Backing Up A Bit

Gosh. Connectivity to the Internet Tubes is hard when traveling by boat. A good rule of thumb has been that, whenever we see a cluster of 10 or more houses on a shoreline, the chances are pretty good that at least one of them is trying to download Internet porn, so it’s worth trying to find an unsecured connection we can tap into. Still, some places have it, some don’t; and sometimes those places that have it (even if you pay for it) lose the connection within a few minutes. Result: I haven’t given my opinion on anything since we visited Mamalilaculla back in June, when we were young. Let’s catch up now, shan’t we?

Having visited the midden and ruins of Mamalilaculla on Village Island, we stayed in the Broughtons at a couple of other anchorages close to one another (Farewell Harbour and the Pearse Islands), the better to give GB some fishing opportunities in the surrounding channels. Fishing, in fact, occurred and a hatchery coho salmon was captured in due course*. A pair of humpback whales was also spotted cruising between Johnstone Strait and Queen Charlotte Strait near the Pearse Islands, causing large excitement with MS.

By June 26, it was time for us to fill up our fuel and water tanks, and our food bins, at Port McNeill. We’d heard Port McNeill was THE place for boaters to reprovision and offload or take on crew, and it sure is. The marina there is easily accessible, the harbormasters and their staff are friendly and helpful, their water is the best around , and there is plenty to do on shore. I’m talking, restaurants, grocery stores, tackle shops, and all kinds of purchasing opportunities. You know you want to go there. McNeill seems like it has a fairly diverse economy for its size; it not only has the marina but plenty of surrounding businesses that are not all directly dependent upon the transient recreational boaters’ trade. Hence it appears to have some staying power. We also noted the grading of what looks like will soon be a new $ubdivision of re$idential retirement-life$tyle hou$ing, all with water view$. Nevertheless.

McNeill also has regular ferry service to two other, smaller islands, each of which has excellent tourist opportunities. We chose to take the short trip to Alert Bay and leave the driving on that rainy day to the BC ferry professionals. Once ashore we swung by the Big House and the world’s tallest totem pole (which at 53 meters high, from a distance looks to the jaded urban eye like a cell phone tower), and hustled to the U’mista Cultural Centre, a museum that houses the repatriated masks, coppers and related items from the 1920 potlatch at Mamalilaculla that The Man busted up and confiscated. Long story short, The Man eventually returned to the tribe those items that had not disappeared into private collections, on condition that the tribe house them in a museum instead of returning them to the families from whom they had been taken. Sort of like, asking the tribe to do a favor and provide cultural education -- under duress.

The mask and copper collection at U’mista is glorious, and if you’re in the area you really need to see it for yourself. It helped us, however, to have gone beforehand to a Native art gallery in McNeill, where the owner gave us some very good insights on how and why such masks were made and the amount of time and skill the craft demands**. U’mista’s gallery of black-and-white photographs of recent tribal elders, and old reprints of long-gone villages, were similarly outstanding, as was their description of the political climate between the Canadian government and the coastal tribes during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. However, I left wanting to have learned more. I understand that the reason the U’mista Cultural Centre came to be was purely political, and that such a history created the overall political…tone, if you will…that I felt there. (For example, the tribe’s introductory video, made in the 1980s, was to my mind saturated with 24-year-old political messages and noble-savage stereotypes aimed at guilty white liberals that, frankly, rubbed me the wrong way. In contrast, GB sensed none of that. And we had watched the same video.) At any rate, there is so much more the U’mista Centre could tell the curious Anglo traveler. What little I know - and would have liked better explained to me - is that during the preceding centuries this area was resource-rich, and supported many different tribes and clans that established trade relationships with one another, made war against each other, took slaves, stole property, demanded payment of tribute, arranged marriages to consolidate wealth and power, and distributed that wealth and power in specific ways. In other words, they were pretty much the same as everybody else - think of the royal houses of Europe during and after the Middle Ages. I had wanted to learn why certain Native villages disappeared, while others persisted. I wanted to learn who had lived at the sites of the middens we’d stumbled across during our time in the Broughtons, and for how long, and why they abandoned those places. I wanted to understand the relationships among those tribes and clans who had disappeared, and those who had persisted.

Unfortunately, I got no answers. Sailing is like that sometimes.

* Fishing tip: if you are cruising along and see a bunch of little power boats bobbing around all clustered together in a small area, bait yer hook and join them. Because the cluster of little skiffs means that recently, somebody heard that somebody else had caught something there.

** It also helps if you actually buy some art instead of just bleed the gallery owner‘s time. I’m just sayin’.

m