Thursday, May 02, 2013

"GUUJAW AND THE REAWAKENING OF THE HAIDA NATION" By Ian Gill



So many of us long for a special place, sometimes once know and lost and sometimes only envisioned and occasionally literary.  A land loved by many is called “Earthsea,” the homeland envisioned by Ursula LeGuin.  Fewer know that this is a real place called by geographers “Queen Charlotte Islands.”  Which always makes me think of the dessert.

My mother told me I was conceived in a thunderstorm on one of those islands.  She and my father had gone to visit a family that included the woman my father almost married.  Neither my father nor my mother had red hair, but I did.  My mother claimed it had something to do with that red-headed woman on the island, either that thoughts of her strayed into my father’s mind or that my mother seized the copper hair from her -- or both.  Sci-fi is just a way of talking within given parameters about a reality so it becomes a story but sometimes the world creates parameters that allow the same thing.  They are always slightly menacing, like that small dark knot in the corner that haunts Jed in “The Wizard of Earthsea.

The Queen Charlottes include the Haida Gwaa which is the main location of the Haida people.  What you need to know about this collection of islands along the British Columbia coast is at first geological:  These islands were once roughly where Hawaii is now, but were moved along on the tectonic plates until they bumped up against North America.  They are connected by contiguity and origin to rhyming islands near Japan and they are rich in copper piped to the surface by volcanic action because they are part of the Ring of Fire that subduction zone that shakes the land violently now and then.  There is a deposit of argyllite, a soft flat black kind of stone good for carving and polishing.  (The Sioux use red argyllite for their pipe bowls.)

But beyond everything else there is cedar.  As buffalo are to the Blackfeet, cedar is to the Haida.  Some would say salmon was a better icon, but others would classify a salmon as a forest animal: they are conceived in the cold streams coming down from the mountains that were pushed up by the tectonic plate action, the mountains that scrape water out of the clouds.  The salmon grow in gravelly headwaters first, then go on their long journey around the sea and back as though someone had slipped them a copy of Joe Campbell’s mythology.  Where there is water, there is life, connected.

The huge cedar trunks, hollowed out with fire and adzes, made possible ocean-going “canoes” so that the Haida were kings of the sea, ranging far and far, Vikings of the Pacific.  They lived in board houses made of split cedar and carved beams and their harbor villages were marked by carved totem poles that told the stories of families in terms of animals: frogs and thunderbirds and otter.  If you didn’t mind rain and smoke, and enjoyed seafood, the life was a rich and comfortable one.  Then came smallpox.

And then came the timber companies and then came poverty.  It’s an old story.  But the awakening came, partly through artists like Bill Reid and Gary Edenshaw, and eventually created a man called Guujaaw, previously Gary Edenshaw.  It means Drum.  Of course, there’s a book -- how else would I know?  “All That We Say is Ours:  Guujaaw and the Reawakening of the Haida Nation,” by Ian Gill. The “Aquarian Age” called to the indigenous people of the Queen Charlotte Islands, renaming them Haida Gwaii, “Islands of the People”, Xaaydlaga Gawaayaay, “Islands at the Boundary of the World”.  Reid is famous for his giant carving of Raven calling the People out of their origin in a clamshell.  Now Guujaaw, carver/storyteller/dancer/actor/singer/politician -- acting as Raven in a proper mask -- set about prying the People out of the mindset of the Euros, which was intent on cutting every old growth tree they could.  To do such a prying thing, first you have to think of it.  Guujaaw, in the traditional human way of talking late at night with the likeminded, began to think of things the rest of us are still only gradually realizing.



First, they thought of meeting Canada as equals, not as dependent victims.  To counter British law based on the granting of authority to a king, they raised Haida law based on the self-evident ecology of the land.  (A shift from Creator to Creation.)  To add the endorsement of “first users” which is a traditional element when dealing with land and water, they went into the forest and found ancient evidence of cedar-based occupation: trees that had been modified by ancient people, logs that had been cut but left for some reason, boxes and house foundations.  Always the places were haunted by the ghostly totem poles, so mystically portrayed by Emily Carr and now standing in front of museums.  Part of Guujaaw’s preparation was going to the secret places marked by the poles and by the bleached bones of the People in order to bury them before the souvenir hunters found the skulls for mantel ornaments.  He slept there and their spirits came to him.

The friends sat late at night with maps and drew lines.  Euros understand drawn boundaries.  When the laws of the cedar were developing, the Haida realized that timber brokers and politicians only planned for tomorrow -- get elected, make the profit, and get the hell out.  So they developed a time-line based on the life span of a cedar -- about a thousand years until maturity, much longer until natural death -- inhabited by the lifespans of the totems.  They worked out the intervals of birth and death and showed that the land could only be sustained by this ecology.  Otherwise the government was looking at a cliff: big money soon -- eventually nothing but rocks and seabird guano.  Reality forced a paradigm shift.  The Haida were ready: in the interval tribal women had attended law school and could elegantly address the courts in their own Haida language.

Call it “post-colonial” if you like.  The Brit Empire reconvened transformed, indigenous peoples united to resist the German/British monarchy-based systems, reaching back to pre-discovery days for their identity.  Now the Australian and New Zealand aboriginals, the Japanese Ainu, the tribes on the southern parts of the American continent, began to talk to each other.  The idea is not to choose between two binaries, but to find either a balance or a blend that saves the land because that IS the way to save human lives.  

The arts are always a major part. http://www.bruceruddell.com/?page_id=49   This is a clip of “The Spirit of the Haida Gwaii Oratorio” that Ian Gill describes in his last chapter.  You are hearing it because of the new level of cyber-networking on the planet now -- if we can keep it out of the hands of the government and predatory corporations.

What follows is a little poem by Jenny Nelson, mother of two of Guujaaw’s children. (I do believe I have seen an ancient movie of this scene.)   Then a video cartoon that is described as “Haida Manga.”

Kjusta
for Naanii Ida

The canoe came,
Long-prowed and slim-paddled it came;
slipping through still water,
and the bear danced.

The bear danced in the prow
bringing the princess in.

Old women cleaned chitons by the fire.
Drank strong coffee.
Made good pan bread
Told the stories.

Children moved
in and out
of the women's circle.

Until the boat came in.

Then faces painted,
Dancers robed
Drums sounded,
Songs sung,
And the bear danced the princess in.


Haida Manga:  The power of the hummingbird.

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