Story: Sea Kayaking to Ninstints

What was once the mighty Haida Indian village of Ninstints now sits veiled behind a curtain of dense emerald green at the back of a quiet cove in the sea. As I paddle my kayak through the choppy waters of the headland, tilting rows of sun-bleached totem poles appear behind the green, jutting across a rare patch of blue in a sky of constant pewter. I glance behind; if a stranger like me had paddled into this cove about a century earlier, there would already be about fifty arrows sticking from my chest.

Such was life then—independent villages strung out along the black and rocky, cedar-forested coastline, all in constant conflict with one another. Just because your neighbors also spoke Haida doesn’t mean they wouldn’t club your brains out in a carefully-planned pre-dawn attack. And raiders did manage to slip past the sentries standing watch on the rocky headland, after which Ninstints warriors struck back some cool still morning, in a cycle of violence that continued for centuries.

We beach our kayaks and I wander among the tilting rows of sun-bleached poles. Ninstints—a corruption of ‘Nan Sdins,’ the name of a powerful village chief in the 1860s—was once home to some 300 people, until European-introduced diseases like smallpox ravaged their world. In the late 1800s the last survivors were taken to refugee villages with their former foes, entering Euro-Canadian domination and leaving behind their impressive poles heralding their once-mighty ancestral clans. As I gaze up at the carved wooden crest of a killer whale, I stand in awe of the Haida people who managed to survive, becoming co-owners and managers of Gwaii Haanas National Park in the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia.

It was the sea otters that first drew European fur traders to these misty islands. Even as some Haida lay dying from smallpox, others partook in the slaughter to gain possession of the new trappings and valuable metal technologies of the western world. Hunted nearly to extinction, a small reintroduced population of sea otters today floats on their backs, breaking oyster shells once again on the long flat tables of their wet furry bellies.

As a novice, I found sea kayaking fun, but only when we stayed in the protected near-shore waters and didn’t paddle toward Japan. One day we couldn’t resist the pull of the big blue, and decided to paddle around a lone rock island in the distance. I could sense the swells mounting beneath my kayak, then I slipped deep in a trough and couldn’t see anyone and then I could again but only those of my fellow kayakers at that moment also gliding along the tops of their swells. As if pulled by a powerful magnet I slipped down another trough, and then up and down and up and I glimpsed that lone rock that hadn’t seemed so far but now seemed an eternity away. A sudden gust of salty Pacific sprayed my face, and my head started to reel from the pungent aroma of the fish I caught earlier and stowed beneath my kayak’s bungee cords. By the top of the next growing swell toward Japan, I felt decidedly nauseous.

By sheer force of will we rounded that lone rock island somewhere near Japan and push-me-pull-you paddled to a quiet beach to camp that night. Light-headed and wobbly-legged, I helped unpack our kayaks and haul them above the high tide line—and requested that someone else remove that pungent dead fish from my bungee cords. But once butterfly-filleted Haida-style and smoked with the driftwood of gnarled and aging crabapples planted by the early missionaries, that pungent fish tasted delicious.

And I returned to Ninstints to amble in wonder through that ghost town, stroll once more amidst those extraordinary tilting totem poles. As I walked I passed odd jumbles of thick vegetation—places where huge cedar plank houses fell to the earth and lie rotting beneath the dense emerald groundcover of the northern coastal forest. Soon the tilting totem poles will fall as well, finally losing their long struggle with gravity to come crashing to the earth some still moonlit night.

As an archaeologist trained in the values of the western world, my first impulse is to rescue those tilting poles from gravity’s constant tug—straighten them to standing, save for posterity those amazing carved crests, maybe even paint a few in their bright originals, replace some of the thin copper sheets that made shine the fantastic creatures from that remarkable era of Haida culture that will never again grace our planet.

But as I stand humbled before yet another amazing pole, I know that won’t happen. In 1957, before the resurgence of contemporary Haida culture, a handful of Ninstints poles were removed to museums in Victoria and Vancouver, where countless visitors have marveled at their magnificence. I have marveled at those very poles myself, and count those moments in those museums as early steps in my career as an anthropologist. It has been suggested that the remaining 26 poles still at Ninstints also be removed for preservation.

But the Haida refuse; they want those mosses and lichens and liverworts to continue growing on the tall wooden poles carved by their ancestors. In fact, they want to see those magnificent museum poles returned to their village of origin—the wet and rotting realm of Nan Sdins, the place where their once-independent warrior ancestors labored with their stone and metal chisels, and hoisted their poles to standing so long ago.