by Lyn Fox

     The next time you eat salmon, you may see an apparition: a barefoot warrior with conical spruce hat, grizzly-bear-tattooed chest, and mother-of-pearl-studded cape. He’s no hallucination; he’s a Haida watchman, standing guard over your dinner and, perhaps, our planet. How well I remember my encounter with this guardian spirit.

     We were sailing through dense fog on a drizzly night—farther North than I’d ever been before. Cloud ceiling hung low enough to make you hunch. Cloud walls, held at bay by surging and dimming deck lamps, enclosed an eerie space.

     A remote coastline of moss-choked forests and deep fjords loomed without warning, then vanished without explanation. As I gripped the rail in nervous silence, my animalistic senses heightened to pick apart the sounds—ship noises, sea noises, other noises. How many creaky boats had hugged this ragged shoreline? How many timid souls had braved this fogbound strait?

     First, came the Haida. From ancient times, these philosophical craftsmen carved up their world into spiritual realms of earth, sea, and sky. With lofty vision, they divided themselves into raven and eagle clans. Then, lowering their gaze, they set about the tasks of life on earth, albeit the sacred earth of the islands called Haida Gwaii.

     Having duly noted that nature provided four seasons and two sexes, the Haida went with the flow, both tidal and menstrual. In autumn, the women gathered kelp, roe, roots, berries, mushrooms, shellfish, cloverleaves, and crabapples. The men, with bigger muscles and shorter attention spans, chased deer sauntering down to drink and caught salmon swimming up to spawn.

     In winter, the community hibernated in post-and-beam, cedar-plank longhouses. Outside, dramatic red and black murals covered the façades. Also, front-and-center totem poles sported fierce family crests, with the bottom creature’s gaping mouth forming an oval door to the smoky, fire-lit interior.

     Inside, the ambience included aromatherapy (drying salmon hung from rafters) and soft rock music (sounds of malleable, black argillite being sculpted, along with interludes of grandma and grandpa getting busy under a blanket).

     One can hardly overestimate the glee when spring arrived. Fertile women pierced babies’ ears, tattooed children’s bodies, and bathed in rushing streams, ice-cold water pouring through long, dark hair, cascading over engorged voluptuousness and funneling down into…well, you can take it from there. Meanwhile, testosterone-laden men felled towering cedars, hollowed out canoes, and prepared to expand dominion over the third realm of sea.

     Throughout summer, these ambitious mariners crisscrossed Hecate Strait, trading for eulachon oil to enrich their diet and raiding for captive slaves to enrich their economy. As I peered over the railing, straining to glimpse nearby land through thick mist and mammoth waves, the enormity of their nautical cajones shamed me.

     Next, came the white boys. I say “boys” because these fur-trading expeditions generally left the women at home. So, by the time they reached Haida Gwaii, the sailors hadn’t erected their totem poles at the oval entrances to their favorite longhouses in quite some time. Perhaps, the rise of hostilities with the Haida is less surprising than the lack of mutiny on the ships.

     British captain George Dixon first circumnavigated Haida Gwaii. He then traded for otter pelts at the village of Sgan Gwaii. (Today, this spot harbors a mystical cluster of leaning, weathered totem poles, constituting a United Nations World Heritage Site commonly called Ninstints.) Soon thereafter, American captain John Kendrick showed up drunk and careless, let the Haida pilfer his laundry and seize his ship, then massacred them in return.

(Curiously, American connections also accompanied the recent Haida art renaissance with Bill Reid [son of an American father/Haida mother] and Robert Davidson [born in America/raised on Haida Gwaii] at the forefront. Canadian twenty-dollar bills now display a Reid carving with Haida figures mimicking “George Washington crossing the Delaware.” Perhaps, brash and reserved cultures mix like oil and vinegar but produce tasteful blends of artistic sensitivity and marketing chutzpah.)

     Once the white folk actually moved into the neighborhood, intercultural relations went from bad to about the same. The primary Haida social institution was the potlatch: a massive, extended feast on the scale of Rio’s Carnival—masks, music, dancing, dining, visions, ceremonies, plus redistribution of wealth by gift-giving. The introduction of European goods cranked up the volume on the whole affair.

     Consequently, British Columbian politicians had to outlaw potlatches. Why? Well, communal property, ecstatic visions, beads and feathers—white people wouldn’t be allowed to act like that till the 1960’s. Besides, all that reckless spending, elder competition, glitz and greed—it almost stole the spotlight from the soon-to-be-invented provincial lottery. In short, the prohibition was arbitrary.

     Before long, missionaries decided that totem poles were also evil. Not understanding their function as official record and coat-of-arms, they assumed them to be a competitive brand of deity. Some clergy-types even abandoned the free and open exchange of ideas for kerosene and a match.

     The Haida were thus stripped of their organization and their database, but the deadliest blow of all had already been dealt invisibly. The smallpox virus passed silently from one European with acquired immunity to one aboriginal without protection. In that unrecorded, unintended moment, ninety-percent of the Haida were condemned to die.

     We moderns congratulate ourselves too often on how tolerantly we’d have handled such a culture clash. Talk is cheap. The Haida no longer constitute a perceived threat and no ship logs document our anxiety driving an RV into Nicaragua or our anger at a Malaysian cop requesting a tip/bribe.

     Staring into the gray abyss around the ship, I certainly had no eagerness to meet a large, armed group of trans-nationals with a different conduct code and language. I love adventure, but the occasional lighthouse or coastguard beam is okay too. Much has changed since the bad old days, but, perhaps, our world is not really more enlightened, just better lit.

     Finally, along came Buck. After growing up a pampered pet in the California sunshine, this St. Bernard/Scottish Shepherd was kidnapped then sold as a sled dog. He, too, passed shipboard through Hecate Strait, en route to the Klondike gold rush. In this Northern wilderness, he learned both the beauty of nature and the law of club and fang.

     Yes, Buck is a fictional character from Jack London’s “Call of the Wild.” However, he’s more. He’s the biography of so many who’ve grown up domesticated and urbanized, only to find their spirit-home in the purity and vitality of wilderness. That’s what brought me to Haida Gwaii: the longing for my primal self, my totem spirit, if you will.

     Eventually, our ship docked and I stepped aground. Finding myself in a circle of elders, we discussed that day’s Vancouver Sun and CBC The National headline: “Salmon Runs Disastrously Low.” We also stared at clear-cut logging scars—at best, nature with a bad haircut, at worst, an eco crime scene.

By dark, I was sitting alone, next to a crackling fire on a bluff overlooking a beach. All night, I sat, dozing then dreaming then waking then reflecting.

     Just before dawn, I saw him: a barefoot warrior with conical spruce hat, grizzly-bear-tattooed chest, and mother-of-pearl-studded cape. Flitting circuitously through the trees, he came up behind me. His left hand held out a Hudson’s Bay blanket; his right index finger jabbed my attention to a particular spot. “I don’t see anything,” I protested.

     He stared back without emotion, “Neither did we.” A smallpox plague spread by infected trade blankets, who could’ve foreseen it?

     Sunrise woke me. I gazed out over the islands of Haida Gwaii and the surrounding sea—sacred ground and holy water for old and new reasons. These shores, framed by Alaska and mainland British Columbia, constitute spawning ground for much of our world’s remaining wild salmon. While indigenous people have always revered this super-protein wonder-fish, the general public has only recently grasped that farmed salmon are no substitute for dwindling wild stocks. Of course, before the Haida could defend these stocks from extinction they had to do the same for themselves.

     Now, rising from the ashes, the Haida again defend their sacred ground and holy water. With today’s war canoes pointed at oil rigs and fish farms, a long-silenced drumbeat steadily rises. Is it melodramatic to lump this current environmental spat with the Haida’s ancient struggle to survive? Maybe. After all, white man’s science has not yet proven that oil drilling and fish farming will significantly harm this fragile ecosystem. Perhaps, we should give them a try…as long as there are no blankets involved.

     After woofing breakfast, I rejoined the elders. Their circle soon became a medicine wheel. A longhaired shaman mixed tobacco, cedar, fungi, and leaves, in an abalone shell bowl. He then lit the concoction. As it smoldered, aromatic wisps rose in phantasmal helixes. Waving an eagle feather over each of us in turn, this “skaggy” administered a baptism by smoke.

     Shallow buckskin drums took up a fast, thunder-like rhythm. Whistles and chants burst from otherwise stoical faces. Frenzied dancers emerged, wearing masks that transformed them into mythic beings from killer whales to cannibals. Physical and spiritual dimensions were merged in ways I couldn’t fully understand. What I did see clearly was that my culture has abandoned both superstition of and connection with nature. In embracing a scientific worldview, we’ve lost our instinctual mystic vision.

     As a pipe passed around, prayers were offered to the Creator. They acknowledged four directions: North, South, East, and West, with four elements: earth, wind, fire, and water, then four colors: red, yellow, black, and white, symbolizing four peoples: Americans, Asians, Africans, and Europeans. The circle concluded with the pronouncement: “Everything is related.”

     We feasted to celebrate the fall equinox then retired to a sweat lodge. The elders told me that a pipe stem represents man, a pipe bowl represents woman, and a sweat lodge represents the womb of life. (So, I wondered, what the hell were we doin’ suckin’ on the pipe stem?)

     The sweat lodge seemed more tomb than womb. Searing hot rocks were piled in the center using antler tongs. Then, the door closed, trapping us in crypt-like darkness. Even after focusing, my eyes saw nothing but the faint glow of these “grandfather stones.” The shaman sprinkled them with herbs, emitting sparks, pops, and a scent palette ranging from wild celery to marijuana. Finally, he doused them with water, flooding the air with suffocating heat.

     For an unbearable two hours, I sat, struggling against drowning, fainting, and an ever-rising heart rate. It was crazy, but we all have our cherished quasi-virtues and “death before dishonor” is mine. When the door, at last, opened, it was only to insert more rocks. Yet, for a brief moment, I was a prisoner allowed a window, a diver reaching the surface, just until light, air, and hope were again mercilessly snuffed.

     For another two hours, we gasped, howled, drummed, and prayed. On the last round, I deliriously tallied the number of voices yet to supplicate. I concluded I could make it without passing out, if the skaggy didn’t go again at the end. He did. Damn that prayer hog!

     Final conscious reflections: ancient man slept in dark caves, my ancestors homesteaded dark forests, I can barely survive this dark super-sauna, most of my peers can’t stand a dark evening without TV. Yet, all of us, alike, are herded into that ultimate dark hole, from which there is no escape, which humanity’s earliest writings call “sheol”—the grave.

     Praying ceased. The door opened. I prepared to dive for that shining portal, but had to wait my turn, like the last varmint out of a hole. My turn never came.

     I came to, five feet outside the door with everyone standing over me. Slimy grime covered my skin. Grimy slime came from my nose—a swollen, blood-trickling nose. Must have fallen on my face (literally and figuratively). All dignity abandoned, I searched my arm for less-muddy places to wipe pinkish snot in front of near strangers.

     Someone handed me a half-peeled orange, in which I buried my face and my pride. Someone else told me that those who endure the sweat lodge till blacking out are considered heroic. I wasn’t buying it. My body had refused to support my pretensions to immortality. In the game of Haida-and-seek, I was the first man out.

     I returned home a disappointed alpha male. I’d seen no macho totem, no grizzly or wolf spirit—possibly because these species no longer inhabit the islands. Dreaming in my toasty bed, cool Haida forest transformed into hot delta bayou. Suddenly, I heard a low, mournful cry. It was Howlin’ Wolf—not a howlin’ wolf, the Howlin’ Wolf, you know, the blues singer.

     Serves me right. Goofy white boy seeking a native vision up North sees a black man from down South. Alas, his message was incomprehensible and his verb conjugation was deplorable. Howlin’ Wolf looked over and mumbled, “Boy, let me teach you theology: God be God…and you don’t be.”