 |
| Japanese visitor Yumichiro meets Beau Dick on Yukusem beach |
 |
| International kayakers meet Beau Dick at Yukusem culture camp |
PHOTO CREDIT Mack McColl As the winter descends on Canada's west coast the culture camp on Yukusem (Hanson Island) continues to grow with an array of facilities built to accommodate occupants in all seasons. Yukusem Culture Camp is situated on the remote site 15 km south of Alert Bay, B.C. by boat. The project has been supported by a lot of volunteers from the beginning in July and especially since the month of August 2008. Crews have built a few liveable cedar houses where Beau Dick lives with wife Fran and other carvers and artisans, and they have supporters like Jerry Higginson delivering supplies and other people by speed boat to Deep Bay on the island's south-east corner. The island's other occupants on the 4 sq. km. include the year-round CMT anthropology study area in the island's heights occupied by David Garrick. Orcalab whale research station occupies the south-east corner and Jim Pattison owns 70 hectares on the east side around Dong Chong Bay. Back at the Yukusem culture camp the international kayak tours stop at a campground in the surroundings of Deep Bay and by the time the tourist season arrives this year the Yukusem Culture Camp will be in full bloom with lessons to teach those adventurous world travellers. The culture camp on Yukusem is the brain-child of Beau Dick and the product of many hands. "It's a lot of teaching, cajoling, and inspiring, and convincing people that the way forward is found by going through the phases of knowing the past," he explained. Beau has extraordinary connections to the coastal past. He was born in 1955 and raised in Kingcome Inlet, B.C. (an inlet that flows deep into the coastline of mainland B.C.) where he stayed until 1965. He lived the first ten years in an extended family of elders, uncles, and aunts, and a few others entirely engaged in the Big House cultural heritage. They lived in close personal contact with the pristine surroundings of Kingcome Inlet, a place governed by story tellers, hard workers, and the conduct found in various crafts, meetings, and celebrations in mask, drum, flute and dance. Beau Dick's archetypes include the close witness of long productive sessions in carving cedar. Also these times in Kingcome Inlet were spent immersed in the national language of the Kwakwaka'wakw people. Beau sat quietly in amongst the carvers, his father, grandfather, and uncles, and listened to histories, legends, laws in Kwakwala, and the importance of their jurisdiction; and he learned the way things came to pass and some of what is to come. When Beau was 10 years old the family sent him to Vancouver to live with an aunt and uncle so he could get some serious book learning. This move to Vancouver was something he calls culture shock. Upon his return to the Pacific Northwest the family had been separated from Kingcome Inlet and Beau settled in Alert Bay, B.C.. He launched his career in Pacific coast national art and became a world recognized carver of the Kwakwaka'wakw tradition, and he has the right to carve a Haida coat of arms and other styles because of his bloodlines from Tongass, Alaska. His great-grandmother was a highest ranking hereditary chief of the Tlingit and she married a Hudson's Bay Factor who took her to Port Rupert. "Lineage is the most important part of our social structure," explained Beau during one of those conversations that resonate away from the Indian Reserve. On Yukusem it is fully supported by a chorus of nature. "Talk about jurisdiction, I can describe the great divide. The Hudson's Bay Company conducted it's slaughter of the Haida people in the mid-1800s with poisoned blankets when the upper classes of England were amusing themselves by eating mummies," the remains of dead Egyptians. The efforts of the 'blanket merchants' failed to kill off the people and small pockets of the culture and the law continued to exist in tiny enclaves like Kingcome Inlet. By the 1930s when the Kwakawak Awak were repeatedly being jailed for holding Potlatches in their hidden Big House societies, "My people were real rebellious. The Kwaguilth branch was tenacious about keeping their ways alive." The rebellion would take dramatic form at times, for instance when Beau's uncle Jimmy Dawson raised a totem pole for King George the 5th "as a celebration of the king's coronation. And at the time of the event the question was simple, What are the authorities going to do about that? Nothing. There was nothing they could do." He credits his forefathers for the adept practice of the art of deception and for using the double entendre to send their messages, "The pole stands beside the Anglican Church in Alert Bay today," he said, "along with the commemoration plaque for the English king." For more information about the Yukusem Heritage Society and the Culture Camp under their Aboriginal Guardianship contact Andrea Sanborn at the Umista Cultural Society in Alert Bay, B.C.: www.umista.ca |
