Mnemonic

by Theresa Kishkan

  I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,

  All alone stood it, and the moss hung down

  from the branches,

  Without any companion it grew there,

  glistening out with joyous leaves of

  dark green.

  But why did Newcombe choose a live oak, I wondered? Living in a city surrounded by wonderful native species — and himself a man who knew the value of plants and how a culture utilized them for medicines, commerce, and the practical business of everyday life — why choose a tree from the southeastern United States? Although common in southern cities, it is a tree happiest in parks, large estates, and on riverbanks where it can access damp sandy soil and where it can spread. The widest crown of any live oak is more than forty-five metres, belonging to a tree in Florida. I tried to figure out why that tree, in that place.

  Next time I’m in Victoria, I drive over to Dallas Road (144 is next to 138; the lot was no doubt larger in the early twentieth century when Newcombe built here) and park across from Ogden Point breakwater. All those huge granite blocks were brought from Hardy Island, near where I live on the Sechelt Peninsula. I want to walk out on it as I did as a young girl with boyfriends on dark Friday nights. We’d pause to kiss as waves crashed against the exposed side. I always felt like I might fall — into the deep cold water of Juan de Fuca Strait or the more mysterious waters of human affection. Perhaps it was that fear of the deep that kept me from loving any of those young men, or even having them matter to me much, for I have a hard time remembering a single one of their names.

  Instead, I pinch off another small branch of live oak with its deep green leaves, their undersides downy as a boy’s face, and tuck it into my notebook, a small accordion pocket at the back provided for mementos. I don’t see any of the acorns nestled in their deep cups, but this is a neighbourhood of squirrels, plentiful and industrious. The nameless branch at home is still pressed in a plant book, my efforts to identify it unsuccessful. Though now I can put a tiny bit of tape around its stem and write on it, Quercus virginiana.

  No, this was no eucalyptus with its pinch of menthol, but a tree that grows quickly to a size large enough for shade, and is tolerant of salt-winds. One hundred thirty-eight Dallas Road is very exposed. There were fortified village sites along this part of the waterfront, beginning eight hundred to nine hundred years before contact, with moats and stockades; and it was kept shrub-free in order to encourage camas, Hooker’s onion, and other food plants of the Lekwungen people. Later on the whole area was known as Beckley Farm, producing meat and vegetables for the Fort. Cattle and pigs ate the camas flowers before they could seed and the pigs even dug up the bulbs, eager for their sweetness. Little by little, exotic and introduced species took over from the delicate wild grasses and herbs; a live oak in soil once nurturing Garry oaks or arbutus. Yet Victoria’s mild climate has encouraged gardeners to plant trees as exotic as bananas and palms so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn the tree’s true name.

  As a child I was impressed that Beacon Hill Park featured the tallest totem pole in the world, carved by Mungo Martin. It was erected in 1958 and is 127 feet tall. Sometimes I’d ride my bike over to the park and sit at the base of the pole. I could see the Juan de Fuca Strait and often there was a cold wind coming off it. I remember leaning my head back and trying to read the story in the totem’s elements. No one talked about its imagery. To refresh my memory, I’ve checked the newspaper reporting of the time and find no mention of the symbolic elements of the work. Its size was emphasized, the method of placing it in a skirt like a huge candleholder so that guy wires weren’t required.

  The cedar tree that became the tallest pole grew at Muir Creek off the West Coast Road near Sooke. Brought to Thunderbird Park, it became graphic with Mungo Martin’s family stories. Beginning with Geeksan wrapped in a blanket at the bottom, followed by the cannibal bird Huxwhukw, the crest animals rise one by one — killer whale with its formidable teeth, sea lion, eagle, sea otter clutching a fish, another whale, beaver, a man, seal, wolf, crowned by three men, two of them wearing blankets against the chill winds off Juan de Fuca Strait. And perhaps against loneliness. Beacon Hill Park is far from Fort Rupert on the northern edge of Vancouver Island where the stories had their origins.

  I saw the world as an animated place. Walking the beach in search of bark for our stove on Eberts Street, I’d find long lizards of root wood tangled in amongst the logs with the faces of ravens peering out of the grain, ovoid knots forming the eyes. The monkey-puzzle trees with their serpent-like branches dropped cones scaled as the garter snakes my brothers would drop down my T-shirt, leaving me frozen in horror as the dry terrified animals slithered out above the waistband of my shorts. It wasn’t that I was frightened of the snakes themselves. I could spend ages looking at one sleeping on Moss Rocks, even touching the pattern on the scales with a tentative finger. But feeling them against my bare skin was enough to make me pee my pants. Which I suppose was the idea. I learned to pretend indifference as I got older, which meant that I lost the knowledge of reptile skin against my own.

  I saw the tired heads of elk in the bare branches of Garry oak and black bears nosed their way from the burned wood of old bonfires. So looking up into the faces of Mungo Martin’s crest animals staring steadfastly out to sea from their perch on the tallest totem was akin to reading a story from a culture adjacent to my own but which shared elements, a sense of the numinous, and to recognize the familiar amidst the strange. These were not my crest animals, but they were part of the landscape I loved, and some of them had formed me as surely as they had formed any child born into that locus.

  The squeak of the wooden wheels of change, carts dragged by sleepy oxen to and from the Fort, bringing turnips, potatoes, slabs of bloody meat.

  Squeaking as they brought food to the pesthouse where a five-year-old child was taken from the Prince Alfred in 1872, “the house formerly occupied by Mrs. Nias on Beckley Farm, which is now Government property and which was fitted up yesterday for the reception of the little sufferer. The yellow flag waves over the house.”8

  Ploughs turning and opening, carts waiting to take away the stones, gulls wheeling in their wake in the clear blue skies over the fields of Beckley Farm. Imagine Lekwungen families watching as their own cultivated patches of common camas and great camas disappeared without consultation. A child in the shadow of a Garry oak, digging stick in hand, puzzled by the sad turning away of a parent while the pigs rooted and feasted on broken bulbs turned up by the plough.

  The smallpox patient taken to the pesthouse died and was buried somewhere on the waterfront, marked now with a small plaque, though the exact location of her grave has been long forgotten. That little sufferer, bones under the foreign grasses and Scotch broom of Holland Point.

  Charles Newcombe was an intrepid collector, not just for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in Richmond, near London, but also for the Field Museum in Chicago and other institutions all over North America and abroad. He wanted Canadian institutions to recognize the value of the materials but had only intermittent luck for years, though he received encouragement from George Mercer Dawson of the Canadian Geological Survey. It became a deplorable competition, boats going up and down the coast carrying fervent hunters for the authentic object. Poles, bentwood boxes, rattles, masks, even something called “osteological collections” — in other words, skeletons. Some museums wanted characteristic materials from the discrete cultural areas. Some went for quantity over quality. Some were generous with funding and urged their agents to go to extreme measures to procure trophies of special interest.

  The missionaries were involved. At first they encouraged their converts in the Native villages to burn totem poles and other aspects of traditional life. But then they realized how valuable these items were. In Jan Hare and Jean Barman’s Good Intentions Gone Awry: Emma Crosby and the Methodist Mission on the Northwest Coast, there is a telling passage in a letter home from Emma Crosby (wife of Methodist m
issionary Thomas Crosby) to her mother. It is 1875, and the Crosbies have been visited by James Swan, erstwhile Indian agent from Washington and agent for the Smithsonian Institute who is also collecting for the upcoming Centennial Exhibition:

  Another stray str. visited us a few weeks ago & a U.S. revenue cutter having on board a U.S. Indian agent looking up Indian curiosities for the approaching Centennial Exhibition. He took dinner with us & I should say was a fair specimen of the U.S. Indian agent as reputed to be — not inconveniently high-minded.9

  This visit was further elaborated upon in Douglas Cole’s Captured Heritage:

  Inducing the Indians to give up their heathen ways, Methodist missionary Thomas Crosby had persuaded many to remove poles from outside their houses, and, though some of these had been burned, others were collected “in a sort of museum.” Swan bought one, a finely-carved forty-foot specimen, and he hoped for more. Both Crosby and C. E. Morrison, the HBC trader, agreed to gather a collection for Swan which they would send to Victoria.10

  Realizing how potentially lucrative the objects were, Crosby began to collect for himself as well and was ideally placed to persuade those under his pastorate to give up their cultural wealth.

  There were rivalries to see which collectors could acquire the most poles, whole houses, coppers, and feast dishes. On one collecting trip for Franz Boas, Newcombe sailed to Ninstints, a Haida village off the tip of Moresby Island in the Queen Charlotte Islands. Chief Ninstints himself accompanied Newcombe as pilot. Newcombe reported to Boas that the Chief “is half-blind and I hope to acquire many interesting things in that almost wholly deserted village for you.” (The population of Ninstints had been decimated by smallpox earlier in the century.) One of the crew diverted the Chief’s attentions while a few “osteological” items were located, though not what had been hoped for. However, other village sites were visited and mortuary areas raided while the “half-blind” Chief Ninstints was kept busy in other ways.11

  Yet the collection at Kew takes us from grave-robber and villain (of a sort: these things are never black and white and at the time Newcombe was in hot pursuit of artefacts, it was an acceptable practice) to a passionate advocate for the importance of ethnobotany. A beautiful set of gambling sticks carved of Pacific crabapple is as lovely as anything sold in a contemporary craft shop. And a halibut hook, formed of western yew and strong enough to hoist the weight of one of those bottom-dwelling sea denizens weighing in excess of 180 kilograms, is graceful and practical. There is some suggestion that collections such as these work to educate those whose cultures have lost their traditional practices. The carefully wrought baskets and implements hold the lessons of their makers — the way their hands worked the fibres, the marks of the adze on the wood — and do much to help us recover the past.

  The Royal British Columbia Museum holds hundreds of photographs taken by Newcombe showing village sites in all their intact dignity, houses gazing solemnly to sea with canoes pulled up in front and a few people purposefully digging clams or sitting on logs in sunlight. For all that he removed from those places, Newcombe preserved a complex codex of place and culture in that photographic record.

  A natural historian like Charles Newcombe would surely have known about the useful qualities of Quercus virginiana. Is this why he planted one? He would have known, for instance, that it was an important tree for shipbuilding (the US Navy had large tracts of live oak for this very purpose), the massive arching limbs finding their way to the ribs and knees of ships, the wood itself heavy, strong, and hard.

  The Houma people who lived in what is now Louisiana cherished the live oak. After their own language was absorbed into French, they called it chêne vert or the green oak. Its bark provided red paint for the post on the Mississippi River that marked their hunting territory in what is now Baton Rouge (or red post). The acorns were an integral food supply; live oak acorns being high on the list of palatability, they were pressed for their oil and were soaked (to leach out the tannins), dried, and ground to make meal.

  The anthropologist John Swanton wrote extensively on the Aboriginal peoples of two geographical areas in his long career — the Pacific Northwest and the Southeastern United States. Charles Newcombe met Swanton at Skidegate in 1900, when Newcombe was on a collecting trip for Stewart Culin and the University of Pennsylvania. The two men got along quite well.12 After his work with the Haida and Tlingit, Swanton went on to study the Muskogean peoples of the Southeastern United States (the Houma are included in this linguistic group).

  It’s a fanciful stretch, but I like to think that maybe Swanton inspired Newcombe to plant his live oak when the latter built his house on Dallas Road. Maybe he even sent a root, an acorn, a small sapling, knowing that the species could withstand the salt-laden wind off the Juan de Fuca Strait. Potatoes, turnips, and the broom which so drastically changed the face of Victoria, graveposts and houseposts and the entire regalia for winter ceremonials travelling by train across America to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, gambling sticks of crabapple wood destined for the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. . . In such ways cultural and botanical knowledge travel the well-worn roads and rivers of human experience, participating in exchange, small acts of mercy and theft, and larger ones of kindness and exploitation.

  The Salvage Paradigm

  I read whatever I can about Wawadit’la. The late Wilson Duff, the anthropology curator at the Provincial Museum who encouraged the construction of Wawadit’la, said:

  This is an authentic replica of a Kwakiutl house of the nineteenth century. More exactly, it is Mungo Martin’s house, bearing on its houseposts some of the hereditary crests of his family. This is a copy of a house built at Fort Rupert about a century ago by a chief whose position and name Mungo Martin had inherited and assumed — Nakap’ankam.13

  According to Wilson Duff, Wawadit’la was one of two names that Martin had the right to choose from for his creation; it means “he orders them to come inside.” Yet it seems there was no single house on which Mungo Martin modelled his Thunderbird Park version. Rather, there are several.

  The house where Mungo Martin was born was the home of his mother’s uncle, the old chief Nakap’ankam.14 It appears this house was never finished — it had no frontal painting. In what seems to be an homage to his father, who had come from Gwayasdums on Gilford Island, Martin uses an image from a house there for the frontal painting of the Thunderbird Park Wawadit’la, though with some stylistic changes. Martin reverses figures on the houseposts from those on Nakap’ankam’s house, and synthesizes other design elements. In a paper given at the 1987 annual general meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago, Ira Jacknis considers the various sources informing Mungo Martin’s concept for Wawadit’la and the way the house both reflects the ideal and the pragmatic in terms of its influences: “the non-native context of Martin’s house may have encouraged the artist to synthesize diverse Kwakiutl forms into a kind of ‘super-artifact.’”15

  And what is a copy, what is authentic? Can the house of a Kwakwaka’wakw chief, built in Lekwungen territory on southern Vancouver Island, far from the village of its origins, built with the sense that everything it represented must be commemorated because so much of that culture was disappearing, can this house truly be called a copy? Houses, like songs and stories and other aspects of culture, exist across time and place, in a moment that is ever-present. When I saw that old man, who might have been Mungo Martin, working in Thunderbird Park, it did not occur to me that he had not always worked there, had not always lived in the house with some sort of sea creature painted on its facade. A child leaning her blue bike against a rock and watching was taken into that moment. The ravens in the trees knew this, their vocabulary unchanged over the centuries, in a city where the bodies of Native children and the young passenger from the Prince Alfred who died in the pesthouse at Holland Point lie under the ground in proximity. Charred stones from the pits where springbank clover was steamed can be found in the sand. The buried streams remem
ber their routes to the Inner Harbour, under what’s now the Empress Hotel, and where the old lodges at the original Songhees village site, though vanished, still give off the faint scent of cedar if the wind is right.

  Anthropologists might disagree about what is authentic and what isn’t, made anxious by preoccupations of contact and culture and the “salvage paradigm.”16 This isn’t surprising: careers are built on fine distinctions. There is evidence that Mungo Martin felt that he was the last of his kind in some respects, working against time and oblivion. Wilson Duff wrote to a friend, “Mungo is convinced: (a) that this will be the last ‘house-warming’ potlatch and (b) that nobody else but him knows exactly how to do the whole thing properly.”17 This house recreated and adapted and given new meaning, then: a repository of both memory and history, those duelling conspirators.

  What is particularly interesting is that anthropologists can engage in considerations of authenticity so many years after the plundering of the Kwakwaka’wakw villages and the loss of so much of their material culture, in part because Charles Newcombe took hundreds of precise photographs documenting the villages. One can look at them, a single degree of separation, and approach something of the experience of gliding onto the beach at Kalokwis on Turnour Island among the canoes where the housefronts stare out to sea, their imagery and context intact. Or walk up to the group of people standing in front of Kwaksistala, a house on Harbledown Island, in 1900, children and adults wrapped in blankets, a few of them in headdresses. That house’s sculpin front informed, in memory, some of Mungo Martin’s work in Thunderbird Park, as of course did Gwayasdums. We can almost remember, looking at these photographs; almost trace the trajectory of the artist’s work back to his original home at Fort Rupert on the northeast coast of Vancouver Island, where clams were dried by the fire and elegant hooks of western yew might bring up a halibut. We can almost stand there in our otherness, our clothing slowly absorbing the smell of cedar smoke and salt.