Mortal Poles Story by Lawrence Millman
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The animals carved onto the poles were not monsters, Wanegan said. Nor were they deity figures worshipped by the Haida, contrary to the opinion of outsiders who visited Haida Gwaii in the 19th century. Instead, they were crests of social identity and rank similar to a European coat-of-arms. The animal on a particular crest told the story of how the deceased person’s ancestors had initially made contact with that particular animal a long, long time ago. I asked Wanegan if he could tell me one of these stories, but he shook his head. The stories had disappeared with the Kunghit themselves, he said. We approached the stumps of several poles whose carved sections had been cut off and I was accompanied by shipped to museums in Canada a middle-aged Haida man and the U.S. some years ago. To named Wanegan. He was the Wanegan, this was not unlike local Watchman, so named wrenching a person from his because his job was to keep home and clamping that person the island’s ancestral artifacts in jail for no apparent reason. safe from plundering outsiders. “Those poles were born here,” Wanegan had been coming to he declared, “and they should be this now uninhabited chunk allowed to die here.” of land for more than twenty The poles that remained years, usually by himself, yet were in fact dying here, bufhe told me he never felt like feted by the wind, scoured by salt Photo by Charles F. Newcombe/Courtesy of the Canadian Museum of History he was alone here. The ghosts spray, consumed by fungi, and of the past always seemed to eaten by wood-boring insects. hover nearby, gathering shellmification —would be placed in a cedar Most Haida think this is as it should be, fish, dancing, shouting, laughing, crybox, then that box would be put in a rectsince these towers of wood weren’t created ing, stripping bark, or carving a totem angular chamber at the top of the pole. to last forever. Indeed, when one of them pole. He assured me that none of these He pointed to a cluster of bones thirty or toppled over in the old days, it was simply myriad ghosts bothered him in the least. so feet above my head. How nice to expepushed away so it could return happily to As we moved from pole to pole, rience a portion of one’s eternal slumber the earth from which it came. ANW Wanegan said that the phrase “totem perpetually aloft like this, I thought. pole” is actually a misnomer for these
ituated in the southern part of Haida Gwaii (formerly the Queen Charlotte Islands), Anthony Island dangles on the very edge of the continent, seemingly poised to be swallowed by the Pacific. Shortly after I set foot on this 395-acre tract of rock and Sitka spruce, I found myself being stared at by a bestiary of faces—eagles, black bears, killer whales, beavers, ravens, and mountain goats. These were not the faces of the local wildlife, but faces carved onto totem poles by the Kunghuit, a group of Haida who once lived here.
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The heartbeat of Cascadia
poles, for they were mortuary poles. They were erected to honor a deceased family member or perhaps a chief whose remains—after a suitable period of mum-
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