refugees from the North American middle-class suburban dream and squat on Haida land—or Crown land; it depended on how you looked at it. In either case, the issue was rarely raised in the early ’70s.
Ron Suza and Pete Townson were two of the handful of “heads” who chose to settle on remote Burnaby Island at the southern end of the Queen Charlotte Archipelago. They hadn’t been there long, however, before their cabin burned down and they found themselves back in Queen Charlotte City, the night I arrived, performing at their own benefit concert. It was a great event with a wealth of local talent, a throbbing sense of community spirit and enough cannabis smoke in the dark dance hall to stone you on entry.
Somehow in the dark and the din I made a new friend, Glenn Naylor, a British bloke who had the best of both worlds—a log cabin along Burnaby Narrows and a house on Hippie Hill. He too was a kayaker and was planning to paddle back to his cabin on Burnaby Island in the next few days. “Why don’t you join me?” he offered. “You can crash at my place on the Hill until we go.” Great good fortune was smiling at last.
It was a beautiful night up on the Hill, as the hippie homeowners called it, and I rolled out my sleeping bag on Glenn’s porch to drink in the sweet summer air. By 2:00 a.m., the musicians had moved from the community hall to a house on the far side of the Hill where a great musical jam was ensuing. The sounds sweeping over the land were in many respects typical of the era: the rich unplugged sound of acoustic guitars, the wail of harmonicas, the flutter of flute and the steady rhythm of conga drums. Only the drumming stood out as something out of the ordinary. The rhythm was drawn from somewhere deeper than the stoned groove everyone else was jamming to. It seemed to come from the land itself. The trees, the rocks, the cedar-plank floor I slept on—all reverberated that pulse. Although I did not get a glimpse through the trees of the musicians that night, I felt connected in spirit to that “talking drum.”
“Who was on the conga last night?” I casually asked Glenn over breakfast porridge.
“Oh, that must have been Gary Edenshaw,” he answered; “He’s a Haida from Skidegate.” Ten years later, long after my life and Gary’s had become inextricably linked, the Haida elders deliberated long and hard to honour him with a new Haida name. His uncle Percy Williams had bestowed upon him the name Ghindigin, the “Questioning One,” but somehow he’d outgrown that. The new name that better suited him, the elders decided at length, was Guujaaw, Haida for “drum.” I could have told them that.
It was 8:00 a.m., June 21, 1973, when Glenn Naylor and I launched our kayaks from the beach in Skidegate Village, the Haida community just five kilometres east of Queen Charlotte City. I recall the time exactly not because it felt like some historic moment, but because it was the first time in eight months I wasn’t bearing the weight of the kayak … it was bearing mine. I felt wondrously weightless and free as we rode the ebb tide out Skidegate Inlet and felt the great swells of Hecate Strait. We had just enough clearance to glide over the long sandy spit that reaches out from the northeast tip of Moresby Island and gives this second-largest island in the archipelago the name of its only permanent community: Sandspit.
We were bucking tide now. This region has the greatest tidal fluctuation on the Canadian Pacific coast, and it wasn’t worth the effort to push on against it. Of course, it pales in comparison to the Bay of Fundy’s reported fifty-foot fluctuation in the Atlantic, but an eighteen-foot rise and drop in the water level every six hours is nothing to toy with either. We sat out the flood tide at Gray Bay.
It was late evening before the currents were running in our favour again, but there was still plenty of daylight to travel. This was, after all, the longest day of the year, and in this northern latitude, there would be light until 11:00 p.m. We managed to reach Cumshewa Rocks by sunset; it was an offshore seabird island with hundreds of nesting gulls. The tide was very low so Glenn and I gathered gooseneck barnacles and a few gull eggs for our dinner. When goosenecks are steamed, the shell and outer sheath of the barnacle slips off and a tasty morsel of meat melts in the mouth. Gooseneck barnacles have a rich flavour, a bit like crab, to which they are related. They are so delectable it’s surprising they’ve never worked their way onto epicurean menus.
I was told the Haida name Cumshewa means “rich at the mouth of the inlet,” and we certainly felt as rich as kings dining with the gulls on the most dainty of delicacies that night while the sun set over the long, glassy, smooth reach of Cumshewa Inlet. It was the perfect summer solstice party.
We slept out the few hours of darkness under the stars on barren rock, washed smooth from eons of pounding waves. Hundreds of gulls sounded our alarm clock at first light; there was to be no sleeping in unless we wanted to be whitewashed in gull droppings. Glenn headed south to a logging camp on Thurston Harbour, where he wanted to check on his mail, while I detoured up Cumshewa Inlet to view one of the old abandoned Haida village sites I had seen on my nautical chart. We agreed to meet that night at a place on the chart named Vertical Point.
Cumshewa absorbed me that morning like a deep dream. It was otherworldly stepping into the moss-hushed forest of that ancient village site. Shafts of sunlight pierced the morning mist and softly illuminated the remains of century-old totems. Great heraldic beasts with large ovoid eyes and broad, raised eyebrows stared in bewilderment as if forever frozen in the surprise of their own demise. Cumshewa, like many Haida villages, had been decimated and abandoned following a devastating smallpox epidemic in 1862–63. In one horrible summer nearly three-quarters of the Haida population succumbed to the deadly disease. The real tragedy is that it could have been averted.
American gold-rushers flocking from San Francisco to Victoria, British Columbia from around 1858 brought with them the horrible scourge. Vaccine for smallpox was available at that time, and all white settlers and their Chinese servants in Victoria were immunized. There was no recorded attempt to vaccinate the large Indigenous population residing in Victoria or anywhere else along the coast. When one looks at the history of Indian wars, relocations, ethnocide and genocide against the First Peoples in North America, it is difficult to excuse this as an oversight. An even more sinister scenario is documented in Tom Swanky’s academic book The True Story of Canada’s War of Extermination on the Pacific. According to the author, Victoria’s famous Dr. John Helmcken, while pretending to vaccinate the Indigenous peoples, was actually inoculating them with smallpox at the urging of Governor Sir James Douglas.
A cargo cult had developed around the European trading centres along the Northwest Coast and in the 1860s, a century after first contact, the principal trade centre was Victoria. In addition to the Songhees Village of the Coast Salish peoples located in Victoria Harbour, Kwakiutl and Haida encampments were set up for trade near what is now Victoria’s cruise ship terminal. It was not uncommon for Northwest Coast Indigenous nations to hold rights to land through marriage, peace agreement or some other arrangement in the midst of another Indigenous nation’s traditional territory. Such was the situation for the Haida settlement located near the entrance to Victoria Harbour in the fateful year 1862.
It may be our feeble attempt to fathom the unfathomable, but very often the great tragedies that befall humanity are reduced to simple tales. We are told that the great fire that burned down Chicago started when Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern during milking, and that the maiden voyage sinking of the Titanic was God’s punishment for the ship having been christened the “unsinkable.” So too, the smallpox scourge that decimated the North Pacific coast nations has been reduced to a mere tale.
According to the “official” story, Sir James Douglas ordered the Haida settlement to be cleared out of Victoria, at gunpoint if necessary, to “protect” them from the spread of smallpox. The Haida, for centuries, had been considered the lords of the coast and refused to allow themselves to be humiliated through such a disgraceful departure. Mustering their courage, the Haida regrouped their canoes offshore and returned in war formation to face the cannons. It was a display of pride more than any other, but it became a cornerstone of the smallpox tale. The Haida stayed
