A story as sharp as a kn.., p.11
A Story as Sharp as a Knife, page 11
and he gave her directions, they say.
<<
Don't be afraid of me.>>>
He gave her a nugget of copper, they say,
with spines sticking out of the side.
Its name, they say, is Down the Throat.
<<
Put scattered cumulus clouds on the top of it, lady,
590
and across the bottom too.
Let the clouds be flat on the bottom.
When the sky is like this,
even good-for-nothing humans may come out to me to feed.
Whenever they see me like this,
the common surface birds will come to me to feed.>>>
Her parents were there on the rim of the housepit, they say,
ready to take her.
But down where they were looking,
she was listening to her father-in-law, they say.
After he had finished his instructions,
600
she stepped aboard the same boat as her father.
They had already lashed the canoes together
and roped themselves into their seats.
When the headman's daughter stepped aboard, they say,
they forgot where they were.
When they came to themselves,
they were out on the open water, they say.
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chapter three: The One They Hand Along
They set off at once, they say,
[ 5.2 ]
and they came to the village directly, they say.
When they had been there for a time,
610
the one of good family was pregnant, they say.
When she started her labor,
they built her a shelter apart from the houses, they say.
They drove in a birthing stake, 28
told her to hold it,
and left her, they say.
Now he emerged,
and she caught her first glimpse of him.
Yes. Oh yes. It stopped her heart, they say.
Something stuck out from under his eyelids.
620
She raised herself up
and scrambled for safety, they say.
<<
and the village flipped over, they say.
Then she went toward him again, they say,
and reached out to him.
<<
she said as she lifted him into her arms, they say,
and the town was as quiet
as something that someone has dropped.
She brought him into the house, they say.
630
Her father put cooking stones
into a urinal that he owned,
and they bathed him in it, they say. 29
< Then, they say, she asked for Master Carver. >30
633a
As soon as they called him,
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he came to them, they say.
He had already started his work in the forest
and brought it half-finished, they say.
As soon as he entered,
he made the design, they say,
as the one of good family described it.
640
He drew cumulus clouds together in pairs.
He drilled holes for the laces
to straighten the baby's legs.
And they fastened him in it, they say.
They brought a pair of skyblankets out,
and they wrapped them around him, there in his cradle.
Then, without waiting, they launched the canoe.
[ 5.3 ]
A crew of five, the woman and her child went aboard.
And they started seaward, they say.
They went farther and farther and farther to seaward.
650
To the landward towns and the seaward towns
it was equally far,
they could see that it was,
when they put him over the side, they say.
When they put him over the side,
he turned round and around and around and around
to the right four times
and lay quiet, they say,
like something that someone has dropped.
And then they made for shore
and settled this place here, they say.
659
*
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chapter three: The One They Hand Along
Sometime after Skaay dictated this story, Henry Moody added a
postscript, which Swanton also dutifully took down :
Llahaw siis yakw tsyadyang wansuuga.
Sttii isghasas gyaanhaw gyaghitga
lla ttl qinggangang wansuuga.
Ll qadlaagang wansuuga,
Nang Ttl Dlstlas aa. 31
He lives there in the midst of the ocean, they say.
Sometimes when sickness is coming
they see him, they say.
He is a reef, they say -
the One They Hand Along is.
This remark is the only authority for the title, Nang Ttl Dlstlas,
"The One They Hand Along" or "The One They Put in Place," by
which the poem has come to be known. Skaay himself, so far as we
know, said nothing about a title.
Nang is the Haida impersonal singular pronoun, corresponding
to English "someone" or "something." Ttl is the third-person plural
animate pronoun, parallel to English "they" or "them" - but also often used in Haida where in English we say "we." Its position in the
phrase suggests we hear it as the subject of a verb. That verb opens
with the animate diminutive prefix dl-, which tells us that its object ( nang) is a being, not a thing, and a being that is probably small or young. The root of the verb is stl, which means to put, to place, to handle or to hand. (Its cognate noun stlaay means "hand" or "paw"
in Haida.) The suffix -as recasts this tenseless verb as a definitive verbal noun : the living one they timelessly have, or once and always
have had, in their hands.
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4 * Wealth Has Big Eyes
Though his story is comPlex, Skaay's language
is simple and direct. Still, some very basic terms, such as canoe
and house and cape, had substantially different meanings for him
than they may have now for his readers. Since his sense of myth is
grounded in the real and immediate world, not in a misty fairytale
existence, it is worth understanding quite precisely the things he
has in mind.
A Haida canoe ( tluu) is an ocean-going redcedar dugout, up to
around 20 m (60 ft) in length and sometimes over 2 m (6 ft) in
the beam. The crew and passengers might number anywhere up to
thirty. Smaller dugouts were used for solo travel. Some Haida had
surely also seen the sealskin boats of the Eyak, Aleut and Yupiit,
page 78: but the self-propelled harbor-seal canoe ( xhuut tluu) is a craft that lines is only seen on the ocean of literature. Skaay may have imagined 25-30;
page 79: that canoe to be made from the bones and skin of a seal, or he may lines have imagined it to be made, like other canoes, of good redcedar, 65-72 painted or carved in the Haida way with the form of a seal. The sea-otter spear may likewise have been, in his imagination, alder carved to embody the sea otter's form. Form as much as substance, in the
mythworld, can and does embody knowledge.
A proper house ( na), in Skaay's experience, was a solid, square
structure with a low-pitched gable roof and a central smokehole.
The frame was built of large redcedar posts and beams, and the
walls were of redcedar planks, vertically set. Light and air could leak
through the chinks, but there were no windows and there was only
one door. The house of Skaay's family head at Ttanuu, for example,
was 15 m x 16 m on the ground and 7 m high at the central beam.
An area roughly 10 m square - the entire center of the house - was
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excavated to a depth of 1.5 m. Halfway up the sides of this housepit
was a terrace or middle tier some 1.5 m wide. At the center of the
housepit was the fire. Before the smallpox epidemics, twenty or thirty
people would normally have lived in such a house, but the head of
the house had private quarters at the rear, often separated from the
rest by a painted wooden screen.1
The largest house in Haida Gwaii (built about 1840 by Wiiha, the
headman of Ghadaghaaxhiwaas, the largest Haida town) was roughly
21 m square. Its central gallery or housepit was nearly 3 m deep and
16 m square, but still, the sidewalls of the gallery had only two tiers,
which Wiiha had equipped with sets of European stairs.2 The house
in Skaay's story, where the housepit is ten tiers deep and a fleet of
canoes can pass through the smokehole, is bigger than any house
the poet or his neighbors could have seen outside their dreams.3
A Haida town or village ( llaana) consisted of one, two or three
(in the myths, more often five) rows of houses, built just above the
beach, facing the sea. Canoes were brought up on the beach stern—
first, directly in front of the houses. After standing offshore to await
an invitation, visitors were expected to land in front of the houses
as well. Many such details are visible in a photo of Skaay's town, The photo Ttanuu, taken by George Dawson in 1878. But we should read side is on pages 106-107.
by side with this photograph the remarks of another visitor, James
Swan, who was there in 1883. Swan performed a little census, counting 29 houses, 23 housepoles, 31 memorial poles, 11 mortuary poles
and 15 mortuary houses. "The monuments of the dead," he wrote,
"outnumber the monuments of the living." 4
The cedarbark cape (Haida qqaayx) has remarkable and vital regenerative powers in this narrative, but in precolonial times it was
an everyday garment. The woven bark of the redcedar is breathable,
waterproof, comfortable and warm. The poem, in taking all this
utterly for granted, may have something else to tell us. Death did
become a vastly greater burden to the Haida, and the worlds within
the world grew more separate from each other, as the people took
to wearing European clothes.
The figured blanket ( naaxiin) is what is now commonly called a
Chilkat blanket : a cape that is also a stylized portrayal of an animal,
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woven of mountain goat wool and yellowcedar bark. Skaay is the
only poet on the Northwest Coast, so far as I recall, who ever sug-
page 85: gested that these animated garments could speak to one another, lines but that suggestion has the air of absolute discovery, not invention.
223-232 Such blankets are like stories : they are alive. And all those figured blankets from the Northwest Coast, now hanging in museums around the world, must certainly be waiting - like the uncompleted blanket
in the poem - for a visit from another of their kind. By donning
such a blanket - such an animated skin - a skinless human being
is empowered to cross the xhaaydla, to pass from realm to realm,
like a sea mammal or bird.
The skyblanket or cloudblanket ( qwiighaalgyaat) - rarer and possibly older than the figured blanket - is a cape of white mountain
goat wool, plainwoven or with stylized rainclouds added in black.5
In ordinary life, figured blankets and skyblankets alike are normally
worn one at a time, but in Haida poetry, where two is a number of
great importance (just as it is in the Haida social order), blankets are
often worn in pairs. One of the few surviving early qwiighaalgyaat
is actually designed in such a way that, when worn, it looks like two
blankets rather than one. This blanket, known as the Swift Robe,
has been for many years in the collection of the Peabody Museum
at Harvard University.6 Swanton must have seen it there, in fact,
when he worked at the museum as a graduate student, three or four
years before he came to Haida Gwaii.
Like the blankets who can speak to one another, the long eyes of
the old god on the seafloor startle a few visitors in museums around
the world. Haida sculptors, by convention, make the heads impossibly
large for the bodies of their figures, and the eyes impossibly large for
the heads, but these exaggerated eyes are of many different kinds.
The eyes of amphibians and fish, for instance, are usually represented
as circular, the eyes of sharks as vertically elliptical, and the eyes of
mammals and birds as ovoid. But throughout the Northwest Coast,
elongated eyes are a distinguishing mark of the god of wealth, who
lives in a house on the floor of the sea, surrounded by seals.7 The
usual Haida name for this spirit-being is Tangghwan Llaana, or Sea
Dweller. His Tlingit name is G_unakadeit' (a word whose etymology
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chapter four: Wealth Has Big Eyes
I do not know). In Tsimshian he is Nagunaks, which simply means
"located in the water." A two-dimensional, frontal view of his face
appears on the sides of countless Haida, Tlingit and Tsimshian storage chests. In these representations, the eyes are generally stretched
sideways and equipped with doubled pupils. Each eye becomes a
face within a face. In three-dimensional representations, the eyes
more often protrude.
The Nuuchahnulth trader and hunter Saayaach'apis put it this way
to Edward Sapir in 1913 : A' iih _' atma qasii h _ aw' ilmis' i.... Ch' ushaama yaaqwil' itq ch' usha : "Wealth has big eyes. ... He is wary of those he suspects." 8
Common though he is on Haida storage boxes, the spirit-being
of wealth is rare on Haida poles. Nevertheless, he appeared in a
prominent form on three of the two dozen housepoles standing in
Skaay's village, Ttanuu, in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Here his eyes are elongated vertically, in keeping with the form of
the pole itself. They reach across his cheeks and well beyond his
chin. In the end of each such elongated eye, where the pupil ought
to be, there is not just a face but a complete small creature, like a
not-quite-human child.9
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Ttanuu, 9 July 1878. This photo, made by the geologist George Dawson, is the first ever taken of the village. The view is from the south, showing six of the roughly thirty houses in the town. In the middle of the left half of the photo, behind and 106
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to the left of the tallest pole, is the house of Xhyuu, who was headman of the village and also of the lineage known as Qquuna Qiighawaay. The poet Skaay lived in this house, from perhaps as early as 1840 until 1886.
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Xhyuu's house at Ttanuu, 9 July 1878 (detail from the photo overleaf). Some Tsimshian visitors are gathered near the base of Gitkuna's memorial pole in front of the house. At lower left, marked by the circle, a sculptor is at work on Xhyuu's new housepole, which was raised shortly after the photo was taken.
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The remains of Xhyuu's house at Ttanuu, September 1902. The new housepole,
carved in 1878, has been raised (it is the middle one of the five poles in the photo).
So has a new memorial pole (second from left). But the inhabitants are missing.
Photograph by C.F. Newcombe.
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The house of Gwiisukuunas of the Qqaadasghu Qiighawaay, Ttanuu, 1 May 1901.
The village had no full-time residents at this date, but several houses, including this one, remained in seasonal use. The topmost major figure on the housepole is the skyaamskun or blue falcon. Below this is the long-eyed spirit-being of the sea, Tangghwan Llaana. Photograph by C.F. Newcombe.
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The long-eyed spirit of
the sea on Gwiisukuunas's
housepole, photographed
by Wilson Duff in 1953,
when the village had been
empty for sixty-five years.
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Daxhiigang, The Face of Tangghwan Llaana, circa 1890. Carved black argillite panel, 15 x 36.5 cm, forming one side of a fully enclosed chest. Royal British Columbia Museum, Victoria.
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