By Malcolm McColl
The study of Culturally Modified Trees is the study of human beings working to organize themselves around rainforest resources. What David Garrick, anthropologist, has uncovered is the "transgenerational" management of Hanson Island (Yukusem) by First Nations at the north end of the Inside Passage, and it is amazing.
This transgenerational management of First Nation forest resources in coastal rainforests was comprised of a complex arrangement of activities. Special preserves of rainforest under carefully defined jurisdictions were ‘managed’ to create and provide essential resources.
Social groups conducted large scale horticulture within particular groves of cedar trees on Yukusem’s 16 square kilometres, doing so on a truly grand scale. Together they made cedar trees do the most amazing things horticultural. David Garrick uncovered cedar-shaping in CMTs during his long and fruitful tenure of archaeology onsite at Yukusem. This amazing horticulture involves planning that spans centuries.
This horticulture was done in a manner that shaped trees and modified them to produce a surplus of bark while maintaining the integrity of a living cedar tree. These First Nations maximized cedar bark production for a particular resource and did so in a way that left the cedar tree to heal, thrive, and produce even surplus bark. It was a strategy of development that occurred because cedar bark was a staple product in their social development. This cultural product was used in an apparently endless array. The rule for many centuries, even millennia, was to cultivate giant cedars to make trees produce surplus cedar bark into a raw material for production of manufactured goods.
Nothing was left to chance or went to waste. The term old growth forest was meaningless to a culture that practised continuous and highly specialized cultivation in the growth of the forests over millennia. Even a burnt forest was an opportunity to exploit a different set of highly prized resources. Everything was planned around the need to produce cedar bark for future generations.
A prime example of the transgenerational planning policy occurs on a site called Bear Grove on Yukusem. David Garrick’s maps point out the existence of at least 55 shaped cedars per hectare in the Bear Grove sector of the island. This is an intense concentration of evidence for creating surplus bark. From concentrations of CMTs of this magnitude it becomes obvious that an organized effort was made to cultivate and exploit cedar bark in patterns showing sustainable, long-term, transgenerational planning processes.
The people of Yukusem living 1,350 years ago cultivated a specific tree to furnish Namgis carver Beau Dick with raw material for his canoe project in 2008. Also in this transgenerational context, those people provided a chain of modern evidence to Harry Alfred and Don Svanvik, CMT researchers from Alert Bay, B.C., who are able to clarify First Nation present day jurisdiction over Yukusem cedar groves. The vital (and missing) evidence was produced from messages in trees hundreds of years old. The fingerprints of this jurisdiction have been uncovered in all the lands and forests of B.C., even so, it was a long and arduous 20th century for the folks around Yukusem (as everywhere).
Only in 2004 did the First Nations recover their jurisdiction over Yukusem. CMTs studied in this way by David Garrick therefore provided scientific resources and empirical evidence giving First Nations the necessary proof of a their missing jurisdiction.
It is odd to note, however, how there was no apparent conflict over the management of the Yukusem resources until about 1930, says Garrick. His archaeological timeline shows that before the cataclysmic culture shock treatments took form (residential schools, banning of potlatchs, et al), the arrival of industrial foresters was a not unwelcome event to a degree. The industrial foresters were cooperative by only taking a few trees from Yukusem’s treasured groves, and David reports they apparently left cedar trees untouched, leaving them to the cedar shapers who used the resources in specially managed (and closely regarded and cultivated) patterns.
The two management paradigms co-existed! It required an exercise of government policy to alienate the First Nations from their ownership, management, and jurisdiction over the cedar shaping activities of their culture. From the time such draconian policies were introduced until Yukusem Heritage Society was formed in 2004 the Yukusem cedar groves were facing dire consequences. David Garrick’s archaeological study was the only thing standing in their way. In a pleasant turn since his studies began a series of scientific facts have unleashed a people to exert their sovereignty.
An even more compelling figure in the territory, now, sadly, dearly departed, was Beau Dick. He was a some sort of timeless person, He danced in the Big House. He danced in the forest. He was musical, played guitar, wrote songs. He told amazing stories. Some of them even related to his culture.
Beau Dick is recognized as a masterful artist of the Pacific Coast tradition, a leading proponent of the collective experience in producing the art of Coastal Nations . He believed builders and artisans cooperating on big projects was naturally a shared burden, strongly reflecting the traditional values of the traditional nations. “The time-line in the experience is all shared,” he once explained about the intricate details of working his branch of cultural awareness.
Beau was a man with direct connections to the coastal past. Born in 1955 and raised in Kingcome Inlet, B.C. (a deep inlet flowing into the coast), where he stayed until 1965. In the first half of the previous century it was the site of a remote fish cannery and a lot of culturally-oriented individuals.
Beau lived his first ten years with extended family including Elders, uncles and aunts, and others who maintained society of the Big House. There are societies organized in Potlatch culture, the purveyors of their history are 'artists.'
In Kingcome Inlet, Beau clearly described, they lived in close personal contact with the pristine surroundings in Kingcome Inlet, which worked like a petri dish of culture remote enough to sustained in the face of draconian laws about Potlatch, Nationhood, Language, and livelihoods. They continued by hard work, s striving in the conduct of various cultural activities and art forms while they participated in the fisheries and logging in their traditional territories.
These early times for Beau were spent fully immersed in Kwakwala, the language of the nation. He sat among the carvers, these were his father, grandfather, and uncles, acting secretly in traditional societies, Beau listened to a steady stream of conscious histories, legends, laws, jurisdiction in Kwakwala, and Beau learned the way things cultural came to pass and became a significant impressario of the way cultural things would become.
It was a purity of vision, and hugely perceived for the quality of the artform, which conformed to direct interpretations of cultural facts, a tangible historical brand of knowledge about the ways and means of the coast. He was the most knowledgeable historian I ever met.
When Beau was 10 years old the family sent him to Vancouver to live with aunt and uncle so he could get some serious book learning. He was in culture shock for a few adolescent years. Upon return to the Pacific Northwest the family was separated from Kingcome Inlet and Beau settled into Alert Bay, B.C..
The importance of his early life lessons began to percolate. He came to be a man who lives to learn, and who passes along the lessons to the entire strata of Indigenous people, and, equally, uniformly able to impart those lessons to English speaking people, and the lessons were masterfully illustrated with iconic artistic manifestations.
He would give you a voluminous account an image, a manifestation of art, how it contained specific responsibility to co-exist with legendary stories. His art was a shared experience, a modernized tradition, the art was responsible for keeping a nation existentially important in the Broughton Archipelago.
Beau is a hereditary chief in the Kwakawak Awak society called Homatsa, they call it the 'cannibal society.' I don't know why. It's a warrior society in the coastal clans, they worked in groups of six, and they ran across the land where they held jurisdiction, and plyed the waters.
They conduct a particular form of economy and governance called the Potlatch.
In the lands and waters of this country, it was their history told in the art prior to the imposition of the Indian Act and Beau was able to reproduce the lost histories in story, song, dance, and art.
 |
| Beau Dick points at sketch of the Yukusem culture camp |
The first cat in Kwaguilth
Beau Dick recounts a couple of stories passed down by generations in relation to first contact with Europeans on the coast of the Pacific North West. One of them describes the fate of the first domesticated feline, and another the chiefs reaction to the rum custom of the British Navy.
The Spanish had sailed up the outside coast of the Pacific North West islands and archipelagos as early as the mid-1500s. But the domestic cat made its first appearance at a Kwakwaka’wakw ville in the Pacific North West in the mid 1700s when the Spanish landed inside the Kwakwaka'wakw nation to begin conducting business.
This nation of Houses, clans, and villages occupies the mainland, several islands in an archipelago, and the top of Vancouver Island, both sides. When the Spanish sailed up to one of the well-populated villes they were immediately visited by the chief who greeted the ship’s captain with a cordial welcome to the Kwakwaka'wakw nation. At this first meeting the chief saw a cat capering onboard the Spanish ship.
The Kwakwaka'wakw chief was enthralled with the creature and the animal was brought before the chief for his closer inspection. After playing with the cat for a spell the chief believed he had received possession of it.
Beau ascribes the captain’s devotion to his pet as enormous, and the captain of the Spanish ship refused to relinquish it. A couple of intrigues later the Kwakwaka'wakw chief was in full possession of the cat.
The infuriated captain of the Spanish ship soon unleashed a cannonade on the shore at the Kwaguilth community blowing apart several war-canoes parked on the beach in front of the bighouses. Canoes were never in short supply in a Kwakwaka'wakw community and a few minutes later a flotilla coursed toward the Spanish ship.
The Kwaguilth surrounded the Spanish and returned the cannon balls. They began demanding that the Spanish perform this excellent feat once again. (They were not, however, returning the cat.)
The Spanish sailed away and left the chief in possession of the curious animal and he announced a special event to be held in his bighouse. Soon a gathering of chiefs and important clan members and associates had been assembled and the stage was set to unveil the cat.
The chief reached into a large cedar basket and grabbed the terrified cat and threw it some distance against a wooden post where it stuck. Everybody oh'd and ah'd while the cat did a couple of frantic loops and took off never to be seen again.
The Spanish spent a number of years exploring and mapping their explorations into the Kwakwaka'wakw nation. They left the territory with a legacy of sketches of people, villages, ship’s log entries, and a few Spanish place-names.
Soon the Spanish were superseded by the British who brought something other than a cat. Beau said the British Navy began stopping around the territory occasionally gunning the Spaniards out of the region and often stopping at the houses of the chiefs of Kwakwaka'wakw communities.
The British had a custom of ending each occasion with the certain protocol of a shot of rum. At first the chiefs were kind of 'taken' but not all were happy with the custom and some were offended by the British insistence at imposing the bitter tasting liquid on these special occasions.
Indeed a large argument ensued among the chiefs about whether to allow the British to stay. The argument that prevailed was, "Ah, let them stay. What harm can it do?" Beau Dick harbour’s little doubt that there may be an element of conspiracy in the rum strategy.
