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 (cont)

I had seen this before. Allie, who lives with me two nights a week, is a lean rope of a kid who prides herself on having some grit. Consider her recent fourth-grade camping trip in the woods near our Portland, Oregon, home. When Henry C. dazzled everyone present by jumping off a junior-size cliff into the Clackamas River 42 times, Allie merely waited for him to leave and then seized top honors by making 45 jumps. Over the years, she and I have cross-country skied in blizzards, gone summer sledding on glaciers, and sneaked into cow pastures to step gingerly past snorting bulls.

But those were day trips, mostly, or weekend getaways, and last year Allie began to dream of a grander, more far-flung expedition. At the time, she was absorbed in a series of six books in the American Girls Collection about a fictional Nez Percé Indian child, Kaya, a Pocahantas lookalike who rode horses and slept in tepees in the 1760s. Allie was intrigued to learn that there is a present tense to the story—that the Nez Percé are, with many other nations, reviving their almost extinct tribal language, and that the Sioux are starting to ranch great herds of buffalo on their reservations. The Native American renaissance is, of course, shadowed by the darker, longer story of reservations—alcoholism and poverty. Still, Allie wanted to see what life was like in Indian country, and the word Alaska, with that aah sound at the end, suggestive of great northern adventure, had a certain tug on us. We flew up to Ketchikan, along with a host of others intent on kayaking and fly-fishing in southeast Alaska, and then rode a ferry west to the sparsely developed Prince of Wales Island, where a taxi took us 25 miles down island to Hydaburg.

The bear's eyes locked with mine. "Allie," I said, "sing the 'Happy Birthday' song." We both did, with gusto, until the bear scampered away, back into the woods.

The larger of two Alaska towns with a nearly all-Haida populace, Hydaburg was established by the federal government in 1912, when 350 Haida (about the same number as today) lived in cedar longhouses, harvesting salmon and seaweed and carving the deities of their two primary clans, eagles and ravens, onto the totem poles they placed by their homes to announce their bloodlines. Today, the 20 poles in Hydaburg's totem park are surrounded by prefab houses, satellite dishes, and all-terrain vehicles rusting in the salt air. We found an ad hoc B&B in town, a detached trailer rented by a woman named Pansy who makes splendid pancakes. That's where we stayed, for $20 a night.

On our first morning in Hydaburg we visited a retired fisherman, Claude Morrison, who at 93 is one of a handful of Hydaburg elders who still speak fluent Haida. (His grandmother taught him secretly, in defiance of his Presbyterian schoolteachers.) Allie and I entered his living room performing a sort of skit, a snippet of Haida dialogue we'd learned on the Internet, as he sat in his aqua easy chair, hale and white-haired and straining to hear.

"Sánuu dang gíidang?" I asked with all the aplomb of a Texas oilman parlez-ing francais. How are you?

Allie paused, hand on hip, sifting through, it seemed, a vast library of possible responses. "Díi ‘láagang," she shrugged finally. I'm fine.

Morrison laughed. "Good," he said. "It's good to hear young people speak Haida, but it's more like"—his mouth yawed open now and he accessed a muscle very deep in his throat, so the word gíidang came out with a low guttural dip in the middle. It was a sound that seemed somehow underwater—a sound from a different world, really. Haida language classes started up last summer at Hydaburg's city hall, but no one will ever speak Haida as a first language again, and the old traditions that Morrison grew up with—gathering cedar bark to make baskets, say, and hunting deer—are diluted by popular culture. Haida kids are now wont to bead the image of Bart Simpson onto handbags and bracelets.

Morrison asked us to try again, to go for that deep, guttural sound. We did, both Allie and I, and then Morrison just shook his head, smiling, as if to say, "Oh, well, forget it." He chatted with us a moment, and then sent us away with a can of sockeye salmon he'd put up himself.

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