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magazine / ja08
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July/August 2008 issue |
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Thunderbirds & thunderstorms
Racing the most famous canoe ever built during Skidegate Days, Haida Gwaii’s premier summer festival
By PJ Reece
For a landlubber, a canoe is the scariest thing since the Deluge, the flood
that followed the last ice age. It forced the Haida to higher ground, where
spirits showed them how to carve elegant wooden boats. More than just transportation,
Haida canoes are an expression of culture, of artistry, of history. I’m
in the Queen Charlotte Islands, 80 kilometres off the British Columbia mainland,
to race the most famous Haida canoe ever built.
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Loo Taas, or “Wave Eater” (named for the killer-whale
design painted onto its sidewalls, fore and aft), was considered by renowned
Haida artist Bill Reid to be his greatest accomplishment. Carved from a single
log of western red cedar for Vancouver’s Expo 86, the 15-metre canoe
launched a cultural revival when it was paddled back to Skidegate the following
summer, a 950-kilometre voyage along ancient Haida trading routes. When Reid
died in 1998, Loo Taas carried his ashes to a burial site in his mother’s
ancestral village. Wave Eater navigated its way onto the world stage when it
was paddled up the Seine River to Paris in 1989 to join a global exhibition
of aboriginal art at the Musée de l’Homme. When it returned home
later that year, canoe races became a fixture of Skidegate Days, a summer
festival and community fundraiser held each July.
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Treasure islands
Six totem poles, one for each ancestral Haida village, guard the ancient community
known as Kay Llnagaay, located in what is now Skidegate. This venerable place
is home to the Haida Heritage Centre at Kay Llnagaay, the culmination of 40
years of planning and preparation.
The centre officially opens in August, after a brief preview in July.
Its five interconnected longhouses face the Pacific Ocean and contain
exhibits of Haida art — including works by Bill Reid, Robert Davidson,
Charles Edenshaw and Tom Price — as well as classrooms for lectures and
workshops, an amphitheatre for live performances of traditional dance, drumming
and storytelling, a carving house and a canoe house. The centre will also serve
as the new, larger home for the Haida Gwaii Museum, whose collection includes
a mix of historic pieces and some contemporary ones.
www.haidaheritagecentre.com
(250) 559-7885 |
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Charlotte, the wife of Mad King George III, never laid eyes on her namesake
islands, but there are better reasons to call this archipelago by its rightful
name. Haida Gwaii means “the place of the people.” A more telltale
translation is “islands coming out of concealment.” Here, two hours
by plane from Vancouver, the mist is legendary. The ragged spires of spruce,
hemlock and cedar are, as often as not, shrouded in heavy layers of cloud scudding
silently in four directions. Ravens dominate the soundscape with their throaty “Doink!
Doink! Doink!” while shore crabs scurry for cover on boulder-studded
tidal flats. They remind me of the little men whom Raven is said to have
lured from their clamshell. According to this creation story, there were no
females among Raven’s new playmates, so he plucked molluscs from the
rocks and attached their vulva-like undersides to the groins of the males.
And that’s how the Haida people were born, right here in this mystical
realm between sea and land.
Saturday morning of Skidegate Days dawns clear, and by early afternoon the
place is alive with booths hawking T-shirts, wood and argellite carvings, fried
bread and lemon meringue pie. You can test your “fish-splitting” skills
at tables covered with fresh chinook salmon. Radio station CFNR interrupts
the rock track to announce the arrival of a klatch of runners making its way
through the village, promoting the Totem to Totem Marathon. And, on the grassy
slopes above the beach, picnickers are watching Loo Taas being towed
into the bay by power launch. Teams are forming spontaneously — 12 paddlers
and a captain. There’s going to be a real advantage for squads starting
their time trials before rain squalls move down Hecate Strait. But I’m
more concerned that my crew, which includes those exhausted marathoners, is
short four paddlers and a steersman. I have no choice but to start befriending
strangers. From the nervous reactions I get, it becomes clear what an honour
it is to participate and what an ordeal it’s going to be.
It’s spitting rain as our crew is advised to stand by. I’ve recruited
Kevin, a logger and grand champion from years past, a local carver named Carl,
and Tom, an Ojibwa visiting from Ontario. Jenna Wilson is also aboard. Her
husband Andy paddled Loo Taas to Paris. Perhaps to protect his wife,
Andy has agreed to come out of retirement and be our steersman.
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