Willie off ered
me pâté of wild sockeye salmon from River Nimpkish,
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 fi gure 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 fi nally 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 BC
prison for the off ense. 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 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 fi re-cracked rock. “Deeper
down,” Willie said, “you’ll fi nd the ash and fi sh oil,
the evidence of everyday living.”T
he 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 rumoured 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
realised there was no indigenous food on off er 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 fi sh that were