The Mystery of the White Indians

The Mystery of the White Indians

This is a version of an article published in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette Magazine in 1994. 



depiction of sorrowful return of white captive to Fort Pitt by
Chauncy Ives, a statue now in Newark.  The white statue below
is also by Ives, of this same event. 


They were marched through the portals of Fort Pitt, the brick and stone symbol of civilization's spread into the western wilderness, an imposing structure built on the spot ordained by the young George Washington as the site of a new settlement sponsored by a group of London merchants and Virginians who formed the Ohio Company. They were early settlers of western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, "ordinary men, women and children of yeoman stock..." writes historian James Axtell, "Protestant by faith, a variety of nationalities by birth, English by law, different from their countrymen only in their willingness to risk personal insecurity for the economic opportunities of the frontier."

But they did differ from their fellow settlers now, as they entered the fort escorted by English soldiers. Some of their bodies were painted with vermillion mixed with bear grease. The men and boys had shaved heads, the women long hair. Some of them wore feathers and wampum beads. Instead of English hard-heeled shoes and boots, they wore moccasins. And upon the order of the commanding officer, Colonel Henry Bouquet, the hands and feet of many of them were bound, particularly the children.

These were white captives of various western Pennsylvania Indian tribes, being returned to the English fort according to treaty. But these liberated settlers had to be restrained--not from attacking the Indians who had brought them here and stood weeping outside the gates. These former captives had to be prevented from returning with their former captors to their tribal homes. "Unless they are closely watched," Colonel Bouquet observed as the first group arrived, "they will certainly return to the Barbarians."

It was a scene of consternation, on both sides. Women cried and begged to go back, and some refused to eat for days afterwards. Some of the returnees promptly escaped. John McCullough, 14 years old, arrived with his legs tied to the horse he was riding and his arms bound behind his back with his white father's garter. Nevertheless, he slipped away during the night and made his way back to his Indian family.

Several women also fled through the darkness. One was the English wife of an Indian chief, who took her children with her. Hearing of her escape, Colonel Bouquet ordered that no one pursue her, "as she was happier with her Chief than she would be if restored to her home."

Most at Fort Pitt did not escape immediately, but as a contemporary witness observed, "Every captive left the Indians with regret."

But those soldiers and settlers who witnessed this strange homecoming must have also been confused. Why would these white men, women and children turn their backs on their own kith and kin, forgo the benefits of civilization to live among people the Europeans regarded as heathen savages?

Yet many here and elsewhere did. This was the mystery of the White Indians. The phenomenon of the White Indians--white captives who returned to the Indians who captured them or remained with them voluntarily-- was perhaps the most psychologically unsettling aspect of settlement. It called into question the values (as well as the veracity) of white institutions and culture. The settlers were heirs to centuries of progress -- great sailing ships and great cities, great governments, armies and global trading companies; the first great machines for casting iron, smelting steel, and manufacturing glass. Though the settlers farmed the same land as the Indians, they did so with iron tools, wearing at least some clothes of manufactured cloth.

Soon there would be a city here, radiating from the grounds of Fort Pitt at the Point. Already Philadelphia was known as a city ranking with the best in Europe. Meanwhile, great corporations organized the trade that was flourishing and the manufacturing that was beginning in western Pennsylvania. Here great churches spread their certainties as they were doing around the world... What did the Indians have that compared with this?

Hearts and Minds

The phenomenon of the white Indians was especially dramatic because it did not happen in reverse. Even before that first group was led forcibly into Fort Pitt in 1764, so many former captives had already left their white families and returned to the Indians that Benjamin Franklin remarked wonderingly in a letter, "When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho'...treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life...and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them."

The phenomenon of the white Indian was known throughout the centuries of white settlement of America, from the colonies of New England and Canada to the Far West. But in the years surrounding Pittsburgh's founding, it was a particular feature here--one not often mentioned in the history books.

This year [1994] Pittsburgh celebrates the 200th anniversary of its incorporation as a borough in 1794. But the battle that allowed Pittsburgh to grow peacefully in the eighteenth and nineteenth century occurred nearly thirty years before, and some thirty miles away, at Bushy Run in Westmoreland County. It was last major battle of Europeans and American Indians in western Pennsylvania.

At the time the first hundred or so Europeans first tried to settle Pittsburgh, the white and Indian worlds were in sharp conflict. There had been a brief peace in the region after the violent French and Indian war, but soon the increasing number of white settlers intruded on land ceded to the Indians by treaty.

Other points of tension developed where the two cultures met. Indians asserted (and some white observers agreed, including Colonel Bouquet) that fur traders took advantage of many Indians by getting them drunk on rum and cheating them. The Senecas complained that whites who murdered Indians were not punished, but if Indians retaliated, they were hung.

All along the frontier from western Pennsylvania to upper Michigan, various tribes were alarmed by British actions and arrogance. Fearing the English were going to try to exterminate them, they banded together to drive the settlers out.

Under the leadership of the Ottawa chief Pontiac, Indian war parties captured all the forts between Detroit and Pittsburgh, including Fort Venango and Fort Presque Isle in Erie. Their objective was to drive the English east, back over the Alleghenies.

Soon the Senecas and Delawares were threatening Fort Pitt itself. Though the English were well fortified and provisioned there, they came up with another stratagem. "Could it not be contrived to send the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes of Indians?" General Amherst wrote to Colonel Bouquet, the local military leader. "You will do well to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race."

In June 1763, when the Indians saw that they had the fort surrounded, two of their leaders, Turtle Heart and Mamaltee, made a speech to the English from just beyond the walls. They said they had prevailed on the much larger forces of the Six Nations ( also called the Iroquois Confederacy, the first functioning democracy in North America) not to attack, so the soldiers and Pittsburgh families inside the fort would have time to withdraw.

The English declined the offer. That day in his journal, English Captain William Trent wrote, "Out of our regard to them we gave them two Blankets and a Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect."


painting of Bushy Run battle by Robert Griffings


In early August, English soldiers commanded by Colonel Henry Bouquet were rushing from Fort Ligonier to the aid of Fort Pitt. Camping for the night near present-day Jeannette, Bouquet's troops were surprised by a force of Senecas, Delawares and Shawnees, probably led by Mud Eater, a Seneca warrior skilled in military strategy. Huddling behind the sacks of flour they were carrying for the soldiers besieged at the Point, the English seemed doomed to defeat, even though they greatly outnumbered the Indians.

But the next day Bouquet tricked the Indians into believing he was retreating, then surrounded them and killed many. The survivors disappeared into the woods, and Bouquet's troops marched on to Pittsburgh.

When the Indians at the Point heard of Bouquet's victory, they lifted the siege of Fort Pitt. Although he did not realize it at the time, Bouquet had ended any organized threat by American Indians to the white settlers of western Pennsylvania.

Native Ground

Freed of danger, Pittsburgh quickly became the gateway for white immigrant expansion into the west. The town soon grew from a settlement of 149 people to a bustling trade and transportation center--the place where settlers bought supplies and boarded river boats to begin their westward trek. It seemed the white settlers' victory was complete.

The treaty of 1764 resulted from Bouquet's triumph, and as usual when dealing with the Indians, the English were not magnanimous. They had "reduced the Shawnee and Delawares etc. to the most Humiliating Terms of Peace," General Thomas Gage gloated. They obliged the Indians "to deliver up even their Own Children born of white women."

Finally defeated by the English in what was probably the most decisive battle in early Pittsburgh history, several Indian tribes signed the treaty. Over the next year, they returned about two hundred men, women and children to Fort Pitt. But instead of arriving with joyful relief, happy to be reunited with their families, most returned unwillingly, under heavy guard.

Many--especially children and young people who had been among the Indians since early childhood--responded only to their Indian names, spoke only in their tribal language, and preferred their Indian clothes. In White Indians of Colonial America (Ye Galleon Press, Washington) history professor James Axtell concludes that many of the returned settlers "in general regarded their white saviors as barbarians and their deliverance as captivity. Had they not been compelled to return to English society by militarily enforced peace treaties, the ranks of the white Indians would have been greatly enlarged."

Why would so many whites wish to return to what their fellow settlers regarded as a primitive way of life--especially after tasting civilization once more--or in the case of children, for the first time?

For some, the treatment they received in white society may have seemed less than civilized. Women who had been "among savages" were considered tainted, and those who had children with Indian fathers had the status of prostitutes, while their children faced a life of prejudice against "half-breeds."

They also didn't always confirm prejudices about Indian life. According to the conventional wisdom, Indians tortured their male captives and raped the women. But the accounts of former captives says otherwise. Though torture was sometimes reported, it seemed mostly to amount to ritual--either symbolic vengence for Indians killed by whites, or an initiation rite into the tribe. Two colonial men taken to an Indian village in Kittanning wrote that their ordeal consisted of "three blows each, on the back. They were, however, administered with great mercy."

If torture was rare, rape was nonexistent. According to the accounts of every returned white woman, nothing indecent or even improper had happened to them among the Indians. George Croghan, a famous western Pennsylvania trader with extensive experience among many local Indian tribes asserted that rape was "a Crime they Despise," punishable by death. Murderers were dealt with by the victim's family, but rape was the only capital crime punished by the tribe as an offense against everyone. In these tribes a white woman had to give her consent before being married to an Indian man.

On the whole, whites were not only not mistreated, but they could find an honorable place in tribal society. Each captive was taken in by an Indian families and treated as a relative--sometimes considered to literally replace a family member killed by whites. "Once the captives had earned the trust of their Indian families," Axtell writes, "nothing in Indian life was denied them."

Many became tribal members, earning wealth and status within the tribe, and some even became chiefs. Perhaps the most dramatic example was a Pennsylvanian named Carswell, captured by the Iroquois at the age of four. He was made a chief at an early age, and as each of his three sons reached manhood, they also became chiefs. Carswell lived a long life as a respected and valued leader among the Iroquois, finally known simply as Old White Chief. "In public office as in every sphere of Indian life, the English captives found that the color of their skin was unimportant;" Axtell observes, "only their talent and their inclination of heart mattered."

"...Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans," wrote St. John Crevecoeur in his 1782 classic, "Letters from an American Farmer." The question remains, what was so enticing?

Axtell and others (such as Annette Kolodny, dean of the faculty of humanities at the University of Arizona) have analyzed the many accounts written or dictated by European captives. The first accounts, published in the eighteenth and early 19th century, portrayed the Indians as savages who treated captives cruelly, which conveniently helped to justify the policy of eradicating them as Europeans settled on more and more of their land. Sensational fictions (young white woman captive about to be scalped, rescued by the paleface hero) added to the image. But there was the embarrassing fact of the White Indians. There had to be something about Indian life that was so appealing.



Mary Jemison

 One of the first positive accounts to interest the public was that of frontiersman Daniel Boone. He told of his capture by the Shawnee and his eventual adoption as the chief's son. He clearly admired the Shawnee ways. An even more popular account was that was Mary Jemison, who was captured by the Seneca in 1755 at the age of twelve. It appeared in 1824 and outsold the works of James Fenimore Cooper for the rest of the decade. It seemed to have caused a sensation because she married a Delaware Indian man. "Strange as it may seem, I loved him!" she wrote.

Crevecour had observed, "There must be something in their social bond singularly captivating, and far superior to anything to be boasted of among us." Indeed, the reports of white Indians emphasized elements of the social bond: marriage, family, kinship, the treatment and education of children, and the flow among activities white society would rigidly classify as work, play and religious worship.

Speaking of the Seneca family who adopted her, Jemison said, "I was ever considered and treated...as a real sister, the same as though I had been born of their mother." She recalled "in the summer season, we planted, tended and harvested our corn, and generally had all our children with us; but had no master to oversee or drive us, so that we could work as leisurely as we pleased."

"No people can live more happy than the Indians in time of peace," she concluded. Jemison dictated her story when she was in her 80s, still living on Seneca land in upstate New York, even though the Seneca were gone.


one of several depictions of William Penn meeting
Pennsylvania Indians 


Here in Pennsylvania, aspects of Indian cultures even impressed William Penn. "We sweat and toil to live," he wrote. "Their pleasure feeds them, I mean, their Hunting, Fishing and Fowling."

Though a bit misleading, Penn's observation has merit. In these "woodland epoch" cultures of western Pennsylvania, Indians farmed and lived in villages. They were not completely opposed to technology--in fact, some historians argue, their growing dependence on iron tools from the whites led them into fur trading, which led them into wars and cultural changes that weakened them. But even in colonial times, the Indians here retained strong ties to the hunter-gatherer culture, in which life closely adheres to the cycles, rhythms and characteristics of nature, and possessions are unimportant. Their social system was so highly attuned to the specific characteristics of their natural surroundings that they seemed to need to work less--partly because they were satisfied with what white settlers would consider less. They derived both pleasure and livelihood from the same sources.

Axtell and others also observe that some settlers were already nervous about increasing urbanization, and the loss of frontier freedoms being imposed by "overseers", such as large landowners, the trading companies or the first bosses of the fledgling industries. They suggest that some white Indians saw more freedom in the Indian way of life.

The Big House


figure on Big House


In these colonial times, a number of different tribes lived in western Pennsylvania, replacing the single dominant tribe that had recently and mysteriously disappeared. Known only as the Monogehela People, this tribe left behind remnants of an advanced culture in hundreds of local sites. One theory is that they were wiped out by diseases introduced by whites--people they never saw, but whose alien microbes (probably smallpox) were passed on by other Indians along the active trade routes from the east coast. If so, this would not be unusual: when Columbus landed, there were perhaps 100 million Native people who lived in the Americas from Argentina to Alaska. Nineteen out of twenty of them died from white-borne diseases. By the time settlers arrived in Pittsburgh, at least 3 out of 4 Indians in North America had perished.

The tribes that filled the gap in western Pennsylvania included the Shawnee (in Sewickley, for example), the Wynadots (below New Castle), Miamis, Creeks, and the Senecas (Aliquippa is named after Queen Aliquippa, head of a Seneca settlement) and other Iroquoian peoples. But the principal tribe in the region called themselves the Lenni Lanape; whites called them the Delaware. One of their principal settlements was in the present-day area of Lawrenceville.

White captives of the Delaware suggest other attractions of Indian life. In his account of his four and a half years among the Indians, John Bricknell wrote, "The Delawares are the best people to train up children I ever was with. Their leisure hours are, in great measure, spent in training up their chidren to observe what they believe to be right."

According to Paul Wallace in his landmark study, Indians in Pennsylvania, Delaware children were cherished; their parents did not hit them. They were taught woodcraft and gardening, a knowledge of plants and animals, and the tribal legends and traditions, and religious beliefs.

"The basic principle of Delaware religion was that spirit was the prime reality," Wallace writes. "All things had souls: not only man, but also animals, the air, water, trees, even rocks and stones." Another scholar observed that the Delaware "trod lightly through his natural environment, merging himself sympathetically into the world of living and non-living things."

The place of humans in the universe was dramatized in the chief annual ritual, the Big House Ceremony, held over twelve days and nights in October. A wooden structure of perhaps 50 by 30 feet, the Big House was as symbolic as it was solid: its floor was the earth, with the underworld below. Its four walls were the four directions; its ceiling the sky dome, with the home of the creator above. At the center of the house was a post, symbolizing the World Tree. Along the floor from the east door to the west was the winding White Path, along which the dancers danced, solemnly following the path of life with its twists and turns from birth to death, around the World Tree. (The last known Big House Ceremony was conducted in Oklahoma in 1924, but a Big House was recently reconstructed for an exhibition at the Philbrook Museum in Oklahoma.)

Within Delaware society, marriages were arranged but divorce was easily obtained if one or both parties wished it. Elders were revered and consulted for their wisdom. There was virtually no crime.

"As a nation they may be considered fit examples for many of us Christians to follow, "Bricknell wrote. "They certainly follow what they are taught to believe right more closely, and I might say more honestly, in general, than we Christians do the divine precepts of our Redeemer....I know I am influenced to good, even at this day, more from what I learned among them, than what I learned among people of my own color."

White settlers who came to America yearning for political democracy may have also been impressed by American Indian societies. In most tribes, and particularly among the Iroquoian people, decisions were made democratically by council, a forum at which everyone had an equal voice. If no consensus could be arrived at, the decision was simply postponed. Women also had a more prominent political role than in white society. These tribes formed the Five Nations, a powerful confederacy whose intricate democratic system was studied by the Founding Fathers, and some elements incorporated in the U.S. Constitution.

The Delaware almost became an equal partner in the American political experiment. They were the first tribe to make a treaty with the new United States government in 1778. Signed in Pittsburgh, it offered the Delaware nation admission to the union as part of a 14th state for American Indians. But the federal government failed to ratify this provision.

Despite numerous subsequent treaties, the Delaware were driven farther and farther west (except for some who fled to Canada, and maintain two small reserves in Ontario province). By the early 19th century, all the tribes were gone from western Pennsylvania.


Since the early days of white settlement and particularly since the western frontier was essentially closed in the late nineteenth century, Indians have been alternately romanticized and ignored by white Americans. Today, both Indians and whites are looking anew at the traditional beliefs and ways of life that existed in America for thousands of years before Columbus. From memory, records and those few who maintained traditions, they are re-discovering a culture deeply embedded in the land.

We may never know exactly what attracted so many whites in colonial times. "The great majority of white Indians left no explanation for their choice," Axtell writes. "Forgetting their original language and their past, they simply disappeared into their adopted society." But many of the same elements that now interest us may have also attracted white Europeans who actually experienced them, when the woods of western Pennsylvania embraced these American Indian cultures. Those who loved this landscape could not fail to notice that while white European society was busy clearing the woods, the Indians lived in them. Those of us who grew up with the shapes and colors of these hills and rivers imprinted in us, may not have much trouble imagining why the white Indians might want to live in them so fully.

PRINCIPAL SOURCES

White Indians of Colonial America by James Axtell. Ye Galleon Press, Fairfield WA 1991.
"Among the Indians: The Uses of Captivity" by Annette Kolodny, New York Times Book Review, January 31, 1993.
Indians in Pennsylvania by Paul A. W. Wallace, Revised Edition, PA Historical and Museum Commission, 1981.
Pittsburgh: The Story of An American City by Stephen Lorant.
"Delaware: Honoring the Past and Preparing for the Future" by Lydia L. Wyckoff and Curtis Zunigha, Native Peoples, Spring 1994.

Dawn of the Eagle: Robert Davidson and the Northwest Coast Native Revival

DAWN OF THE EAGLE: Robert Davidson and the Northwest Coast Native Art Revival 

By William Severini Kowinski

This is the full text prior to editing of the article that appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, January 1995. Bill Reid, who was ill and unavailable when I wrote this piece, died in 1998. Robert Davidson was awarded the Order of British Columbia in 1995 and the Order of Canada in 1996.  Robert Davidson has continued to create new work and you can see some of  it on his website, and the websites of Spirit Wrestler Gallery, Inuit Gallery, and Stonington Gallery, among others.  There are more books by and about Robert Davidson published since this article--one of the more recent commemorates the raising of the totem pole in Masset in 1969 that he and his brother Reg carved, as mentioned in this piece.  It's called Four Decades: An Innocent Gesture. 

A later photo of Robert Davidson at work

Wearing a light blue denim shirt and clean faded jeans, his black hair gently edged with gray, Robert Davidson sits on a metal-framed wicker chair, painting with a sure flowing hand the canvas that rests in front of him on the top of a short aluminum ladder. He follows and sometimes changes the pencil drawing he previously made. A goose-neck lamp illuminates his work, compensating for the dim light coming through the windows of his cedar-paneled studio on a gray late morning. A telephone is at his side, next to his paints.

Sitting nearby under the high shelves of paint cans, surrounded by the surfaces of counters and tables displaying partially completed sculptures and scattered with brushes, saws, torches and other tools, are two apprentices, Bill Kuhnley, Jr. and Gloria Godrich. Davidson keeps an eagle-eyed watch on their work as he does his own. At his back, just beyond the sign on the wall that says "If we see you SMOKING we will assume you are on fire and take appropriate measures," is a small kitchen, with refrigerator, stove and cappuccino maker. Through an open doorway is an office and the bright stare of a computer screen, where Kate Brauer, Davidson's recently hired assistant, takes faxes and phone calls concerning commissions, exhibitions, press inquiries and requests to meet the artist.

"You can put some music on if you like," Davidson says to Bill, the newer apprentice. The stereo system, fed by a cabinet full of CDs and tapes, is uncharacteristically silent.

"Okay," Bill says. "What would you like to hear?"

A pause as Davidson continues working. "Nothing," he says quietly. There is another pause before everyone laughs. His comic timing is impeccable.

"Bill is learning about bantering," Davidson remarks.

"Besides talent," Kate comments later, "The qualifications for Robert's apprentices are a quick wit and proficiency at making cappuccino."

It might be the studio of any successful contemporary artist. Except that the canvas Robert Davidson is painting is actually deerskin, stretched across the frame of a drum. His apprentice Gloria is working on the template for another drum design. Bill is carving a miniature canoe of yellow cedar. The sculptures awaiting completion include a large, elaborately painted red cedar mask of a salmon head, very much like the one that Davidson's Rainbow Dancers use in a ceremonial dance. Though the nearest town is White Rock, a beach-and-bedroom community outside of Vancouver, British Columbia, the studio itself is located on the Semiahmoo Reserve of the Salish people. The designs Davidson is painting on the drumhead are in a unique style rigorously developed over at least a thousand years by the Haida people of Haida Gwaii, the islands south of Alaska designated on maps as the Queen Charlottes.

Europeans and their American relatives praised this ancient style for its power and beauty since they first encountered it in the late eighteenth century, but few masters remained by the time Davidson was born in 1946. Today, Davidson is the most prominent working Haida artist giving new life to this art and the culture it expresses, not only by returning to past traditions and standards, but by adapting and extending both the art and culture to the contemporary world.

In the process, Davidson has become internationally known. His tall carved totem poles tower over works by Rodin and Henry Moore in Pepsico's International Sculpture Park in Westchester County, New York. Other poles grace public areas in Montreal, Toronto and Dublin as well as his home village of Masset on Haida Gwaii. A major retrospective of Davidson's carvings, prints, bronze sculptures, and gold and silver jewelry was mounted last summer by the Vancouver Art Museum and is now richly displayed at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull, Quebec (just across the river from Ottawa, Ontario) until September 11, 1994. He is the subject of one recent book (Robert Davidson, edited by Ian Thom ) and the author of another forthcoming in the fall (Eagle of the Dawn, with photographs by Ulli Steltzer), both published in the U.S. by the University of Washington and in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre.

Yet Davidson grew up in the Haida homeland without ever knowing about the masterpieces of his culture, which he discovered only after he left. It seemed the old culture had vanished as well, but as he found when he returned, it was only sleeping in the hearts of the last elders who had lived it. But it took a totem pole to awaken it.


* * *

Growing up in the mid 1950s, Robert Davidson crammed into the movie theater with the loud mass of Masset children. "You'd think the movie was a sports event happening," he recalls, "because we'd all be coaching the actors on, shouting "hurry! hurry!" when there was a suspenseful chase, cheering for the good guys, booing the bad guys." In western movies, the good guys--the winners--were the cowboys, the cavalry. The bad guys--the losers--were the Indians.

Then one day Robert's uncle took him aside and told him that he was an Indian himself. " All of a sudden, Revelation Day. I must have been ten or eleven. That was a real shattering blow to me. I didn't want to be those bad people. I wanted to win."

Until then, he was just another boy in the small fishing village of Old Masset in the north of Haida Gwaii, living with his family--parents, sister and two brothers-- in a one room house lit by Coleman lamps and heated by a wood stove. He knew he was named Robert after his grandfather, Robert Davidson, Sr., and Charles after Charles Edenshaw, the father of his grandmother, Florence Edenshaw Davidson, who he called naanii-- Haida for grandmother. But there was a pained silence and common amnesia about parts of his parents and grandparents' past, a gap that a child knows marks forbidden territory.

Still, he enjoyed the closeness of the community and his many relatives. He loved to fish with his grandfather, who sometimes pretended to be catching a big one to entertain him. At night he listened to stories on the battery-powered radio.

Though he felt no overt discrimination, there were intimations of differences in the conflict of his everyday life with the demands of formal schooling. "School was so foreign," he remembers. " I wanted to have perfect attendance, but we lived with the seasons, not by the calendar. We went clamming when the tide was right, not according to the clock. Also, at home we learned by demonstration, not by intellectualizing and hypothesizing. But there was no sensitivity to that in school, so we were always labelled as slow learners."


argulite sculpture by Charles Edenshaw

One thing he could learn by watching and repeating was carving--first from his father, who'd recently taken it up, and then from his grandfather, who'd been a carpenter and shipbuilder as well as a commercial fisherman, and carved in both wood and the soft black slate unique to Haida Gwaii called argillite. They were unusual. There weren't many other carvers in Masset anymore.

His father and grandfather carved one side of a miniature totem pole and Robert would try to carve the other side exactly the same. They were copying full-sized poles from fuzzy black and white photographs in old books published by the National Museum of Canada, taken by an indefatigable ethnologist, Marius Barbeau. There were no actual totem poles left in Masset, and few anywhere in Haida Gwaii. When he was alone, Robert also carved his own toy boats from driftwood on the beach. "It was like a real deja vu for me," Davidson says, of his first carving attempts. "It felt like I was there before."

The local schools stopped at tenth grade, so to finish high school Robert had to go to the big mainland city of Vancouver to live with relatives of the local church pastor. His fellow students were curious about him and his people, and Davidson became curious about himself. "I started to look in the Canadian history books, because I wanted to know about who we were," Davidson says. "But there was not much in them about the Haida. I didn't realize what an incredibly complicated society I came from. There were values and systems going on for centuries." But over the next few years he met anthropologists and other experts. He combined what they told him with the fragmented memories and vague references of his childhood.

He learned that for an estimated eight thousand years or more the Haida were one of a number of peoples that lived and eventually traded with one another along the coast of the present day state of Washington and province of British Columbia as well as southern Alaska and the islands in between, known collectively as the Northwest Coast. Among these peoples, the Haida were known as the best canoe-makers and the most accomplished carvers, as well as the dominant nation.

He learned that the Haida had an intricate culture, based on kinship and hereditary rights. There were two main groups, the Eagles and the Ravens. Their members chose mates from the opposite group. There were many subgroups and ranks, which determined who had the right to pass on certain names and songs and dances. They lived along a strip of land between the thick forest and the ocean in great communal houses made of giant red cedar. The totem poles in front of these houses facing the sea told their family story through the crests displayed on them, and linked their lineage to the great figures of mythtime, such as Raven and Eagle and Killer Whale.

He learned that at first the appearance of European ships eager to trade for sea otter pelts urged the Haida to new heights of wealth and artistic expression. The foreign ships brought the first iron tools (in fact the Haida word for the white traders meant "Iron Men"), which they used to carve larger and more intricate objects. The Haida melted down the gold coins and American silver dollars to make bracelets and other jewelry. And when they saw the sailors' whalebone scrimshaw, they began carving small objects in their own idiom out of the local argillite for sale to the foreigners.

But after the traders came missionaries, miners and other settlers. The Christian missionaries taught that totem poles and potlatches were evil. The settlers brought new diseases, and a series of smallpox epidemics almost wiped out the Haida completely. From an estimated 7,000 at the time of first contact, they were down to as few as 350 by the early twentieth century. The survivors gave in to the European religion and culture, which seemed to have so much power. The villages were abandoned except for Masset in the north and Skidegate in the south. The last totem poles were chopped down for firewood. The potlatches--essential ceremonies of self government in which hosts gave gifts to witnesses to validate new rights such as rank, names and marriages --were eventually forbidden by law. The last Haida took European names and lived in European family houses.


Charles Edenshaw

But before all the old ways were lost, a chief who came to Masset from his abandoned home village was determined to use his carving skills to leave a legacy in wood, argillite, silver and gold. Europeans marvelled at his artistry. He was Charles Edenshaw, Robert's great-grandfather.

Robert learned that his grandparents'generation was the last to learn the old names, the songs and the dances; the last to speak the Haida language. His parents were forced off to boarding schools, as were the rest of their generation, where the last remnants of their Haida lives were wiped out. "Their identity, their being, their spirit, their dignity, and their self-esteem were beaten out of them," Davidson later wrote.

They returned home confused and disoriented. "It must have been devastating that all of a sudden you can't speak your own language," he says. "These beliefs that had lasted centuries were suddenly stripped from everybody." When Robert asked his grandmother why he was told so little as a child, she replied, "We didn't want you to go through the same thing that our children went through, so we didn't speak Haida to you." But now he knew that he was Haida, an Eagle who had been given a Haida name which he translates as "Eagle of the Dawn."

Early in his Vancouver days, Robert at last saw the artistic evidence of this culture, when one Sunday he walked into the city museum, which in those years was tucked into a Carnegie Library. What he saw bears little resemblance to most other Native American art, especially the naturalistic paintings, turquoise jewelry and ceramics the U.S. southwest.

The art of the Haida and other native peoples of the Northwest was a response to their lives and their environment, which was characterized by sea, rivers, rain and forests. They made canoes for fishing and seafaring, houses and boxes to protect themselves and their possessions from the rain and damp, and the other ordinary implements of daily life--spoons, bowls, ladles--as well as ceremonial masks and rattles--from the best and most abundant material of their world: wood.

Though they used alder, yellow cedar and other woods, the best for most purposes came from the giant red cedars, which grow slowly for centuries, tall and straight, yielding soft wood that is relatively easy to carve but cuts cleanly across the grain. It is light in weight and very flexible but strong, with excellent insulating properties and imbued with natural oils that preserve the cut wood.

Besides shaping the wood into elegant and useful objects, the Haida carved stylized depictions of animals imbued with mythic dimensions, portraying the power of these creatures and forces in their lives, both to give life and take it away. Using the red of red ocre, black from charcoal and green from copper oxide or clay, they often painted the carved and uncarved surfaces.

When Davidson first saw these objects he realized this was "art beyond my wildest dreams, art done by my ancestors, art I did not know how to relate to, art whose purpose and meaning I knew nothing about." But it's power spoke to him. "I was in dreamland. I was in the spirit world: images were alive..."

Inspired by these past creations, Robert Davidson set out to master these arts. He continued carving in wood and argillite, he learned silkscreen printing, and after completing high school he enrolled in the Vancouver School of Art where he took classes in painting, sculpting and design, and especially drawing. He also became an apprentice to the most famous artist then working in the Northwest idiom: Bill Reid. An artist of enormous accomplishments, Reid was another link from the Haida past to its future.

* * *

With a U.S.-born father of Scottish and German parents, and a devoutly Anglican mother, Bill Reid had acquired a taste for English and American literature, and studied the paintings of Cezanne and Picasso long before he immersed himself in Haida art. He didn't learn of his mother's Haida roots until he was a teenager, for a familiar reason. "My mother had learned the major lesson taught the native peoples of our hemisphere during the first half of this century, that it was somehow sinful and debased to be, in white terms, an Indian," he said much later, adding that she "certainly saw no reason to pass any pride in that part of their heritage on to her children."

Reid was 23 and beginning his career as a radio broadcaster when he visited his mother's home village of Skidegate on Haida Gwaii, and met his Haida grandfather, Charles Gladstone. There he saw the carving and engraving tools that Gladstone had inherited from his uncle and mentor, Charles Edenshaw of Masset. It was 1943, and Reid had begun the slow journey that would eventually lead famed anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss to write: "We are indebted to Bill Reid, that incomparable artist, for having tended and revived a flame that was so close to dying..."

By 1966, when Robert Davidson looked up from the argillite he was carving as a demonstration in a Vancouver department store to see him watching, Reid had studied jewelry-making, both of Europe and of Edenshaw, and was already a master and innovator in silver and gold. He had studied Haida carvings in museums, and at the side of an elder carver, learned to sing to the wood he carved. For the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, he had just completed restoring and carving five totem poles, and helped to build two Haida houses.


Robert in 1960s


Reid invited Davidson to be his apprentice, and then to live in his studio. "He gave me direction on all the pieces I was working on at the time," Davidson says now. "It really changed my style. It helped to refine my understanding of the art form." Reid also helped Davidson find work as a teacher, and otherwise encouraged his career. Eventually they carved a 12 foot totem pole together for a private client. "It's quite a unique pole," Davidson says. "It has two figures of very different styles. He carved the Raven on the bottom, I carved the Killer Whale on the top."

Though Reid was already established when Davidson met him, much of his most important work was still ahead: the yellow cedar sculpture, The Raven and the First Men (now at UBC), and the first large bronze sculptures in Haida style, including the Killer Whale at the entrance of the Vancouver Aquarium. Though afflicted with Huntington's Disease, he designed and supervised the construction of what may very well be his masterpiece from 1986 to 1992. It is the dazzling black bronze Spirit of Haida Gwaii--mythic Haida sojourners in a black canoe--which greets visitors to the new Canadian Embassy in Washington, and as such is an official symbol of Canada as well as the first outdoor sculpture in Washington by a Native American artist.

Reid's Spirit of Haida Gwaii, jade version at Vancouver Intl Airport

Reid's Raven and the First Men 

Relations between Reid and Davidson were sometimes strained in later years, although mutual respect and cooperation remain. But in 1989, Reid made an uncharacteristic appearance at the opening of a Davidson exhibit at the Inuit Gallery in Vancouver, and spoke to the assembled throng. Although his Huntington's had weakened his voice, at least some witnesses remember his remarks as a passing of the torch to his one-time apprentice. Reid joined Davidson and other revelers for a celebration well into the night.

Differences in style and approach between them were inevitable. "Both are meticulous workmen--their craft is what I respect the most," says Marjorie Halpin, UBC Museum of Anthropology curator of ethnology. "Bill is much more traditionalist. Robert is bolder in his work, more experimental." Or as Ulli Steltzer, who has photographed both artists and their works for more than twenty years, puts it, "Bill is the Bach, and Robert is the Mozart."


For all Reid's achievements (now in his seventies, he designs smaller works) he became only minimally involved in Haida ceremony. Yet this aspect of culture turned out to be the key to Robert Davidson's artistic growth, and to an awakening in his homeland as well as in himself.

After learning from Reid and from studying and copying the work of his own great-grandfather, Charles Edenshaw, 23 year old Robert Davidson returned home on one of his periodic visits. Making his customary rounds of the elders' homes to say hello and help with the firewood, he entered one house to find a group of his grandparents' generation gathered in an uncomfortable row, attending a church service. He had been thinking about carving a real totem pole, but the haunting emptiness he felt there convinced him to carve it for Masset, so the elders could experience once more some part of the old ways.



pole erected in Masset in 1969 with 40th anniversary celebration in 2009 

No totem pole had been erected in Masset in the twentieth century, perhaps not in a hundred years. But the pole itself--which Davidson based on another Barbeau photograph-- turned out to be secondary. The pole-raising would be accompanied by a celebration, and for that the old songs and dances would be recalled and resurrected. Not everyone in the village was happy with the idea, but many responded to Davidson's patient interest. His grandparents were the most important. Though 89 years old and with fading eyesight, Robert Davidson, Sr. wanted to help carve the pole. Though he couldn't continue, his effort inspired his grandson to complete the arduous work. His grandmother, herself a pillar of the local church, nevertheless sang the old Haida songs she remembered and led the dance at the celebration.

The 1969 pole-raising became the first of several events Davidson organized in Masset over the years--feasts, potlatches and memorials, or what his Naanii simply called "doings." They each inspired new artworks and gave him new sources of knowledge. He had learned much from the anthropologists, even though some of their tendencies annoyed him. (Once an anthropologist showed Davidson an old Haida tool, saying he didn't know what it was for. Davidson recognized it as something the Haida still used. He put it together, showed the anthropologist how it worked, and said, "Why don't you people ask us once in awhile?") But now he had a richer base--experience. "I learned very quickly from my own involvement in feasts and potlatches that a lot of that information wasn't even in writing, it had to be demonstrated or performed," he says. " It's something you have to witness, and then it becomes part of you."

His grandfather died shortly after the pole-raising. But Florence Davidson became even more active, making Haida button blankets from Robert's designs and becoming the most respected elder of the village, as well as Naanii to everyone she met. Through the years she became Robert Davidson's cultural guru, instructing and correcting him. When he asked her how to carve a mask that went with a particular song she said, "Make it smile." Later he realized that the Haida words of the song meant "I'm in awe," and that's why she said the mask should smile.

Davidson marks 1980 as the beginning of his mature work--the year he started the Rainbow Dancers. He learned songs, first from tape recordings of his grandmother and others made in 1969. He began learning the Haida language. He now made masks not just as art objects but to be worn for specific dances. For example, the salmon mask.

Once when he returned to Masset to go fishing, Davidson found himself silently thanking the salmon for returning and for giving up their lives for human nourishment, just as his ancestors had. But few others were continuing this old and profound custom. "It seemed like we were on the path very much like the rest of western civilization, of continual taking without putting something back," he remembers. "Even if you say 'thank you' that's putting something back--you're acknowledging the gift."

This was the inspiration for a feast he gave in Masset and also for the salmon mask (above) , which his dancers used along with a new song composed for that occasion. Culture and art again became intertwined.

At the same time, his art work became more colorful, more daring and even more playful, as in the painting punningly entitled, Put Your Complaints 'Ere (right) "Yeah, it's just a big ear," he admits. "One day I was feeling excited about something, but everybody I visited had some kind of complaint. Later I thought it would be really neat to have a big ear that people could go to and complain."

He remains not only a contemporary artist, but a contemporary Haida artist, using the ancient forms and convention as the basis for his work. "Once you learn the form, there's freedom," he says. "It's amazing, there's so much freedom. Like once you learn the alphabet, you can create any book you want."

Davidson learned these forms from studying and copying classic works, as well as from the analysis of scholars Bill Holm and Wilson Duff and fellow artists like Bill Reid and Doug Cramner. By using a flowing and connecting line called the form line and the basic shapes called the U and the ovoid (a kind of rounded rectangle), the faces and bodies of familiar and mythic creatures are portrayed or suggested by the creative use of a set of conventions: the Eagle's beak usually curves downward, for example, while Raven's stands straight out. The Bear stands upright like the human figure, but Bear has ears and the human doesn't. When hands appear (as in Davidson's Raven Finned Killer Whale (below left) they symbolize the creature's humanness. "The Haida believe everything is human," he says. "In their own worlds, creatures look human. They only put on their animal forms when they are in our world."

Sometimes just a head and an identifying feature (like the dorsal fin of the Killer Whale) are enough to symbolize a creature. The body parts don't even have to be in the correct places, and images may be repeated or "split." Add to that the "visual punning" that permits part of one creature to also form a different part of another creature. For the viewer it all becomes a gigantic puzzle of images, a game of separating field from ground, or what is sometimes called positive and negative space.

At it happens, Davidson likes to play with negative space, too--creating images in the areas that are left over from forming other images. He even pokes fun at the western idea of "negative" as bad. In his bracelet  Happy Negative Spaces, it is the negative spaces (where the silver isn't) that seem to smile.

Davidson relishes the complexities. "I love to do subtleties, to bring the viewer in. The element of surprise is always motivating." Although a knowledge of the alphabet of the art is helpful as is an idea of the creatures, Davidson maintains that "you don't need to have a B.A. or M.A. in Northwest Coast art to appreciate it. I want that sculpture or that painting to grab a person and bring them into it."

Some of Davidson's images are classically simple (such as the gold pendant Moon) but no matter how much or how many of the intended images the viewer perceives in the more complex works, the intensity of the images as well as the tension, flow, balance and elegance of the composition often has an awe-inspiring effect, as it does with the best Haida art. There is no sentimentality about nature--it can be fierce and implacable as well as inscrutably giving. The sense of mystery and power in this art is immediate.

Many of Davidson's images come from Haida myth. Raven Bringing Light to the World reflects an important one: in a world still dark, the trickster and culture hero Raven steals the light held captive by a selfish man and frees the sun, moon and stars. This old tale was first illustrated by Charles Edenshaw, and is charmingly retold by Bill Reid and the poet Robert Bringhurst in their book, "The Raven Steals The Light."

Like Raven Bringing Light to the World--which he worked large in red cedar, yellow cedar, bronze and gold and small as a pendant, as well as a painting, screenprints and a drum-- many of Davidson's most striking images are repeated and worked out in different media and sometimes in vastly different scales. "Sometimes I get stuck on an idea, and I really want to explore it to its fullest."

Some images combine mythic and personal experience, like the screenprint (and drum) Southeast Wind Foam Woman,[left] which embodies so much motion it seems to jump off the surface. "I always look forward to being back in Masset when there's a southeast wind--it's a really powerful wind, it just dwarfs you," he recalls. " Once when I was there the wind was so strong the foam was blowing right over the road from the sea. Foam Woman is a term that's used for foam. So I got all excited, and that's where that image came from."

He also finds that some mythological figures unconsciously call up personal meaning. Early on, for example, the frog came to symbolize his spirit helper, the guide of the heart. "I don't know how exactly--the image just kept showing up at important moments in my life. My first real direct association was when I carved the Frog Soapberry Spoon. I finished it sitting outside. I was satisfied with it and happy. I put it down on the steps to admire it and just as I did, a frog croaked."

But the unconscious can be a key to cultural meaning as well--as in his terrifying mask of Gagit. [left] "Gagit is the wild man in our culture--a person whose spirit was too strong to die." No images of Gagit had survived from the past, so Davidson imagined what the wild man would look like. "In the old days, if a canoe capsized at sea, whoever made it to shore alive might turn into Gagit. So I made him blue-green from the cold water." After he carved his first Gagit mask, someone showed him a description of a Gagit image made by an ethnologist in 1908. "I was really amazed at how close I was in creating it. It shows that we all have that cosmic memory, that we are connected to our cultural past in some way."

He is even able to use the traditional forms to look inward. Eagle Transforming Into Itself  [below] is really me, becoming who I am," he says, referring to several works--screenprints, a painting, a mask. "You live most of your life in fear. You'll do anything in your power to please someone, even sacrifice your own values or your identity to appease the gods or please your peers. So that's me becoming myself. It's okay to be who you are, to have weaknesses, to have strengths and acknowledge them...Transforming into yourself is really becoming honest, becoming true to your heart. The Haida believed that your mind was really here in your chest because that's where you felt everything. That's the meaning of the spirit helper, too--it's your heart. When you follow your heart all the doors open. Sometimes you might not be happy about what they open to, but that is your path."

Davidson has sometimes been criticized for going too far beyond tradition in his art. But by personally tapping into the kind of cultural experience his ancestors had, Davidson learned viscerally that culture is a process, a stimulus and response to both the timeless and the times. Those who were too rigid about Haida art were wrong. Culture is a dance of the eternal with the now. "As I learned the songs from my grandparents, I realized that as much as they gave meaning to those songs from their lives, it was equally our responsibility to give meaning to them for today." That responsibility goes both ways: as Davidson once put it, "The only way tradition can be carried on is to keep inventing new things."

* * *

When Robert Davidson walked into the Canadian Museum of Civilization last December on the opening day of his retrospective, he felt as if a circle was being closed. True, in some ways he wished this event was taking place down the street in the National Gallery where living artists are usually shown, to validate this art form as contemporary. But here he was literally among his ancestors: near the entrance to his exhibit was the canoe his grandfather Robert Sr. had carved, which had been painted by Charles Edenshaw. There were echoes of other aspects of his life: under the soaring canoe-shaped ceiling of the Grand Hall was the very totem pole he'd copied from a book and carved for Masset in 1969--it had been in England then. Nearby was the white plaster casting of Bill Reid's "Spirit of Haida Gwaii."

"This is a history of Robert," said his brother Reg, himself an artist and primary dancer in the Rainbow Dancers, looking around the galleries of the retrospective. There was the Killer Whale rattle Robert's son Benjamin had played with. When they were younger, Ben and sister Sara had crawled all over the large red cedar frog that now bore the sign "Do Not Touch." There was the first Eagle mask he made, so powerful that he couldn't look at it for a year. There was the large red cedar Thunderbird panel, with the scratch where his knife had slipped, drawing blood.

Although he did not know it until morning, another circle was closed that night. In introducing the Rainbow Dancers before their performance, Davidson said, "Our elders are dying faster than we can learn what they have to tell us." As he spoke, his grandmother had passed away in Masset at the age of 99.

Today Haida art is known around the world, and Davidson's work fetches high prices. The Northwest Coast style, glimpsed on the Northern Exposure television series, the movie Free Willy or even as adapted on the helmets of the National Football League's Seattle Seahawks, is becoming popularly known, and increasingly fashionable among collectors. It is already deeply embedded in the general culture of the Pacific Northwest, with galleries specializing in it, and major permanent exhibits at the glorious UBC Museum of Anthropology, the expanded Vancouver Museum and the user-friendly Seattle Art Museum.

Artists from other Northwest peoples, each with their distinctive styles, are becoming prominent: among them, Joe David, Ron Hamilton and Art Thompson (of the West Coast peoples of Vancouver Island, formerly called Nootka); Richard Hunt (Southern Kwakiutl), Ken Mowatt and Norman Tait (Tshimshian). Women artists have begun working in media previously restricted to men. But for some if not most of these peoples, there has been at least a thread of tradition holding together art and culture, linking the past to the present. Ironically, it was among the Haida--believed by Europeans to have the most refined art and advanced culture--that this thread was most profoundly broken.


Raven Stealing the Moon (1981) by Reg Davidson

So in some ways it is Reg Davidson rather than Robert who completes a certain cultural circle. After living for awhile in Vancouver, Reg has returned to Masset, where he continues to make and sell his masks, prints and other artworks through galleries in the city. He also lives something of the traditional life of fishing and hunting in Haida Gwaii.

But Robert Davidson has found yet another new avenue for expanding that culture--of making another circle. Late last year he hosted a two-day feast for a thousand "urban Haida" living in Vancouver. They gathered at the Aboriginal Friendship Center to witness dances, get and bestow names, and trace genealogies on charts on the walls--with pencils attached for corrections--while salmon grilled outside the fire doors. "It was a real high, a spiritual experience," Davidson remarks. "It filled an emptiness many felt, to see that they weren't alone in the city... It freed me of Masset, "he adds. "Vancouver has become my home."

Davidson puts down his brushes, and looks at the drum he's been painting. New creatures have been emerging lately in his work--some of them on this drum. "I don't know what they are yet." He stands and stretches and groans. "I should get back to my yoga," he says. He's driving into Vancouver for a Haida lesson; he also teaches Haida dance there. But first he must change into his sweats, so he can head out to the rocky beach of gray sand for his afternoon run.



"The World Is As Sharp As the Edge of A Knife" by Robert Davidson.  It seems odd now that this article doesn't mention this work because I seem to remember we talked about it. He said (and wrote) that it is a significant Haida saying.

Wiyot Return to Tuluwat

Wiyot in dance regalia.  Identities and year unknown. From Wiyot Tribe website.



Return To Tuluwat

by William S. Kowinski 

 The following article appeared on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle Datebook section on Saturday February 28, 2004, the day of the annual vigil marking the massacre of the Wiyot in 1860.  I've kept the structure of the edited version, with some changes and my own subheads.  I tried for years to get some publication interested in this story. It finally happened in early 2004. Though I didn't know it at the time, negotiations were already underway for the return of some 40 acres to the Wiyot, owned by the City of Eureka--the subject of the next article in this sequence. I was later told that the appearance of this story in the Chronicle was one factor that helped move these talks to fruition.

 The 2004 vigil, which I think was the fourth I'd attended, seemed larger than the year before. I'd guess there were 400 people there, including Humboldt County's District Attorney. It was a dry but not entirely clear night. The event is held whether it’s raining (as it often does) or not, though in 2000 it was so stormy the event had to be moved indoors. That 2000 event is notable for several reasons: It was filmed for the Living Biographies project, so a professionally shot tape exists as an archive. Cheryl Seidner announced that the first 1.5 acres of Indian Island had been purchased by the Table Bluff Wiyot Tribe, the culmination of a grassroots fundraising effort that captured the imagination of the community and beyond.

 And during the course of the year 2000 vigil, Cheryl sang her "Coming Home Song" for the first time in public. That song has become a cherished part of these and related events ever since. It was included at the end of a documentary on Native Sacred Sites, which ran on PBS.  More people probably heard that song on PBS in one night than had ever heard a Wiyot song since first contact. Probably more North Coast people, Native and Non-Native, have sung it together than any other Native song.

Like 2003, several dark necklaces of honking geese flew over during the course of the evening in 2004. Brian Tripp, a Karuk artist and writer, recited his powerful poem about the massacre, which I'd heard Julian Lang recite two years before. The vigil ended with Cheryl Seidner singing her Coming Home song, with a "backup group" of Wiyot children joining in, and then everyone. It was dark by then, and I looked up to see a ring around the moon.

The last vigil was held in 2008, for by then the Wiyot had returned to the Tuluwat ceremonial grounds. The first World Renewal Ceremony since the 1860 massacre was held in 2014.  Other updates follow at the end of the post.

2009 Vigil

Just before dusk on the last Saturday in February, several hundred people gather each year at the edge of Humboldt Bay in Eureka, across from a small, tear-shaped island half a mile away.

Standing under a deepening blue sky flared with reds at the horizon (as they did last year) or under umbrellas in a North Coast late winter rain (as they did the year before), they will hold candles and share songs and prayers.

The forested land they can see across the bay, still called Indian Island, was the scene of one of the most notorious massacres in California history. At least 60 and perhaps more than 200 women, children and elders of the Wiyot tribe were slaughtered with axes and knives by six white men, known to be landowners and businessmen. This was one of three simultaneous attacks at different locations that sent this small tribe spiraling towards extinction, some 144 years ago.

For a long time, it seemed they were extinct. As late as 1996, correspondent Fergus Bordewich wrote, "Little is known about the Wiyots." But the Wiyot tribe, denied federal recognition in 1953, regained it in 1990, and moved to a new reservation at Table Bluff, south of Eureka's city center, where some 450 tribal members now live.

"We are still here," said Cheryl Seidner, the elected Wiyot tribal chair since 1996, and a direct descendant of an infant survivor of the Indian Island massacre. "We are still a people. We still cast a shadow, we are not gone."

History Is

By a quirk of the California coastline, Eureka is the westernmost city in the 48 contiguous United States. Through the fate of history, it was one of the last places in America where Indians and Euro-Americans confronted each other. In a sense, it recapitulated and condensed several hundred years of American history in a few decades.

In 1860, California had been a state for only a decade, and the city of Eureka, growing from its docks to push against the redwood forests around it, had been the seat of the newly formed Humboldt County for just four years. The Humboldt Bay communities of Eureka and Arcata began by supplying the gold miners prowling the northeastern mountains, but by 1860 had opened nine timber mills, and were busily engaged in agriculture and ship-building. In 1853 alone, 143 ships left the bay loaded with timber, bound for San Francisco and other ports.

But far northern California had many small tribal groups of Indians living in its forests and mountains, and along its rivers and coast, some for 10,000 years.

The village of Tuluwat on Indian Island was the physical and spiritual center of the Wiyot world, which was comprised of some 20 villages spread over forty square miles, with a population of perhaps 3,000. There is evidence of Wiyot presence on the island for at least 1,000 years. But for many white settlers, Indians were a not-quite-human barrier to progress. Local newspapers supported a policy of extermination.

On the last Saturday in February 1860, the Wiyot completed their week-long world renewal ceremony at Tuluwat, to bring the world back into balance and mark the equivalent of their new year. The small boat arrived late that night, while the Wiyot men were away gathering supplies.

The massacre on Indian Island was not the first in the region, nor would it be the last. It was part of an accelerated pattern of destruction, beginning with random killings and rapes by miners and ranchers, and including kidnapping and legal slavery of mostly women and children under California's 1850 Indian indenture law. Later, Indians were forced into forts and small reservations under concentration camp conditions, and finally, those still living on their lands were subject to organized warfare by local militia while federal troops fought the Civil War. Together with the ravages of disease, this history reduced an estimated 15 local tribes to five.

But Indian Island became the most infamous massacre in northern California probably because of the presence of Bret Harte, who before achieving literary fame, reported for a newspaper in Arcata. His account of the massacre and editorial condemning its cruelty made him a local outcast, but anonymous letters to a San Francisco newspaper rumored to be his work were largely responsible for the national knowledge of this event. Editorial writers in San Francisco and in New York began referring to Eureka as Murderville.

Though the names of those responsible for the Indian Island massacre were apparently widely known, no legal action was ever taken against them. As Eureka became a prosperous commercial center, and Humboldt Bay became the busiest port between Seattle and San Francisco, this part of the past seemed better left forgotten.

But unlike much of California, the Indian populations indigenous to the Humboldt County area remained significant. Besides residents on Yurok, Hupa, Karuk and Wiyot lands and several Rancherias of mixed tribal groups, many enrolled members of indigenous tribes live and work in Humboldt's cities and towns. Though less than 6% of Humboldt's population, Native Americans are its largest minority group. In this large but mostly rural county(some 80% of it forested or devoted to federal and state parks), a bare majority of its population lives in communities surrounding Humboldt Bay, on land that once belonged to the Wiyot.

"The past is not dead," as William Faulkner wrote. "It's not even past."


The Wounds of Murderville

1996 Vigil: Leona Wilkerson, Marian Seidner, Loretta Brown and Cheryl Seidner

Seidner and her sister, Leona Wilkinson, began the vigils in 1992, together with two non-Indians, Peggy Betsels. former pastor of Eureka's United Church of Christ, and Marylee Rohde, former president of the Humboldt County Historical Society.

I've known about the story of the massacre since I was a little girl," Rohde said, "so I hadn't realized how deeply it was buried in Eureka's psyche. Peggy didn't hear of it until her daughter was in school, from the Native American parent of another student. But in talking with Cheryl and Leona, we realized that the story needs to be told. There needs to be healing, but the wound tends to fester if it's been suppressed."

"It's a healing of two communities," said Seidner. "It's not just us or them. We need to come together as a community of learning, to understand each other. That rip in our society needs to be mending, and hopefully we've been trying to do that for the last 13 years."

Community awareness of the Wiyot story increased dramatically in the late 1990s when Seidner began to raise funds for the purchase of the 1.5 acres of Indian Island where the ceremonies had traditionally taken place. At the vigil in 2000, Seidner announced that as a result of many small contributions from the local community, together with donations from Indian organizations and individuals nationally, the tribe had reacquired this land. The Wiyot would return to Tuluwat.

More funds are needed to clear the site of debris left behind by an abandoned shipyard, to erect the new ceremonial building, and perhaps acquire more of Indian Island. The Wiyot Sacred Sites Fund continues to raise money, partly through events such as the third annual benefit concert earlier this month. One source of continuing support has come from the local churches that recognize a special responsibility.

An anonymous letter about the massacre thought to be from Bret Harte was sent in 1860 to the San Francisco Bulletin asserting: "The pulpit is silent, and the preachers say not a word." "They did nothing, they said nothing," said Clay Ford, current pastor of the Arcata First Baptist Church. "We realized that we needed to take responsibility before God and before the Wiyots, for what Christian people did not do, even if we weren't there." After making a formal proclamation of repentence, Ford handed Seidner the first of annual checks, on behalf of the Humboldt Evangelical Alliance.

Another group, the Humboldt Interfaith Council (affiliated with the United Religious Initiative based in the Bay Area) is dedicating its community fund-raising efforts this year to the Wiyot Sacred Sites fund, including the proceeds from its Interreligious Peace Festival, being held on the Humboldt State University campus today.

"We're very passionate about what the Wiyots are trying to do," said Ross Connors-Keith, director of the group. The theme is the sacred arts---"especially dance and music, said Ross Connors-Keith, the group's director, "in keeping with the Wiyots' world renewal ceremony, which involved dance and singing. We thought this would be a wonderful way of bringing the community together."

At the Interreligious Peace Festival on the last Saturday of February this year, the Council will also present the Wiyot with a quilt made of individually purchased and decorated blocks (with proceeds going to the Wiyot fund), assembled by two county quilting guilds. "We selected a fish motif," Connors-Keith said, "because the massacre destroyed the Wiyot culture, and this is a theme that relates to their traditional way of life."

There have been other signs of reconciliation in recent years, as when Cheryl Seidner, about to speak to the Arcata Planning Commission in a public hearing concerning a proposed new center for the United Indian Health Service, spontaneously decided to welcome everyone to Wiyot country. It is an American Indian tradition for the host tribe to give permission to others coming onto their land. "I don't know if anyone has ever welcomed you before, and I want to be the one to do that" she said, and now recalls, "the roar that went up in the building was monumental---I couldn't believe what I had heard...The whole community that was there, it just exploded."

But in other ways, progress has been slow. "It's been a disappointment to me that I haven't seen more of the white population of Eureka interested in the vigil," Marylee Rohde says. "I think the wound is finally being acknowledged, but...Peggy Betsel's theory, and she did her dissertation about this at the theological seminary in Berkeley, is that this community had so much difficulty pulling together partly because this wound wasn't acknowledged. That burying it continued to poison what tries to happen."

"But we have seen participation in the vigil increase over the years from the Wiyots and other Native Americans," Rohde adds. "When I look back at the Civil Rights movement, I think maybe the healing has to happen with the victims first, before the perpetrators can acknowledge their own wounds."


Return to the Center of the World



Wiyot Bear Mask, now at the Smithsonian

 "The Wiyot are a people who are beginning to learn about themselves again," Cheryl Seidner says. "Culture gives us our identity. We are not just a name. We have to learn to live our culture, and try to incorporate it in our daily life."

"Cheryl stepped in at a transition point," observed Julian Lang, a language scholar and cultural activist whose ancestry includes Karuk and Wiyot. "Before Cheryl, the effort was to regain the Wiyot identity at the political level, to gain recognition and stabilize. Cheryl was able to begin charting a path of development at the cultural level, to begin the cultural rejuvenation. She's looking forward, representing the idea that there is a traditional ceremonial life ahead for the Wiyot."

Cheryl Seidner has worked full time at Humboldt State University since 1979. She is currently an administrator for the Economic Opportunity Program(though Governor Schwarzenegger has recommended it be abandoned.) Her older sister, Leona Wilkinson, recently retired from the Upward Bound program at HSU. But some fifteen years ago, Cheryl persuaded Leona to begin traditional basket-weaving again, which she had learned as a girl from their grandmother. The beautifully designed and water-tight woven baskets, caps and other items have both practical and sacred purposes essential to Wiyot life. Now she teaches her niece and grand-niece, beginning with the proper gathering of materials.

Basketry was easy compared to reviving the Wiyot language. There are no fluent Wiyot speakers left- only some tapes made in the 1950s. Marnie Atkins, Wiyot Cultural Director, is hoping to attend the "Breath of Life" conference at UC Berkeley for the second time this June, where she will be paired with a linguist to investigate the archives.

Meanwhile, she will be working with these tapes to create usable lessons that can be disseminated on CDs and over the Internet. Her goal is to get the language "into our ears, and into our children's ears."

Julian Lang has also studied these tapes, and combined what he learned with some singing derived from the Karuk culture for classes he offered to interested Wiyot a few years ago. "There was instant acceptance of that, and an incredible aptitude," he says. "People learned very fast. Lynn [Reisling, his partner in the Institute for Native Knowledge] and I were amazed. Within a month it was like all the cultural knowledge had always been there. It was close to the surface of everybody's soul."

Because February 1860 on Indian Island was the last time the Wiyot performed their world renewal ceremony, Seidner acknowledges that they will look to other local tribes for help in reconstructing it. Several have similar ceremonies, and they have traditionally participated in each other's dances.

The rest, she says, "will come from our dreams. It's in our DNA."

With what Wiyot words she learned, she created her "coming home" song, which she sang at the end of a PBS airing of a documentary on American Indian sacred sites produced by the San Francisco based Sacred Land Film Project.

Sharing among tribes has already begun at the vigils. At last year's event, as participants gathered around the bonfire in the cold, clear night, Julian Lang looked up and remarked, "in Wiyot the word for 'stars' means 'God's eyes.'" Then he sang a song from the Karuk's world renewal ceremony, the Jump Dance. Joseph Orozco, a member of the Hupa tribe who is the station manager of KIDE-FM, the first tribally owned and operated public radio station in California, sang a mourning song based on the White Deer Dance.

All of this is also preparation for the future, when the vigil will be over and there will be ceremony at the end of February again.

"Cheryl recognizes that land is at the heart of the ceremony," Lang says. "Ceremony needs a place, and there's no more significant place than Tuluwat on Indian Island."

Seidner is not only a direct descendant of a baby boy survivor of Indian Island, but of the boy's father, who was the last Wiyot to lead the ceremony at Tuluwat.

She talks with enthusiasm about members of other tribes "who say, we can't wait to be back on the Island with you...It's getting to the point that they can feel it coming. It's been a real blessing. We realize we are not standing by ourselves.''



Postscript: In 2006 a Wiyot Flower Dance was held at the edge of Humboldt Bay.  This coming of age ceremony for a young girl was believed to be the first Wiyot ceremony held since the 1880s.  Some participants, From left: Leona Wilkerson, Joycelyn Teague, Hupa visitor Lorelei George, and Rosalinda Ruiz. Photo credit: Cheryl Seidner.

Further Update 2024:  The first World Renewal Ceremony since the 1860 massacre was held on Indian Island in March 2014. The city of Eureka deeded back the rest of Indian Island to the Wiyot in 2019, and more recently another culturally significant area of land in the Samoa dunes has also been returned to the Wiyot Tribe. In addition, the Wiyot Da Gou Rou Louwi' Cultural Center has opened in Old Town Eureka, with the goal of increasing cultural understanding.  It is open to the public.