Cannery & ‘Ksan

June 8, 2019

Our last day in Haida Gwaii we drove out past Masset to Tow Hill. We walked along Agate beach for a long while doing what you might imagine: collecting agate. Unless you don’t know what agate is. Agate is rock made of cryptocrystalline silica alternating with microgranular quartz. It looks really cool. We then hiked to the top of Tow Hill for a spectacular view of beach and Alaska off in the distance. Then we hiked to the Blow Hole which wasn’t blowing when we arrived. Had we waited a little longer for the tide to completely come in we would have witnessed blowing. Everything on the hike was again beautifully carpeted in plush moss.

After the 2 hour ride back to Skidagate it was time for a dinner outing to celebrate the publishing of Lucy’s story and the fact that Lucy was a winner in the contest. We went to the OV (Ocean View) Restaurant in Queen Charlotte for tasty fish and seafood. The ferry was again the Northern Adventure and uneventful.

In the morning we made eggs at the covered picnic tables in Cow Bay and then shopped and did laundry. Just after 10am we arrived at the Northern Pacific Cannery National Historic Site.

The cannery was cool. It contains a healthy dose of racism endemic to those times. The tour guide showed us a piece of canning machinery with a plaque announcing it to be the “Iron Chink” and explained how there was separate housing, work rolls and pay grids for European, Native, Chinese and Japanese workers. And how the company store owned the souls of many. We saw how all waste including unwanted fish guts, machine parts and human feces went under the floor boards right into the ocean.

After a picnic lunch at the cannery wharf we headed to Hazleton 3.5 hours away. We’re at ‘Ksan campground, run by the native people of this area. Today’s my birthday. My nieces and nephews sent wishes on WhatsApp and Lucy and Miriam gave me a FREE SPA certificate so they can brush my (now long) hair and paint my toenails later. How lucky I am to have such wonderful immediate and extended family.

After breakfast we went to the ‘Ksan Museum. We paid for the guided tour during which our tour guide Savanah took us into 3 different long houses. In another long house an artist named Dan Yunkws was carving four individual totems concurrently. These will eventually stand at the Petro Canada gas station in town. He’d been at it for 7 months and had at least that much longer to go. He was also carving a structure with 4 posts and horizontal beams together with several high school students. This structure will stand at a bike trail on a lookout nearby. He invited us as well as 2 women and a newly married couple visiting from Germany to carve our initials into the wood. And so we carved AS, WS, LS, MS and then a tapir into the wood! He helped us with chiseling technique and even got tracing paper so we could outline the tapir. Dan spends 9am to 9pm carving his totems but is happy to pause and teach tourists about his carving and about the Gitxsan people. In addition to his Gitxsan heritage he has Scottish roots and works symbols from all parts of his heritage into his carvings. He had experience working on local negotiating teams with the federal government and a very inviting and open view towards persons of all backgrounds. He has some concern that the artistry technique he knows will be lost when he’s gone and so he’s been teaching anyone that wants to learn, including a British man that lives in Britain and comes for a month every summer to work on totems. Dan also has a university degree in art, fine drawing of portraits being his specialty. I wish him luck in all his ventures and want to return to see his 4 totems standing and the structure with our carved and initialed tapir at their final locations.