Return, Renewal and Reconciliation

I recently heard a wonderful story of loss, return, cooperation and healing.  A friend told me about a radio interview he had heard on the CBC.  It was an archival piece of broadcaster Peter Gzowski interviewing Metis filmmaker Gil Cardinal who passed away in November of 2015.  During the interview they discussed Cardinal’s film  Totem: The Return of the G'psgolox Pole   released in 2003.  My friends and I decided to see if the film was available on the National Film Board of Canada website and we found that it was free for the viewing.  We also noticed that a later film Totem: Return and Renewal  was released in 2007 so we chose to watch that one and hear this beautiful story about a little known chapter of Canadian history.

In 1872, Chief G’psgolox of the Kitlope people, now Haisla nation, suffered the catastrophic loss of all of his children and many family members.  Struggling with this loss, he had a spiritual experience with the spirit Tsooda that is expressed in a nine meter tall mortuary pole, a gravestone, that he had commissioned.  It was erected in the Haisla village of Misk’usa in the Kitlope valley, about 600 km northwest of Vancouver.

On the top of the pole is Tsooda wearing a hat.  Below him is Asoalgot and a mythical grizzly that lives under the water.  The pole tells the story of resurrection, that the family and tribe of G’psgolox will be woken up and brought back to life.  

In 1929 without any permission, the pole was cut down by an Indian agent and sold to Sweden.  It ended up in the Swedish National Museum of Ethnography where it was kept in storage for fifty years.  In 1980 when a new museum was built, the pole was erected in a main hall and held up with a metal collar and guide wires.

The whereabouts of the G’psgolox pole remained a mystery to the Haisla people until 1991 when they discovered that it was in Sweden.  Haisla Chief Councellor Gerald Amos and Louisa Smith, a descendent of Chief G’psgolox travelled to see the long lost pole and began negotiations with the museum for repatriation.  This took many years.  The Haisla people offered and began to carve a duplicate pole to take the place of the original one in Sweden.  After fifteen years of negotiations, the Swedish government agreed to repatriate the pole.  However, the museum wouldn’t release the pole unless a special climate controlled building was erected to house it.  The Haisla people couldn’t afford that.  As Cardinal tells the story you begin to wonder if the pole will ever be repatriated. 

However, the Swedish public had been hearing the Haisla tell the story of the importance of the pole’s return for them for years.  In an unexpected turn of events, the public started to put pressure on the museum to return the pole.  Cardinal narrates, “an empathetic alliance was formed with the people of Sweden.”  Public pressure grew and the museum relinquished the pole. This was the first time a totem pole had been repatriated from overseas by a First Nation.

To satisfy their own condition, the museum agreed to make a climate controlled shipping crate that would house the pole.  Before it left, the Haisla erected the replica pole in Sweden.  And then in 2006, twenty-five years after it had been found, the old pole began a 9000 km sea voyage through the Panama Canal to Vancouver.  It was housed in the Museum of Anthropology there for two months so that people could see it and so this story could be shared with Canadians.  One Haisla elder hoped it would facilitate reconciliation.

The problem of climate control still existed.  The owners of the City Centre Mall in the town of Kitimat offered to host the pole while the money was raised for a cultural centre in Kitamaat Village to be built as a permanent home.

The Haisla believed that repatriation of the pole was vitally important.   They felt that it was an “invisible umbilical cord to the ancestors.”  One elder said, “The spirit of the people will wake up when the pole is returned.”  The whole community had united together to reclaim their cultural heritage and the negotiations became a “catalyst for cultural renewal.”  And the cultures of the Haisla and the Swedes working together in understanding, promoted healing as well.

Once it got to the mall in Kitimat, the Haisla elders used the pole to teach their children about their history.  There is a lovely scene of a Haisla child asking an elder if the pole would ever be put upright again.  She kindly answered that no, the pole would always stay on its side now because traditionally when a pole fell down, it would be left for nature to take its course. The elders also educated the people of the Kitimat with whom they shared the pole, about the significance of the pole and how it came to be returned.

In a particularly poignant scene, an elder shows the metal yoke that held the pole in place in Sweden.  The yoke became a symbol for the Haisla of the imprisonment of their cultural practices and now that it was off, the people are free to celebrate their culture fully.

At the welcoming ceremony at Kitamaat Village, a thousand people squeezed into the recreation centre including neighbouring First Nations, sponsors, politicians, museum representatives and of course, David Suzuki.  One Haisla elder said he had always felt that “our mission must be to create better stories together.  Stories we can be proud of, that we can tell our children.  The return of the pole is a good story.”

This story is of course best told by Gil Cardinal.  The acclaimed Metis filmmaker, director and writer began work with the NFB in 1970 telling indigenous stories including his own in Foster Child.  He directed dramas for CBC such as Big Bear in 1995 and Indian Summer: The Oka Crisis in 2006 and worked on North of 60.

Jesse Wente, critic and director of film programs for the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto said of Cardinal, “His devotion to truth and storytelling advanced indigenous cinema by laying the path for future generations to follow” (CBC News Nov. 23, 2015).  Filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin spoke of his historical importance to Canada.  And his business partner, Dorothy Schreiber said, “If Canadians take the time to watch Gil’s films, that will be an act of reconciliation” (Globe and Mail, Dec. 18, 2015).

The storyteller is gone but the stories remain.  They are good stories.  You can see many of them on the NFB website.  Perhaps listening to their truth is part of reconciliation and creating better stories together – stories we can be proud of that we can tell our children and grandchildren.