to contract the deadly illness, so the story goes, and as they paddled up the coast they stopped at every village to boast of their daring deed and in so doing spread the smallpox. Cumshewa was one of the villages the death canoes stopped at.
A great sadness hung over Cumshewa at the time of my visit; it was as if the world had closed in on itself. Human skulls, still working their way to the surface from burial mounds blanketed under thick moss, told of the magnitude and swiftness of the disaster that befell this once thriving community so “rich at the mouth of the inlet.”
I fell asleep in the sun on a mossy promontory of land where there was evidence of otters frolicking and cracking open crabs. It would be wrong to say that I fell into a deep dream; it was more a trance, an altered state, an almost out-of-body experience in which the village came fully alive again. Children laughed and squealed with delight as they bounded barefoot over the gravel beach to help haul in halibut from returning fishing parties. Women strung strands of kelp with herring roe attached to dry in the sun atop cedar drying racks. Smoke curled from each of the sixteen longhouses and countless smokehouses so that the air was permeated with the rich aromas of alder-smoked clams and spring salmon, boiling crab and other foods fresh from the sea. Somewhere down the beach the sound of wood being slowly chipped away told of a canoe being fashioned from a great cedar log. Nearby, a master carver was putting the finishing touches on a huge ceremonial pole to proudly proclaim the lineage of his family for all the world to see.
It was late morning before I paddled away from the ghost village and crossed Cumshewa Inlet to Louise Island. Huge beds of bull kelp, stretching far offshore, indicated that I was running with the tide. Sea lions, cormorants and pigeon guillemots bobbed in the tide rips running strong off Skedans Point. Something felt totally different, yet strangely familiar, as I paddled through the breaking tide rips. I was used to river running where the current is swift but waves are stationary, or lake travel where the waves are moving through stationary water. Now I had to cope with both conditions simultaneously. The sea here could go from calm to raging tide rips in a matter of minutes and one had to be alert, to live and learn, or risk not living long.
A perfect peninsula juts out from the eastern shores of Louise Island and embraces two superb landing beaches. This stunning setting was the site of one of the greatest strongholds and most celebrated Haida villages. Those born at Koona, also known as Skedans, were truly masters of their universe, at least until the epidemic hit. Now, like neighbouring Cumshewa village to the north and Tanu to the south, Koona is but a hollow, brittle shell of its former glory. Most of its monuments in cedar today grace the museum lobbies of the world, while a few forgotten grizzly and eagle mortuary poles lean dangerously or recline on the ground sprouting flowers for their own funerals.
What made the tragedy that befell Skedans especially poignant this June day in 1973 was to witness the sacred resting place of its one-time inhabitants being desecrated through logging. An aluminum-sided trailer had been skidded up the beach and into the village site from a barge, and a bulldozer was being used to haul logs down from the hillside. It was a small gyppo operation run by a married couple and a few hired hands, but the impact on the site was massive. How could a major archaeological site be treated in this way, I wondered. Wouldn’t the Haida believe their ancestral spirits would be outraged? The answer to both of my questions came some days later.
If there was a silver lining in the dark cloud that hung over the Skedans site that day, it was the warmth and genuine hospitality of the couple that held the logging concession. They invited me in for dinner and sent me on my way with fresh homemade bread, still hot from the oven. But paddling south to my rendezvous with Glenn at Vertical Point, I was saddened to see in the distance the massive clear-cut scars and associated landslides on Talunkwan Island. Little could I have known what a rallying point this mangled island would become in my future endeavours.
We found ourselves stormbound on Vertical Point the next morning. A roaring southeaster had turned Hecate Strait into a fury of white froth and mountainous waves. Glenn and I hunkered down and battened the hatches in a small cabin built on the Point by Benita Sanders, an acclaimed artist residing in Queen Charlotte City. Pots of wild mint tea and a few select books from Benita’s little library helped ease the slow passage of the day.
Though the wind had abated the following morning, the seas were anything but calm. Glenn felt confident that the worst of the storm was over and that we should push on. A certain lady friend he was anxious to see again at his Burnaby Narrows cabin may well have been clouding his judgment. We paddled out of the protected little cove fronting Benita’s cabin and were engulfed by the sea.
The swells were enormous, but at least they weren’t breaking. Only on the crests of the waves could Glenn and I see each other, though we were never more than fifty metres apart in our separate kayaks. Dropping back into the wave trough after topping each crest was like being consumed, swallowed up by the sea. Huge walls of steel-grey water obscured any hint of land. It was as if the leaden sky itself had fallen and sunk into the sea, still writhing in the depths from the wrath of the storm. Humbling as the experience was, it was also exhilarating.
Entering the sheltered, calm waters of Klue Passage and the serenity of Tanu Island after the harrowing high seas was to know the true meaning of salvation. Could there be a more serene setting in the world than the moss-hushed silence of Tanu? Tanu in Haida translates to “where the eel grass grows,” and this ancient village site not only supported an amazing diversity of marine life, it once rivalled any culture in the world for artistic expression. Pole carvers from Tanu were sought after up and down the coast for their brilliant designs and masterful carvings. One Tanu pole is the subject of a painting by Emily Carr titled Weeping Woman of Tanu (1928) and depicts the tale of Frog Woman shedding tears that turned into frogs after the brutal burning of her children. Today, the pole has been cut into sections and is displayed in the glass rotunda of the Royal BC Museum, but the spirit of what the master carver captured is still very much a part of Tanu.
I spent hours wandering among the massive longhouse ruins being reclaimed by the forest. A few superbly crafted corner posts still stood, but the roofs of the longhouses had long ago collapsed. Beams smothered in a dozen species of moss spanned the ground pits, some of which were twenty-five metres across. It must have been a Herculean endeavour to construct one of these massive multiple family dwellings. I knew from my anthropology courses that eight or more nuclear families of the same clan all lived under the same roof, and forty to fifty people would have resided in the largest of these houses. Living within the clan house brought with it a strict social code based on rank. The clan chief resided along the back wall farthest from the entranceway, which was often a carved tunnel-like passage through the bottom carved figure of the house’s frontal pole. Only one person at a time could enter through this portal and they had to bend over to do so. This allowed the house to be easily defended, even by women and children, as intruders could be clubbed in the back of the head one at a time as they entered. It is said the Haida positioned their slaves closest to the entranceway to further foil attack. The cry of a stabbed slave at night was all the security alarm system a household needed. Then again, if the slave was from a neighbouring tribe and recognized common language in the attackers, he might become a liability more than an asset.
Everyone cooked on a central hearth in the middle and lowest level of the two- to three-tiered floor and found some semblance of privacy along the upper sleeping levels where bent cedar storage boxes and blankets divided the room into private quarters. The Haida longhouse was seen as a living being as well as a container of souls; it had skin (the planks forming the walls) and bones (the rafters and central supports). The heart was the central hearth and a mouth for exhalation was symbolized by the smoke hole. Two distinctive styles to Haida longhouses distinguished them from all others on the Northwest Coast—the two-beamed and the classic six-beamed. These houses displayed great architectural ingenuity designed to meet specific and demanding environmental conditions. Perched atop excavated house pits, the Haida longhouse was amazingly roomy inside while keeping a low profile outside, a necessary condition for the gale-force winds and the occasional tsunamis they were subjected to.
