The Forest Lover

  Emily stood at the edge of a crowd surrounding several chiefs whose headdresses were carved animal faces. They wore elaborate blue and green blankets edged in red and decorated with hundreds of mother-of-pearl buttons in Raven and Eagle patterns. She recognized Chief Wakias, and wished she could ask him to pose, but he seemed unapproachable wearing the regalia.

  Beatrice pointed out Chief Tlii-Tlaalaadzi, a wide-faced older man whose Eagle headdress had ermine tails hanging from the sides. His speaker stood beside him wearing a bark head ring and button blanket. Holding a heavy carved staff with Eagle at the top, he spoke in Kwakwala, and the crowd of men and women opened around the pole to be raised. Men sitting behind a hollowed-log drum began to beat a rhythm, slowly at first, then faster and louder. With great ceremony, men lifted the tarps. The crowd murmured approval and then sang their joy at seeing the carving. Although Emily couldn’t see the top of the pole because of the crowd, the Raven, Bear, Killerwhale and Wolf that she did see were magnificent. The carving was surprisingly sharp-edged, the wood smooth, the figures heroic, full of meanings she could not grasp.

  Toby nodded toward a man moving through the crowd, speaking to everyone as he passed. His skin was furrowed by time like the great old poles at Alert Bay. “My uncle,” Toby said. “Hayward James. He carved that pole.” Toby did a proud little hop.

  She realized with a flush of excitement—the toddler at Alert Bay years ago who knew he’d be an artist because one of his eyelashes was put in his uncle’s paintbrush, that was the same Toby.

  “I can’t see,” he said.

  “You will,” Beatrice said, lifting Alphonse to see while Tillie lifted Jack. “You’ll remember this for a long time.”

  Suddenly it was essential that Toby see everything. Emily spotted an empty crate and fetched it for the boys to stand on. “Try not to hop,” she cautioned.

  Lines of men, Mac among them, squatted by the pole to shoulder it from underneath. A hush spread through the crowd. Ropes creaked and the pole raised several inches. She knew she was witnessing something few white people understood. Halliday would call it a senseless tug-of-war with a dead tree, yet the rapt attention of every person here showed that in that tree lived history and pride and ancestry and love.

  Hayward James crouched beside Toby and whispered. His gestures spoke lovingly of the wood, its grain and texture, its fragrance. He’d lived with the cedar, studied its character, responded to its spirit. Here, at this moment, art was being transmitted. She hoped Toby understood the responsibility.

  Raw energy pushed up the column inch by inch until pairs of smaller supporting poles crossing like scissors could be propped under it. Children who’d never seen this before and old people who’d seen it many times all stood still and silent, as though they all were holding their breath. The men rested four times, while the chief’s speaker recounted events in the lives of the dead chief and his ancestors. Raven, Bear, Killerwhale, Wolf, and the top figure, Eagle, rose higher and higher against the sky. The line of men pulled ropes over the scaffolding, and in ten minutes, start to finish, it was up. Incredibly, it was up—Eagle, wings outspread, soaring. A sigh whooshed like wind through the crowd.

  Men filled in the hole with boulders and tamped down dirt. No shout of hurrah went up when the ropes were released. It was an occasion deeper than cheers, a moment of reverence. Toby tipped his head back. Emily put her cheek close to his. “Someday you’ll make a fine work of art like that.”

  The chief’s speaker announced that they would give out the blankets right then. Mac and Beatrice exchanged serious glances. Emily asked what it meant.

  “Most times they don’t give out anything this soon,” Beatrice said.

  One by one, the blankets were presented to people whose names were called. This, she guessed, was the beginning of the potlatch. Emily looked over her shoulder to see if BCPP boats were bearing down on them.

  Drummers carried the log drum into the bighouse, and drumming started again as people filed in. Emily tied Billy’s leash to a tree, and gave him water and food. Hemlock bows decorating the doorway brushed her cheek when she entered with Tillie, and wood smoke stung her eyes. A quavering hollow rattle startled her. Raven, all beak and tarred bark feathers, swooped across the room on a cord. A man poured grease onto the fire, which crackled more and lit up the room.

  Emily and Tillie’s family sat where they were directed to. She felt the bench vibrating beneath her. A whistle hooted like a ship’s horn. Panic seized her. Was it the BCPP? She whirled around. No. Only Dzunukwa carved on an interior house post, her cavernous cheeks familiar yet fearsome. Somehow the whistle sounded as though it were coming right through her fat, open mouth. Then the room grew ominously quiet, like the silent tension before the rising of a theater curtain.

  Chief Tlii-Tlaalaadzi walked once around the floor, his arm a steady scythe through smoky air. White down and feathers floated out of his headdress like swirling snow. With statuesque grace, he saluted Chief Wakias, the thirteen other chiefs and dignitaries, the guests from other bands, and finally the Mamalilikala people. His speaker planted his staff into the ground and gave the welcome, accentuating certain words by gesticulating with both hands, tilting his head, raising his eyebrows, bobbing up and down, bending his knees, shaking his clenched fist. It was a ritualistic world, foreign, forbidden, and utterly fascinating.

  The chief sat with a man wearing a bear-claw headdress shaped like a candelabra. Beaks hung from his robe. Emily thought he must be a shaman. She visualized him rattling his bear claws over a sick woman’s stomach, chanting syllables linking her with earth and seasons, breathing down her throat the steam of herbs and skunk cabbage roots.

  Silhouetted against the open door, a man decorated entirely in hemlock branches crouched. He wore a head ring of branches, a skirt of branches. Branches crisscrossed his chest and hung from his shoulders. Except for circles around his eyes, his face was blackened with charcoal which, together with his expression, made him look possessed.

  “He’s a Haa’maatsa, a cannibal dancer,” Beatrice explained. “Don’t be afraid. It’s not real.”

  He danced into the room to staccato drumbeats, squatting as if he were carrying something large in his empty arms. In spite of the imagined weight of the thing, he rose up frequently, stepping lightly to the drumbeat. No one could carry a real dead body the way he was pantomiming. Drums pounded in Emily’s chest, tensing her shoulders. This was one of the dances that caused such Christian outrage. She shouldn’t watch, but she couldn’t look away.

  The dancer’s movements conveyed both attraction and repulsion toward the body. Forces of good and evil unleashed themselves in his movements. He hurled the body down but couldn’t wrench himself away. He lunged closer, circling the empty air in which he saw the body. Chants joined the pulse of drums, louder, faster, halting abruptly, and breaking into rapid broken-rhythmed tapping. He bent down and it did appear that he bit, then leapt, then bit again, tortured by his urge, until at a resounding boom, he flung himself away from what he saw and disappeared behind a wooden screen, spent, the demon exorcised. Good had reigned. Or so she chose to think.

  They had trusted her with this, a grisly pantomime of a morality play shrouded in secrecy, and she would tell no one. She had crossed a line. A chasm lay behind her, separating her from most other white people. Yet this didn’t make her Indian. She dangled in a middle ether. She wondered if Claude had ever seen a Haa’maatsa dance. He hadn’t mentioned it. Maybe he’d been trusted with it too, and was keeping the secret.

  Six men carried in a carved wooden feast dish, eight feet long. It tore her breath away. It was Dzunukwa reclining, her calves and arms supporting her. Her trunk, breasts, kneecaps, and navel were cavities steaming with food. The bearers set the giantess directly in front of the chiefs. Ceremoniously, Chief Tlii-Tlaalaadzi touched each of the cavities with a staff as if blessing them.

  Tillie whispered, “See? Dzunukwa is the Wealth Giver too.”

  Bestower and P
lunderer, all one. Maybe all people had need of such beings to account for lack and plenty, good and evil.

  Stewards using three-foot carved ladles served the chief from Dzunukwa’s cheeks and eyes. They presented food from the breasts to the visiting chiefs, from the navel to the shaman. Seeing these men, their robes heavy with bird beaks and animal teeth, eat as if eating Dzunukwa’s entrails struck Emily with awe. She envisaged Hayward James carving such a dish, and Beatrice sewing teeth and abalone shells in heraldic patterns on robes, using her grandmother’s awl to punch holes in the puffin beaks and attaching them as fringe to a shaman’s apron to rattle when he walked. Then she imagined herself doing the same thing.

  Women presented the kneecap bowls to clan leaders, who served their families. Others brought in three-foot alder serving dishes shaped like canoes and filled with fish, and smaller Wolf and Frog bowls, all to be distributed around the room.

  At some signal from the drummers, Dzunukwa crept in. With lustrous white eyes, blood red cheek cavities, wild black hair, a basket on her back, the masked ogress danced, calling, “Huu, huu.” Children in the front rows recoiled.

  A Raven dancer clad in feathers leapt in through the door and swirled around the room, cedar bark strands flying behind him as a tail. Giant wings flapped, the wingspan ten feet across, creating a great wind. Jack shrank back against her legs.

  The mask the Raven dancer wore was a handsome work of sculpture, painted in blue and red and black, the cedar grain showing satiny in unpainted places. A terrifying three-foot beak opened to reveal another mask inside, a placid child’s face—Annie Marie’s face, Emily thought—then clamped shut. Raven, the Trickster offering a child, then shutting her away, showing his catch, then hiding her. Another dancer wore a crescent moon mask which opened to show the sun. Nothing was as it seemed. The masks changed right before her eyes. In wavering firelight, birds transformed into boys and then changed back into birds. Big wooden crabs, untouched by dancers, scuttled across the dirt floor. Little canoes with tiny wooden paddlers moving their paddles slid after them. Eagle with flailed bark tail feathers dove down from the rafters at a young man sitting near the chief. The young man pretended to be afraid and the crowd loved it.

  Emily was dizzy following it all. Drumbeats pounded in her chest. Her ears throbbed, but she succumbed willingly to the drums, the smoke, the phantasmagoria of lunging, swooping creatures. It was theater and spectacle and carnival and religion and living, moving art, and she was breathless to take it all in.

  A group of men burst in the door wearing officers’ uniforms. “By the authority vested in me as captain in the British Columbia Provincial Police—”

  Laughter drowned him out, as if this were a skit. Emily froze. He tried again. The laughter was weaker this time. A few dancers slipped out the door carrying their masks. Older children ran out after them. One of the officers raised his pistol to the ceiling, ready to shoot. The people quieted. The captain spoke. “By order of the premier of the Province of British Columbia, Dominion of Canada, and under the auspices of William Ditchburn, regional superintendent for the Department of Indian Affairs, I order you to cease the activities of this potlatch.”

  “Bunch of bullies strutting in here creating a foofaraw,” Emily muttered.

  William Halliday strode in, his feet spread wide as if he were a general. Behind him came Reverend Hall, his roving scrutiny accounting for who was here. For an instant, his eyes met hers, filling her with dread. Maybe white people could be arrested for potlatching. A law’s a law. She clasped her sketch sack, just in case. But no. She was part of this. She would stand her ground, even though it meant she’d never be invited to stay at the mission house again.

  The drumming began softly, slowly—the shared pulse of the whole room. An officer fired his pistol at the ceiling. She heard Billy bark outside. All drumming stopped. The little regiment marched into the center of the bighouse. All the chiefs rose in unison. The captain consulted William Halliday, then shouted rudely right at Chief Tlii-Tlaalaadzi, not at his speaker. “I order you to stop this potlatch immediately. You know well the potlatch ban in the Indian Act. ‘Anyone who engages in or assists in celebrating the Indian festival known as the potlatch or in the native dance known as the tamananawas shall be liable to imprisonment.’ ”

  Pompous zealot. Oh, wouldn’t she like to heap a tower of scorn on him, right here in front of everybody.

  Chief Tlii-Tlaalaadzi stepped forward. His voice rolled out deep and solid. “We are doing what our laws command us to do, what we have always done. It is an ancient law that bids us dance, older than your Canadian law.”

  “It’s a savage practice and a deplorable custom which will never advance your people in the scale of civilization. Furthermore, it’s against the statutes of the Dominion of Canada,” the captain said.

  “It’s no different than Christmas,” someone shouted back.

  That unleashed hot speeches shooting back and forth across the room while the men of Mimkwamlis carried the Dzunukwa feast dish out of view. People hid masks and birds under blankets, and carried off the dance paraphernalia.

  “Chief, order that this potlatch be stopped or you must come with me.”

  It seemed an impasse. The air was charged. Everyone rose.

  “I will never order my people to stop what their ancestors have told them to do. It is not harming you, and it is not harming Canada. Let it be known that we, the Mamalilikala Qwe’Qwa’Sot’Enox’ of Mimkwamlis, will never stop potlatching.”

  He swept right through the group of BCPP who parted for him to pass, his button blanket flaring. White down billowed out of his headdress. Men in the regiment raised their rifles as a signal that no one should follow them out. One of the BCPP carried something large wrapped in a blanket.

  Everyone was stunned into silence. Emily was petrified with worry that people would think she had let out the location to the Halls or to Halliday. Eventually, elders passed from group to group to account for the children of each family.

  “Why did so many children run?” Emily asked.

  “If they belonged in St. Mike’s School, they’d be beaten and locked in,” Beatrice explained.

  People found sleeping places for the night, some in the bighouse, some in the forest. Emily brought Billy inside, and settled on a wide sleeping platform, cradling Jack like a lost kitten. Hearing the crooning of mothers and the various rhythms of sleep sighs from young and old felt strangely comforting.

  Toby banged a stick on the platform below until Tillie made him stop. He pulled away from her and drew his knees to his chest. It was a hard time to be Kwakiutl.

  Mac offered her his new blanket.

  “Thank you, Mac. You’re a kind man.” She draped it over herself and Jack. “They knew it might happen, didn’t they? That’s why they gave out the blankets first, to hide the masks.”

  He managed a nod.

  “I’m glad I came.”

  “We are too.”

  • • •

  In the morning, the atmosphere was leaden. People moved slowly, murmuring instead of talking. Chief Wakias spoke privately to a group at the far end of the room. No one brought out any masks. No one danced. Drummers slumped behind the drum. Still, there was a kind of victory in just being there together.

  Word flew through the bighouse. The Raven mask was missing. “They took it for their court case,” Beatrice said. “After that, a museum will get it. If not a mask, then a child, for St. Mike’s. We were lucky this time.”

  By mid-morning, the business of the potlatch went on quietly. The chief’s speaker held in one hand the carved talking staff; in the other, a black Dzunukwa mask gleaming silver at the forehead. Not once did he do the bobbing movement to accentuate his words.

  “What did he say?”

  “The Mamalilikala will never stop potlatching.”

  “Nothing about the raid?”

  “No.”

  She was stunned. Was it too common to be worthy of note?

&nbs
p; Holding the Dzunukwa mask before him, the speaker and his assistants began the distribution of goods. Maybe that was the response—in the face of theft, the giving, an aggressive act, to go right on, Dzunukwa leading them to put themselves back together again.

  Relief washed over Emily when she was called to receive a share of smoked salmon and a small dish stamped with Royal Albert—Bone China—England on the bottom. If they suspected her, they surely would not have made this presentation.

  Her final gift was a twined spruce-root rain hat in the same graceful, curved shape as on the welcome figure. “I will wear this with pride that I received it at a Mamalilikala potlatch,” she said solemnly.

  Mac chuckled. “You say you’re going up the Skeena River?”

  She nodded.

  “You’ll need it.”

  People laughed, and Tillie held up her arms, fingers down, wiggling them, signifying rain. Emily put on the hat and grinned. People smiled back and she grinned more broadly.

  23: Willow

  “Not many women take passage on the Skeena River.”

  Emily turned from the sternwheeler’s railing to face a man with an exceptionally narrow head and a mustache that perched on his upper lip.

  “Especially white women traveling alone,” he added, leaning with too-casual familiarity on the railing close to her, baring brown-stained teeth to chew his cigar.

  She moved back a step.

  “What might your business be in Indian territory?” He emphasized the last two words as if he were speaking to a child.

  She looked at the willows along the bank. Her business? To become big, like the Mamalilikala spirit was big. To find in herself the Wild Forest Woman alive and fearless.

  “I want to see all the poles I can,” she said.

  “You working for the government?”

  “No.”

  “Railway?” His lower left eyelid twitched.

  “No.”

  “Museum?”

  “No. I’m working for myself. I’m an artist.”