Raven Walks Around the World. Thom Henley
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of its only permanent community: Sandspit.
We were bucking tide now. This region has the greatest tidal fluctuation on the Canadian Pacific coast, and it wasn’t worth the effort to push on against it. Of course, it pales in comparison to the Bay of Fundy’s reported fifty-foot fluctuation in the Atlantic, but an eighteen-foot rise and drop in the water level every six hours is nothing to toy with either. We sat out the flood tide at Gray Bay.
It was late evening before the currents were running in our favour again, but there was still plenty of daylight to travel. This was, after all, the longest day of the year, and in this northern latitude, there would be light until 11:00 p.m. We managed to reach Cumshewa Rocks by sunset; it was an offshore seabird island with hundreds of nesting gulls. The tide was very low so Glenn and I gathered gooseneck barnacles and a few gull eggs for our dinner. When goosenecks are steamed, the shell and outer sheath of the barnacle slips off and a tasty morsel of meat melts in the mouth. Gooseneck barnacles have a rich flavour, a bit like crab, to which they are related. They are so delectable it’s surprising they’ve never worked their way onto epicurean menus.
I was told the Haida name Cumshewa means “rich at the mouth of the inlet,” and we certainly felt as rich as kings dining with the gulls on the most dainty of delicacies that night while the sun set over the long, glassy, smooth reach of Cumshewa Inlet. It was the perfect summer solstice party.
We slept out the few hours of darkness under the stars on barren rock, washed smooth from eons of pounding waves. Hundreds of gulls sounded our alarm clock at first light; there was to be no sleeping in unless we wanted to be whitewashed in gull droppings. Glenn headed south to a logging camp on Thurston Harbour, where he wanted to check on his mail, while I detoured up Cumshewa Inlet to view one of the old abandoned Haida village sites I had seen on my nautical chart. We agreed to meet that night at a place on the chart named Vertical Point.
Cumshewa absorbed me that morning like a deep dream. It was otherworldly stepping into the moss-hushed forest of that ancient village site. Shafts of sunlight pierced the morning mist and softly illuminated the remains of century-old totems. Great heraldic beasts with large ovoid eyes and broad, raised eyebrows stared in bewilderment as if forever frozen in the surprise of their own demise. Cumshewa, like many Haida villages, had been decimated and abandoned following a devastating smallpox epidemic in 1862–63. In one horrible summer nearly three-quarters of the Haida population succumbed to the deadly disease. The real tragedy is that it could have been averted.
American gold-rushers flocking from San Francisco to Victoria, British Columbia from around 1858 brought with them the horrible scourge. Vaccine for smallpox was available at that time, and all white settlers and their Chinese servants in Victoria were immunized. There was no recorded attempt to vaccinate the large Indigenous population residing in Victoria or anywhere else along the coast. When one looks at the history of Indian wars, relocations, ethnocide and genocide against the First Peoples in North America, it is difficult to excuse this as an oversight. An even more sinister scenario is documented in Tom Swanky’s academic book The True Story of Canada’s War of Extermination on the Pacific. According to the author, Victoria’s famous Dr. John Helmcken, while pretending to vaccinate the Indigenous peoples, was actually inoculating them with smallpox at the urging of Governor Sir James Douglas.
A cargo cult had developed around the European trading centres along the Northwest Coast and in the 1860s, a century after first contact, the principal trade centre was Victoria. In addition to the Songhees Village of the Coast Salish peoples located in Victoria Harbour, Kwakiutl and Haida encampments were set up for trade near what is now Victoria’s cruise ship terminal. It was not uncommon for Northwest Coast Indigenous nations to hold rights to land through marriage, peace agreement or some other arrangement in the midst of another Indigenous nation’s traditional territory. Such was the situation for the Haida settlement located near the entrance to Victoria Harbour in the fateful year 1862.
It may be our feeble attempt to fathom the unfathomable, but very often the great tragedies that befall humanity are reduced to simple tales. We are told that the great fire that burned down Chicago started when Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern during milking, and that the maiden voyage sinking of the Titanic was God’s punishment for the ship having been christened the “unsinkable.” So too, the smallpox scourge that decimated the North Pacific coast nations has been reduced to a mere tale.
According to the “official” story, Sir James Douglas ordered the Haida settlement to be cleared out of Victoria, at gunpoint if necessary, to “protect” them from the spread of smallpox. The Haida, for centuries, had been considered the lords of the coast and refused to allow themselves to be humiliated through such a disgraceful departure. Mustering their courage, the Haida regrouped their canoes offshore and returned in war formation to face the cannons. It was a display of pride more than any other, but it became a cornerstone of the smallpox tale. The Haida stayed just long enough to contract the deadly illness, so the story goes, and as they paddled up the coast they stopped at every village to boast of their daring deed and in so doing spread the smallpox. Cumshewa was one of the villages the death canoes stopped at.
A great sadness hung over Cumshewa at the time of my visit; it was as if the world had closed in on itself. Human skulls, still working their way to the surface from burial mounds blanketed under thick moss, told of the magnitude and swiftness of the disaster that befell this once thriving community so “rich at the mouth of the inlet.”
I fell asleep in the sun on a mossy promontory of land where there was evidence of otters frolicking and cracking open crabs. It would be wrong to say that I fell into a deep dream; it was more a trance, an altered state, an almost out-of-body experience in which the village came fully alive again. Children laughed and squealed with delight as they bounded barefoot over the gravel beach to help haul in halibut from returning fishing parties. Women strung strands of kelp with herring roe attached to dry in the sun atop cedar drying racks. Smoke curled from each of the sixteen longhouses and countless smokehouses so that the air was permeated with the rich aromas of alder-smoked clams and spring salmon, boiling crab and other foods fresh from the sea. Somewhere down the beach the sound of wood being slowly chipped away told of a canoe being fashioned from a great cedar log. Nearby, a master carver was putting the finishing touches on a huge ceremonial pole to proudly proclaim the lineage of his family for all the world to see.
It was late morning before I paddled away from the ghost village and crossed Cumshewa Inlet to Louise Island. Huge beds of bull kelp, stretching far offshore, indicated that I was running with the tide. Sea lions, cormorants and pigeon guillemots bobbed in the tide rips running strong off Skedans Point. Something felt totally different, yet strangely familiar, as I paddled through the breaking tide rips. I was used to river running where the current is swift but waves are stationary, or lake travel where the waves are moving through stationary water. Now I had to cope with both conditions simultaneously. The sea here could go from calm to raging tide rips in a matter of minutes and one had to be alert, to live and learn, or risk not living long.
A perfect peninsula juts out from the eastern shores of Louise Island and embraces two superb landing beaches. This stunning setting was the site of one of the greatest strongholds and most celebrated Haida villages. Those born at Koona, also known as Skedans, were truly masters of their universe, at least until the epidemic hit. Now, like neighbouring Cumshewa village to the north and Tanu to the south, Koona is but a hollow, brittle shell of its former glory. Most of its monuments in cedar today grace the museum lobbies of the world, while a few forgotten grizzly and eagle mortuary poles lean dangerously or recline on the ground sprouting flowers for their own funerals.
What made the tragedy that befell Skedans especially poignant this June day in 1973 was to witness the sacred resting place of its one-time inhabitants being desecrated through logging. An aluminum-sided trailer had been skidded up the beach and into the village site from a barge, and a bulldozer was being used to haul logs down from the hillside. It was a small gyppo operation run by a married couple and a few hired hands, but the impact on the site was massive. How could a major archaeological site be treated in this way, I wondered. Wouldn’t the Haida believe their ancestral spirits would be outraged? The answer to both of my questions came some days later.
If there was a silver