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In 2015 carvers Gwaai and Jaalen Edenshaw travelled all the way to Oxford to carve a replica of a masterpiece of Haida art: a remarkable bentwood box that had been held in the Pitt Rivers Museum collection for over 130 years.
But why were Jaalen and Gwaai recreating the box in the first place? Why was having the original bentwood box return to Haida Gwaii not an option? And how did the box end up all the way in England?
In this episode, Ry Moran talks with Gwaai and Jaalen Edenshaw, Marenka Thompson-Odlum, Heather Igloliorte, and Nika Collison about the way museums can at once obscure history or be powerful sites of truth-telling.
In this eight-episode series, host Ry Moran (founding Director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation) goes in depth on why the truths of Indigenous Peoples are so often suppressed and why we need truth before reconciliation.
Over course of this season, we visit with Survivors, Elders, Knowledge Keepers, academics, artists, and activists, exploring the opportunities and barriers for truth telling, and ways we can move forward together.
This podcast is presented by the Libraries and Archives of University of Victoria where host Ry Moran is the Associate University Librarian-Reconciliation. It is produced in the territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples.
Visit www.taapwaywin.ca for transcripts, shownotes and more information.
Ry Moran
In 2015, Gwaai and Jaalen Edenshaw made the 7,522 km long journey all the way from Haida Gwaii to Oxford.
They were there for a very special purpose – to spend a month furiously working to recreate, to the most precise detail possible, a magnificent Haida bentwood box.
It’s a piece that has been held at the Pitt Rivers Museum since it opened in 1884. But we have no record of how it came to be all the way in England.
Gwaai Edenshaw
We stumbled across what has come to be known as the Great Box. And, you know, it was just something that blew our minds at the time
Ry Moran
But why[KG1] were Jaalen and Gwaai recreating the box in the first place? Why was having the original bentwood box return to Haida Gwaii not an option?
This episode is about the relationship museums have to truth. And about the way they tell the story of our history, the facts they obscure, and the truths they are sometimes unwilling to confront.
Jaalen Edenshaw
Really it just shows that, you know, it's what it is - is a sort of storehouse of colonial plunder.
Ry Moran
But it’s also about how museums can be powerful sites of truth-telling. And how two museums - on opposite sides of the world - are grappling with the complicated situations they have inherited.
Today we’re going to look at the Great Box Project, listening to the Gwaai and Jaalen talk about their experiences working on this extraordinary project –
Gwaai Edenshaw
The child of the great box is a - is an example of - of us, repopulating our world, you know, with - with Haida art
Ry Moran
And discuss with Marenka Thompson-Odlum at the Pitt Rivers Museum her work in trying to bring more collaboration and honesty to the museum’s interpretation.
Marenka Thompson-Odlum
By the fact that so many of our, so much of our collection, is rooted in kind of colonial enterprise. It can never just be glossed over.
Ry Moran
And finally to Haida Gwaii – to speak with Nika Collison about the how Haida Gwaii Museum is doing things differently.
Nika Collison
Our museum is fully part of our culture, and our ability to heal, to seek and attain reparation and to find ways to coexist.
Ry Moran
Welcome to TAAPWAYWIN: talking about what we know and what we believe, a podcast from the and the territories of the Lekwungen peoples and the Libraries and Archives of the University of Victoria.
[music plays out]
We talked to Gwaai and Jaalen on a rainy Wednesday in February.
Gwaai Edenshaw
Internet router is not the best, so apologize for that.
Jaalen Edenshaw
Especially when it's sprinkling as it is. Sort of seems to…
Ry Moran
Gwaai and Jaalen are brothers, and although Gwaai is a little older, they look like they could be twins.
Ry Moran 03:00
…Hear you lough and clear. So maybe, can we start just - can you introduce yourselves please?
Gwaai Edenshaw 03:16
Sure, I'm Gwaai Edenshaw.
Jaalen Edenshaw 03:19
My name is Jaalen. We're out at our carving shed right now, on Masset.
Gwaai Edenshaw 03:28
Haida Gwaii.
Ry Moran
Both are Haida, both are expert carvers and artists, having worked on a multitude of projects in a large variety of media - everything from totem poles to stop-motion animation. One of their recent projects was SGAAWAAY K'UNNA Edge of the Knife, the first feature film that is entirely in Haida.
Jaalen Edenshaw
So, we're up on the north end of Haida Gwaii in a little reserve, old name for it is [Haida]. And this is where I got my carving shed.
Gwaai Edenshaw
Haida Gwaii, if people don't know is something like 500 miles north of Vancouver and a six to eight hour ferry ride straight out into the Pacific. When we look at the mainland, what we actually see is the Alaskan pan-handle. Only on a clear day though.
Ry Moran
The brothers visited Oxford in 2009 alongside the other members of the Haida Delegation to Britain. While at the Pitt Rivers, they had the chance to handle and spend time with a number of Haida belongings.
Jaalen Edenshaw
We went and got to spend a lot - a lot of time with the Haida collections over there. And in the process, that was the main reason was to get the Haida human remains home. But we also were able to create quite a good relationship with the museum.
Ry Moran
One particular object caught the eye of the two carvers –
Gwaai Edenshaw
In that examination of pieces, we stumbled across what has come to be known as the Great Box. And, you know, it was just something that blew our minds at the time. You know, it is an amazing piece of form line art.
We commented, you know, the only way for us to really understand what this artist was - was up to, would be to do a recreation of that of that box.
Ry Moran
You talked about the box, and a bentwood box being a box of treasures. But I'm wondering if you could just maybe share a bit about what a Bentwood box is in Haida culture?
Gwaai Edenshaw
It's sort of all kinds of things, you know, it's - it's a utility device we used it for cooking and for storage. It was used for you know, inside of ceremonies to house sacred objects, it was used within our burial practices. You know, what makes a bentwood box is the - the corners are curved in a specific way, and then it's steamed. So, the sides are all one piece.
Ry Moran
This bentwood box is one of the very small percentage of the Pitt River’s overall collection that is actually on display. About a metre long, all four sides of the box feature depictions of the supernatural being Kuugin Jaad, or Mouse Woman, alongside other creatures and supernatural beings. The designs are painted in red and black together with a luminescent turquoise. The design work is complex and multilayered, and the more you look, the more you begin to see.
But why was the box all the way in Oxford to begin with? How did this remarkable bentwood box end up thousands of kilometres away from its home on Haida Gwaii?
[music transition]
Karina Greenwood
I mean the University of Oxford played an essential role in supporting British imperialism.
Ry Moran
To give us some context on the Pitt Rivers Museum, I spoke with our producer Karina, who studied art history at Oxford and who also spent a lot of time right in the Pitt Rivers.
Karina Greenwood
The University itself was a really fertile ground for legitimizing a lot of the ideas behind colonialism. Those ideas were then taught to its students, who then went out to become a lot of the really high-ranking positions in the British Empire – so everyone from Prime Ministers and viceroys, to colonial administrators, teachers and missionaries, everyone being fed these ideas of British superiority.[i]
And beyond playing a really important role in educating students, the Pitt Rivers Museum collection was expanded by those university graduates, who would send things back to the Pitt Rivers from the places in the British colonies that they were stationed – a lot of things often acquired under less than legitimate or ethical conditions.
So the museum has pretty rightly been described as this kind of like ‘time capsule’ of colonial collecting and theft that was happening during the British Empire.[ii] And it has a lot of work to do to address that history.
Marenka Thompson-Odlum
Hello, my name is Marenka Thompson-Odlum. And I'm a curator and researcher at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. I work specifically on the Labeling Matters project, and I'm also a doctoral candidate at the University of Glasgow.
Ry Moran
Marenka has been working at the Pitt Rivers since 2019 on a project rethinking the museum’s approach to labeling. We talked to her to try and get a better understanding of this complicated work.
Marenka Thompson-Odlum
So the Pitt Rivers Museum, as I said it's a university museum, and it houses over 500,000 objects, photos, manuscripts, and archives.
Many of these were collected during the height of the British Empire - so from the beginning of the founding of the museum in the 1880s, to around the 1970s - that's when the most of the collecting was being done. And if you map those collections onto the former British Empire, the largest parts of our collections come from all those places.
Ry Moran
The 1880s in Canada were a particularly violent time, where the Canadian settler state massively intensified its colonial efforts and violence against Indigenous peoples. To name but only a few events, this decade saw the first use of the Gatling gun to suppress the Métis resistance at Batoche, the growth of the residential school system, the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the expansion of the National Parks, amendments to the Indian Act, treaty making, and small pox raging all along the West Coast.
Marenka Thompson-Odlum
When we talk about different levels of violence - one thing that always stands out to me in the Benin Bronzes case in the museum, is that you can actually see that violence on the objects. There is this beautifully carved elephant task that would have been on what would have been an altar, originally, and you can see where it's been broken off. But also during the punitive expedition, in 1897, a lot of the city was burned and razed and you can see the scorch marks all along one side of that carved tusk. So you can literally see like, you know, violence enacted on those objects, so then take that a step further, and you can think of the violence enacted on the people who, you know, who created the - the makers of those objects - the communities where it came from, from Benin city.
Ry Moran
But the violence of collecting is not always this visible upon the objects themselves.
Marenka Thompson-Odlum
One of the first things you see when you walk into the Pitt Rivers Museum, is the Star House pole, a Haida pole, from Masset Island. And what is really kind of interesting to me about that one is on the label, it says that it was purchased for £36 in around 1900, right. £36, when you think of this, you know, beautifully carved massive pole and then you read that it cost about the same amount to pay people to basically transport from where it was down to the shore to be put on a ship. And then it cost about £200 to then put it on a railway all across Canada, then be shipped over to London and then put on a train to get to Oxford. So basically, all that - it costs more to do all that - than was paid to the community.
But more important than that than just the price, is that when you look at the time that it's collected in you realize that, this is an era where you know the Haida of community is basically facing a smallpox, you know, pandemic. So they're losing a lot of their population, so people with that knowledge of carving, and how and how to read those poles, and you know, all this cultural knowledge. You're also facing, there's an influx of missionaries, saying, you know, that the poles and different practices, Haida practices are, you know, not Christian or they're ‘satanic.’ So there's, there's also this push and there's this is another form of colonization happening.
Ry Moran
Pitt Rivers Curator Laura Peers has pointed out that in 1884, the same year the Great Box is being transferred to Oxford, the Canadian government amended the Indian Act to include the Potlatch Ban.[iii] This new legislation criminalized a number of important cultural traditions. And many of the belongings confiscated or sold under this ban ended up in scattered museum collections around the world.
Marenka Thompson-Odlum
And so, you know, faced with all those kinds of pressures, selling the poles - at that time - is a means of survival. So, you know, that's a different type of violence that's happening, you know, one where, you know, maybe something, or, someone is not as brutal as the Benin, example, but yeah, so that's really, that, to me, shows the different layers of what we're working with, and sometimes how insidious you know, colonization is.
Ry Moran
As sites that possess a great deal of power to shape our understanding of history, museums often fail to be honest about their colonial roots – something that becomes clear when looking at the labels in the Pitt Rivers.
Marenka Thompson-Odlum
We have some labels that are just very overtly offensive, so they're derogatory language. You know, that you would not use things like the word like ‘savage,’ or ‘savages,’ you know, on some of the older labels. So that's something that's still on some of our objects, and on some of the labels, where you just learned that people don't even know the meaning of that word, here, and so they just kind of transcribe old labels onto new labels without even like thinking through. And that causes, I mean, significant, significant trauma to people who come in, who recognize what that term is.
And then you have, what I call, the more euphemistic labels that - it's so much harder to see the issues of, you know, why they're problematic - because they're not exactly saying anything that's incorrect. They're just basically hiding an entire like history.
Ry Moran
I think I mean I've certainly even seen it to appear a lot of times even in the, in the kind of the throwaway word of ‘collected,’ right, like this item was collected, and it's like, oh, how was it collected? Who was it collected by? How much consent was involved in that like, quote-unquote ‘collection?’
Marenka Thompson-Odlum
Yes, I mean, 'collected', 'presented', 'acquired', then you have the ones that were 'donated', but who are they donated by? How does that person get it? I think euphemism is the currency of museum interpretation. [Laughter]
Who, in quotation marks ‘collected’ these objects to what information is privileged, on, you know, and reproduced on the labeling? But yes I mean, that is just very clear of who kind of the hierarchy that we're establishing, you know, who's given the greater importance, even though it's an object - museum full of objects from all over the world - it's only people from a very kind of mainly, in this sense, mainly British, but also Eurocentric, communities that are given that kind of power.
[music]
Ry Moran
Despite the Great Box being a part of the museum’s founding donation, there is almost no associated information about how it came to be a part of the Pitt River’s collection.
Jaalen Edenshaw
We had an idea, you know, we knew it was a Haida box, we had an idea, maybe - maybe from Masset, but - but as we started looking at all the notes or field notes or different things from - from the collectors, we realized how little was known, and how poor the record keeping was, you know, at that time, it was more just a frenzy to collect, and the museums wanted to fill their stores. And, you know, they weren't recording who owned it or - or who carved it or even in most cases, where it was collected.
Ry Moran
Collectors and museums at this time were ravenously trying to get trying to collect objects and belongings from Indigenous nations up and down the Pacific Coast. Many belongings were sold to collectors, some were simply stolen. Collectors were also not above robbing graves, for objects or for ancestral remains.[iv]
Gwaai Edenshaw
Literally, when you go into museums, you know, you go into their back rooms or storage. And there's hundreds, if not 1000s of pieces that really nobody's ever going to see. But really it just shows that, what it is - is a sort of storehouse of colonial plunder. It’s showing the power that they had at this time.
Jaalen Edenshaw
Yeah, it's all - it's always sort of this - this conflict in our hearts as we go into those places you know because we know what it represents but also, you know, we allow ourselves to be filled with the wonder of what we're seeing.
[music]
Ry Moran
Even though we don’t know the details of how the Great Box came to be in Oxford doesn’t mean we don’t know the policies and ideas that created the conditions for it to be sold or stolen.
It also becomes increasingly difficult to argue anything obtained under the genocidal and destructive forces of colonialism was legitimately acquired.
Even though it’s clear that treasures like the Great Box should be returned to their homes, many museums are still unwilling to admit the uncomfortable truth of their origins and return these important pieces of cultural heritage.
Marenka Thompson-Odlum
Yeah, I mean, I always question how much a place like the Pitt Rivers can actually be decolonized?
Ry Moran
Yeah...
Marenka Thompson-Odlum
But sometimes I wonder like, is there - by the fact that so many of our, so much of our collection, is rooted in kind of colonial enterprise. That is always going to be with us it's something that always has to be discussed, right? It can never just be glossed over because while these objects do have a life, before coming into the museum, that act of them being in the museum is often through a colonial process. And so that’s, that is something that I keep on questioning.
And then it also is something that makes me wonder, 'why do I work here?' [laughter] Because you're working in a place that, you know - I love museums - but I'm also very conscious of the fact that museums are colonial in their like, very, like definition.
Ry Moran
In her project at the Pitt Rivers, Labelling Matters, Marenka has been working for the past several years to try and more truthfully, and with greater care and respect, communicate knowledge about the objects, belongings, and their communities of origins to the museum’s visitors.
Ry Moran
It sounds like you have got an absolutely enormous task that, even once you get to the end of all 50,000 labels, you'll probably have to go back and re-examine them because these – this is all - Like it's all evolving. It's all in process - Right? And it's all relational.
Marenka Thompson-Odlum
One thing, I always tell people, I'm like, this doesn't end. Actually, the, to me, one of the key parts of kind of decolonial work is the constant critiquing of your own work and asking of yourself that like kind of self-reflexive practice.
One of the things that I always get - even from colleagues is like - 'why haven't you changed, like, all the labels yet?' And I was like, ‘Well, first of all, the labels are like, literally the tip of the iceberg.’
But also, my main reason is like, well, if I rewrite all these labels, I'm not any better.
And so it's gonna take time - to kind of develop all those relationships, to be able to think through some of the labels or more thoughtfully, especially, especially the ones that are deeply problematic.
Ry Moran
I suppose there's a place like Pitt Rivers that is unconsciously colonial. And then there's a Pitt Rivers museum that is conscious and is alert to this, and that's - that has the potential to be quite a powerful space, actually, if it's willing to engage in these hard conversations and to situate the work, the space, the objects, in this broader history of what even gave rise to the Pitt Rivers in the first place.
Marenka Thompson-Odlum
But that's almost how I see the Pitt Rivers kind of role as a whole, is using this extremely colonial space, to - yeah to kind of helped people kind of unpack coloniality. Because I think one of the things that we tend to always do is want to try to just jump to decolonization without actually fully understanding, like how we live with coloniality every day, to like little things that we see and don't even question it, you know, until you feel like, 'Oh, why do I think that? Why did I say that?'
It's not about just kind of throwing away the museum's history, but it's actually, actively learning from it, and trying to help people - like - elicit the palimpsest of like, coloniality that we're under that no one realizes, and peel back all those like layers.
[music transition]
Ry Moran
What do you know about the artist that carved it and where this box came from?
Jaalen Edenshaw
We've been doing quite a bit of research on that. We thought we, you know, we knew we were going to learn a lot, but - but we didn't know how much we were going to learn. And literally, every single day, there was a new revelation, you know, about the carving style or a technique. Everything, every day, there was something new. And so, by the time we were done, we still didn't feel like we learned all that we could from this artist, and we knew that he would have had to have had other pieces out there, you know, he's just too good, not to have a series of work.
Gwaai Edenshaw
I mean, its signature in the art was distinct enough that we felt confident that if we’d seen other pieces by him that we'd recognize it.
Ry Moran
The unmooring of Indigenous knowledges from pieces cultural heritage is yet another result of colonial assimilation policies. But dedicated research provides one pathway to begin reconnecting that knowledge with these belongings.
Jaalen Edenshaw
So, we start looking and we start finding in books and - and first in books and internet searches, and then we’d sort of make a shortlist of pieces we thought might be his and then we start going out to different museums – so in Ottawa, or Washington DC, or New York, and then actually examining the boxes. And once we - once we were there, you can see almost immediately that it was his - you know, done by the same artist.
Ry Moran
We mentioned the Great Box project to Inuk art historian Heather Igloliorte when we spoke to her for another episode. She was excited to hear about Jaalen and Gwaai’s research.
Heather Igloliorte
Oh, there's some really interesting work happening around how do we how do we even name and identify works by people that we don't, that we can't identify? So like, works from the historical record cultural belongings going back. Do we call these ancestor works? Do we say that they're, you know, artists not yet identified?
And so just because the museum doesn't have that knowledge doesn't mean that they are anonymous producers from a culture but that they are actually, you know, this is someone's artistry, this is someone's life’s work that's in the collection, and how do we restore the dignity to that piece again? And how do we really acknowledge how important it is to the community, when the institution did not, you know, at one point, didn't care who made it, you know, and it was a part of the just collecting it for the sake of having something in the collection, rather than really appreciating who the individual artists was.
I think that's such exciting work that, you know, can be done through the bringing together collections worldwide and it does point to all of those fissures and mistakes and disregard that, you know, we can we can get that information back and that's really, really exciting to me to the possibility of recovering knowledge, because it's there in the thing you know, it is there in the belonging. The knowledge is all there in the visual artwork, and it's just for us to unlock that puzzle and to discover that and then, you know, return, return that knowledge to the object.
[music transition]
Ry Moran
On the other side of the world, the other collaborator on the Great Box Project, the Haida Gwaii Museum – is doing some incredible work in expanding what is possible within museums.
Nika Collison
I’ll probably get a little emotional sometimes when I talk because it is just so part, it's inextricable, it is real life in our world. Our museum is fully part of our culture.
[Introducing herself in Haida].
Hi, my name is Jisgang, Nika Collison in English. I am Haida and Scottish. And from the [Haida] clan.
Ry Moran
Nika currently works as the Executive Director the Haida Gwaai Museum, but she’s worked in many roles at the museum over the years in addition to her work on the Repatriation Committee.
Nika Collison
So it was - so Natalie McFarland was our director. And she tricked me [Laughs] into working at the museum.
And I got to work with Natalie, who was the ED of the museum, two person staff at the time, and we hit it off and I - and I really enjoyed the work we did together. And she, like I said, she tricked me, she stole me away. She said, 'how about I offer you an internship for negative $10 an hour?'
Ry Moran
The Haida Gwaii Museum, as a Haida-led institution, is taking a unique approach to its work.
Nika Collison
So within Saahlinda Naay in our greater community, the museological practices we've developed, or we're actively decolonizing museology. And we're Haida-izing, our own practices, right? So the way we do things in our museum follows the way we conduct ourselves in Haida society. And we're instilling our own worldviews and how things should happen. And they don't feel so foreign and militant anymore. And that's a really exciting thing all in its own way.
Ry Moran
Nika’s passion for her work is infectious, and so visible when she talks about all the work her museum is involved in.
Nika Collison
Okay, I want to tell you about our friggin departments -
Ry Moran
[Laughs]
Nika Collison
Because this is the best thing ever because we are Haida museum, Haida led - I mean, we don't ever leave our Canadian neighbors behind. We - like my father said to me, why would we do to others what was done to us, right? And we do things that our community needs.
Ry Moran
The museum not only does all the traditional kind of museum programming and education, but they are involved in a host of other projects. Everything from language mentorship, to an ipads for elders program – which was created during the pandemic to helped get elders ipads and internet access to keep them safe and connected.
The Haida Gwaii Museum was founded on this kind of dedication to serving the needs of their community. It is through decades of work by the Haida Repatriation Committee that many of the treasures that fill the rooms of the museum were returned home.
Nika Collison
Well the museum was founded on repatriation, right? Like, you've got over 90% of our people dying through genocides, you've got over 90% of our belongings leaving as well and - as well or relatives, right? So, repatriation, we call it Yahguudangang, to pay respect.
We had to have a formal letter of authorization from our nation from lead hereditary and elected leaders saying that we're mandated to do this work. And within that mandate is where we're mandated not just to research and bring home our ancestors, our relatives, and our belongings, we're mandated to do this work by building relationships with mainstream museums and universities. And we undertake this work with the - with the absolute goal of mutual respect, cooperation, and trust.
Ry Moran
Nika’s work with the Repatriation Committee has taken her around the world, and she described to us the kind of learning she herself has done as she has come in to contact with Haida belongings and ancestors.
Nika Collison
And then I was working in New York and found two masks there - one is documented as being Raven in human form, presenting as male, and then the mask opens and and raven is presenting themself as their female self, right. And there’s another mask in the same format which is a human male self that opens to present their female self.
I had to start researching all this and you know that is really changed a lot in me. Growing up always hearing Raven being referred to as 'he,' knowing that there's not a heck of a lot of materials to go on or contemporary rememberings because that colonial force was homophobic and transphobic. But being able to find little bits of information and then researching beyond that and learning that it appears a lot if not most Indigenous communities had more than two genders before.
Now, here's the kicker, this was the big eye opener for me. With someone else's research, I realized that is where gender became compartmentalized was during the genocides as well, because the church comes after the smallpox, and the church only has 'he' or 'she.' And then the Indian Act comes along in the end, and only has 'he' or 'she' and residential school comes along, and only has 'he' or 'she.'
So the whole thing about the Canadian project, their ultimate goal was to kill identity. So you look at the different mechanisms Canada used to fracture and try and kill our identity. You have, first, biological genocide, you have the Indian Act making us wards of the state and removing us from our lands. You have the residential school. You have the 60s Scoop, which actually happened - started in the late fifties and still occurs today. All of these things, absolutely, tactically developed to annihilate any sense of self. And they did it with gender, too. And if you think you think of yourself, and who you are, and where does it start your absolute essence of being even before your culture. And they tried to destroy that too. And they did a good job, but they didn't succeed.
And that is what brings us back to Yahguudangang, Saahlinda Naay, the Council of the Haida nation, and every other thing our nation does, to put ourselves back together. And not only put ourselves back together, but not leave Canadians behind in the process.
Ry Moran
I think this - this preservation of the past, the Saving Things House - yes, it's about the past, but it's equally about the future, right? It's equally about transmitting, and preserving, and honoring those generations to come, in the recognition that, I guess, they can't be fully Haida unless they know where they came from, and who they are in order to continue being Haida, right?
Nika Collison
Yeah and, I just love the way you frame that.
But I'm going to say that it is a moral responsibility for all of us. You know, people, it's a moral responsibility to find out the truth. Because like my Auntie [Haida] says, ‘now that you know, there's no excuse.’ And there is enough out in the world, if nothing else, our children, and the knowledges of what happened to them. There's no excuse not to educate yourselves.
I like, I like again how my Auntie [Haida] explained it to me she goes yeah, we you know, we have laws there are things we're not supposed to do. But what we really like are our values because values are things you strive for always, right? It's a goal, and values - even that word in English I don't know how we would frame it in Haida honestly, but, um - Haida ways of being that's how we would say it. Haida ways of being. In and of itself, acknowledge is humaneness right?
So we're striving for Yahguudang, to be respectful. We're striving to gain consent to remember always to ask first. We're striving for reciprocity, for balance, to seek wise counsel, to listen so hard, you can hear, you know, all these beautiful values. And within those values - I could go on and on with those values – there's one called Tl’l yahda. And Tl’l yahda, as I've been taught means—like many of our words can have different meanings, it's how you use them in a sentence or context— Tl’l yahda means to tell the truth. Tl’l yahda has been likened to law. And Tl’l yahda also means make things right. So when you do misstep, by mistake or on purpose, we have this incredible mechanism of being able to make things right. And that requires you being true to yourself and acknowledging the missteps you've made and being able to state them and make things right. So these - these values you know, in - in this day and age, we all have to codify things and put them on paper and have processes and policies and things like that. If you just write those words down as your guide, and you bounce what you're doing off these - these - these ways of being, you've got your strategic plan, you know, [Laughs].
[music transition]
Ry Moran
When Jaalen and Gwaai set out to recreate the Great Box, they had a really specific goal in mind for the child of the Great Box.
Jaalen Edenshaw
Any museum, right? You go in and the Haida collections, and you're just sort of overwhelmed by all these pieces. And - and you can study them and everything, but what's missing is that they've been taken out of - out of use and out of context. They're not being used for performance or used for, you know, the proper things and so they sort of sit there. Sterile, almost. And - and so that was also one of our goals was, you know, we knew in todays climate, there's no chance of having that box returned to us at the time, but - but what we could do is we could create a box and its likeness to be used for - for ceremony and you know, brought out at Potlatches and, you know, holding our treasures and you know, moving things forward in - in that way.
Ry Moran
The brothers worked on recreating the box for a month, carving in twelve-hour shifts. At the end of the thirty days, the nearly completed ‘child’ of the Great Box was shipped back to Haida Gwaai. Within days of its arrival, it was in a classroom at the Old Masset High School - already helping the next generation.
Jaalen Edenshaw
So that was like an initial vow that we made was - was that this was a, you know, not a box just to be put under glass or - or something like that - that we put it to use. And, you know, and it has - it's had a song put into it by - by Beau. We've had it out at our father's Potlatch. And you know, we've been building a collection of masks and regalia to be housed in it, in time.
Gwaai Edenshaw
The child of the great box is a - is an example of - of us, repopulating our world, you know, with - with Haida art.
But - but what else it does is it puts up Haida art in the community. It's really, like, rewarding for us to be able to do these projects and, you know, make masks for dancing. And there's so many people doing it now, you know, there are a lot of artists that are working in the community and that are keeping the songs alive and vital. And our chiefs are doing their work and throwing potlatches and things. So you know the dream is that we have what our ancestors had that, you know, people can look around and see the art as an everyday part of their lives. And to some extent, we're already there, but we want more.
[music begins]
Marenka Thompson-Odlum
I mean, we all live on this planet together. And we all live in different ways of knowing, and different epistemologies. It's about creating a space where you can actually maybe see yourself from somebody else's perspective, and to hope that, you know, that fosters greater understanding.
Nika Collison
Our museum is fully part of our culture, and our ability to heal, to seek and attain reparation, and to find ways to coexist.
And coexistence is not static, but it gives this foundation of we have to live together. So we have to commit to finding ways to live together….
And you can't have coexistence without reparation. And you can't have reparation without acceptance, you can't have acceptance, without truth telling. And you can't have truth telling until you have a forum where people are willing to hear the truth. And you can't have a forum where people are willing to hear the truth until that truth is mainstreamed. So that's nonlinear, and Gina ‘waadluxan gud ad kwaagiida, everything depends on everything else.
[music transitions]
Ry Moran
This podcast was created through the direct team work of an incredible group of people. It was written and produced by Karina Greenwood and myself, editing and consulting by Cassidy Villebrun-Buracas, mixing and mastering by Matheus Liete, and music by myself, Ry Moran.
Special thanks to the University of Victoria Libraries team that assisted in countless ways on this production.
Maarsi to our guests Jaalen Edenshaw, Gwaai Edenshaw, Marenka Thompson-Odlum, Heather Igloliorte, and Nika Collison.
Taapwaywin is made possible through the University of Victoria Strategic Framework Impact fund, and with direct support from the University of Victoria Libraries and CFUV Radio.
This podcast was created on unceded lək̓ʷəŋən and WSÁNEĆ territories.
[i] Richard Symonds. Oxford and Empire: The Last Lost Cause? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Dalia Gebrial. “Rhodes Must Fall: Oxford and Movements for Change.” In Decolonising the University, (eds.) Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial and Kerem Nişancıoğlu, 19-36. London: Pluto Press, 2018.
[ii] Matt Smith. Losing Venus, Published in 2020 to accompany the exhibition Losing Venus at the Pitt Rivers Museum, 20.
[iii] Laura Peers. “Decolonization as a Permanent Process: PRM Relations with the Haida Nation, 1998-2018.” In Journal of Museum Ethnography, 32 (March 2019), 2.
[iv] Douglas Cole. Captured Heritage: The Scramble for Northwest Coast Artifacts. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1985.