It's dark and drizzling when I finally reach the village of Gitanyow, but the dull weather can't blunt the striking scene before me. Here, alongside the muddy main road, stand more than 20 weathered totem poles, the carved crests and lineage of families who have lived here for centuries. While it's impressive to see these stark sentinels in any setting – whether in a museum, art gallery or urban park – the chance to view the poles in situ, in the First Nations community where they belong, is both wonderful and humbling.
And in this isolated Gitksan village, in northern British Columbia, I'm among some of the oldest standing poles in the world.
“This one is from 1760, this 1880, and 1910,” says hereditary chief and local museum curator Deborah Good, as we walk among the remains of the weathered wooden figures, many which had been left to rot on the ground before this small museum was opened in 2008.
While Terrace, with its abundance of community galleries, carving sheds and museums, is the best place to explore the First Nations' carving tradition, it's here in Gitanyow (a.k.a. Kitwancool) and neighbouring Kispiox, that Canadian artist Emily Carr came to paint the totem poles of the northwest coastal people nearly a century ago. She saw the faces of the wolf, the frog and mountain eagle entangled in the encroaching temperate rain forest, and depicted many poles in her art, including the oldest Hole-in-Ice (or Hole-in-Sky) pole, standing in this spot for more than 140 years.
“She spent some time with my great grandparents, in 1928,” says Good, pointing out the corner of the museum dedicated to Carr and the whimsical frogs – the crest of the local Frog Clan – encircling a ragged segment of one of the oldest poles.
The row of traditional longhouses that Carr saw, framing this forest of towering carved cedars in Gitanyow, has been replaced by a motley collection of 20th-century bungalows, but it's still an iconic spot to see this ancient art form.
“These poles are land and property deeds – the poles tell the story of where the people originated from, and how the land was given,” Good explains. In the collecting frenzy of the 1800s, Gitksan poles were taken to museums in Vancouver, Ottawa, Boston and Philadelphia, she says, but somehow these remained untouched.
And somehow, in small pockets of the province – like here along the interior reaches of the Skeena and Nass Rivers – the tradition of carving survived, despite nearly a century of suppression. In 1884, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald banned the potlatch feasts and dances, the centre of the coastal peoples' unique social and legal system. Many poles were removed, toppled, even burned, and the skill of carving such ceremonial articles all but disappeared. By 1951, when the ban on the potlatch was finally lifted, only a few carvers remained.
Survival and revival
The artists we know today – Mungo Martin, Bill Reid, Freda Diesing – had to comb the world's museums to learn about their ancestral crests and carving styles. But thanks to these stalwarts, and their apprentices, West Coast Native art and culture is again alive in towns and villages from Haida Gwaii to Prince Rupert and Hazelton. You will still see old poles – and contemporary poles – standing in communities like Kitselas, New Aiyansh, Canyon City and Kitsumkalum not as museum pieces, but to tell clan stories, claim property rights and mark local events as they have for centuries.
At the 'Ksan Historical Village near Hazelton, high above the banks of the Skeena and Bulkley rivers, there are several reconstructed buildings where young guides describe 1870s aboriginal life inside smoky cedar long houses. There's a forest of poles here, too – many carved by the generation of artists who helped resurrect the art form in the 1960s and '70s.
