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Willie Hawkins and Beau Dick onsite at canoe project |
Return to Yukusem a triumph of jurisdiction
In Alert Bay, B.C., carvers do intense work in red cedar and rare yellow cedar and other woods and mediums. Under the leadership of world-famous Beau Dick, a troupe carves, paints, and crafts.
A lot of people in Alert Bay have a bent for defining images out of wood, bark, colors, and weavings.
At the centre of the totem pole culture lies the dugout canoe, which remains a potent cymbol of the people's seamanship. It has evolved into more than a vehicle for plying the amazing watercourses of the Inside Passage and inlets of Canada's Pacific Coast, however.
The people traveled these river-like tidal currents in these sturdy constructions as a matter of jurisdiction.
The island of Yukusem (Hanson Island) has become the site of Beau Dick, hereditary chief, iconic carver in the tradition, carving a war canoe this summer.
The transformation from cedar trees to vehicles, from shaped resource to shaped cultural symbol of jurisdiction, occura on Yukusem since it belongs to these people and falls completely under the legal jurisdiction of the Yukusem Heritage Society.
The canoe project is therefore a triumphant return to jurisdiction that occurs under the aegis of the society. Beau Dick is making time to develop this important cultural project out of a busy schedule. He intends the culture camp on Yukusem to be permanent.
The return to Yukusem is the outcome of work done when David Garrick, anthropologist, who achieved amazing results from research of Yukusem at an archaeological level. The island began to reveal cultural secrets to David Garrick beginning around the mid 1980s.
Garrick returned to make a full study and write a book, called Cedar Shaping and Cedar Shapers, 1989, a detailed account of Culturally Modified Trees on Hanson Island.
The secrets uncovered by Garrick show the forest being shaped like a garden. The First Nations were shaping cedar trees without impeding their growth, indeed, shaping certain trees to grow bigger, indeed, to grow massive layers of bark.
He uncovered countless examples of how First Nations made specific cedar trees produce this doughy bark in surplus.
They shaped the trees to produce massive layers of bark which produced an abundance of raw material for manufactured household goods, and then these selfsame cedar groves were made to contain an array of other cedars.
The groves were being cultivated for major constructions including house poles, house planks, and war canoes (and other species of trees for other matters of society, be they dietary, health oriented, or ceremonial).
David Garrick explained, "The First Nations transgenerationally organized their forest resources. We don't do it. A transgenerational mentality is opposite a 'me first' mentality. The 'me first' mentality leads to consuming everything in sight."
Beau Dick displays a jurisdictional triumph by working on the Yukusem Heritage Society canoe project in a seemingly remote rainforest on this 16 square kilometre island across from Telegraph Cove.
It is an amazing turn of events that he will carve a canoe from a tree his ancestors planted for him about 500 years ago. His ancestors will delight in watching him make the canoe they foresaw so long ago.
