Other construction methods

Lore’s was not our only warm welcome in Haida Gwaii. I’d made advance contact with native Haida canoe carver John Bennett, and just after our arrival in the islands Bennett called with an invitation to a traditional Haida feast at his home. A pub­lic works supervisor in Old Massett, Bennett builds European-style plank-on-frame boats and carves canoes in his spare time.

Deadly European diseases were one factor in the extinction of canoes, but another was the influence of plank-on-frame con­struction, a skill at which Haida craftsmen quickly became adept. Marine engines dealt another blow. The Haida turned away from their own boat-building traditions to become commercial ship­wrights for the region’s growing herring fleets.

The powerful stylistic elements and sculptural perfection achieved by traditional Haida craftsmen had earned widespread respect from Europeans since their first contact in the 1700s. In the 1960s and ’70s, however, fresh appreciation for traditional Indigenous art emerged worldwide, and the Haida legacy gained new adherents. Native peoples everywhere were working to re-establish their cul­tural identity, critical skills, and languages they had been forced to relinquish. Among the Haida, an upwelling of traditional culture took place in those days, and associated with that movement came a desire to revive the art of traditional canoe-building.

Throughout history, until modern times, dugout canoes pro­liferated all along the temperate rainforest coast from Alaska to northern California. They were the state-of-the-art transportation on the coast, where mountains, enormous trees, thick forests and dense undergrowth discouraged land travel. Each tribe had its own canoe tradition, but the Haida type was considered the highest form of the art. The boats were used for fishing, trade and war­fare. The largest could seat 60 paddlers, and when English Captain George Dixon sailed into Cloak Bay in 1791 to trade for furs, he was greeted by 11 such boats carrying nearly 600 paddlers. Oral history has such canoes travelling as far as Hawaii and Japan, and there is archaeological evidence they did venture as far south as Baja, California.

Lost knowledge?

Haida artisans of the early modern era, however, were chagrined to find that by their time, no one knew the techniques used by ear­lier canoe carvers. So, they began piecing together memories from their elders and reinventing the craft by experimentation and close examination of the remaining boats.

At the forefront of the renaissance was Bill Reid, a Haida multi-disciplinary artist, whose design was used on the modern Canadian $20 bill and whose most important public sculpture, the canoe-inspired “Spirit of Haida Gwaii,” has long been displayed at the Canadian embassy in Washington, D.C.

Reid learned Haida culture from his grandfather, who in turn learned from Charles Edenshaw, whose work was famous inter­nationally in the early 20th century. Edenshaw had produced a number of commissions for the American Museum of Natural History and other institutions worldwide, and he decorated the two remaining 19th-century war canoes – a 22-metre war canoe currently in the American Museum of Natural History’s collec­tion and a 29-metre war canoe housed at the Canadian Museum of History just outside Ottawa.

Reid came from a boat-building family, and when he was offered a commission to build a Haida war canoe for Expo 86 in Vancouver, he jumped at the chance. Reid was already getting on in years by the time of the world’s fair, so he was only able to develop the design and oversee the canoe’s construction by younger carvers and a growing school of apprentices – a pattern he established with his artwork as well. The canoe—named LOOTAS, which means “wave eater”—became an ambassador travelling widely, and even paddling the Seine into Paris. Several years ago, LOOTAS under­went restoration at the Haida Heritage Centre in Skidegate.

Reid eventually came to consider the canoe his most important work of art. The young carvers he tutored have grown older and, building on what they learned, are passing that knowledge along.

John Bennett is one of those carrying on the tradition of canoe building in Haida Gwaii. When I visited him, he had station moulds set up for a double-ended, five-metre skiff, replicating a boat that had been built by his grandfather. The earlier boat, which was hanging in the boat shed, was in turn based on canoes built by their ancestors. But it is the dugout canoe that has become Bennett’s passion. Bennett didn’t work with Reid. Instead, he learned his skills from his father, Wilfred, and his grandfather – both respected craftsmen on Haida Gwaii.

His latest canoe is a small one, around seven metres overall. My visit found the boat nearly ready for the interior shaping. The canoe’s sides were stoutly supported on a balk of wood left in place to keep it stiff and to prevent cracking under the tremendous blows the hull has to take while chopping and adzing. The upright hull also had about four centimetres of water in the bottom to keep it from drying out.

Bennett uses an adze to rough out the interior and an inshave to smooth it further. Another canoe, a 4.5-metre effort that Bennett described as “a toy,” was nearby, fully completed. Behind the shed, a raw red cedar log as wide as Bennett is tall was set aside for a much larger canoe, perhaps a 40-footer.

HAIDA WARRIOR

I met another Haida carver in the islands, Christian White, with ambitions to become a canoe builder as well. In his carving shed, he stores boats built by his father, Morris. Two of them were com­pleted in the 1980s and another left unfinished when he died. Before he would even show me these boats, however, he talked extensively about Morris and his grandfather, and insisted on show­ing me the herring seiner, HAIDA WARRIOR, now propped up in a field, drying out. His grandfather lost her to the fishing company that financed the boat in the 1950s. The loss is still a cause of bitter­ness for White. Lineage is of vital importance to the Haida culture, and White often referred to his father as he showed me work in progress in the longhouse, which is part boathouse, part carving shed.

He had a totem pole ready to carve, with the figures outlined on the surface, but the first cuts were not yet made. His father’s boats occupied the shed’s main space. White himself had a canoe project in mind, but he needed approval to harvest an old-growth tree.

Talking with John Bennett and Christian White, it’s evident that a Haida canoe is a work of art as well of technology. The canoes are beautifully made, but they’re also dependable and extremely seaworthy. They had to be: Haida Gwaii is said to be the windiest location in Canada, where wave heights often hit 12 metres.

The Haida Heritage Centre

My education in the archipelago’s canoes began at the Haida Heritage Centre, which has two traditional canoes and one made of fibreglass, which the locals smugly call LOOFLEX.

The two wooden canoes are modern renditions built by appren­tice carvers at the Heritage Centre, and very sophisticated in their construction. Each is carved from a single western red cedar log. The only joinery involved comes with fitting a long extension to the bow, where harpoons would be placed, ready for use, and another cap at the stern. Both are fastened with treenails. The canoes are reinforced with yellow cedar frames which help prevent splits and provide support for the thwarts. Splits are repaired using precisely fitted butterfly tenons. White, for example, repairs his father’s canoe using tenons with the same profile as copper amulets tradi­tionally prized by hereditary chiefs.

Amazing trees

The monumental red cedars of the Pacific coast rainforest enabled the Haida to build their largest canoes. Old-growth rainfor­est dominates the landscape, and the forest is filled with massive stumps left from the harvest of western red cedars and Sitka spruce, the predominant species on the islands.

First, the canoe carver has to find a suitable tree. It must be big enough for the intended canoe and without the twisting growth pattern that sometimes occurs in red cedar. Fresh greenery at the top indicates it’s probably a viable tree, but test holes are cut to make sure the heartwood is free of rot. Because cedars are found in boggy ground, excess water drawn up through their root systems can cause the tree to rot from the heartwood out.

Historically, cutting down a tree of these proportions took a lot of patience. First, an interlaced nest of hemlock and other small trees was prepared to cushion the tree’s fall and prevent it from frac­turing. The person chosen to fell the tree—who might not be the carver—started by cut­ting out a small groove girdling the tree. Once he had enough space to work, he coated the top of the groove with mud as a fire retardant and set a fire in the lower section. As the wood charred, he used an adze to chip out the char­coal. The process was repeated until the tree came down.

Today, the process isn’t limited by technol­ogy, but by laws that protect the remaining monumental red cedars, which are becoming increasingly rare. The Haida Gwaii Cultural Wood Access Permit program is a joint effort between Canada’s Ministry of Forests and Range Act and the Council of the Haida Nation. It’s meant to provide a long-term source of wood for traditional Haida nation artisans, such as canoe and pole carvers. Before a carver can cut down a tree, he must file an application with specific volume requirements, proj­ect blueprints and letters of support. An advisory board made up of representatives from the Haida council, the ministry, villages and hereditary chiefs reviews applications.

Despite advances in technology in felling trees, the adze remains the most important tool for carving canoes. Adze blades are now made from steel, but their elbow-shaped handles are still fabricated from the crooks of red alder roots. White believes that before iron was introduced through trade with Russian fur trad­ers, jade was most likely used for adze blades, since it is tool-hard and holds an edge for a long time. Jade is not native to Haida Gwaii, but the islanders traded for it with mainland peoples like the Tsimshian.

The coastal tribes were all traders, and iron had become an important commodity for the Haida even before their own first contact with Europeans. Mainland tribes in Russian Alaska traded scrap iron for canoes.

Bennett told me a story reflecting iron’s importance: “A chief and his two sons found a mast floating in the water from a sail­ing ship that probably sank. Around its top it had an iron band, the kind you attached rigging to, so there was a lot of good iron in it. That much iron would make any man a chief in his village [and] very rich. The old man hopped into the water to try to take the iron off but couldn’t budge it. They were going to need tools but didn’t have any in the canoe. The old man told his sons, ‘I’ll be all right. You paddle to the village and bring back the tools.’ But it was a long way to the village, and the old man had to spend the night on the spar. The next day, when the boys got back, they could see their father sitting on it. He was tired and cold, but he had his iron and was a very rich man in his village.”

Form follows function

After the chosen tree was felled, the carver worked on the out­side, first giving the canoe its shape. A canoe used for inshore seal hunting would have a flatter bottom than an offshore canoe, giv­ing the seal hunter more speed for the pursuit. The bow would be flared to keep the canoe dry as it worked in heavy seas, and it also gave the harpooner a support for his weapon and a stable platform to throw from. A voyaging canoe would have a rounder bottom with more rocker (the curve – or sheer line – from bow to stern along the length of the boat), more flare to the sides and higher ends.

In shaping the exterior, the builder had to form a reverse sheer, a kind of hump in the middle. The reasoning was that the canoe would eventually be filled with boiling water to soften the wood so the sides could be bent outward to give them considerable flare. Such bending has the effect of lowering the sheer line midway along the hull and the builder had to predict how much mate­rial he had to leave to account for the bend. Done right, the final sheer line would be eye sweet.

With the exterior shaping completed, the hull would be partly dug out to reduce the log’s weight. The boat then had to be dragged down to the coast, sometimes from places miles from the sea. Canoe building began in late fall, after food had been gath­ered for the winter.

The timing has nothing to do with sap production, since trees in this temperate climate don’t go dormant like they do in east­ern North America. Carvers worked all winter, then in the spring skidded their boats down to the water’s edge so they could be towed to the village. Boats would be pushed over muddy ground, or on log rollers. If a canoe was not ready in time for the spring fishing season, work was set aside until the following winter.

When the canoe arrived at the carver’s village, the next project was to boil it to flare the sides out, which also had the effect of raising the ends.

First, the hull was hollowed to its rough dimensions. The thick­ness of the sides and bottom was carefully measured using pegs of a specific length and painted with pigment on their inside ends. These pegs would be driven into strategically placed holes along the length of the boat. They would be set flush on the outside, then the inside of the hull would be carved with adzes and chisels until the coloured heads of the pegs were flush with the surround­ing wood.

Bennett, however, uses a different method to measure the thick­ness of his hulls. He pushes an adjustable wire probe through a 0.3-centimetre hole in the hull until it emerges on the other side. The tip of the wire is black and extends through the inside of the hull. The probe’s body is white and, using tape as a stop, he can set the depth he needs. The white portion of the probe is mea­sured against a tapered cardboard template. The cardboard’s widths represent the finished thickness of the hull at correspond­ing points around the circumference of the exterior.

When the probe appears on the inside of the hull, Bennett mea­sures the difference between the black and white sections and uses that measurement to drill a larger-diameter hole from the inte­rior outward with tape on the drill bit marking the required depth. Then he shaves the hull down with an adze and inshave until the larger hole disappears, leaving him with just the smaller hole, which is then easily plugged.

After the inside shaping of the hull is finished, it’s time to boil the canoe for bending. First, hemlock boughs are placed in the hull to protect its interior surfaces. Traditionally, the hull was filled with a mixture of water and urine, which has a nitrate con­tent that increases the wood’s flexibility. Today, hulls are filled with a mixture of fresh water and ammonia. The water is brought to a boil by heating rocks to red-hot over a fire, then transferring them one-by-one to the water.

Bennett told me he uses only round river rocks so the hull isn’t gouged by sharp edges. He also uses white stones exclusively, because they are less likely to explode than dark ones.

The boiling is kept up by continuing to drop hot rocks into the water. Depending on the size of the canoe—and historically some of them reached 70’—the wood becomes flexible after a day or more, and then the hull can be bent to its final shape. Sometimes, a hull can become so flexible that the carver drives stakes around the perimeter to keep the sides from flaring out too much.

When the bending is complete, the water is drained off and the wood allowed to cool. Then, the final finishing can begin. Rail caps and thwarts are added. Traditionally, the hull was “sanded” using volcanic rock and sandstone. Today, belt and orbital sanders take the place of the rocks.

Extensive decorations usually incorporated mythological crea­tures that were important to the carver if the boat was ceremonial – if not, it would be left plain. The canoe would be honoured in a ceremony upon launching.

White believes that Haida adapted sails for their canoes only after their first contact with Europeans. Woven cedar bark or spruce roots were probably used at first, eventually supplanted by canvas. The canoes are reported to have sailed as well as they paddled. One famous canoe, named TILLIKUM, sailed around the world at the turn of the 20th century. The boat was from the Nuu-chah-nulth tribe on Vancouver Island but similar to the Haida style.

With the abundance of fish and gigantic cedars, Haida crafts­men could draw on the resources of their immediate environment for everything they needed, and the rich culture they established created one of the most admired artistic forms in the world.

Cedar made life on the islands possible. Cedar bark made rope and cloth, and mortise-and-tenon-joined cedar posts and beams supported longhouses; riven cedar planks sheathed them. Cedar was the foundation of a rich heritage of woodcarving and, above all, cedar logs made possible the canoes that allowed the Haida to draw on the sea resources that surrounded them. Canoe carving today not only reconnects Haida with their legacy but with their environment.