Of Babies and Bathwater
February 2020
It’s beautifully sunny as Beth Anne and I stand in silent contemplation on the balcony of the Watchmen’s cabin at Sɢ̠ang Gwaay looking across the water to Kunghit, the last landmass of any significant size in the 400 island archipelago that makes up Haida Gwaii, the islands of the people. Bounded by the still disputed Dixon Entrance to the north and the treacherously shallow Hecate Strait to the East, these islands hang off the edge of the North American continental shelf, a transitory space between continent and ocean, the last land before Japan. It’s no wonder to me that the Haida worldview situates their territory on the edge of things, envisioning it to be where the veil between perceptible and un-perceptible worlds merge, where bears become human and humans become bear, where trickster Raven released the First People from the giant clam shell that both gestated and imprisoned them.
“Looks like you’re staying here tonight,” says Jay, one of the Watchman, breaking the brooding space Beth and I have created. We both sigh a little in relief. Our clients, novice paddlers now on the 3rd day of an 8-day sea kayaking expedition, sit blithely in the cabin enjoying their lunch, unaware of the building wind and seas that have Beth and I concerned. Overnight stays on Sɢ̠ang Gwaay, a UNESCO world heritage site that hosts an abandoned Haida village with over 30 still standing mortuary poles, are expressly forbidden, except in circumstances like these where the winds make it too dangerous to leave. Secretly I think we’re both relived that Jay made the decision for us. Beth heads into the cabin to tell the group we’re staying put, and I head off down the winding forest path to the pocket beach we arrived on to secure our boats for an overnight stay. Weather days are a strange puncutiation in the normally busy life of a guide, full of an uneasy stillness and far too much time. When I get to the beach there’s a Parks zodiac tied up and three wardens sharing lunch, they wave me over calling with a knowing smirk, “you can’t be that busy today, it’s not like you’re going anywhere!” and “I remember you, you where here last summer too, weren’t you?” Haida Gwaii is like that. It’s a place where people remember you.
Over cold salmon and bread we shoot the shit, talking about how our seasons have been going so far, how unnaturally dry it is, where the best fishing spots are and the precious secrets of how to catch halibut. Brian, who lives in Masset during the winter tells me about a storm that took the roof off of his house, Beau laughs saying that’s why he spends his winters in Europe. The conversation shifts to Beau’s next trip, which museaums and institutions he’ll be meeting with this time, what cities he’ll be visiting. Barcelona. London. Paris. Copenhagen. Lisbon. Frankfurt. Last year he went to Australia too. “We’re focusing on the human remains first,” he says “we’ll work on repatriating the rest of it later.” This warm and frank conversation brings the remarkable reality of this place into perspective. That so many poles remain standing in the ground here, when so many others sit divorsed from their context in instititions around the world- pulled down with ropes, or hacked apart with chainsaws – seems almost miraculous.
This is problem of babies and bathwater. How do we know what to keep and what to discard? When a way of thinking, a system of constructing reality, or the dispositif that allows for the creation of a certain commonsense causes irrevocable harm to some while making irrevocable and lasting gains for others, how can we acknowledge the gains without diminishing the accompanying losses? That such theories of the efficacy of art exist to contest each other hardly seems to matter when one creates the conditions to house the cultural properties of those othered by power, and the other is used to justify their continued holding. When the notion of aesthetic distance creates the conditions for the misrecognition of an object central to the legal and historical systems of a culture as merely art, or even worse as merely decoration, and allows for it to be carted across the globe, displayed for those with the privilege of an indifferent gaze, does it matter what was gained through its inception in another field? When will we leave behind the patriarchal notion that impersonal effects are more important than personal affects?
Beau tells me that he takes bentwood boxes with him on his trips, made by the children in Skidegate using traditional techniques: heating, steaming and bending a single plank of cedar to make the body of the box, stitching the seam with cedar roots, fitting the base and lid snuggly. When Beau succedes in his negotiations for the return of the bones of his ancestors from their uneasy institutional rest he places them in these boxes with care, bringing them back to be reclaimed by their territory, on the edge of things, in the space between preceptable and un-preceptable worlds.