Raven Walks Around the World. Thom Henley
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revellers racing by along the road above me and the tide rising up to my feet, so I awoke at first light to end the ordeal. Camouflaging the two kayak bags as best I could under logs and rocks, I shouldered my backpack and set off north along the road. I wanted to find a beach where I could camp for a few days while I sorted out my next move. Several kilometres later I walked into Haida Village, a long series of Indian Affairs dwellings fronting the road along Masset Inlet. A Haida man in his thirties was the only sign of life on the road this early Sunday morning. He staggered up to me, pulled out a folding knife and with glazed eyes and an unsteady bearing, introduced himself with the words: “I should slit your throat, you stinkin’ white man.” He was the first Islander to speak to me since I’d arrived, and I took this to be my official welcome.
I remained calm and left my acquaintance staring drunkenly into the void where I encountered him, working my way presumably out of harm’s way to the beach just beyond the cemetery of the village. Here, finally, was food for the spirit. A majestic sweep of sand and gravel beach stretched more than 160 kilometres along the shores of Dixon Entrance and Hecate Strait. Breakers rolled endlessly down the long reach of shoreline, roaring like bowling balls down some infinite corridor. The air was heady with oxygen and the rich aromas of salt, seaweed, seabird droppings and the occasionally fishy burp from some offshore sea lion. Across the deep cobalt blue of Dixon Entrance, the southernmost islands of Southeast Alaska shimmered in the sun. This was the Queen Charlotte Islands (QCI) I had been hoping for, and I felt a great weight lifting from me, as if someone had come along to shoulder the bags of my kayak and gear. For six months and almost 10,000 kilometres of hitching, that kayak had hung around my neck like an albatross; now I would finally get it on the water where it belonged.
I was feeling much more positive about the Islands now, and as if to bolster my spirits even more, the following afternoon the man who had threatened me was all smiles as I walked back through the village. It was as if he had been awaiting my return, though he seemed to recall nothing of our first encounter. He pointed to a doorway where an old Haida woman was looking at me. “She’s been expecting you to join her for lunch,” the man said pleasantly.
“What?” I asked in utter astonishment. “Yesterday morning you wanted to slit my throat and now …” He acted as if he hadn’t heard me and went on his way. The old woman beckoned me inside.
A traditional Haida feast had been set out by the woman’s grandchildren. There was barbecued salmon, fried halibut, razor clam fritters, steamed Dungeness crab, herring spawn on kelp, dried oolichan and oolichan grease, octopus, abalone, seal meat, wild berries, boiled potatoes and bannock. I’d never seen a spread like this in my life. You couldn’t order this in any restaurant in the world, and even if you could, few could afford it.
The woman’s name was Eliza Abrahams. She was the oldest living Haida, and according to accounts I heard later, she was the most traditional. Eliza spoke little English but was bright and fluent in her own tongue. The two of us dined together and laughed and enjoyed each other’s company even though there was little common language between us. After we ate, far too much, she had her family go into her dresser drawers to bring out all of her button blankets and family heirloom regalia to set on my lap. “What’s happening here?” I finally felt compelled to ask one of Eliza’s attendants, even though I ran the risk of appearing rude.
Always immersed in her culture, Eliza Abrahams is seen here weaving a cedar bark hat in 1976. Three years earlier, she was the first person on Haida Gwaii to befriend me, welcome me into her home and serve me a lavish Haida lunch. Had it not been for the generosity and hospitality of this oldest and most traditional Haida Nonnie I might have left Haida Gwaii a few days after my arrival. Ulli Steltzer, 1976, Haida Gwaii Museum At Kay’llnagaay, Skidegate, BC, Canada
“She’s been waiting a long time to see you,” came the bewildering answer.
I had never really believed in destiny. At least, my lifelong liberal education had taught me not to. I always wanted to think that I made my own choices in life; for better or worse, I did what I truly wanted. If I wasn’t exactly always in control of a situation, neither was I merely subject to the whims of fate. I believed this. I wanted to believe this. I needed to believe this. But my little lunch with Eliza made me start to question it all.
The pace quickened now; I was embarking on a journey that would mould me and hold me in its spell for decades to come. I returned to the place I had stashed my collapsible kayak, retrieved the two big bags and started hitchhiking south. Before long I was offered a ride from Masset along the seventy-mile length of the Islands’ only highway to Queen Charlotte City, a misnomer if ever there was one. This small settlement of only a few hundred souls, spread out along the north shore of Skidegate Inlet, had become the preferred gathering place for alternative-lifestyle youth arriving from the mainland. It was Canada’s Ellis Island; all it needed now was an upright eagle or raven statue bearing a torch: “Send me your dispossessed, your stoned and your penniless.” For $65 you could buy a home site on “Hippie Hill” from John Wood, in all probability the world’s only real estate developer who never charged a penny more for the land than he had paid for it. Or you could join other refugees from the North American middle-class suburban dream and squat on Haida land—or Crown land; it depended on how you looked at it. In either case, the issue was rarely raised in the early ’70s.
Ron Suza and Pete Townson were two of the handful of “heads” who chose to settle on remote Burnaby Island at the southern end of the Queen Charlotte Archipelago. They hadn’t been there long, however, before their cabin burned down and they found themselves back in Queen Charlotte City, the night I arrived, performing at their own benefit concert. It was a great event with a wealth of local talent, a throbbing sense of community spirit and enough cannabis smoke in the dark dance hall to stone you on entry.
Somehow in the dark and the din I made a new friend, Glenn Naylor, a British bloke who had the best of both worlds—a log cabin along Burnaby Narrows and a house on Hippie Hill. He too was a kayaker and was planning to paddle back to his cabin on Burnaby Island in the next few days. “Why don’t you join me?” he offered. “You can crash at my place on the Hill until we go.” Great good fortune was smiling at last.
It was a beautiful night up on the Hill, as the hippie homeowners called it, and I rolled out my sleeping bag on Glenn’s porch to drink in the sweet summer air. By 2:00 a.m., the musicians had moved from the community hall to a house on the far side of the Hill where a great musical jam was ensuing. The sounds sweeping over the land were in many respects typical of the era: the rich unplugged sound of acoustic guitars, the wail of harmonicas, the flutter of flute and the steady rhythm of conga drums. Only the drumming stood out as something out of the ordinary. The rhythm was drawn from somewhere deeper than the stoned groove everyone else was jamming to. It seemed to come from the land itself. The trees, the rocks, the cedar-plank floor I slept on—all reverberated that pulse. Although I did not get a glimpse through the trees of the musicians that night, I felt connected in spirit to that “talking drum.”
“Who was on the conga last night?” I casually asked Glenn over breakfast porridge.
“Oh, that must have been Gary Edenshaw,” he answered; “He’s a Haida from Skidegate.” Ten years later, long after my life and Gary’s had become inextricably linked, the Haida elders deliberated long and hard to honour him with a new Haida name. His uncle Percy Williams had bestowed upon him the name Ghindigin, the “Questioning One,” but somehow he’d outgrown that. The new name that better suited him, the elders decided at length, was Guujaaw, Haida for “drum.” I could have told them that.
It was 8:00 a.m., June 21, 1973, when Glenn Naylor and I launched our kayaks from the beach in Skidegate Village, the Haida community just five kilometres east of Queen Charlotte City. I recall the time exactly not because it felt like some historic moment, but because it was the first time in eight months I wasn’t bearing the weight of the kayak … it was bearing mine. I felt wondrously weightless and free as we rode the ebb tide out Skidegate Inlet and felt the great swells of Hecate Strait. We had just enough clearance to glide over the long sandy spit that reaches out from the northeast tip of Moresby Island and gives this