The Haida Life: Learning from Alaska's Native People

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Outside Traveler 2004

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Family Vacations
The Haida Life
Learning the old ways from southeast Alaska's native people

By Bill Donahue


	Alaska’s Native Fauna: The Black Bear (Corel)

Even before the skiff left the harbor, I had one of those gnawing moments of self-doubt that eternally plague suburban parents.

My daughter, Allie, who's nine, pulled on the adult-size life jacket she'd been thrown and then settled into the bow with the loops of the vest riding up near her ears. "It's kind of weird to sit in," she said, "but it should be OK for swimming."

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The water in Cordova Bay, off southeast Alaska's 135-mile-long Prince of Wales Island, was about 55 degrees. And on this warm afternoon last July, midway through our five-day tour of Haida Indian country, the wind was kicking up swells that, for me, sang one simple word: Dramamine. To our Alaskan hosts, though, getting pitched around in a 16-foot aluminum boat was nothing. Terry Peele, 49, and his son Tony, 28, both Haida, were letting us tag along on a deep-sea fishing trip. They're stalwart proponents of Haida Pride, a collective movement to reinvigorate their cultural roots. They make drums, carve totem poles, sing, and dance in homage to their warrior ancestors, who raided enemy nations in giant cedar canoes. And now they were staring over at me as I fidgeted with Allie's vest.

"Um," I said, "this doesn't really fit."

We went back to the dock to get a smaller life jacket. When we finally gunned out of the harbor, Terry and Tony stood side by side in the skiff, brows to the wind, ready to catch fish to feed their families. Terry is a recovering alcoholic who's found solid ground by embracing old Haida ways, like carving canoe paddles and beading traditional designs onto rawhide. He sang tribal fishing songs, chant-like, under his breath as we paused to haul in some halibut lines, and once, when he found a pesky octopus in one of his shrimp pots, he bit off its beak, raw, and spit it into the water. "There," he said. "That'll put him out of business."

Allie's eyes bulged, and for a second I thought she might cry. She didn't. Instead, she tried to summon the shrimp and halibut to our nets. "C'mon, fish!" she shouted.

"C'mon, fish!" shouted Terry. We whipped along the forested Prince of Wales coast, where the Peeles live in Hydaburg, population 350, a three-hour boat ride from Ketchikan, and a bald eagle soared over our boat. Shadows grew in the valleys beneath the green interior mountains, and now and then we came upon a small island without roads or people: just a rise of almost impenetrable woods ringed by a rocky shoreline. We paused at one, Blanket Island, and Allie and I spent ten minutes scrambling over the bleached-gray dead trees piled all over the shore. Up close, everything was colossal: the rocks and the curling, upended roots of the fallen trees, so sturdy that Allie grabbed one root and safely hung there, monkey-bars style.

"Are you having fun?" I asked her.

"Definitely."

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Outside correspondent Bill Donahue wrote about the arsenic-tainted water in Fallon, Nevada, in the February 2001 issue.

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