the beginning and end of a resident Indian Agency in Masset, the development of schooling from the one-room mission school through the residential boarding schools to the modern public educational system, and the evolution of transportation from the dugout canoe to daily jet service on the Queen Charlotte Islands.
Florence remembers a time when the ceremonial button blankets, devised probably in the 1850s by native people, were disdained and her grandmother cut the small buttons from hers to give to her granddaughters for their babies’ clothes. Today Florence Davidson has become perhaps the foremost Haida button blanket maker, sewing exquisite appliquéd blankets from her grandson Robert’s patterns. She recalls the time in 1932 when William Matthews took his uncle’s place as town chief of Masset without a semblance of a traditional installation ceremony. Forty-four years later when Oliver Adams succeeded his uncle, William Matthews, he hired Florence Davidson to cook for the feast; she sang a Haida song in his honor and was recognized for her efforts at the potlatch marking his chieftaincy.
There were no totem poles carved during Florence’s childhood, save the few commissioned of the last of the old carvers at five dollars per foot by museum collectors. In 1969 Florence and Robert Davidson gave a potlatch honoring the erection of the pole their grandson Robert had carved for the Masset people. In short, Florence Davidson’s life weaves through a significant period of Haida culture history, a time that saw the disappearance of many traditional practices (the puberty ceremony, arranged marriages, most forms of potlatching) and the rebirth of others (such as the visual and performing arts).
RECORDING THE LIFE HISTORY
My only special preparations for the journey to Masset in January of 1977 included packing a wool shirt and rain slicker, a tape recorder and forty hours of tape, a journal, a copy of Murdock’s Our Primitive Contemporaries, which contains a chapter on the Haida, and Clellan Ford’s life history of Charlie Nowell to show to Florence Davidson as an example. I had not given extensive thought as to how we would proceed, confident that the problem would resolve itself once I arrived in Masset. My only worry was that I might have the same experience as anthropologist Nancy Lurie, who secured in her first brief session with Mountain Wolf Woman, the Winnebago woman’s entire life history (Lurie 1961: XIV). Luckily I need not have worried: “I’m full of stories yet,” Nani pronounced about halfway through the project.
The quickest method of getting to Masset is to take a jet from Vancouver to Prince Rupert and from there a float or amphibious plane to New Masset on the islands. No matter how rough the weather, I never fail to enjoy the forty-five minutes from Prince Rupert to Masset. Ten minutes in the air, from a point not far out to sea, one can see in the distance the long dark tongue of Rose Spit licking the waters of Dixon Entrance. Minutes pass; the sand bluffs of the east coast of Graham Island make their appearance and the familiar landmark of Tow Hill rises several hundred feet into the air from the sands of North Beach. Geologists call Tow a volcanic intrusion; the Haida say he has a brother up Masset Inlet with whom he quarreled and that is why he stands alone now at the eastern extremity of the islands.
Button blankets worn by Florence Davidson (left) and other Masset Haida (photograph by Ulli Steltzer)
The plane flies over the ancient beach ridges ancestral to the present sands of North Beach and along Tow’s backside. Yakin Point, where Tow paused in his westward migration, intrudes into the cold waters of Dixon Entrance, and beyond I recognize Kliki Creek where Nani, my anthropologist friend Marjorie Mitchell, and I went to collect spruce roots in the summer of 1974. We cross the mouth of Chowan Brook where Nani and her mother used to pick crabapples.
Ten miles from Masset is the “elephant pen,” the local name for a Canadian Forces communications installation whose circular wires and fences look incongruous against the spruce and sand. The plane crosses the village of New Masset giving a glimpse of the Forces base and housing, the new hotel with the only beer parlor for miles around, the high school, the government wharf, the Co-op store. Water splashes the belly of the plane as it descends into the waters of Masset Inlet. Grudgingly, it struggles up on land coming to rest beside the tiny air terminal.
Haida Masset is three miles from New Masset and every taxi driver knows how to find Florence Davidson’s house, or just about any other local house for that matter. Each time I return to the village, I mentally tick off the changes in its facade. Since I have been coming to the islands, the village has expanded as far southward toward New Masset as available reserve land will allow. It now moves westward, into the piled-up stumps of once timbered land. In January of 1977 traces of bright blue paint that adorned the exterior of Peter Hill’s little house in 1970 had been washed away by the frequent rains, Alfred Davidson’s fine large home had burned to the ground, Joe Weir’s house had been razed to make way for a more modern one, the Yeltatzies had added a large picture window to the side of their home, and a rental duplex had been built catty-corner to Nani’s house.
The taxi turns down an unpaved side street and comes to rest just short of the Anglican Church and Robert Davidson’s magnificent totem pole. Despite the external changes in the village, Nani appears little different to me than she did in 1975 or in the years I knew her previous to that. She waits in the open door and enfolds me in a warm hug as I set down my suitcase.
Nani lives alone now in a sprawling one-story house, originally designed and built with the comforts of a large family in mind. Her front door opens into the spacious “front room,” constructed as in other older Masset homes large enough to hold the entire adult population of the village. The front room has seen numerous feasts and potlatches, but normally it contains couches and overstuffed chairs pushed against its perimeter. The Sunday dining table sits in the room’s center; plants fill the front window, and Robert Davidson’s Haida designs, family photos, and religious mementos adorn the walls. Five bedrooms open off the large central room at its far end; at the opposite end, a leaded-glass door leads into the parlor—remodelled between January and June of 1977—panelled and carpeted in thick red plush. Many of our summer taping sessions were held in the quiet softness of this sitting room.
My favorite spot in the house and the room where I have spent the most time is Nani’s expansive kitchen. I mark the passage of my Masset visits by the additions to her kitchen: new appliances, a new shelf, new flooring, a different color scheme. When I first came to Masset in 1970, the wash was done on the back porch in a wringer washer and Nani used to lug the heavy baskets of wet clothes across the yard to hang on the long clothesline, but by 1975 the old machine had been replaced by a new spin washer and dryer (gifts from a daughter and son-in-law), which occupy a prominent position in the kitchen. The village has had electricity since 1964 (and before, if one counts the portable generator that lighted the church and vicarage). Freezers and refrigerators followed in its wake, dramatically altering old patterns of food preservation and storage. Nani’s kitchen contains both of these appliances, and a second freezer, filled to the top with venison, herring roe, berries, and fish, sits on the back porch pantry.
The most eye-catching feature of Nani’s kitchen is the long bank of open shelves along one wall, which display some two hundred bone china cups and saucers, plus everyday dishes and the mugs from which we drink our breakfast coffee and afternoon tea. An oaken table, one of the few pieces salvaged from a house fire in 1952, faces the large kitchen window. In many ways this table is the focal point of the household. At it most meals are taken, visitors are received and served tea, and here Nani sits to rest from her baking or to weave a cedar bark hat. I have spent much of my fieldwork time here, too: interviewing Nani, writing in my journal at night, drinking coffee and gazing at the ever-moving waters of Masset Inlet, talking with Nani and others over tea.
By the summer of 1977, however, the view from the table had changed. I recorded the change, somewhat petulantly, in my journal.
