A REKINDLED CULTURE RECLAIMS ITS PAST

AFTER DECADES IN MUSEUMS, NISGA'A ARTIFACTS ARE GOING BACK TO THEIR ORIGINAL OWNERS

By Craig Mcinnes
Globe Victoria Bureau

Victoria -- There is a mannequin depicting a Nisga'a chief in the Royal British Columbia Museum and behind it stands a big yellow cedar screen.

The screen is beautifully decorated with stylized figures surrounded by 13 faces, but its presence and purpose are not explained. The exhibit focuses on the chief and the symbols of power he wears -- a tightly woven blanket with the instantly recognizable designs of the Pacific Northwest, a headdress inlaid with abalone shell and a finely carved raven rattle in his right hand.

To visitors, the screen seems like little more than a backdrop. However, to the Nisga'a people far from Victoria in northwestern British Columbia, it is of great significance. It has become part of their struggle to regain title to their ancestral lands and to renew their cultural identity.

That's why, 65 years after its departure, the screen is going home. For more than a century, the museum has strived to preserve history by collecting artifacts. Now it is giving some of them back to a people trying to make history by keeping their culture alive.

A Victoria doctor bought the screen in 1913 while visiting Kincolith, a small community at the mouth of the Nass River near the border of the Alaskan panhandle. By that time, Nisga'a chiefs had little left of the power symbolized by the blanket, headdress and rattle. Their homeland in the Nass River valley had been settled by Europeans, their shamans had been driven underground by missionaries and their stories -- traditionally the source of power and status in native communities -- were being suppressed.

The potlatch, their most important cultural celebration, was outlawed. Children were shipped off to school where they were not allowed to use their language or to respect their cultural traditions.

Museums like the RBCM, which started collecting the natural and human history of the province in 1886, believed they were preserving dying cultures.

But despite the best efforts of governments and church leaders to assimilate Canada's native people, some of their culture has survived, and for the first time in more than a century the Nisga'a have regained some of their power.

For the museum, this has meant that after collecting artifacts from one of the richest native cultures on the planet, it is now being forced to give some of them back.

In a recent book called Bringing Our Ancestors Home: The Repatriation of Nisga'a Artifacts, published by the Nisga'a Tribal Council, author Alex Rose describes how, as a boy, Chief Joseph Gosnell crawled under his grandfather's house and wondered why anyone would do such elaborate carving on the dusty foundation beams.

Years later, he realized that those beams were actually totem poles that had been cut down at the behest of missionaries who had demanded that the old symbols be forsaken as part of the price of converting to Christianity.

Some of the skilfully crafted poles were used as logs in local construction. Others were floated downriver where they were turned into cedar lumber by the sawmills at Prince Rupert.

Thanks to the skill of the native artisans and the accessible motifs of their art, the artifacts driven out by the colonizers because of their cultural significance quickly became sought after for their artistic merit.

So while many of the cultural artifacts that are now so widely sought after on the antiquities market were simply destroyed or left to rot, thousands survived, and many were collected by the very missionaries who demanded their disavowal.

Historians say some were stolen, some were given as gifts and some were sold by natives who got into what became a booming trade in artifacts collected between the late 19th century and the Depression.

Whatever their route from native hands, the descendants of the people who created them want them back.

"They were obtained, as far as we are concerned, under duress," said Chief Gosnell, now president of the Nisga'a Tribal Council.

For more than two decades, he has been leading negotiations to secure title to the Nisga'a homelands along the Nass. Those negotiations led to the ground-breaking agreement in principle reached last year between the Nisga'a and the federal and provincial governments. The deal involves land, rights to self-government, fishing, wildlife and cash.

The settlement, which has yet to be finalized, also promises the return of some of the artifacts mined from the rich culture developed by the natives of the northwest coast.

Chief Gosnell said the return of artifacts has always been part of the land-claims agenda.

"They are part of our culture that have been removed from the valley. . . . It's very important that they be returned to our people."

The cedar screen is one of 150 artifacts the RBCM has agreed to hand over. A similar number will be coming back from the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull.

Alan Hoover, manager for anthropology at the museum, says while they had no choice but to come to the table with the Nisga'a, they now see the repatriation of the artifacts as a positive process, partly because their value can be enhanced by putting them back into a living culture.

"They all had meaning, it wasn't art for art's sake," Mr. Hoover said. For example, the screen, like most native artifacts, has a story behind it. The notes left by the Victoria doctor who collected it are confusing but appear to tell the tale of travellers who are helped out by supernatural beings.

In the museum, among the thousands of artifacts from native bands around the province, there is little chance that the screen will ever become more articulate, but back among the people who have the remnants of the oral traditions, it may spark old memories, says Mr. Hoover.

"I think these artifacts going back into the community are going to resonate in a way that's going to be really positive for the community and for B.C."

It is also a process likely to be repeated. The Nisga'a have become the first to reach a tentative agreement, but with more than 40 other land claims initiated in British Columbia, it is unlikely they will be the last.

Craig McInnes is Victoria correspondent of The Globe and Mail.