Occupied lands? During the recent controversial protest of Israel at the Toronto International Film Festival, the issue of Israel's so-called occupation of Palestinian land was chief among the complaints. Perhaps the complainants should have looked no further than their own home and native land. As former Vancouver Sun writer Ian Gill points out in his necessary and timely All That We Say is Ours: Guujaaw and the Reawakening of the Haida Nation, the land question goes to our very origins of Canada as a confederation.
“An issue,” writes Gill, who has been visiting Haida Gwaii for 25 years, “that remains perhaps the most profound failing of Canada as a nation, a deep stain on our claim to value fairness for all people in everything from our daily lives to our constitution.”
All That We Say is Ours: Guujaaw and the Reawakening of the Haida Nation, by Ian Gill, Douglas & McIntyre, 256 pages, $34.95
Haida Gwaii (“Island of the People”), according to Haida legend, emerged from a cockle shell at Rose Spit, off the coast of British Columbia, more than 10,000 years ago. A land of great abundance and beauty, it was inhabited by tens of thousands of Haida for more than 6,000 years. On a clear day, Alaska to the north is visible, but mainland Canada is never in sight.
In 1787, the islands were surveyed by Captain George Dixon and named by him after one of his ships, the Queen Charlotte (it later became known as Haida Gwaii).
At the time of colonial contact, the population was roughly 10,000 to 60,000. Ninety per cent of the population died during the 1800s from smallpox; other diseases arrived as well, including typhoid, measles and syphilis, affecting many more inhabitants. By 1900, only 350 people remained.
Industrial logging arrived on Haida Gwaii in the early 1900s. The Gowgaia Institute estimates that 170,000 hectares were logged over the next century – enough wood to circle the Earth with a six-foot diameter log worth about $20-billion. The land in Haida Gwaii was ruined, as what was once forest was laid bare.
“From an aboriginal perspective, ownership of the land was never in question until someone arrived to contest it,” Gill writes. Beginning with Sir James Douglas and the Hudson's Bay Company, there was no real distinction between the goals of government and those of business. The land question was never settled by successive B.C. governments, which preferred not to acknowledge that there was a “question” at all. Native people were herded onto reserves and left to their misery.
The blockade was a significant new chapter in Haida mythology
Gary Edenshaw, later known as the visionary artist, drummer and orator Giindajin Haawasti Guujaaw, was born in 1953 into a family of nine children in the town of Masset on Haida Gwaii. A young tough working at the Dragon Bowling Alley, rowing, signing and drumming, he became known as Giindajin, full of questions.
Giindajin did not go to residential school, however, avoiding it by “the narrowest of threads,” dancing at the feet of his great grandmother and demonstrating a keenness for listening to the stories of his elders, connected him to the Haida's vast culture. His mother died when he was a teenager; he learned carpentry as a trade, leaving the island for a few years before returning to his hometown in the early 1970s, when Haida Gwaii had begun to attract some counter-culture types. Jenny Nelson, a flower child from Ontario, became his wife and mother of his children.
