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.