Mnemonic (7 page)

The squeak of the wooden wheels of change, carts dragged by sleepy oxen to and from the Fort, bringing turnips, potatoes, slabs of bloody meat.

Squeaking as they brought food to the pesthouse where a five-year-old child was taken from the Prince Alfred in 1872, “the house formerly occupied by Mrs. Nias on Beckley Farm, which is now Government property and which was fitted up yesterday for the reception of the little sufferer. The yellow flag waves over the house.”
⁸

Ploughs turning and opening, carts waiting to take away the stones, gulls wheeling in their wake in the clear blue skies over the fields of Beckley Farm. Imagine Lekwungen families watching as their own cultivated patches of common camas and great camas disappeared without consultation. A child in the shadow of a Garry oak, digging stick in hand, puzzled by the sad turning away of a parent while the pigs rooted and feasted on broken bulbs turned up by the plough.

The smallpox patient taken to the pesthouse died and was buried somewhere on the waterfront, marked now with a small plaque, though the exact location of her grave has been long forgotten. That little sufferer, bones under the foreign grasses and Scotch broom of Holland Point.

Charles Newcombe was an intrepid collector, not just for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in Richmond, near London, but also for the Field Museum in Chicago and other institutions all over North America and abroad. He wanted Canadian institutions to recognize the value of the materials but had only intermittent luck for years, though he received encouragement from George Mercer Dawson of the Canadian Geological Survey. It became a deplorable competition, boats going up and down the coast carrying fervent hunters for the authentic object. Poles, bentwood boxes, rattles, masks, even something called “osteological collections” — in other words, skeletons. Some museums wanted characteristic materials from the discrete cultural areas. Some went for quantity over quality. Some were generous with funding and urged their agents to go to extreme measures to procure trophies of special interest.

The missionaries were involved. At first they encouraged their converts in the Native villages to burn totem poles and other aspects of traditional life. But then they realized how valuable these items were. In Jan Hare and Jean Barman's
Good Intentions Gone Awry: Emma Crosby and the Methodist Mission on the Northwest Coast
, there is a telling passage in a letter home from Emma Crosby (wife of Methodist missionary Thomas Crosby) to her mother. It is 1875, and the Crosbies have been visited by James Swan, erstwhile Indian agent from Washington and agent for the Smithsonian Institute who is also collecting for the upcoming Centennial Exhibition:

Another stray str. visited us a few weeks ago & a U.S. revenue cutter having on board a U.S. Indian agent looking up Indian curiosities for the approaching Centennial Exhibition. He took dinner with us & I should say was a fair specimen of the U.S. Indian agent as reputed to be — not inconveniently high-minded.
⁹

This visit was further elaborated upon in Douglas Cole's Captured Heritage:

Inducing the Indians to give up their heathen ways, Methodist missionary Thomas Crosby had persuaded many to remove poles from outside their houses, and, though some of these had been burned, others were collected “in a sort of museum.” Swan bought one, a finely-carved forty-foot specimen, and he hoped for more. Both Crosby and C. E. Morrison, the HBC trader, agreed to gather a collection for Swan which they would send to Victoria.
¹⁰

Realizing how potentially lucrative the objects were, Crosby began to collect for himself as well and was ideally placed to persuade those under his pastorate to give up their cultural wealth.

There were rivalries to see which collectors could acquire the most poles, whole houses, coppers, and feast dishes. On one collecting trip for Franz Boas, Newcombe sailed to Ninstints, a Haida village off the tip of Moresby Island in the Queen Charlotte Islands. Chief Ninstints himself accompanied Newcombe as pilot. Newcombe reported to Boas that the Chief “is half-blind and I hope to acquire many interesting things in that almost wholly deserted village for you.” (The population of Ninstints had been decimated by smallpox earlier in the century.) One of the crew diverted the Chief's attentions while a few “osteological” items were located, though not what had been hoped for. However, other village sites were visited and mortuary areas raided while the “half-blind” Chief Ninstints was kept busy in other ways.
¹¹

Yet the collection at Kew takes us from grave-robber and villain (of a sort: these things are never black and white and at the time Newcombe was in hot pursuit of artefacts, it was an acceptable practice) to a passionate advocate for the importance of ethnobotany. A beautiful set of gambling sticks carved of Pacific crabapple is as lovely as anything sold in a contemporary craft shop. And a halibut hook, formed of western yew and strong enough to hoist the weight of one of those bottom-dwelling sea denizens weighing in excess of 180 kilograms, is graceful and practical. There is some suggestion that collections such as these work to educate those whose cultures have lost their traditional practices. The carefully wrought baskets and implements hold the lessons of their makers — the way their hands worked the fibres, the marks of the adze on the wood — and do much to help us recover the past.

The Royal British Columbia Museum holds hundreds of photographs taken by Newcombe showing village sites in all their intact dignity, houses gazing solemnly to sea with canoes pulled up in front and a few people purposefully digging clams or sitting on logs in sunlight. For all that he removed from those places, Newcombe preserved a complex codex of place and culture in that photographic record.

A natural historian like Charles Newcombe would surely have known about the useful qualities of
Quercus virginiana
. Is this why he planted one? He would have known, for instance, that it was an important tree for shipbuilding (the US Navy had large tracts of live oak for this very purpose), the massive arching limbs finding their way to the ribs and knees of ships, the wood itself heavy, strong, and hard.

The Houma people who lived in what is now Louisiana cherished the live oak. After their own language was absorbed into French, they called it
chêne vert
or the green oak. Its bark provided red paint for the post on the Mississippi River that marked their hunting territory in what is now Baton Rouge (or red post). The acorns were an integral food supply; live oak acorns being high on the list of palatability, they were pressed for their oil and were soaked (to leach out the tannins), dried, and ground to make meal.

The anthropologist John Swanton wrote extensively on the Aboriginal peoples of two geographical areas in his long career — the Pacific Northwest and the Southeastern United States. Charles Newcombe met Swanton at Skidegate in 1900, when Newcombe was on a collecting trip for Stewart Culin and the University of Pennsylvania. The two men got along quite well.
¹²
After his work with the Haida and Tlingit, Swanton went on to study the Muskogean peoples of the Southeastern United States (the Houma are included in this linguistic group).

It's a fanciful stretch, but I like to think that maybe Swanton inspired Newcombe to plant his live oak when the latter built his house on Dallas Road. Maybe he even sent a root, an acorn, a small sapling, knowing that the species could withstand the salt-laden wind off the Juan de Fuca Strait. Potatoes, turnips, and the broom which so drastically changed the face of Victoria, graveposts and houseposts and the entire regalia for winter ceremonials travelling by train across America to the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, gambling sticks of crabapple wood destined for the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. . . In such ways cultural and botanical knowledge travel the well-worn roads and rivers of human experience, participating in exchange, small acts of mercy and theft, and larger ones of kindness and exploitation.

The Salvage Paradigm

I read whatever I can about Wawadit'la. The late Wilson Duff, the anthropology curator at the Provincial Museum who encouraged the construction of Wawadit'la, said:

This is an authentic replica of a Kwakiutl house of the nineteenth century. More exactly, it is Mungo Martin's house, bearing on its houseposts some of the hereditary crests of his family. This is a copy of a house built at Fort Rupert about a century ago by a chief whose position and name Mungo Martin had inherited and assumed — N
ak
ap'
a
nk
a
m.
¹³

According to Wilson Duff, Wawadit'la was one of two names that Martin had the right to choose from for his creation; it means “he orders them to come inside.” Yet it seems there was no single house on which Mungo Martin modelled his Thunderbird Park version. Rather, there are several.

The house where Mungo Martin was born was the home of his mother's uncle, the old chief N
ak
ap'
a
nk
a
m.
¹⁴
It appears this house was never finished — it had no frontal painting. In what seems to be an homage to his father, who had come from Gwayasdums on Gilford Island, Martin uses an image from a house there for the frontal painting of the Thunderbird Park Wawadit'la, though with some stylistic changes. Martin reverses figures on the houseposts from those on N
ak
ap'
a
nk
a
m's house, and synthesizes other design elements. In a paper given at the 1987 annual general meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago, Ira Jacknis considers the various sources informing Mungo Martin's concept for Wawadit'la and the way the house both reflects the ideal and the pragmatic in terms of its influences: “the non-native context of Martin's house may have encouraged the artist to synthesize diverse Kwakiutl forms into a kind of ‘super-artifact.'”
¹⁵

And what is a copy, what is authentic? Can the house of a Kwakwaka'wakw chief, built in Lekwungen territory on southern Vancouver Island, far from the village of its origins, built with the sense that everything it represented must be commemorated because so much of that culture was disappearing, can this house truly be called a copy? Houses, like songs and stories and other aspects of culture, exist across time and place, in a moment that is ever-present. When I saw that old man, who might have been Mungo Martin, working in Thunderbird Park, it did not occur to me that he had not always worked there, had not always lived in the house with some sort of sea creature painted on its facade. A child leaning her blue bike against a rock and watching was taken into that moment. The ravens in the trees knew this, their vocabulary unchanged over the centuries, in a city where the bodies of Native children and the young passenger from the
Prince Alfred
who died in the pesthouse at Holland Point lie under the ground in proximity. Charred stones from the pits where springbank clover was steamed can be found in the sand. The buried streams remember their routes to the Inner Harbour, under what's now the Empress Hotel, and where the old lodges at the original Songhees village site, though vanished, still give off the faint scent of cedar if the wind is right.