Pilgrim in the Palace of Words

by Glenn Dixon

The translations show them to be works of great virtuosity. One of the elders Swanton interviewed, a man by the name of Ghandl, had lost his sight to smallpox. This brings to mind Homer and his great epics, and the comparison is apt. Haida tales can go on at length, even being told over several nights of sitting. There are stories of heroes and monsters, and a creation myth in which the beings of the world emerged from a cave — a consistent theme among many First Nation creation stories.

  So are these structural archetypes? Are they fundamental components of human myth-making? That’s the conclusion the structuralist camp offers, but it’s a view that’s largely fallen out of favour with academics. Now there’s post-structuralism, deconstructionism, and postmodernism, and what they’re all saying is that the differences between cultures and languages far outweigh any perceived similarities.

  And it’s true. The Haida myth stories are, for the most part, unlike anything I’ve ever read before. They’re called qqaygaang or qqayaagaang — both of which come from the root qqay, “to be old or full or ripe.” The infix aa changes the mode of the verb so that it emphasizes a state or a condition over a process or an action. Qqayaagaang, it seems, are things that continuously ripen with the telling.

  A storyteller is a nang qqaygaanga llaghaaygaa, and Ghandl was one of the best. His stories float on a bed of the surreal. The Haida are a people who live on the edge of three worlds. In fact, in the old Haida pronunciation, the name of the land Haida Gwaii is called Xhaaydla Gwaayaay — land on the boundary between worlds. Out in front of the villages is the great Pacific Ocean. Killer whales — sghaana — are the primary visible forms of the spirits of this place, and when a Haida paddles on the ocean, he’s literally a tiny island floating over the roof of heaven. The dark temperate forests behind the villages form another edge of the spirit world for the Haida. The deep inlands of the islands were once places where the Haida never went. They were the place of the spirit bears and the deer and all manner of mythical creatures. And above the villages was the third world — the sky — the spirit place of the Eagles and Ravens.

  Humans in the old Haida language are called xhaaydla xhaaydaghay — surface people. It means that they live on the edge, on the shiny bubble surface between three different spirit worlds. The human territory is at the boundary where the earth meets the ocean and where the sky meets the land. A few strokes on the paddle, a few steps into the woods, or if it were possible, a few flaps of the wing into the sky, and one would be in the spirit world.

  In reading the Haida myths I often have the sensation of dreaming. A canoe cuts through the ocean waves in one passage, then a line later it floats through a great cedar house. Creatures morph from shape to shape, sometimes in mid-sentence. A bird becomes a girl, a spear metamorphoses into a rope, a tree transforms into a ladder leading to another world.

  This is different. The Haida are a people living on a thin sliver of reality, the knife edge of inhabitable land between the vast open ocean and the cloud-capped mountains. And they’re truly original.

  There are fifty-three aboriginal languages spoken in Canada, and almost half are found along the coast of British Columbia. The Haida were once a singular people, remote and isolated on a chain of islands far off the coast. They traded with (and raided upon) the peoples of the mainland, but they were distinct. They were something unique.

  We tend to lump the aboriginal nations together in a kind of television image of the “Indian,” but they actually differ considerably more than we think. They’re a lot more different, say, than the French are from the English. To compare the different First Nations is more like contrasting the English with the Turkish. They have distinctly different languages, different customs and religions, whole different ways of being in the world.

  Part of the problem is that the English language has borrowed words from various nations and used them to apply to all indigenous peoples. Teepee, for example, is a Sioux word, but we use it to apply to any sort of animal hide structure. Moccasin, tomahawk, powwow, and toboggan all come from the Algonquian family of languages, which includes Cree, Mi’kmaq, Blackfoot, and many others. Kayak comes from the word qajaq and is Inuktitut, the tongue of the Inuit.

  They’re all different, but in our rush to understand and to label we seem to have all aboriginal peoples living in teepees, wearing feathered headdresses, going to powwows, smoking peace pipes — all the stereotypes. The first order of business is to throw away that mental baggage. Each First Nation has its own story, its own House of Being, its own Palace of Words.

  Words, we have to remember, don’t label things. They label meanings. A canoe in Haida is t’luu, and it’s really quite a different thing than the canoes used to paddle in the Great Lakes and on the rivers in central Canada. Totem comes from the Ojibwa word ninto:te:m, and though James used the word totem, the old Haida would never have employed such a word. For them the poles were called gyaaghang or zhaat, depending on their use, depending on whether they were clan poles or mortuary poles.

  The poles, of course, are complex symbolic systems in their own right. They don’t tell stories exactly, as James told us, but they do identify the people and the clans quite precisely. Their figures, their symbols, are derived from the stories of the Haida’s own particular spirit world.

  Like many First Nations, the Haida experienced great tragedy with the arrival of the Europeans, and I’m not talking about the battles between the Red Cod People and the European ships. No, many of the other Haida villages had far more amicable first encounters. However, with the white men came disease. Typhoid, measles, and syphilis all took their toll, but by far the most deadly disease was smallpox.

  The variola virus that causes smallpox has now been eliminated on Earth, except for a few vials hopefully carefully protected in a few select laboratories around the world. Smallpox, of course, is highly contagious, and for a people who had never had contact with the disease, it was catastrophic.

  The first sign is a fever. A person’s temperature rises quickly after the initial infection, and in a few hours he’s immobilized by a temperature that soars to well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Then come the “spots.” Raised bumps appear on the skin, growing until they cover large parts of the body. The lumps are hard, as if small pebbles are lodged under the skin, and this is when the disease is at its most contagious. Survivors, and there were very few among the Haida, would have borne the scars of these bumps for the rest of their lives.

  When the first Europeans sailed through the straits, there were about twelve thousand Haida living in hundreds of villages up and down these coasts. Within a couple of decades the population dropped to about six hundred desperate souls. In fact, their numbers dipped so precipitously that it looked as if the Haida and all their meanings might be wiped off the face of the planet.

  On SGaang Gwaii the population plummeted from three hundred or four hundred to about fifty and finally to five ragged survivors, all in the space of a few years. All along the island chain of Haida Gwaii, the few survivors fled their villages, and by the end of the nineteenth century, congregated in two safe places: Skidegate, in the great fjord that runs between the two main islands, and Masset at the tip of the northern island.

  To this day Skidegate and Masset are the only villages where the Haida still live in any great numbers. Some say there are now only two Haida dialects, one in the north and one in Skidegate, but that’s actually not quite right. It’s a bit more complicated than that. At Skidegate the descendants of villagers all up and down the southern islands, including SGaang Gwaii, banded together. They held on to their ancestries so that today the elders actually speak a tumble of different dialects. In Skidegate there are at least six ancestral chiefs among the population, that is, the chiefs from six different villages. They’re all in one place now, the survivors. This is what remains.

  We sat on a log on the beach in front of the abandoned village. A mist had come in off the ocean. I looked at James. As I said, he was a big guy. Except for the hockey jer
sey, I could well imagine him in a war canoe, thumping at the gunnels as it rushed toward the beach of an enemy village.

  “So,” I asked, “what are you?”

  “What?”

  “Are you a Raven or a —”

  “I’m an Eagle,” he said without hesitation.

  “And do you speak Haida?”

  “Well, they teach it in the schools now. The elders come in and teach the kids right from kindergarten. But that was after me. I only had it in grade eight, so I only know a few words. Not much.”

  In truth the Haida language is on the edge of extinction. There are only a few hundred people still fully fluent. But a concentrated effort is underway not only to teach the children but to assemble a sort of language bank before it’s too late. The elders meet and argue over the ancient words, as there are many dialects and accents. The spelling, too, is problematic, and there are at least four different writing systems in place.

  The very last speaker of the dialect of the Red Cod People died in 1970, so the tongue of the Wailing Island is already gone. I had assumed that James was from this place. “No,” he told me. “I have a one-month shift here … living in the watchman’s cabin.” He glanced up at the sky. It was hard to tell if it was going to rain or not. “I’ve only been here for three days, so I’ve got, what, more than three weeks left.” He heaved a sigh. “There’s not much to do.”

  Funny. I had the impression there was nothing James would like more than to shoot some hoops with his friends, maybe play some video games. This was a job for him, a responsibility, and he didn’t seem to be taking a great deal of pleasure in it. That wasn’t to say he didn’t have the greatest amount of respect for the place. It was just that, back in Skidegate where he lived, there was a here and now.

  Seeing James sitting there on a clump of driftwood, his back to the ancient totem poles, distractedly tossing rocks into the water, all this reminded me that cultures, and languages for that matter, are pretty abstract entities. The world, in reality, is made up of individuals, and the way that individuals actually fit into these cultures and languages is sometimes problematic. James was a good example.

  Post-structural theory talks about the individual as a “subject” caught in the “object” that is culture. One of the big problems with the old theories about culture say the post-structuralists, are that they’re very much bogged down in Western preconceptions. A Western preconception that really stands out is that we tend to think in dualities: this and that, us and them. We think in terms of individuals as separate from cultures. But the fact is, they’re not divisible.

  What’s needed here is a collapsing of René Descartes. The French philosopher, of course, was the one who uttered the immortal “I think, therefore I am.” He was contrasting himself, his own consciousness, with the great outside world, the ghost in the machine, if you will.

  But the post-structuralist line of thinking says that he got it all wrong. Consciousness doesn’t come first. Consciousness, after all, has to be conscious of something. It’s a sort of chicken-and-egg thing. We’re immersed from the very beginning in our culture’s sets of symbols — its beliefs, its ways of seeing and encoding the world. It’s the water we swim in. We can’t escape it because it precedes us, envelops us. It’s the world we’re born into no matter what sort of mental gymnastics we attempt to avoid it.

  The world has already been defined for us through our language and through all the other semiotic systems of our culture. Such symbols might change over time, certainly, but we’re quite inseparable from them.

  So what happens to the person who’s caught between two cultures, or three, or four? That’s where things really get interesting. I suppose the post-stucturalists would say we’re making arbitrary divisions again. A person exists within a world, not a world made up of two cultures but of a single blended culture — one with televisions and totem poles, one where you fish for Salmon and surf the Internet. This is life in the twenty-first century, the world that James lives in.

  A long fjord separates the two main islands of the Queen Charlottes. It’s called Skidegate Inlet, and I’d come here to go sea kayaking, skimming over the spirit world in a Haida canoe.

  So I found myself up at dawn one morning, standing at the dock with fog hanging over the inlet. Out in the water I could hear a small skiff puttering into shore to pick me up. A tall man, his feet in gumboots, jumped out to greet me. This was Patrick. His long black hair was tied in ponytail, and he spoke with a French-Canadian accent. He wasn’t Haida. Patrick turned out to be, of all things, Mohawk.

  He was taking me to a small island owned by another man, his friend and mentor, Louie Two Elks. Louie, who was going to be my kayaking guide, wasn’t Haida, either. He was Métis, part Cree and part I wasn’t sure what, but I thought it might be Italian.

  So here I was in Haida Gwaii, land of the Haida, about to go on a kayaking trip with two Native guides. One was Cree and the other was Mohawk. Now that seemed weird. But things don’t always fit into the neat conceptual boxes we build for ourselves. What exactly does it mean to be Haida? The answers aren’t always so straightforward.

  “How many days you staying at Louie’s place?” Patrick asked as we set out across the inlet.

  “Three days.”

  Patrick nodded. A man of few words, he turned back to the tiny outboard motor and puttered out to a chain of three tiny islands. Louie Two Elks lived on the middle one. The island was perhaps four hundred metres from edge to edge. You could walk around it in a couple of minutes. Patrick steered the boat around the edge of the island and there, on the little beach, was Louie. He was about a third of a metre shorter than Patrick, but he also had his long hair tied back in a ponytail.

  Louie waved to me from the beach and then helped to pull the boat in. I couldn’t help but see that Louie was wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt, and when I commented on it, his face lit up in a big grin. “Did you see The Motorcycle Diaries?” he asked. “I’m a big fan of Che.” And that made sense. Louie was a bit of a rebel himself.

  He took me up to his cabin, actually quite a nice little house. Louie had been living here with his family and Patrick for twenty years. “We’re completely off the grid,” he told me. They didn’t get their power or their water from anywhere except nature. On the roof was a set of solar panels. Out back was a big rainwater tank, and for the winter, Louie had rigged up a system for heat — all of it very neat and tidy.

  “When I first came out here,” Louie said, “I got a job on a tramp steamer going up the Inside Passage of Alaska. Well, I’d never been on the ocean before and I got real sick. You know, some people, they get sick …” Patrick nodded at the story. I was sure he’d heard it a thousand times. “Some people get seasick for a day or two and then they get their sea legs. But a certain percentage of people … they just stay sick. There’s nothing you can do. They never get over it. And that’s what happened to me. Finally, they just dropped me off at the Queen Charlottes, and I’ve been here ever since.” He looked at me and chuckled. “Me, I’m a freshwater Indian.”

  Louie, as near as I could tell, was from northern Saskatchewan. His grandmother was full-blooded Cree, and though he was born Louie Waters, he was given his Native name in a ceremony a few years back.

  “Two Elks,” he told me, “is perfect because, to me, it means I walk in two worlds, the white one and the Native one.” In fact, Louie had eventually married a lovely woman named Joy. She was non-Native, but a few years later they adopted two full-blooded Cree kids. Then along came Patrick, who had wandered out from Quebec, and they sort of adopted him, too. He was something between an uncle and a brother to the kids.

  Louie, besides occasionally guiding kayaking trips, lived largely off the land, hunting and fishing. Sitting on the deck of the cabin on the first evening, we watched the Salmon jump out of the water. They passed by here for most of the year, each according to its season. The spring Salmon arrived first and then the coho. After that the chum Salmon made their run un
til finally September brought the sockeye. That was one of the secrets of Haida civilization. For thousands of years they had lived here, hunting and fishing, and the food was so plentiful that it allowed them lots of time to develop their consummate arts and storytelling.

  Lounging on the deck, Louie and I got to know each other. He told me about the guy on the next island over. This man had a commercial greenhouse operation, a large, almost industrial complex with a barking dog and lots of no trespassing signs. He was the polar opposite of Louie’s eco-friendly little slice of paradise. A few years back this guy searched some legal papers and discovered he actually owned the rights to Louie’s little island. Within days Louie received an eviction notice.

  Well, Louie was already into his second decade there and wasn’t about to move. Across at Skidegate the Haida heard about Louie’s impending eviction and came over to rescue him. One of the elders, Chief Skedans, a full ninety-two years old, was the first to help.

  Chief Skedans arrived and looked around at Louie’s little island. “I think,” he said, “there was an old Haida village here once.” In fact, that’s pretty much a sure bet. Just about all the islands, at one time or another, had villages. At any rate, Chief Skedans claimed the island as Haida, and after that the guy next door couldn’t face the prospect of a legal battle to prove otherwise. Even the Canadian government doesn’t try to tackle land claims like that.

  Louie told me that the Haida were in a different position than most of the other First Nations in Canada. Land treaties were never signed here. There was never an agreement with the provincial or the federal governments. The islands were too remote. So with a declaration by Chief Skedans, Louie’s island became Haida territory — as simple as that.

  But there was more. Chief Skedans offered to adopt Louie’s family. This was a great honour, and Louie still gets quite moved when he talks about it. An ancient potlatch ceremony was held, and Chief Skedans, who is a Raven, formally adopted Louie Two Elks’ family. They would now be Haida, or at least Joy Waters and the children would be.