Alert Bay

I can't upload pictures right now. The connection I'm leeching off of is the slowest, most unreliable one I think I've ever used, but it's free, so it can't be that bad.

Instead, you're going to have to do a little bit of work yourself. Open another tab (or window if you absolutely insist upon being uncool) and do a google search for "Emily Carr". Take a good look at the paintings that come up.

Trees, rainforest, totem poles. Flowing lines in greys, greens and red-browns. The colours here are the same, the lines, the same. She came a great way in capturing the way it is up here. The one that I always found the most poignant was the one picture of the skinny tree in the middle of the clearcut, stretching towards the sky. It's not all that famous, so the likelihood of you finding it in a google image search is pretty low. It's still my favourite, though. It captures far more than the scene.

Carr had a great respect for the indigenous peoples up here. At one point in her life she devoted a great amount of time to travelling up the coast and painting images of the villages she found there, because she recognized that theirs was a way of life that was quickly disappearing, unrecorded. She apparently approached some people in high places about finding someone to sponsor her documentation of their culture but found no takers. So instead she ended up making native-style trinkets out of clay and selling them as authentic to feed herself, and feeling guilty about the cultural appropriation.

Cultural preservation wasn't exactly at the top of many people's lists of priorities at the time. Government policy stopped barely short of genocide. To improve the lives of the natives, government sent agents to remove children from their homes and parents to put them into boarding schools where they were beaten for speaking in their own languages, neglected and sexually assaulted by preists and nuns. This happened as recently as the 70s in some cases.

The sheer arrogance of it all hits me as I stand out in front of St. Michael's Indian Residential School in Alert Bay. Today it is an ugly, imposing building, crumbling at the edges but still monolithic. As the only brick structure on the entire island, I can only imagine the impression it would have made when it was first built.

Next door is the U'mista Cultural Centre, described as a treasurebox of local history and culture. When white people arrived here they were stunned by how incredibly 'uncivilized' the residents were, and the epitome of their savagery was a cultural practice called the 'potlatch'. A potlatch is a large feast hosted by a very wealthy person. People would arrive in their finest clothes, eat and dance. At the end of it all, the host of the feast would divy up everything he owned and give it away as gifts to everyone who had participated.

As all good Caucasians know, one can not be fully civilized until he is able to hoard everything he possibly can while others starve. Thus, the potlatch came under attack by the government, until the practice was all but wiped out.

The story of U'mista was that the people of Alert Bay continued to have potlatches in secret until the fateful day when one hosted by the Cranmer family was broken up by officials, who stole the dancing masks from the people. After years of fighting, they finally managed to have them given back, and now their permanent homes are inside the cultural centre. U'mista is the word in their language for prisoners of war who had returned home.

Talk to anyone in town and it's clear how proud the people are that unlike so many others in their situation, they were able to have some of what is rightfully theirs returned to them. Others aren't so fortunate. In the Vancouver Sun this weekend, I read that one of these masks sold recently at Southeby's for 1.8 million. To the community it was taken from, I'm sure it was worth far more.

I hope the cultural centre has a very good sprinkler system.