The Starship and the Canoe. Kenneth Brower
and colossal, in the beach windrows whose chips feed George’s fire at night.
Most of the Inside Passage lies under water, in one or another of its forms. The Pacific insinuates from the west, and year-round snow covers the summits to the east. The dry land between is seldom truly dry. Parts of the coast receive more than two hundred inches of rain a year. Streams run everywhere. Rivers rise at every opportunity and after a few turns become mighty, running clear when their source is snow, milky when their source is glacier. The glacial milk is ground-up continent in suspension, for inland the ice continues its whittling. The Ice Age is not over in George’s country, and continues to enlarge it for him.
The skies of the Inside Passage belong above a more vaporous planet, like Venus. The waters rule up there, as they rule below, marching in different densities to different drummers. The sun seldom burns through the leaden overcast. Clouds boil up from the cold cauldron of the North Pacific, white against the high gray. Fogs flow tidally in and out the inlets. Mist mystifies the forest. Vapors heighten the headlands. White lenticular clouds cap the foothills. The gray inverted sea of cloud decapitates the peaks.
George, unlike his father, never has to look for water. George has to look for shelter from it.
The aborigines were water people. They built their villages on the shore, usually at the mouths of rivers. They hunted land animals—deer, elk, goats, and bear—and they were good at it, but it was more like sport than work with them. Their real business was the sea.
The Northwest Coast culture divided into seven language families. From south to north the people spoke Salish, Bella Coola, Nootka, Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, Haida, and Tlingit. These linguistic groups divided into dozens of tribes, and all were sea people: whalers, shell gatherers, fishermen. Their civilization developed in isolation, shut off by the sea in front and by the mountain wall behind. Their few foreign influences came along the coast, primarily down it, for they borrowed most from the hunting technology of the Eskimos to the north. Unlike the Eskimos, they conducted true wars—campaigns intended to exterminate their neighbors or at least to move them elsewhere. True warfare was rare among Native Americans. The wars here were probably fought for living space. The land between mountains and sea was so slim and steep that village sites were hard to find. The armies wore armor of animal hide or wood, and wooden helmets carved with terrifying faces.
The artists of the Northwest Coast were the finest in the Americas.
“To their taste or design in working figures upon their garments, corresponds their fondness for carving, in everything they make of wood,” wrote Captain Cook “Nothing is without a kind of freeze-work, or the figure of some animal upon it.” This Northwestern decoration, strong, animistic, stylized, polychromatic, was several centuries ahead of its time. Rediscovered in the 1900s by men like Picasso, it had a delayed influence on the art of the world. The Indians achieved it without agriculture. Agriculture is the invention that is supposed to let a people lay in the food reserves that permit the idle periods that allow experimentation with art, and the coastal Indians practiced no agriculture at all, except for planting a little tobacco. It was the sea that allowed them to break the old rule. The coastal waters were as rich as any field. Shellfish were easy to gather in great numbers along the Inside Passage. The coastal women shucked clams and mussels instead of peas, and over the centuries their patient fingers built huge shell middens. (In a rainy climate where intentional art in wood decays, the middens endure, great banal monuments standing everywhere along the shore. They make good soil for berries, and George Dyson likes to forage them, his fingers stained purple or red.) There were also the big salmon runs on the coastal rivers. Salmon was the Northwestern maize. The Indians smoked or dried the fish in great quantities, gathered bushels of clams, then turned to their art.
They were fine basketmakers. They made ingenious fishhooks and harpoons. They wove excellent blankets from the wool of mountain goats, and one group, the Salish, raised a breed of woolly dogs that they sheared to make hair garments. They knew how to make moccasins but preferred, like George Dyson, to go barefoot. The Inside Passage is a good country for that. The rainfall carpets the forest understory with moss, and the beach stones make a pleasant cobbling underfoot. When you wear shoes there, George explains, it is not from fear of cuts or stubbed toes, but to circumvent that force which leads you to step in something unpleasant just before bed.
The Indians made seagoing canoes. These were dugouts carved from cedar logs, the hulls sculpted, painted, and rubbed regularly with oil to keep them from cracking. War canoes were sometimes sixty feet long and could carry eighty warriors. They were given names—Halibut Canoe, Gull Canoe, Crane Canoe. The prows of some were equipped with tall shields fenestrated for archers—aboriginal landing craft. In their war canoes, one group, the Nootka, hunted whales.
At the University of British Columbia there is a new art museum devoted almost entirely to the material culture of the Northwest Coast. George’s sister Katrina works there as a receptionist. I visited the museum once with George, and after we had chatted with his sister, he led me briskly through the place.
One bright, high-ceilinged hall, all glass and pale-gray concrete, is forested with totem poles. The poles are huge. On each, the massive heads of demigods, semihumans, eagles, bears, and killer whales succeed one another up to the roof. The painted eyes have weathered away. Wooden eyeballs stare blind and splintery at the concrete, or gaze out the glass. The poles face this way and that, like guests at an unsuccessful cocktail party. To my mind, the sterile concrete and glass made a fine setting for the weathered wood, and I would have liked to linger, but George rushed me along. We walked beneath Raven’s outsized beak and made our exit from the totem forest.
We passed storage chests carved in geometrical designs and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. We passed bowls, food dishes, ladles, rattles, daggers, halibut clubs, headdresses, wool blankets, togas; none of it unadorned, as Captain Cook had observed. George hardly glanced around him. At his pace, Northwestern art passed as a blur. I was left only with the impression of being watched. The Northwestern artists liked to fill all available space, and they filled it most often with formalized eyes: eyes in the middle of an animal’s chest, eyes marking its joints, eyes looking out from the least representational of the geometric designs.
We passed a wall of masks. They grimaced and leered at me. The masks, I thought, had most to say about the people. The old Northwestern Indians would have liked Boris Karloff movies. A pantheon of demons gibbered against the black felt of the display. They were carved with great imagination and humor. They jumped time and the culture gap to scare me in the twentieth century. There were clownish masks too, full of a more raucous humor. There was sharp parody in the few masks depicting white men. The black backdrop was a fine idea, I thought, especially for the demon masks and death’s heads. They seemed to be materializing in the darkness of the aboriginal unconscious. I would have liked to study them longer. But George had moved ahead, and I followed.
We came to the canoes.
The success of Northwestern art, I had decided, was in the grace of its curves, and that grace reached apogee in the canoes. Looking at the canoes, I wondered where that Northwestern curve came from. What had inspired it? Was it the glacier-shaped curve of the fiord headlands? Was it the curve of the lens clouds, or the dorsal curve of a fleeing whale? Or could it have derived from the canoe lines themselves? Maybe all Northwestern art began in that pragmatic solution to the problem posed by the waves. It was a happy solution, certainly, both in form and function. The designers of the clipper ships had thought so, and had let it influence them in lofting their bowlines.
The finest lines, for me, were those turned by the Haida, the inhabitants of the Queen Charlottes, where canoes began in myth. The leafbladed Haida paddle is surely one of the classic shapes devised by man. It has all the inevitability of the leaf-bladed African spear, or, for that matter, of the leaf. But George walked past. He finished the museum almost at a dead run.
“You liked it?” he asked me at the door, surprised. He shook his head. He didn’t like the museum at all, he confided. It made him nervous. He hated the glass and concrete. He preferred finding his totem poles under blueberry bushes, overgrown where they had fallen.
“Doesn’t it seem like a graveyard to you?” he asked. “A bunch of rich white people get this stuff and