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.