A Story as Sharp as a Knife, page 4
English-speaking Haida now call these islands Haida Gwaii,2
the Islands of the People. That name became official only in 2010.
Atlases printed up until that date all show the archipelago as the
Queen Charlotte Islands, a British colonial name imposed in 1787. In
English, older people, including many Haida, still often refer to the
place as "the Charlottes." This politically incorrect and affectionate
nickname may endure for quite some time. The islands lie at the same
latitude as Ireland, the Netherlands, Lake Baikal, Warsaw and Berlin,
but in the grip of different weather, in a different fold of time.
The Gregorian calendar meant nothing in Haida Gwaii at the
time of Ghandl's birth. It was at most a mysterious rumor - like the
Christian faith, the roman alphabet, the Greenwich prime meridian
and the reigns of the English kings. But if later missionary records are
accurate, the year of Ghandl's birth, by European reckoning, was 1851.
He belonged to a family called the Qayahl Llaanas, the Sealion
People, of the Eagle side or moiety. Because inheritance is matrilineal
in the Haida world, all children, male and female, take the family
name of their mother. Ghandl's father (whose name I do not know)
belonged to a family or lineage called Hlghaaxhitgu Llaanas, the
Pebble Beach People, of the Raven side. But Ghandl was a Sealion
Person, because that was his mother's lineage, and he was an Eagle,
because that was his mother's family's moiety or side.
The people of Qaysun abandoned their village about 1875, after
a series of smallpox epidemics had swept through Haida Gwaii.
With other refugees, they built a new town at an old site known as
Xayna, which means Sunshine, on the sheltered east side of the archipelago, where traders came more often. In the 1890s, after more
bouts of smallpox, measles and other disease, the survivors moved
to Skidegate, the new mission town displacing the old Haida village of Hlghagilda.
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Hlghagilda is west of Attawapiskat and Wetaskiwin, east of
Petropavlovsk and Unalaska, south of Tuktoyaktuk and Chutine, and
north of five thousand miles of open ocean and a rock called Pitcairn
Island. If you triangulate from Paris and New York, Jerusalem and
Rome, the Haida village of Hlghagilda may seem, in consequence,
remote. It is true the outside world has taken from it less than what
it offered and a great deal more than it could give - and that is one
definition of remote. But it needed, and still needs, little or nothing
of what the colonial world can offer. In that sense, it is not remote
at all. In fact, like every place where birds sing and people pause to
listen and a storyteller speaks, it is the center of the world.
*
The verb to be brave in Haida is sqaatsi. A number of names, titles and nicknames have grown from this root. There are elaborate forms
like Sqaatsidaahlging (Belly Full of Bravery) and simple ones like
Sqaatsigins (Always Brave), Nang Sqaatsis (One Who Is Brave) and
Sqaatsigaay (Bravery Itself). The latter name, used by a headman of
the Qayahl Llaanas family of Qaysun, caught the ears of the early
British traders who anchored near the town and was transmuted
into Scots Guy. The few British sailors who knew of Qaysun then
began to call it Scots Guy's Cove, and the people of Qaysun learned
that Scots Guy was a handy name to use in all transactions involving Europeans.3 A short-lived gold rush around 1852 gave Qaysun
another English name, Gold Harbour, but the anchorage is charted
even now as Skotsgai Bay.
In 1884, Methodist missionaries started a steady campaign of
conversion among the smallpox survivors in southern Haida Gwaii.
Hundreds of southern Haida were baptized over the next few years,
and in the village of Xayna on Sunday, 25 December 1887, Ghandl of
the Qayahl Llaanas joined their number.4 The officiating clergyman
recorded Ghandl's age as 36 and interpreted his name in the colloquial terms of the time : not as Fresh-Water-Person of the Sealion
People but as Water of Scots Guy's Family. The missionary gave this
name what he regarded as a proper Christian form, and Ghandl was
henceforth known to speakers of English as Walter McGregor.
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Stormblown poles in the empty village of Qaysun, on the west coast of Haida
Gwaii, summer 1901. In the foreground is the housepole of Wiixhaws of the Qayahl Llaanas, still erect in front of the disintegrating houseframe. Photograph by C.F.
Newcombe.
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The worst single outbreak of smallpox to hit Haida Gwaii came
in 1862, when Ghandl was about eleven. During that year alone,
the Haida population fell by more than half.5 Six years later came a
severe epidemic of measles, lethal to many more native people up
and down the Northwest Coast. Ghandl survived these disasters and
others, but sometime before his move to Hlghagilda in the 1890s,
a bout of smallpox or measles cost him his sight.6 From that point
on, the time he might have spent on the traditional professions of
an adult Haida male - fishing, seahunting, woodworking, trading -
went largely into listening instead. Even in his forties, he possessed
extraordinary skill as an oral poet and extraordinary insight as a
scholar of the seen and the unseen. In the midst of continuous death,
evacuation and destruction, followed by aggressive transformation
of his culture, Ghandl collected the remnants of an old and fundamentally celebratory tradition. We owe him much of what we have
in the way of classical Haida literature, and much of what we know
of Haida thought before the Christian missionization.
*
Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas of Qaysun, or Walter McGregor, the
blind poet of Sunshine and Sealion Town, spent the month of November 1900 telling stories - that is to say, dictating his condensed,
tightly woven narrative poetry - to a 27-year-old linguist from the
state of Maine. The linguist was John Reed Swanton (1873-1958), a
self-effacing man who spent a year in Haida Gwaii and years more
making sense of what he learned while he was there. He became,
by what we might call accident, a figure of considerable importance
in Haida cultural history.
A third important person joined Ghandl and Swanton at each
session : a young bilingual Haida whose Christian name was Henry
Moody ( c. 1871-1945). He was Swanton's tutor, assistant and guide,
and during these long sessions of dictation - typically six hours a
day - he was the storyteller's primary audience and the linguist's
second tongue and set of ears. His task was to listen to the poem
and repeat it sentence by sentence in a loud, clear, slow voice, proving to the poet he had heard each word and giving Swanton time to
write it down. 7 Ghandl spoke, a sentence or two at a time, Moody
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repeated, and Swanton wrote, hour after hour, day after day. On
one of those wet November days, Ghandl began a poem with the
following words :
Ll gidaagang wansuuga.
Kkuxu gyaa' at gutgu lla giistingdyas.
Ll xhitiit ttsinhlghwaanggwang qawdi
llanagaay diitsi qahlagaagang wansuuga.
Ttsalaay waghii gwatxhaawasi
5
suughii lla qaagyaganggandi xhan
ll gyuugha hlgitghun kyingaangas.
Gyaanhaw gha la qaagasi.
Ga jaada sting suugha ghaadangdyas.
Tlaagi giina sqqagidaasi gu
10
hlgitghun qqaal ttlsting xhaxiiwas.
Kkit qqul ghaada qqaghattiisgasi.
Lla qindi qawdihaw
lla dawghattlxhasi.... 8
14
There was a child of good family, they say.
[ 1 ]
He wore two marten-skin blankets.
After he took up the shooting of birds,
he went inland, uphill from the village, they say.
Going through the pines,
just to where the ponds lay,
he heard geese calling.
Then he went in that direction.
There were two women bathing in a lake.
Something lay there on the shore.
10
Two goose skins were thrown over it.
Under their tails were patches of white.
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After watching for a while,
he swooped in.
He sat on the two skins.
The women asked to have them back.
He asked the better-looking one to marry him.
The other one replied.
<<
I am smarter. Marry me.>>>
20
<<
And she said that she accepted him, they say.
<<
You caught us bathing in a lake
that belongs to our father.
Now give me my skin.>>>
He gave it back.
She slipped it on
while she was swimming in the lake.
A goose swam in the lake then,
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and then she started calling,
and then she flew, they say,
though leaving her younger sister
sickened her heart.
She circled above them.
Then she flew off, they say.
She passed through the sky.
He gave the younger woman one of his marten-skin blankets,
and he brought her home, they say.
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A two-headed redcedar stood at the edge of the village,
40
and he put his wife's skin between the trunks.
Then he brought her into his father's house.
The headman's son had taken a wife.
[ 2 ]
So his father invited the people, they say.
They offered her food.
She did nothing but smell it.
She ate no human food at all.
Later, her husband's mother
started steaming silverweed, 9 they say.
Then she paid closer attention.
When her husband's mother was still busy cooking,
50
she asked her husband
to ask her to hurry, they say.
They placed it before her.
It vanished.
And then they began to feed her this only, they say.
After a time, as he was sleeping,
his wife lay down beside him,
and her skin was cold.
When it happened again,
he decided to watch her, they say.
He lay still in the bed,
60
and he felt her moving away from him slowly, they say.
Then she went out.
He followed behind her.
She walked along the beach in front of the village.
She went where the skin was kept.
From there, she flew.
She landed beyond the point at the edge of town.
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He started toward her.
She was eating the eelgrass 10 that grew there,
and the breaking waves were lifting her back toward shore.
70
He saw her, they say.
And then she flew back where they kept her skin.
He got back to the house
before she did, they say.
There he lay down,
and soon his wife lay down beside him, cold.
A famine began in the village, they say.
One day, without leaving her seat, she said,
<<
80
She went there.
They followed her.
Food of many kinds was lying there :
silverweed and clover roots. 11
They carried it home.
And her father-in-law invited the people, they say.
When that was entirely gone,
she said it again :
<<
90
They went there.
There were piles, again, of many kinds of food.
Again they brought it home.
And her father-in-law again invited the people.
Then, they say, someone in the village said,
<<
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The woman heard it.
She got up to leave at that moment, they say.
Her husband tried to dissuade her.
No use.
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She had settled on leaving.
It was the same
when he tried to dissuade her in front of the town.
She went where her skin was.
Then she flew.
She flew in circles over the town,
and leaving her husband sickened her heart, they say.
And then she passed through the sky.
After that, her husband was constantly weeping, they say.
An old man had a house at the edge of the village.
[ 3 ]
He went there and asked,
110
<<
<<
whose mother and father are not of this world.>>>
And the old man began to fit him out.
He gave him a bone marlinspike
for working with cedar-limb line.
Then he said,
<<
Get two sharp wedges too.
And a comb and a cord and salmon roe
and a coho skin and a spearhead.
Get all these.>>>
After he gathered what he needed,
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he came back to him, they say.
<<
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<<
Take the narrowest of the trails that lead from my house.>>>
Then he set off.
After walking awhile,
[ 4.1 ]
he came upon someone infested with lice.
He was trying to catch the lice by turning around.
After he had stared at him awhile,
the other said,
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<<
I have long been expecting you.>>>
Then he went up close,
and he combed out his hair.
He rubbed him with oil
and picked off the lice.
And he gave him the comb and the rest of the oil.
The other one said,
<<
Again he set off.
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After walking awhile,
[ 4.2 ]
he saw a small mouse in front of him.
There was a cranberry in her mouth.
Then she came to a fallen tree,
and she looked for a way to go over it.
He let her step onto his open hand
and put her across.
She laid her tail up between her ears
and ran ahead.
Not far away, she went under some ferns.
150
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He rested there,
and something said,
<<>>
Then he parted the fronds of the ferns.
He was standing in front of a large house.
He walked through the door.
There was the headwoman dishing up cranberries.
She spoke with grace.
Her voice had big round eyes.
After she'd offered him something to eat,
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Mouse Woman said to him,
<<
back from my berry patch,
you helped me.
I intend to lend you something that I wore
for stalking prey when I was younger.>>>
She brought out a box.
She pulled out four more boxes within boxes.
In the innermost box was the skin of a mouse
with small bent claws.
She said to him,
<<
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Small though it was, he got into it.
It was easy.
He went up the wall and into the roof of the house.
