PWAC Victoria: Tom Koppel, Writing Sample

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The Spirit of Haida Gwaii

by Tom Koppel © 1995

Archaeology and totem pole restoration in B.C.'s Queen Charlotte Islands. Published in Canadian Geographic, Mar./Apr. 1996.

It is September on a small sheltered cove near the remote southern tip of Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands) off the northern 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 poles. Some lean crazily, others have fallen down. All have been bleached gray 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, 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 a sad scattering of 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 strewn by animals, to lie for decades until unearthed by Greene and colleagues during an archaeological 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 Sgan Gwaii ("Red Cod Island") village, also called Ninstints after an early chief. Once, this was a major settlement, home to hundreds of people with a bold and vibrant sea-faring 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, the weeds and turf growing over them. But, especially at quiet moments, 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.

Sgan Gwaii is unique. Probably because of its isolated location on small Anthony Island, for all the decay it is still the best-preserved traditional village on the Northwest Coast. An official UNESCO "world heritage site," it attracted 1,500 visitors the 1994 summer season. I have come to spend time with the crew of fifteen (including cooks and support personnel), who are camped out in tents for two and a half weeks of post-summer archaeology and preservation work on four of the poles. Weighing up to four tonnes, they have been leaning farther each year. If allowed to fall onto the ground, they would quickly rot. By erecting heavy steel cages around each pole, when excavation frees the base the crew can pull it upright.

As work resumes around the poles, diggers with trowels excavate carefully between dayglo 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 archaeologists 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; tiny metal thimbles. All bespeak a thriving settlement in the early to mid-nineteenth century, when traditional materials and goods of wood, stone and bone were giving way to Western 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 for a visit.

Barbara Wilson, a silver-haired Haida cultural resources manager for Parks Canada, takes a break from documenting the work on video and helping to screen the diggings on the beach. She studied and practised cinematography in Montreal, Toronto, even a spell in New York, before returning to the 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 all but wiped it out." So much was lost, she laments. "But using archaeology, 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." And the poles "are a reminder of the past and a promise for the future," especially for Haida children and youth.

Emotionally and visually, the pole project is dramatic. But it follows an extensive five-summer archaeological survey of the area which has been just as significant to the Haida and to science. In 1988 Gwaii Haanas (southern Moresby island and offshore islands) became a national park reserve. (The "reserve" denotation is because of unsettled land claims.) Since then, local archaeology 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 archaeology, provided much-needed employment and contributed to the ongoing Haida cultural renewal. It has pinpointed hundreds of previously unknown archaeological sites and many thousands of artifacts. It has pushed back the date of earliest known human habitation on the islands to well over 9,000 years. And it has shown how 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 archaeologists such as Ian Sumpter, a Parks Canada staffer, and Tina Christensen of the consulting firm Millennia Research of Sidney, B.C. Although excavating may look technical and difficult, trainees pick it up quickly. "I just have to explain how deep we want to go and where to stop," says Sumpter, dangling his feet into the pit and recording each artifact or piece of bone. "And I emphasize how important it is to have control of the material. You want to be sure you have the three-dimensional context: where you're finding the material--how deep, how far in from the sides--and make sure the information is getting to the recorder."

After a day or two, beginners like Tom 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 aesthetically pleasing find of the dig, a harpoon head probably made of whalebone. Gladstone, whose mainly desk-bound job is 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 flintlock pistol.

Other Haida are more experienced. Sean Young has worked on the summer survey and has a strong theoretical background. Interested in archaeology ever since reading illustrated books on ancient Egypt as a child, he is a third-year student at Malaspina College on Vancouver Island majoring in anthropology and history. Young already knows his mammal bones and human anatomy, his stone tools and how they were made. With solid grades in his courses, he plans to go on to a Master's degree in archaeology, 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 archaeologists. Involving native people in archaeology on their traditional territories used to be mainly a response to political pressure, says Martin Magne, chief of archaeological services in the West for Parks Canada. "Now it's a sincere commitment." 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 band-run Queen Charlottes Museum in Skidegate after six months of study, radiocarbon dating and analysis.

Much of that analysis falls to Parks Canada archaeologist Daryl Fedje, who directs the pole dig and summer survey work. Tall and bearded, Fedje has poked around in the coastal wilderness so long he has practically "gone native," slipping away with the Haida to fish every break he gets. Somehow, though, he still musters 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 represented by totem poles. The survey was launched in part to show the new park administration which sites might need protection from campers and souvenir hunters. But it has also revealed a highly distinctive pattern of truly ancient human habitation in Gwaii Haanas as it responded to rapid sea level changes.

At the peak of the last Ice Age around 18,000 years ago, says Fedje, so much water was locked in continent-spanning ice sheets that worldwide sea levels were 120 metres lower than today. Great snouts of ice pushed out through mainland river valleys and inlets onto the coast, bulldozing everything in their paths. But most of today's Hecate Strait, between the Queen Charlottes and the B.C. mainland, was low-lying, sparsely vegetated tundra and steppe raked by frigid winds off the ice. Over this grim coastal margin of shallow lakes and meandering rivers there likely ranged such now-extinct species as woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, and the giant short-faced bear, a carnivorous killing machine without modern equal.

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 under the Charlottes, out at the edge, as when someone sits on a waterbed. When the climate began to warm after 15,000 B.P. (Before the Present), mountainous icebergs calved off into Dixon Entrance, north of the Charlottes, and world sea levels rose. As the ramparts of ice retreated from the coast, the crustal bulge under the Charlottes subsided. These two effects added up to one of the fastest rises in the level of the ocean (relative to the land) anywhere in the world. On the eastern side of the Charlottes the sea went from 105 metres below its present level around 10,400 B.P. to 15 metres higher than today by around 8,900 B.P. It remained there until around 5,000 B.P., then gradually settled to its current stand.

Daryl Fedje and his colleagues realized that they couldn't just look for traces of ancient people along the current shoreline. 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 and 15 metres above the present sea. Basing themselves at remote seaside camps and travelling by speedboat through the archipelago's watery canyons, two or three survey teams at a time, usually one Haida and one consulting archaeologist to each, went out to search. Digging small test holes, using hand augers and examining exposed soil, they 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 be rich in stone tools 8,000 to 9,000 years old.

Fedje's archaeologist wife Joanne McSporran and their children pitched in as volunteers on the survey, which also scoured the current seashore. At Echo Bay on Moresby Island they found some 2,000 artifacts and stone tool fragments exposed on 100 metres 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 chickenpox." They even dug in the intertidal muck and weeds, "working like stink" knee-deep in water as the rising tide poured into the excavations, and still found a wealth of artifacts. There was also a sea otter bone that was radiocarbon dated to 9,300 B.P., when the sea passed its current stand as it rose to the 15-metre level. "It had obviously been butchered," says Fedje, "you could see the stone tool marks on it." 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. In summer 1994, using big mechanical jaws that scooped up large bites of the sea bottom, Fedje and McSporran dredged for artifacts just off Richardson Island from a federal research ship. They had very limited time and found nothing. Last summer two Haida divers and two underwater archaeologists 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. Although they found a stone club and some flakes from tool making, these could have been washed down from the artifact-laden beach. But below this was a coarse rocky layer, and underlying it were other artifacts which may well be older. The divers also located a very promising drowned beach terrace a little farther 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 beyond 9,300 B.P.

However early the first people appeared on the shores of Gwaii Haanas, they would have experienced a very strange world. Between 9,000 and 10,000 years ago, says Daryl Fedje, "the sea level was just roaring up there." And as the sea rose, the entire shoreline configuration and ecology changed rapidly. Lakes near sea level became first brackish lagoons and then fully 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 sea view to die for. Like his brother Bert Wilson, the survey's Haida crew chief, he has also worked on archaeology 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 after 12,000 B.P. 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. The weather remains good. The meals, taken at the watchman's cabin, are hearty. Morale is high. And although armed standoffs between natives and police are creating tension elsewhere in Canada, a spirit of mutual respect and genuine comradeship prevails among the mixed crew.

When the excavation reaches bottom, each pole is pulled up straight with winch-like comealongs attached to the corners of the steel cage. Tucker Brown, a huge jovial Haida who operates a park service boat, designed the cage-and-comealong system and directs the delicate operation. "O.K. Put a bit more tension on her, Ernie," he calls out. "She's swinging a bit. Now slowly. One--two--three--four clicks. O.K., now we've got to go ahead on yours, Jordan. Don't let her get too slack." Gradually the pole, carved in the likeness of an eagle, is ratcheted into a vertical position. Preservation consultant Richard Beauchamp checks the alignment with a plumb bob. (Later, Beauchamp lines the cavities atop several of the poles with lead flashing to stop rain from penetrating the wood and encouraging decay. He also glues back pieces that have broken off some poles.)

To keep the eagle pole upright, wheelbarrows of large stones are hauled up from the beach. Brown eases them down to Tom Greene in the pit, who wedges them around the base of the pole, where the wood is still remarkably sound. "How's that!," Brown guffaws, pleased at the results. "It'll still be standing long after you and I are ancestors, Tom. 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 the 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 the truly ancient post-Ice Age world. To the east, towards the B.C. 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 follow the food resources 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 higher on the beach.

Tom Koppel
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