December 5, 2004
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
The New York Times
KIDEGATE, British Columbia - In this rainy land of scarlet dawns and
big black bears, workers are busy constructing a 40,000-square-foot
extension to a museum that sits in a bushy cove where gray whales come to
eat herring and roll over the shell beach to scratch barnacles off their
bellies.
It is an ambitious project, not least because the hundreds of
traditional masks, carvings and blankets the building is meant to display
for the native Haida people still belong to some of the world's most
prestigious museums. Resistance to the return of artifacts is likely, but
the Haida have become used to challenging the rich and powerful, and
winning.
Today they are in the vanguard of what appears to be a renaissance of
Indian nations in Canada that legal scholars and others say could determine
ultimate control over many resources vital to Canada's future, including
oil, timber and diamonds.
The Haida won a landmark case in November in Canada's Supreme Court
obliging British Columbia to consult with them over land use anywhere on
their traditional homelands here on the Queen Charlotte Islands. The
decision is expected to have a sweeping impact on similar Indian claims
across Canada.
Adapting their old warrior ways to federal and provincial courtrooms,
the Haida have already managed to slow efforts to clear-cut their lands by
Weyerhaeuser and other companies. They have stalled plans by Petro-Canada
and other companies to drill in ancestral waters should a government
moratorium be lifted along the coast.
They are not alone in their efforts. Native bands are similarly
exerting increasing control over natural resources across vast stretches of
northern Canada that promise to be vital economically in a future of global
warming. The developments have pleased environmentalists. But some legal
experts warn that the stirrings represent a danger to the unity of a nation
already struggling to keep separatist leanings in Quebec under control.
There has not been a full-blown public debate on the issue, partly because
most Canadians agree that native people deserve better conditions.
"When you wed the notion of sovereign self-governments to land claims
that are far-reaching and poisonous to investors, you create an
ungovernable, uneconomic and unharmonious community of Canada," John D.
Weston, a constitutional lawyer who has worked for the British Columbia
government, said in an interview.
The balance of power is already tipping in a nation where a vast
majority of the population lives within 100 miles of the United States
border and rarely thinks about developments in the far north. In the
Northwest Territories, the 4,000-member Dogrib band last year won the right
to control fishing, hunting and industrial development over 15,000 square
miles of territory.
The nearby Deh Cho band has managed to stall a $6 billion gas pipeline
project planned by ExxonMobil and several other companies through its
traditional lands until Ottawa makes major financial and environmental
concessions.
In the snowy woods of northern Quebec, the Cree made a deal three
years ago with the provincial government giving them full autonomy and
substantial powers to help manage mining, forestry and hydroelectric energy
development.
After Eskimos gained their own Arctic territory, Nunavut, in 1999,
they have since won self-rule in northern Quebec and logging rights over a
vast forest in Labrador.
"The groundwork is being laid for the possibility that aboriginal
people will have more power and real participation in national politics,"
said Dara Culhane, an anthropologist at Simon Fraser University.
For the Haida, their revival has yet to penetrate the consciousness of
most Canadians. But already their efforts have produced a bright new chapter
in a history of highs and lows that stretches back many centuries.
The Haida carved the mightiest totem polls and swiftest canoes out of
giant cedar trees before the Europeans arrived in the mid-18th century on
this remote archipelago. They were fierce conquerors and vibrant
storytellers, and their rich culture spread up and down the coast.
While never conquered in war, they were nearly wiped out by smallpox -
reduced from a population of 6,000 or more to 500 by the late 19th century.
Canadian government policies until the late 1960's focused on forcing them
to assimilate, leaving only a handful of people speaking Haida and a sad
tableau of poverty and addiction.
There is still a lot of unemployment and substance abuse here, but
there are signs of a rebirth. While the elders are taping 25,000 Haida
idiomatic expressions to save the language, the use of Haida phrases in
everyday conversation has become fashionable at the local high school. There
is a boomlet of construction in totem poles and longhouses. Women are
spearing abalone again.
In the village of Massett, the first Haida canoe wedding in the
traditional style in 80 years was held last year, with the groom not
permitted to paddle ashore with his family and friends for the ceremony
until he agreed to love his bride forever and serve her breakfast in bed for
the rest of her life.
The Haida, like many native groups, has a high birthrate, and the
population has grown again, to about 4,000 on the islands. A resurgence in
handicrafts and spiritual healing has bolstered self-esteem.
When Ottawa created a new $20 bill this summer decorated with a print
of a Haida myth depicting a raven, a frog, a grizzly bear and his human
wife, the Bear Mother, the government intended to honor the ascendant band.
"We've come into a new age," said Gilbert Parnell, a 39-year-old
guide. "There's so much strength we find in our songs, dances and stories
and we need to keep up the momentum to clean up our nation."
When the provincial government withdrew financing for a local program
to maintain the salmon population three years ago, the Haida Nation took
over operations to save jobs and keep Pallant Creek teeming with chum and
coho salmon. The Haida are pushing forward with a land use program, using
computer software to map surveys of bear dens, seabird nesting areas and
other habitat to protect them from logging.
"We're a few thousand people with no resources except a stubborn
belief that we are the owners of this land just as our parents and
grandparents believed," said Guujaaw, the charismatic Haida president who
uses only one name, while sitting on a log along a forest river. "If they
fly the Canadian flag over the land, they think they have the right to spoil
it. For us, that is unacceptable."
Much of the renewed energy was generated in recent years by a
successful effort to repatriate 500 ancestral remains from private
collections and major museums in Canada and the United States, including the
American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Village youth took part in making and painting burial boxes, cedar
mats and button blankets to properly lay to rest ancestors who had been
taken off the islands by researchers and thieves.
Harold Williams, a 20-year-old student, said he was so inspired when
he painted burial boxes and made cedar mats for the burials that it changed
his life. He went on to make an animated movie of a Haida warrior capturing
and slaying an escaped slave.
"Its part of our history after all," he said. "We have the weight of
the culture on our shoulders."