Raven Walks Around the World. Thom Henley
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his skiff and hiked across the narrow neck of land to hunt for deer. Scanning the beach unsuccessfully, he found himself gazing out to sea. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular; it was just a built-in Haida instinct that had helped his ancestors survive more than twelve thousand years on a coast where war parties arrived by sea.
What Percy had seen that evening completely baffled him, as he later recounted to me. It was not a war party, but a great eagle flying low over the water, its wings wet and glistening in the sun, and it was coming straight toward him. Although he had been a seaman all his life, Percy had never before seen a kayak, and the wing-like movement of the paddle blades catching the last rays of the setting sun and the large white, sheet sail depicting the head of an eagle had totally mystified him.
The sun had already set before I made my landing on the beach and began hauling my gear up above the high-tide line to make camp for the night. There in the twilight, amid the silver-grey beach logs, I was surprised to see a Haida man with a sweater as weathered and hair as grey as the old cedar log upon which he sat. People behave oddly when they’ve been out of the social loop for a while, so instead of the customary courteous hello, I said nothing. But I immediately thought, I want to show this man my eagle. I took the carcass from the kayak stern and carried it up the beach, holding it out with both arms proudly.
The old man stood, startled, and took a few steps back, all the while watching me intently. “Why do you bring me this eagle?” he said cautiously.
“Because there aren’t many left,” I responded without thinking.
For me, growing up in Michigan where DDT poisoning and habitat loss had decimated the North American bald eagle population, the statement was true. For Percy Williams, growing up in Skidegate where eagles on the beach are as common as pigeons in a city park, my statement was bewildering. Neither of us said anything further for some time, until finally we sat on a beach log and casually started talking about my journey and how extraordinary I found the Haida Islands. I expressed deep concern about the clear-cut logging I saw working its way progressively south and I lamented what was happening at Skedans. Skedans, it turned out, was the ancestral village of Percy’s mother, and as Haida trace their clan lineage matrilineally, it was his village as well. The logging concession had been sold, he told me, because Skidegate needed funds to build a new basketball court and community recreation facility for their youth. “We’ll never do that to a village site again,” Percy said, though he never let on that he was both a hereditary and elected chief of Skidegate. For me, our impromptu encounter was a moment in time soon forgotten; for Percy it proved profound, and would influence the course of Haida history.
ReDiscovery: The Eagle’s Gift film promotion featured Gerald Amos wearing Rediscovery regalia made from the same eagle carcass I had found at Windy Bay in 1973. Richard Krieger photo
The eagle carcass never did make it to the Queen Charlotte Islands’ museum. The museum society didn’t want it: Ottawa was supplying all their bird specimens fully stuffed and mounted. The Windy Bay eagle found its way to a storage freezer in Victoria’s Royal BC Museum, only to be returned to Haida Gwaii seven years later as part of the regalia donated to the Haida Gwaii Rediscovery Camp. I had never shared the eagle story with anyone so I was dumbfounded when Peter Prince, an independent filmmaker from Victoria (who now lives on Salt Spring Island), produced an award-winning documentary on Rediscovery that he titled ReDiscovery: The Eagle’s Gift. The promotional poster featured Gerald Amos, a Haida participant on Rediscovery, wearing the wings and body feathers of that same Windy Bay eagle.
It was then that I came to the realization that I was merely a player on the Haida Gwaii stage; the best I could do was bear witness to my own unaccountable involvement.
Chapter III
Drawing the Line
At one time or another we all adhere to boundaries, borders and lines in our lives. They help us establish our territories, define our relationships, set sight on our goals, or just bring some semblance of order to a world that all too often appears chaotic. Somehow, though, it’s not adhering to pre-existing boundaries but creating new ones, or defying established ones, that define us most. Heroes and fools, geniuses and social misfits know what it’s like to do so. A person’s actions can create a boundary just as their other actions can challenge and break a boundary down. My involvement with South Moresby and Rediscovery would soon put me at both ends of that spectrum, though it would confound me how I got there.
Arriving back in Skidegate in July 1973 after my kayak trip through South Moresby left me in a bit of a quandary and had me asking myself, “What exactly am I doing on the Queen Charlotte Islands?” I decided to press on back to my cabin in Alaska, my original goal when Stormy had detoured me with her cloud-busting trick back in Prince Rupert. I needn’t return to the mainland to do so, I reasoned; I could paddle back to Alaska across Dixon Entrance. If the Haida could make this sixty-kilometre crossing in their dugout canoes, surely I could do the same in my kayak, I thought with all the self-assurance and blissful ignorance of a twenty-three-year-old convinced of his immortality.
Rather than deal with the long, shelterless northeast shores of Graham Island, the largest of the 150 Haida Isles, and treacherous Rose Spit, I decided to head north through Masset Inlet from Port Clements, a small logging-based community in the heart of Graham Island. According to Haida legend, this passage was made possible by Taaw, the younger brother of a larger hill by the same name. These hills, it is said, once resided side by side in the centre of Graham Island until the two brothers had a dispute over who was eating too much of the food. One night the younger Taaw left his sibling in a rage and stomped out across the bogs in the dark. His aimless wanderings carved out what is now Masset Inlet, an unusual body of water that extends from a wide bay near Port Clements fifty kilometres down a long, narrow channel to Old Massett at the mouth of the inlet. When Taaw reached the shores of Dixon Entrance he continued wandering east along the beach until he came to the mouth of the Hiellen River. Taaw looked out over the twenty kilometres of glistening white sand that forms the Great North Beach and knew he’d found his new home. Here was food in abundance: razor clams, cockles, weathervane scallops and Dungeness crabs that washed in on the big storm tides and piled up like windrows along the beach.
From the top of Taaw (Tow Hill) today, one can look out from this ancient volcanic basalt plug and view Masset Inlet to the west and Rose Spit to the east. Naikoon, “the nose,” was the name the Haida gave this great sandspit that extends out into Dixon Entrance and marks the boundary with Hecate Strait. East coast erosion from the prevailing southeast winds is depositing sand at the tip of Rose Spit so fast that the land is growing two to three kilometres ahead of the colonizing vegetation.
The Great North Beach is noted for another reason—it is the sacred site of Haida creation. It was here, legend tells us, that a bored but ever curious Raven heard sounds emanating from a cockleshell on the beach. Prying open the strange bivalve, Raven inadvertently released the first humans—the Haida.
I was thankful to Taaw for the passage he had created as I raced out of Masset Inlet in my kayak on the strong ebb tide that midsummer morning. It seemed amusing that an early European explorer had once sailed to the head of this inlet thinking he had found the fabled passage to the Orient.
I stopped briefly at Yan, a lovely ancient village site opposite Old Massett at the mouth of Masset Inlet, and then proceeded out into the open waters of Dixon Entrance. I could see that a storm was beginning to brew but foolishly pressed on toward Langara Island. A pod of feeding killer whales surfaced from directly below me, giving me quite a start. The sea grew dark and threatening; steep breaking waves compounded the huge swells rolling in off the open Pacific and the wind built to gale force. There were no boats in sight and no apparent landing beaches; only kayak-crunching waves exploding on fortress-like rocky headlands. I needed to find shelter, fast. The orcas appeared again, nearer to shore, and one of them breached in a spectacular display, which couldn’t help but catch my eye even amid the storm. It was a good thing I looked, for directly behind the breaching whale I spotted a narrow