Part 7: Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge all our friends and colleagues at the American Museum of Natural History for their incredible contributions, both financial and in-kind, that made our journey a success.

In particular, we'd like to thank:

Eleanor Stirling, Christopher Filardi and Brian Weeks at the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation. Chris is one of our oldest friends and supporters, and together with Eleanor, was a champion of this exchange. They have been incredible partners in what we've undertaken. We thank Brian for his instrumental role in organizing and executing the trip logistics, and also for graciously bringing us into his home. As Heiltsuk people, we appreciated this important gesture, and look forward to showing our gratitude through hospitality.

Peter Whiteley, Laila Williamson, and our friends in Anthropology. We would especially like to thank Laila for her incredible patience and good humour as six towering Heiltsuk boys shook the walls of Anthropology with their singing, and stooped in clumsy awe over works of incredible age, rarity and fragility. We so enjoyed sharing with you.

Barbara Mathe in the photograph archive, and Julie Feinstein in cryogenics. We are so grateful for the incredible access you gave us to the resources at your disposal. Barbara, sifting through the treasures of the archive was an incredible delight, and brought us a new sense of connection to the real people - our ancestors - whose artifacts we held. Julie, we appreciated the opportunity to see the future home of our grizzly bear genetic samples, and your fascinating behind-the-scenes tour of such an amazing facility.

At the High School for Environmental Studies, we'd like to acknowledge Matthew Washington and the teachers and students who invited us into their classrooms to share part of our story. Along with our partners at The Nature Conservancy, you helped to add a new and unexpected highlight to our trip.

Thank you to Paul, Shannon, Phil and Sandy, dear friends whom we felt fortunate to share our time with in New York City.

We acknowledge Ian Jansma for volunteering his photography services to our group, and capturing the spirit of what we were doing so that we can share it with our supporters.

The administrative staff at Qqs would like to express their pride and gratitude to our boys - Rory Housty, William Housty, Collin Reid, Ian Reid and Kevin Starr - for the dignity, strength and power they brought with them to everything we undertook on our journey.

And perhaps most importantly of all, we thank and uplift our ancestors, our family and community in Bella Bella, our Heiltsuk family abroad, and all of our supporters everywhere who followed with us and shared each chapter of our story. We are moved beyond words by your unhesitating support.



Group photo with Brian, Eleanor, Laila and Christopher

Part 6: Closing

Five days ago, we arrived in New York City. It’s a long way from Bella Bella, but for the brief space of time we were there, we taught ourselves to own it. To make it home. We did that with the help of truly wonderful friends and colleagues, with the support we gave each other, and with the knowledge that our families and our community were rallying behind the idea of our trip.

The time has slipped by quickly – or maybe it’s gone slowly, because it feels like we’ve been here for weeks, pacing the sidewalks between our hotel and the Museum, dodging taxicabs and sweeping ourselves through the doors of the 77th street entrance of that great institution. What we found was not a revelation – it was an affirmation. We have always known, or sensed, our strength. Now, we can never deny it, nor can anyone who really hears our story.

We held pieces in our hands that were ancient, intact and beautiful. What we held in our hands was our culture. It is fundamentally unchanged from the culture that birthed our First Generation stories. If we ourselves have changed, it is only in developing a greater awareness of our roots, of the magnitude of our spiritual power as Heiltsuk people, and of the great obligation we so joyfully assume of stewarding our culture and all it represents – for the generations that came before us, and for the generations that will follow.

We’ve left eagle down in the halls and offices of Anthropology, and in the small, private room where our masks waited for us each day. We shook eagle down from our hair when we walked through the public exhibits, and down the streets of New York. We dropped eagle down from our sleeves and the hems of our clothing when we walked through Central Park and Times Square, and it drifted down in our hotels rooms, and on the sidewalks of New York City.

There’s this beautiful thing about eagle down. It represents something so sacred I couldn’t even begin to build four walls of language to enclose the concept. But it’s both light, and incredibly dense. It is patient. It will wait. Someday, after countless janitorial staff have come and gone through the Museum, when all of us who stood there this March are long passed on to dance with our ancestors, a little beam of light will come through the window, and something incredible will happen.

A little piece of eagle down that’s been waiting somewhere – tucked behind a beam, caught in a bit of cobweb, dangling invisible at the height of some room we walked through – it’s going to let itself fall. It will hang suspended in the air, and even though no movement will stir the currents, it will whirl and dance to the sound of distant drums and rattles that only it can hear, until the song ends and it comes to rest on the floor.

At that moment, the space will be sanctified all over again. And the room will remember the sound of Heiltsuk singing, the strong syllables of our language, the reverberation of drumbeats and footsteps and the soundless, wordless joy of masks that slept just a little too long. We’ll be long gone, and that space – like a far-flung corner of Heiltsuk territory, in the sense that it’s a space on which one of our important stories is now written – that space will whisper to itself all that happened here.

Please carry this story with you. It’s your story now, and I want you to share it. Celebrate with us. We uphold you and uplift you – you have witnessed something that is of great importance to us. The strength of our story, like the strength of our people, will not diminish. We hold it in a sacred space within us – a space of narrative, memory and language – a space of touch and sound and light – a space that is shared between all of us, and you, and everyone who reads this. We will remain strong together.

Thank you for witnessing what we have undertaken.

Part 5: Wednesday

This morning we headed to a different part of the Museum: the photo archives. There, we were met by Barbara, who guided us through boxes, drawers and albums of old photos, many of them from the Jesup Expedition in the late 1800s. The Expedition is well-documented elsewhere, and I recommend reading up on it; we all know Franz Boas, but he was one of many, and all of them were undertaking quite interesting work in an impressive list of different places.

(The neat connection for me is that one of the participants in this Museum-sponsored journey went on to write some neat articles about medieval Chinese medicine that I’ve found cause to read for thesis research. Someone who may well have stood in Bella Bella before even my grandparents were born has gone on to influence me in a completely different part of my life).

I think that nothing can parallel the incredible power of the masks and paddles and other pieces carefully hewn by our ancestors from cedar, the neck rings and other dance paraphernalia woven from softened bark. But if anything was to offer competition, it might just be looking into the faces of people who died even before my parents were born – whose names I’ve heard all my life in familiar stories.

Suddenly, they’re no longer figures of myth. Suddenly, I can see the beautiful old dresses with tiny buttons crawling up from breast to throat; the high cheekbones and perfectly straight black hair; the figures standing alongside piles of Hudson’s Bay blankets gathered for a potlatch; the searching eyes of strong-willed men who seem only to have remained still in their lives long enough to be captured in those photos.

Hopefully, we’ll be able to show you those photos soon. We looked through hundreds (maybe thousands) of old photos from across the Pacific Northwest, like we were on some incredible treasure hunt where the prize was a lost or forgotten piece of our identity as Heiltsuk people. With every archive number that we scrawled on a pad of yellow paper, every moment where we crowded, thrilled, around someone’s find, we began to build another dimension to our culture as it existed then.

We have our stories. They are our history, and our pulse. We have our territory, and all it contains, which has provided our sustenance since our people were born. We have our masks and regalia, the ceremonies that have always been our lifeblood. But sometimes it’s important to realize that we are not descended from mythological beings whose powers far surpass our own. We are descended from men and women whose devotion to their way of life as Heiltsuk people was enough to sustain them, to motivate them to become teachers of the next generations.

When you search their faces in those photos, it’s hard to put away the idea that we have nothing to hide behind. We cannot say, “we are less than they were – this challenge is beyond us”. Our stories are still our pulse as a people, and our territory still sustains us. Our ceremonies are still our lifeblood. And our ancestors are holding up our mirror. We cannot look away. And if we look just the right way, we’ll realize we’re meeting our own eyes when we look into theirs.

The Museum has graciously agreed to do their level best to provide us with copies of the photos from our territory. We created a list of archive numbers, and as soon as we have copies that we can share, we’ll make them available in the Koeye Cafe for the community.

When we left the photo archive, we dispersed for a few hours to collect ourselves and to find a little food (you’d be surprised at how often we forget about things like sustenance and sleep on our trip). We gathered ourselves at the Museum again in the late afternoon, this time back in Anthropology, this time to prepare for another special event.

To our mind, the time we spent at the Museum and all we learned and saw and experienced is cause for huge celebration. As well, we wanted to uplift in our way – in public, as at a potlatch or a feast – all those partners who contributed to our visit in a positive way. No one has ever denied our kinship with these pieces, or the idea that interacting with them would help to re-forge an old and important connection. But so many people stepped up to make sure that happened in the correct way: with dignity, respect, and an intimate space in which to engage with our living history. They did not simply facilitate this – they were partners in it.

So, we felt it was important to uplift them, and to celebrate with them, and invited them to join us as we celebrated the continued strength of our culture with masks, regalia and dance that, much like the Museum-held pieces, capture and have always captured our nation’s great power.

We gathered in an office off the narrow halls of Anthropology, and as we readied ourselves, we were set by the same confidence and excitement that always marks these events. We are deeply proud of our roots, and of the knowledge we hold – even as we recognize that the process of learning and teaching will never end for us.

We share the same foundation, and though each of us has chosen a different expertise, together we are able to present a unified body: singer, drummer, dancer and attendant, linguist, speaker, storyteller and together, bearers of the weight of thousands of years.

At home, our numbers swell to dozens, and we have a whole community behind us. There, in the Anthropology office, we could feel those dozens and hundreds and the thousands of our ancestors crowding into the room with us.

We entered the floor – blessed with eagle down and sanctified as our dance space, the bright corridor lined with glass display cabinets was transformed into the domain of ceremony and song. Lining the hall were a hundred or more people, some of whom we knew, others joining us because they were drawn by our story or called by the beat of our drum.

And they stood in respectful silence as we swept the floor with our blankets, our voices resounding off the ceiling and the walls, the sound of our rattles and our drums stirring against the glass cases and calling to the treasures of other civilizations.

To practice our culture makes us feel good in our hearts. We know that we are building a bridge between our world and the world of our ancestors – that the strength of untold generations has rolled down the centuries toward us, and that we are conduits which will allow that strength to flood into the generation that follows us.

The heaviness of a button blanket on my shoulders lifts a weight from my heart. To move my feet to the beat of a drum is to align my pulse with the pulse of something much greater than I am. Whether we communicated that synergy successfully to those who witnessed our performance is almost secondary. What we showed them was a sign that our people are strong, that our songs are good medicine, and that our stories are always growing – that our stories have swallowed them up, too, and make them stronger whether they realize it or not.

I hope this story has moved you. One more post is yet to come with the wrap-up of our trip, then you’ll be treated to some amazing photos. Thank you for sharing our story.

Part 4: Tuesday

This morning, before we buried ourselves deep in the marrow of the Museum's sprawling halls, we took a detour to visit some new friends: the Grade 9 students at New York's High School for Environmental Studies (HSES).

HSES is a theme high school whose curriculum is infused with a more detailed and intensive focus on environmental issues than one finds in most secondary programs. We visited two Environmental Studies classes at the Grade 9 level, each of which had been prepared before we called in with maps and information on the Great Bear Rainforest.

Our link with the HSES program comes through our colleagues at The Nature Conservancy (TNC). Long-time partners of Qqs Projects, TNC has been instrumental in a wide range of projects and initiatives both broadly and locally on the central coast. In particular, they are strong supporters of the research and monitoring undertaken by Coastwatch, the environmental arm of Qqs.

More recently, we have collaborated with TNC, the Museum, the Bella Bella Community School, our brothers in Hartley Bay/Gitga'at territory, and Pacific Wild on a youth science program called Coastal Youth Connections (formerly Virtual Rainforest Initiative).

Coastal Youth Connections gives indigenous youth in the Great Bear Rainforest an opportunity to engage with ongoing science and research in their traditional territory through exciting internship programs, delivered alongside an incredible array of in-class science enrichment at local schools.

Students and interns utilize the latest technology (for example, hydrophones, remote cameras and Smart Boards) to link community educational spaces with the rich wilderness of the Great Bear, fostering a sense of connection to place and to traditional stewardship models while introducing youth to the incredible opportunities afforded by science education.

The technology utilized by the Coastal Youth Connections program also has another function the project’s collaborators are beginning to explore: virtual exchange with school programs elsewhere in the wide world, possibly leading to opportunities for travel exchange programs. This mutually enriching school partnership program would link youth in Bella Bella and Hartley Bay with students in urban classrooms elsewhere – students, for example, like those found at HSES in New York City.

So, since we were going to be in New York anyway, we were thrilled by the invitation to visit two classes of students at HSES to tell them a little bit about where we come from. We visited the classes with two old friends from TNC, Phil and Shannon, as well as a couple of their colleagues; they introduced us to our two classes full of bright and eager students and kicked off what we felt were very exciting and successful presentations.

It’s amazing how little human values suffer across distance, time and environment, especially when you get down to the most basic level of need. When you think about what’s required to sustain yourself and your community – whatever that community looks like, and wherever it exists – the superficial differences between kids in the Great Bear and kids in New York start to dissipate.

Each place has an unshakeable character than cannot be replicated anywhere else, but in each place, there are also key ways in which people interact with it that forge links across the imagined gaps. The issues we shared and the concerns the kids expressed were much the same: clean air, clear water, food security, sustainable living, effective ways to protect and care for the environment.

And the thing that those kids were quick to realize is that what happens in the Great Bear matters to them in New York. What happens in New York affects us on the central coast of BC.

In many ways, the world has become much smaller, but the way we think about other “cultures” and other people hasn’t changed with it. I love that these kids’ faces lit up with the same excitement as the faces of our Heiltsuk kids back home. And I love how quickly they engaged with the idea that relationships and partnerships, even across such seemingly disparate groups, is a necessary and mutually beneficial thing.

In each class, we passed around one of Ian Reid’s carved cedar masks so the kids could have a tactile connection to the culture we were trying to share and express. The mask, for us, is a symbol of our important relationship with our landbase; it shows our sacred and timeless link with our resources, our stories, and our sense of place identity that’s bound up not just in physical locations and traditional territory, but in every cedar tree and salmon stream our territory contains.

We also shared with them a traditional song, accompanied by the boys’ deerskin drums. As they sang and the walls of the classrooms echoed with their deep voices, wide eyes and bright faces materialized out of nowhere at windows and doors, pressed to the glass, just as excited as the faces of those kids who’d sat through our whole presentations. Proof, at least, that you don’t even need to speak the same language to share a connection.

We’re grateful to Matthew Washington and the teachers and students at the High School for Environmental Studies for inviting us, hosting us, and allowing us to share something of our culture and identity with them. Their respectful engagement and enthusiasm were deeply refreshing, and we so admire the unique opportunity those kids have in studying at such an importantly specialized institution. We are also grateful to TNC for providing us a link with the school. We are confident that a fruitful partnership of sharing and exchange will soon be a reality.

From our visit to HSES, we proceeded to the Museum for an important ceremony. Though we’d had a substantial block of time with the Heiltsuk pieces on Monday, and greeted the spirits of our ancestors with song, we hadn’t yet blessed the space with ceremonies that we felt fitting.

In addition, we wanted to take a special opportunity to uplift Eleanor, our strong ally at the Museum who was so instrumental not only in making this opportunity possible – but also in ensuring that our interaction with these artifacts took place in a dignified and intimate way. We cannot do her enough honour, nor her colleagues at the Museum whose hard work made our trip such a powerful experience.

So, we gathered again into the private room in which our masks were laid out, and stood with our friends from the Museum to bless – quietly, at first, and then with tremendous song – the space in which these pieces now dwell, the people who are now their custodians, and the spirits of our ancestors that still dwell in the old cedar, the bark trimmings, the resilient paint and the fragments of abalone.

It was a very private moment. It was a moment of great power. As the boys sang with a supernatural power in their voices I’ve rarely heard before, we dressed each mask in eagle down, danced in that tiny anonymous room in the Museum, and watched the down swirl through the air – moved as much by the spirits, I think, as by our own movements.

Some of those old pieces still had bits of eagle down clinging to the strands of cedar bark trim, holding over from ceremonies that no living person remembers. It’s not difficult to imagine that they were confiscated by an Indian Agent in the middle of a ceremony or a secret potlatch, even, and certainly the facepaint that transferred to the inner mask and the old, perfectly preserved eagle down indicate that these were sacred pieces utilized in real ceremonies. Whatever the mechanism of their first removal, when they finally came to rest at the Museum, their power slept - but remained undiminished.

It was a privilege and an honour to awaken and uplift the spirits of our ancestors, bound up in those masks. It made us feel good and strong to speak to them in our language, to sing to them both songs that are old – older, even, than the pieces in the Museum – and new, composed in recent years in the incredible renaissance of Heiltsuk culture. It made us feel strong to hold them in our hands, to transfer some of our life and everything our blood symbolizes, pulsing through our palms and our fingertips. And it was good medicine for us, too, to teach those old pieces to remember the blessing presence of eagle down again.

We were glad of the opportunity to include those closest to us at the Museum in our blessing of the masks. We extend again – because we cannot thank them enough – our profound gratitude to Eleanor, Christopher, Brian, Laila and their colleagues for understanding that we – participants in and symbols of a powerful living culture – had a need we could not otherwise ease to bring new life to ourselves and our people by breathing life back into the spirits of our ancestors.

If my description of this event seems too brief, it’s because I know instinctively that this is too big for me. For language, or for the English language, at least. It needs a heavy, steady drumbeat. It needs six voices raised louder than they’ve ever been raised before. It needs the unmistakable presence of our old people gathered invisible around us. It needs a language that is older than all of us. And it needs the incomparable beauty and sanctity of eagle down, moving with perfect grace through the still air, blessing each one of us and the space in which we were dwelling and everything that space contained until there was only room for good energy, good medicine, and strength beyond reckoning.

Our people and our culture have a resilience we’re only beginning to guess at. Our ancestors knew it. Maybe we were closer to losing it than we realized. For those of us gathered in that room – and, I hope, for those of you reading this who will take my word in good faith – this resilience is too great and too powerful to ever be denied or forgotten again. We, as Heiltsuk people, have an unbroken strength that reaches back through time before memory. We will hand that strength to our children and to our future generations intact, immovable, and able only to grow and expand.

Thank you for reading. More tomorrow.

Part 3: Monday at the Museum

There are moments in time when your mind is filled with such a sudden torrent of thoughts and emotions that it seems there can’t be words enough to express the magnificence of the experience. Later, in moments of quietude, when you reflect on these momentous occasions, you’re shocked to find the words have swept themselves away. You’re left with clear images, strong impressions, and little ability to articulate them and share them.

Today, I’m sorry to say, was one of those days. Rarely can I recall being so moved. Rarely can I recall such pride swimming in my veins and such total joy and wonder swelling up in me. I wish I could show it to you. I wish I could remember everything that was said in the exact words that were used, the same idiosyncratic language, the precise inflection and the correct posture and the way the light came in through the bare windows to illuminate people’s faces. I wish you could have been there.

This morning, we all woke up to the constant hum of New York City. We gathered ourselves up, and we gathered together. Mid-morning, we all walked through the unassuming doors of the Museum, and met each other beneath one of the fiercest and most beautiful emblems of Heiltsuk strength: the mammoth canoe suspended from the ceiling at the doors to the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians.

You can learn about the history of the canoe elsewhere; it is well-known, well-documented, and expressed elsewhere much better than I can express it here. At the same time, until you’re standing underneath it, looking up its sides and down its length and realize you’re holding your breath in sheer awe of it, no article or book or website will ever tell you what’s it’s like to hold it in your sight.

The canoe would be an extraordinary artifact in any culture, to my mind, but what makes it truly astonishing to me is its story. Everything has a story. The canoe has stories ingrained in its wood and tucked into its cracks; it has stories we’ll never know or dream. But it also has stories we know very well.

Carved by Captain Carpenter in Heiltsuk territory, it traveled north to our Haida brothers to begin the second part of its existence, and began yet a third when it was acquired by the Museum and made a long, slow, winding journey from the wild Pacific coast of its home to the spacious, looming halls of the famous New York institution.

Now, when I close my eyes and conjure up images of it dangling impossibly still above me, I can make myself believe it’s beginning a fourth phase of its existence. It’s inspiring a new generation of young Heiltsuk leaders. It’s tipping quietly, imperceptibly, and pouring its silent stories over the gunwale; it’s parceling out some of its incredible spirit for us to carry home to our people. It’s teaching us, wordlessly, to lean our hip against the solid wood and dig our paddles deep in the water. It’s teaching us to pull in unison.

Our first stop within the Museum was a meeting with Eleanor, the wonderful woman who did so much extraordinary work to bring us all to New York – and to bring us in the right way, with the physical and spiritual space to interact with our Heiltsuk pieces with both intimacy and authority. We thank Eleanor for her incredible generosity and hard work, and uplift her for all she’s done for us.

We couldn’t contain our energy very long, and fortunately, we were not made to wait. We were ushered to Anthropology to meet Laila, yet another wonderful (and patient) woman (who remained unsurprised through all our outbursts of emotion and song and holding the masks up to our faces to breathe in the impossibly still-sharp scent of cedar). Already, laid out on a long table that soaked up the natural light swimming through the windows, tray after tray teeming with cedar rings and small carvings waited patiently for us to hold them in our hands.

I will tell you some of the things we saw. We saw a model canoe, with fish hooks, paddles and sails. We saw a set of 70 wooden game sticks, and I’m bringing back photographs of each of the 70 unique designs painted on those sticks. The sticks came with an incredible leather pouch that fastened with a carved whale the length of my palm and outstretched fingers. I hope I can replicate that carving. We saw four old paddles, two of them blackened with handles made smooth and shiny by the palms of our ancestors, pulling in their canoes. Two were painted with beautiful designs, heavy with a green even richer and brighter than the newest shoot in a spring thicket.

We saw paraphernalia from different summer dances, elaborate spoons carved from mountain goat horn, and cedar dance regalia: bracelets, anklets, and a breathtaking neckring laden with carefully-carved wooden skulls, and links of wood carved to represent vertebrae. Peering close and lifting the edges with utmost care, you could see through the thinning cedar the strips of old canvas and Hudson’s Bay blankets that formed the firm base of the ring. Caught in the ribboned strips of immaculately-pounded and perfectly softened cedar, some traces of old eagle down still remained – caught in a dyed-cedar web.

We saw tray after tray of whistles and horns, and when Ian picked them up and fitted different pieces together, even the Museum staff were occasionally astonished by the mysteries that can be revealed, decades and centuries later, by someone with intimate and natural knowledge. Who knows when those whistles were blown last. Their haunting sound still chills me. It might be the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard: even buried deep in the heart of the Museum I felt, when I closed my eyes, like my feet were sunk in a heavy bed of sphagnum – like huge cedars were looming at my sides, and that wild, supernatural call was coming from a thicket nearby. Like the forest was dense but the noise was sharp. Like I should run, knowing the creatures whose coming the whistles signified, but I was rooted like a cedar tree - waiting for the inaudible approach of the supernatural.

All of this, incredibly, was a prelude. One of the fantastically gracious things our colleagues at the Museum provided to us was a private room in which to view the collection of Heiltsuk masks that currently reside at the institution. In this room, we had (and have) a deep freedom. Laila, our patient and enriching guide through the labyrinth of Anthropology, showed us to the intimate, well-lit space in which we were to introduce ourselves to the faces – human and supernatural – carved by our ancestors.

I won’t belabour you with a description of how we all wandered, nervous, into the room. How we held ourselves back when all we wanted to do was run. How we pulled on our gloves and reached out tenderly when all we wanted was to pick those masks up, clutch them to our breast, bury our faces in them to gaze through the eyes of our ancestors, turn them to face us, forehead to forehead, nose to nose, to look our ancestors lovingly in the eyes. Okay, maybe I just went ahead and belaboured you with a description anyway. If you’d been there, you’d spend the rest of your life trying to find or invent a vocabulary and a language to express to complex emotions in that room at that moment. Unutterable joy. A reflexive hesitation. An inexplicable, improbable symmetry between our faces (full of wonder and fear and loss and beauty and the pure happiness of reunion), and the faces of the masks (still, natural, supernatural, till-then unseen but totally familiar). It’s not a symmetry that you could draw. It’s a symmetry of spirit.

Those of you who have attended potlatches will remember the vivid red paint on the cheeks of the dancers. That paint tells a story. It’s a powerful mark. When I wash it off after the ceremony ends, I can still feel that mark burning on my cheeks. Sometimes, when I’m miles from home and anything that’s familiar to me, a moment of mental or spiritual reunion with my traditional upbringing will make my cheekbones burn anew. When you embrace someone with paint on their cheeks, especially when they’re sweating after a dance, it will often rub off on your skin, on your clothing. If you’re a dancer and you don a mask, sometimes the mark from your face will be mirrored inside the unfinished, unpainted cedar of the mask when you remove the rigging and take the mask away.

We held those old masks in our hands. We examined every inch of them lovingly, tenderly, in total awe. We took in every detail of every design. Then we turned them over.

The red stain of a dancer’s face paint is still visible inside those masks.

These pieces are not lifeless artifacts. These pieces have been brought to life in a potlatch. They know the scent of woodsmoke in a bighouse. They’ve seen great feasts, great celebrations, and great mourning. They’ve heard the beat of a deerskin drum or a heavy log. They’ve heard the sound of a rattle. They’ve been addressed in our language before. They’ve seen it all.

They’ve slept for a long time. We woke them up. They remember us now. And something of that long, collective history of our people has been reawakened in us as well. It is reawakening in you.

We introduced ourselves, greeted the masks like long-lost family. Then the boys stood in a line against the row of masks, rapped their knuckles on the table, and they sang. There was grief and celebration. There was loss and renewal. There was the moving reminder of an unfading strength that’s passed through the webs of our family trees and the generations of our people. The power in the room was palpable. The masks remained still, patient. But the spirits were dancing with us.

I can’t express to you what it felt like to be in that small room at that moment. We all fit in comfortably, but once the boys started to sing, you could feel the physical crush of our ancestors crowding around us. You could hear voices that weren’t just our six boys. You could hear feat hitting the floor to the beat, the low sound of rattle that wasn’t there. You could feel the little breath of wind that hits you when someone whirls by.

Today was just the beginning. Tomorrow we’ll be back, and we’ll sing to them again. We’ll sing to them every time we walk through that door, and when we’re home, we’ll keep singing to them across all this distance. To wake those spirits was a great honour. But today, we sang new life into our own selves as well.

People have been asking me hard questions about repatriation. These are not questions that Qqs, as an organization, can answer. It is a long argument with strong points on both sides, with the knowledge that nothing can truly undo the actions of the past. But one thing is clear to me today. These pieces have been held safe here for a very long time. The people at this Museum have great respect for the life our pieces hold within them. We didn’t come here to take the pieces away – we came here to build a relationship – between us and this institution- between us, and these pieces that have been lost to us for so long. We’re not bringing the masks and whistles and ancient cedar rings back with us. But we’re bringing back something far more important than any physical object.

The story and the life those pieces represent has lit a fire in our hearts. We’ll carry it carefully back home. We’ll burn a fire in the singers’ house, in the Koeye bighouse, on the beach, in front of our homes. We’ll watch that fire flare up skyward until it’s so hot and bright we almost want to turn away. And we’ll know that the whole community will have its warmth and light. It’s a fire that will never burn out. It’s been burning, somewhere, since time before memory – since the world was created – since our first mother came into this world. It’s been burning, quietly, in the drawers and cabinets of the Museum. It’s ready to blaze.

We’re bringing back everything these pieces represent. We’re bringing it home. We’re bringing it home to you.

More, soon. In the sweep of emotion that’s carried us through this day, the love and support we’ve felt from all of you has been phenomenal. It’s carried us, too. Thank you for witnessing what we are doing. Thank you for supporting us. Thank you for reading this today, and please – journey with us til we circle back home.

Part 2: The boys, and the background

N. B. If you would like a history of Qqs (Eyes) Projects Society or the Heiltsuk people, we recommend that you visit our website by clicking on the logo on your righthand sidebar. Additionally, you might read any of the number of books written about Heiltsuk culture, or visit us in our territory to learn about our living traditions in person.

We would first like to introduce you to a very important group of young men. These six men are part of an incredible network of cultural leadership in the Heiltsuk community. They are part of a strong team that has brought our culture back to life, simply by reminding us that it is our life. They, along with their elders and mentors who have gone before us, have been instrumental in bringing great life our potlatch culture, in upholding our gvi’ilas (our traditional laws and practices), and in teaching the next generation to raise their eyes and their hearts – teaching them by example the honour and obligation of traditional leadership.

From this network, six young men agreed to step forward and help us plant a powerful seed in the harsh soil of New York City. These are their names – and since names carry stories of their own - these are their stories.

Rory Housty is a student of anthropology at Vancouver Island University. He has taken on an instrumental role in the potlatch house executing our dance program. His intimate knowledge of our sacred ceremonies brings great strength to our potlatch program. In the summers, he coordinates Qqs’ youth cultural camps. We uplift him and thank him for standing with us.


William Housty holds a degree in natural resource management, and in addition to his cultural work, oversees the research and monitoring arm of Qqs Projects Society. He brings great strength to our Heiltsuk culture by living it in his daily life. He holds great knowledge of our stories, names, and genealogy, and is a powerful voice at our drum log. We uplift him and thank him for standing with us.


Collin Reid is a powerful presence in our potlatch house, both at the drum log, and on the sacred floor as a dancer and attendant. With his knowledge and strength, he is a conduit through which our ancestors are able to participate in our potlatch ceremonies. We uplift him and thank him for standing with us.



Ian Reid is a master carver and artist and strong presence both at our drum log and on the sacred dance floor. He oversees the carving of the houseposts for the future bighouse in Bella Bella, and spends his summers teaching carving and traditional canoe pulling to Heiltsuk youth. We uplift him and thank him for standing with us.



Terry Reid is a gifted linguist and also a gifted teacher. He is engaged in important work that is bringing our Heiltsuk language back into the daily lives of our youth and community, revitalizing our connection to our mother tongue. We uplift him and thank him for standing with us.




Kevin Starr is a powerful singer and brings great strength to our drum log in the potlatch house. He sings with unmistakable authority and empowers his brothers at the drum log. His unwavering voice symbolizes the growing strength of our cultural leadership. We uplift him and thank him for standing with us.


We would like to acknowledge that these six young men do not stand alone. The network of cultural leadership in our nation expands to all fields, all ages, and more names than we can record here. In uplifting these men, we also intend to uplift the people and the nation they represent. Our strength is not individual strength. Our strength is the strength of a nation.

For a number of years, we at Qqs have been cultivating an important relationship with colleagues in New York at the American Museum of Natural History. While we stand a world apart, we have discovered many powerful links and common values that have certainly enriched us in our own work. We hope this relationship with our friends at the Museum has been reciprocal.

We have long held on to the idea of gathering, of sharing - of taking some of the individuals who are mouth, heart and hand to our culture on a critical and beautiful journey: a journey to New York, to greet and bless the Heiltsuk pieces held at the Museum. That idea, through the hard work and good faith of many people, is transforming into a reality. Tonight marks both a departure and an arrival. A beginning and an end. Tonight, the six boys to whom you were just introduced board a plane bound for New York, where they will soon hold in their hands many of the Heiltsuk artifacts currently held at the Museum.

Our goal is to show that these pieces are not relics. We want to uphold them as important symbols of a living culture with deep, immovable roots – to prove that they represent one part of a long continuum, and mark a point in an ongoing cycle that continues to guide our lives as Heiltsuk people. We want to breathe good energy into these pieces. We want to teach these pieces to remember the touch of Heiltsuk hands. We want to sing these treasures back to life.

Each of these objects has a memory, whether they are immense and iconic – the impossibly large canoe looming suspended in the hall – or small as a bead or a whistle. Each of these objects holds a story. We will sing to these treasures the story of our growth and transformation as a people – our living story. We believe they will whisper back something of the story they hold, an important physical and spiritual link to our roots and our ancestors.

Throughout the telling, you will meet some of our friends who have played an important role in the story of our journey. At the end, we will close by acknowledging all of them directly. Please hold in your mind a kind thought of the many people who have committed themselves to making this trip possible for our boys. In particular, we would like to thank Christopher Filardi and all his colleagues at the Museum for sponsoring the boys' travel. Their kindness, keenness and incredible generosity are unsurpassed.

Tomorrow, after days of leaning into the wind and pacing the packed snow of Bella Bella, we’ll set our feet on the sidewalks of New York City. Though a week of inclement weather threatened to halt our journey from the motherland, we are able to commence our trip as we first intended. We thank the rugged coast of our home for reminding us that we can take nothing for granted. Your positive thoughts will bring good energy to us during our travels.

Thank you for joining us on our journey. Thank you for witnessing our story. Our next update will come from New York City!

1. Introduction

Every culture has a creation story. Every important object and artifact across the span of human existence has an origin story. Even if we have forgotten the words, even if it’s no longer held in living memory, even if the dusty relic of narrative has been obscured and fragmented beyond recognition – there is a first point at which all important things caught like a seed in the soil of human consciousness. There is a point at which all important things pushed through that soil and began a slow climb skyward.

The story we’re going to tell here encompasses many creations, many origins. It takes the heap of tangled spruce roots that represents all the people, all the lives, all the moments concerned with the telling – and it weaves them into a tight basket. We will show you some of the immense treasures that basket holds.

We are Heiltsuk. Our name is a story, our people are many stories. Our territory is a long, broad landscape and seascape on which many stories are written. Our people have existed in this place since time before memory, and our very identity is intimately tied to our land and waters. Others have plied the channels and inlets of our motherland, followed the waterways and deer trails into the heart of the rich outer coastal islands that have sustained us since our creation. This is not their story. They are a part of it. This is our story. We are telling our own story.

We practice a strong, strict and beautiful storytelling tradition. We invite you to witness the story we are about to share with you. To stand as a witness is a great honour. You will carry this story with you, and when the time comes, you will be able to stand before our critics and our celebrants and say to them, I know this story. I witnessed this story’s first telling. And I attest that it is true, and that the storytellers acted in the correct way. In the Heiltsuk way.

Thank you for witnessing our story.