Gathering up the dead and bringing them home

by Paul Sullivan

Globe and Mail, August 28, 2002

In the 19th century, thousands of people died of a terrible disease, a plague brought by immigrants from another land. The local people had no immunity to this disease, and there was a fear that they would be wiped out altogether. Citing their concern to preserve a record of the culture, collectors from among the immigrants looted burial grounds, gathered up the coffins and shipped them to faraway museums, where the contents could be studied and displayed.

These particular locals were the Haida of the Queen Charlotte Islands, off the coast of British Columbia. In 1850, the native population was between 6,000 and 9,000. By 1915, there were 588 left, the rest carried off by smallpox caught from European traders. Now a minority of 2,000 in a population on the collection of islands they call Haida Gwaii, they are about to gather up their dead and bring them home, rescuing them from the role of artifacts and repatriating them as ancestors.

On Sept. 18, Haida representatives will journey to the Museum of Natural History in New York City and bring back the remains of 48 ancestors who have been at the museum for the past 100 years, carrying them across the border in traditional bentwood coffins.

While the New York museum is co-operating with the repatriation, there are still a couple of hundred Haida ancestors languishing in file cabinets around the world, including the Field Museum in Chicago, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and the British Museum in London. The British Museum is particularly loath to part with its plunder, as it is trying to build a case to hold onto the more significant spoils of the British Empire, such as the Elgin Marbles snagged from the Parthenon.

These are not prehistoric matters, any more than the potlatch law passed in 1884 outlawing the ceremonial cornerstone of the coastal native culture can be dismissed as ancient history. Indeed, the native equivalent of the baby-boom generation is still trying to recover from the residential schools experiment that lingered into the 1960s.

The story of Canada has been written in the attempt to reconcile two solitudes; still, in Quebec, the license plates read Je me souviens,indicating how slow and painstaking the process of reconciliation must be. Yet in B.C., the aboriginal thirst for justice has been most recently met by the referendum on aboriginal treaty negotiations, a thinly veiled bid to dispatch native claims using the blunt instrument of the majority.

But even though most of the voters who mailed in their ballots succumbed to the temptation to put the Indians in their place, the Gordon Campbell government has won, at best, a Pyrrhic victory. For one thing, Ottawa has quietly opposed the referendum, and not just because some of the questions (such as taxation) intrude on federal jurisdiction. And for another, First Nations such as the Haida keep winning court battles that force the province to treat them more like sovereign entities and less like the inconvenient vestiges of a dim past.

The Haida have staked claim to all of the Queen Charlottes and the sea around them, a claim that includes the Campbell government's shining hope for future economic prosperity for all British Columbians -- the offshore oil and gas deposits under the Hecate Strait.

Guujaaw, the artist/politician Haida leader, believes that 10,000 years of uninterrupted residency entitle his people to own Haida Gwaii outright. But the reality of 150 years of immigrant European settlement has led the Haida to claim a more realistic, if limited, aboriginal title, a claim that has just been upheld by the B.C. Court of Appeal. Logging companies and governments are now required by law to deal with the Haida before resources are developed further.

We can expect a people who have been nearly wiped out through contact with our European forebears to drive a hard bargain. Considering the cavalier brutality they have experienced at our hands, a brutality echoed in the Campbell government's ill-conceived referendum, it's surprising there aren't more native leaders who echo the bitterness of Bill Wilson, the controversial former head of the First Nations Summit who once said, in an unguarded moment (one of many): "We should have killed you all." Instead, they have chosen to show faith in the rule of law.

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