Islands of beauty | British Columbia | Canada

Located 93 miles off the coast of British Columbia, the archipelago of Haida Gwaii is home to the indigenous Haida people – renowned amongst the First Nations of Canada for their remarkable skills as mariners, sea hunters and master craftsmen.

Words and photos by Simon Urwin

According to Haida myth, a raven dropped a black pebble into the ocean and so created the two hun­dred islands of Haida Gwaii”, says local guide Behn Cochrane as we walk along a vast, sweeping crescent of sand. 

“The Haida also believe that the first human beings were born on the spit at the end of this beach”, he continues. “The story goes that the raven found a large clamshell there, looked inside and saw many little men hiding in fear. The bird prized the shell open and set them free. They were the first people on earth – and they were Haida.” 

Clouds scudding across the sky suddenly turn to black. As the rain begins to fall we head for cover, clambering over piles of driftwood thrown ashore on a ferocious high tide. “Whatever the true origin story, we know for sure that the Haida have lived on these islands for at least fourteen thousand years”, he says.

Where the high tide ends, dense rainforest begins, and we shelter under the leafy canopy until the downpour eases, then follow a trail inland through great stands of hemlock, spruce and red cedar. “Like all coastal peoples, the Haida’s lives have always revolved around the tree”, he explains. “They built their sea canoes and long­houses from timber, their hats and baskets were woven from roots, and their clothing was made from bark. Wood was also their means for expressing their spirituality, their creativity and their cultural traditions.”

We emerge into a clearing where a Haida totem pole towers 50-foot above us, resplendent with figures of ­grizzly bears, pine martens, butterflies and frogs. “It was cut from a whole tree; a 600-year-old red western cedar. The artist is a friend of mine – he’s one of the best craftsmen on the islands. Let’s go and see if he’s at work.”

The totem pole carver

We drive to the town of Old Masset and pull up outside the home of fifth-generation master carver Christian White. Cochrane toots the car horn and White emerges wearing his traditional giid dajang hat. We say our hellos on the front lawn in the shadow of a soaring totem, also his handiwork, hewn from a trunk so mighty it took a team of more than a hundred people to raise it into position. 

“It’s a memorial pole to honour my grandfather”, says White. “One of the reasons I wanted to express my gratitude to him was because he taught me so much when I was growing up. He would take me to fish for sockeye salmon and halibut, and he showed me how to gather seaweed and mussels. Thanks to him, I know how to feed myself from Mother Nature all year round.”

 White invites me into his carving shed to show me his latest project: a pole that commemorates the peace treaty between the Haida and the Heltsyuk people of Bella Bella island. He picks up a carving tool and sets to work on the timber, which was recently felled in a sacred ceremony. White tells me it will take him six months to finish the carving and painting, but despite all the intricate and intensive labour involved – such as making natural pigments from clamshells and salmon roe – the finished pole will purposefully receive no weatherproofing. 

“Sun, rain and wind will begin to eat away at it first”, he tells me. “Then, the lichen and the woodpeckers will take their turn. The colours will fade and the pole will eventually rot and crumble. In Haida culture, succumbing to nature is all part of the totem’s lifespan. Returning to the earth is its destiny. You’ll see this when you visit some of the old village sites around Haida Gwaii. But there are no roads to take you there – you’ll need to arrange a boat.”

The Vikings of North America

I spend the night in the nearby logging town of Sandspit, and next morning Jessie Lay, a cheery transplant from the Canadian mainland, picks me up in her truck and we drive to a boat ramp an hour away at Camp Moresby. The sun is slowly creeping over the treetops as we launch our Zodiac onto the steely blue waters. “It was from forested inlets like this that the Haida once set sail in their canoes to raid and trade their way up the Pacific coast”, she tells me. “Their fearless sea expeditions earned them the reputation of being the Vikings of North America.”

We slowly skirt the maze of coves and channels, and Lay recounts more of the islands’ history. “First Contact with Europeans happened in the late 1700s”, she says. “Ships arrived to purchase sea otter pelts from the Haida in exchange for iron, firearms, beads and buttons. Sea otter fur was all the rage back then – especially in China – because it’s the densest fur in the world. Hunting totally decimated the otter population though, and hundreds of years later it still hasn’t recovered.”

 The fur traders were followed by further waves of outsiders who came to ransack the islands’ rich natural resources. As we drift down Cumshewa Inlet the debris of their endeavours – the logging camps, gold mines and fishing canneries – can be seen rusting and crumbling in the forest undergrowth, silently suffocating under blankets of ­liverwort, moss and lichen.

 “The explorers and colonizers left behind a much darker legacy than industrial pollution”, says Lay, as we drop anchor in the shallows off Louise Island. “First Contact brought Western diseases like smallpox, influenza and tuberculosis that swept through Haida Gwaii like wildfire. The total population of 10,000 Haida fell to less than 600 and resulted in more than a hundred deserted villages across the islands, just like this one.”  

We walk into the settlement of Skedans which is mournfully quiet save for the cry of a pair of bald eagles wheeling overhead. Where a proud row of twenty-seven longhouses once stood, there are now just hollow foundations that resemble shallow graves. Many of the last surviving totem poles lean at drunken angles; others have been felled completely by the wild winter storms. I see one marked with 13 rings and ask about their significance. “They’re potlatch rings”, says Lay. “A potlatch is a gift-giving feast in Haida culture and it can serve many different purposes. It could be for a wedding, or to honour ancestors, or to celebrate finishing the construction of a longhouse. Historically the host would provide food for all those who attended, also gifts – everything from candle­fish to canoes. So the rings indicate that there were 13 highly significant events during the lifetime of the village.”

An quatic Aurora Borealis

We spend the night further down the coast in a floating lodge. From the deck I spend hours watching the waters; blooms of fried egg jellyfish swim by and, after dark, the bioluminescent algae produce their extraordinary flashes of electric-blue light, like a kind of aquatic Aurora Borealis. 

Next morning we depart in the direction of Gwaii Haanas – ‘Islands of Beauty’ in the Haida language, a ­national park reserve that covers almost 15 percent of the archipelago’s total landmass, and the only place in Canada to be protected in its entirety from sea floor to mountain peak. 

Gang Sgwaay, a ­UNESCO World Heritage Site

We venture out into the infamous Hecate Strait, a perilous stretch of water that shares its name with the Greek goddess of witchcraft – a malevolent deity with the power to open the gates of death. Today on the Hecate there are mercifully no violent storms or terrifying swells to contend with; instead we are met with a full day of fog that’s so dense and spectral it dims bright sunlight to the point of darkness. It slows our progress, but come the afternoon, we finally draw close to the village of SGang Gwaay, a ­UNESCO World Heritage Site, which is home to the largest collection of Haida totem poles anywhere on the islands. 

We wade ashore and follow a path through large patches of giant skunk cabbage – a favourite of the islands’ bears who devour it to cure their constipation after months of hibernation. Eventually the trail reaches a bay, where two-dozen mortuary poles stand guard, staring out to sea. 

Their trunks, bleached to the colour of bones, are scored with all manner of wild-eyed creatures – both real and supernatural; some with their nostrils flared, others with teeth bared, as if ready to bite.  Lay tells me that the top of each pole would have held the boxed remains of a highly regarded individual. “It was believed that in time their soul merged with the tree, and that once the earth reclaimed the pole, the soul was free to continue with their journey”, she says. 

One pole carved with a grizzly bear stands apart from the main cluster. The wind ripples through the trees as we approach it, and there’s a palpable sense of a presence of some kind, as if someone or something is watching us. “There’s a story about a Japanese photographer who felt the strangest sensation. He couldn’t lift his camera to take a picture of it”, says Lay. “Not long afterwards he was in Russia and was attacked and eaten by a grizzly. It was as if he had experienced a kind of prophecy, a foreseeing.”

The old whaling station

As the light begins to fade, we set sail, rounding the southern­most tip of Gwaii Haanas to reach journey’s end in the serene inlet of Rose Harbour, its mirror glass waters broken by the rusting hulks of a once-prosperous whaling station. “In the past it was worse than a concentration camp”, says resident Goetz Hanisch as he welcomes me ashore. “Between 1909 and 1943 they slaughtered more than 2,000 sperm, blue, and humpback whales here, then processed their carcasses for meat and by-products like lamp oil, glue and margarine.”

He invites me to see the house he single-handedly built from scratch that now stands amongst the station’s ruins. I ask what brought him here. “It was Mother Nature”, he replies. “As a child growing up in Germany I had these vivid visions of trees, mountains and water. I happened to come to Haida Gwaii as a traveller and realised that this was the place that I’d seen in my dreams. I then set about looking for the right place to live. I wanted somewhere with no road access – because the road is a corrupting force that brings all the bullshit of modern life. I found Rose Harbour. The nearest road is at least 74 miles away. This is probably the most isolated spot in British Columbia.”

Finding the place of ones dreams 

His home for nearly 35 years, Hanisch remains the only full time resident. “There are very few people nearby and sometimes in winter I don’t see another soul for four months”, he says. I ask him if he enjoys the hermitic lifestyle.  “I prefer the words ‘contented isolation on my own terms’ to ‘hermit’”, he replies, pointedly. “It was my decision. I wanted to live somewhere surrounded by nature and to be self-sufficient. And I’ve more than achieved that – you should see my garden.”

We walk to the back of the house to find a riot of perfume and colour: roses and trumpet lilies blooming amongst the gooseberry and redcurrant bushes; honeysuckle and grape vines climbing along the fence posts.  “I catch all my own fish, I get eggs from my ducks, and I’ve even learned how to grow figs and lemons in this cold, rainy climate”, he says.   

“The most wonderful thing though is that all the nectar has attracted a flood of insects and birds to the garden, and to Rose Harbour”, he continues. “The deer have returned and I’m sure there’s more biodiversity now than ever before. It just goes to show that the human footprint can be a good thing. I’m slowly overturning the cruel legacy of the whaling station. The animals know they can trust me – they can sense that I’m different to the whalers. What was once a place of death, is now a part of Haida Gwaii that’s full of life.”