A story as sharp as a kn.., p.15
A Story as Sharp as a Knife, page 15
his family and his work while Swanton reembarked alone to visit
his new friend's ancestral home.
Three years earlier, Boas himself was marooned for two weeks at
Port Essington, waiting for a boat that didn't come. Da xhii gang was
there, and Boas hired him, first to make drawings and carvings, then
to interpret other Haida artworks - including a few of his own - that
Boas had bought for the American Museum of Natural History, and
finally to tell stories. From Wednesday, 11 August, to Wednesday, 25
August 1897, Daxhiigang answered Boas's questions, talked about
the principles of Haida painting and sculpture, and told Boas a dozen
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Port Essington, at the mouth of the Skeena River, c. 1900 (photographer unidentified). Unlikely as it may look, this was the seasonal home of one of the finest artists working in North America at the end of the nineteenth century: the Haida sculptor Daxhiigang (Charlie Edenshaw).
An independent trading post was built here in 1871. An Anglican mission was
added in 1876, a cannery in 1877. The latter provided the seasonal work that gave the town its Tsimshian name, Spaaksuut (Autumn Place). At its peak, the town included about half a dozen stores, four canneries, three restaurants (two Japanese, one Chinese), two hotels with gaming rooms and bars, a pool hall, at least one brothel, a sawmill, a makeshift jail, two churches, and a school. There were two residential areas - one for indigenous people, the other for Europeans. Orientals had a dormitory of their own.
The fortunes of the town began to fade when a rail line was laid along the Skeena in 1914. The line brought traffic to the new port of Prince Rupert rather than Port Essington - and destroyed every Gitksan and Tsimshian village in its path.
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chapter six: The Anthropologist and the Dogfish
myths or more.7 These conversations - conducted in Chinook Jargon
salted with Haida - formed the basis of a short monograph that Boas
published the following year, entitled Facial Paintings of the Indians
of British Columbia. They also inform a more substantial work that
he published thirty years later under the title Primitive Art. 8
If Boas had asked Daxhiigang to tell the myths in full, and had
made it plain that he would listen as long as required, and if he had
then transcribed Daxhiigang's Haida word for word, we would now
have the luxury of comparing the master carver's sculpture with his
poetry. Since the links between classical Haida poetry and classical
Haida sculpture are unusually close, this could prove much more
than just an interesting exercise. In the absence of full Haida versions, transcriptions of exactly what Daxhiigang said in Chinook
Jargon would be extremely welcome.9 But Boas had other work on
his mind. He recorded the myths only in English paraphrase. Back
in New York, he had them typed, in a slightly bowdlerized form,
and in 1900 he passed the typescripts on to Swanton, restoring the
bowdlerized passages by hand. Swanton (to Boas's surprise) published most of these paraphrases as supplements to his own Haida
transcriptions and translations.10 One of them is the only version
we have, from a classical source, of the story of Qqaaxhadajaat, the
Dogfish Woman. The group of drawings 11 Boas bought from Daxhii gang in 1897 includes a detailed image of this creature, and Boas
asked the artist to explain it. What Daxhiigang said is lost, but this
is what Franz Boas thought he meant :
A woman went travelling with her husband. She used to make fun of
the dogfish. They went to visit a small rock in the sea. When they were
out there, the dogfish, whose home the rock was, came and took the
woman down into the sea. There she discovered that the dogfish were
really people. They had taken off their dogfish blankets. After she had
stayed in the house for some time, fins began to grow upon her arms,
her legs, and her back. Her husband was searching for her everywhere,
but he was not able to find her. After a number of years he found her.
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Daxhiigang, Qqaaxhadajaat [ The Dogfish Woman], 1897. Pencil and colored pencil (black, red ochre, and blue) on paper, 28 x 23.5 cm. (The image itself is 24 cm tall.) Boas Collection, 1943. Dept. of Anthropology Archives, American Museum of Natural History, New York.
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chapter six: The Anthropologist and the Dogfish
Her face had remained unchanged ; but fins had grown on her arms,
on her legs, on her back, and on her head. She never returned. Ever
since that time her family have used the dogfish crest, and their house
is called Dogfish House. 12
Dogfish do not have fins on their heads, and it is highly unlikely
that Daxhiigang said the Dogfish Woman had fins on her head either. I suspect that he said something much more careful and precise
than the paraphrase suggests, and quite possibly just as precise as
the image he drew. That image was made quickly but with absolute assurance. It incorporates with surgical clarity the gill slits, the
crescent-shaped mouth full of sharp, triangular teeth, the vertical
pupils, elongated forehead, asymmetrical caudal fin and spined double
dorsal fins of the dogfish. The woman within the dogfish is just as
clearly shown. She is hairless like a slave but wears the face paint
and labret of a Haida woman aristocrat. She also has - or she and
the dogfish jointly have - what seem to be the talons of an eagle or
a raven. There are multiple transformations and interrelationships
here of which Boas's paraphrase gives only the scarcest hint. There
is also a considerable range of tone, from the severity and grace of
the emaciated woman within the dogfish to the muscular poise of
the body and head of the dogfish itself to the impish humor of the
twins inhabiting her dorsal fins. Silent though it is, the drawing has
some of the properties familiar in well-told Haida narrative. There
are no stray lines, no anecdotal shading or coloration. The logic of
the form is as sleek as a fish and as spare as a skeleton. There are
enigmas, but there are no irrelevant details or loose ends.
Daxhiigang made his drawing of the Dogfish Woman in black
pencil enlivened with dark red and bluegreen pigments - canonical
Haida colors, though not quite traditional Haida media - on the back
of one of the large preprinted forms that Boas had prepared for a
study of Northwest Coastal face painting.13 There is a note in Boas's
hand on the front of the drawing and a longer one in Swanton's hand
on the back. It appears, in fact, that Swanton may have taken the
drawing with him when he left for Haida Gwaii in 1900 and made his
annotations in the Islands. Which of his Haida teachers he consulted
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when he did so is harder to say. He too sometimes omitted crucial
information. But his notes tell us some interesting things.
Boas's notes tell us, first of all, and Swanton's notes confirm, that
heraldic rights to the use of the image of the Dogfish Woman were
claimed by the Yaakw Llaanas of the Raven side and by two families
of the Eagle side : the Gitins of Hlghagilda and Skaay's family, the
Qquuna Qiighawaay. Swanton's notes tell us further that the Hlghagilda branch of the Gitins - which includes Sghiidagits's family,
the Na Yuuwans Xhaaydaghaay - caused dissension by starting to
use the image without permission from the Qquuna Qiighawaay.
Finally and most importantly, Swanton's notes tell us that the Dogfish Woman "is the sister of Nang Ttl Dlstlas" : the sister of the One
They Hand Along.14
If we take this statement narrowly and literally, it means that
Qqaaxhadajaat is the daughter of the woman who was kidnapped by
a creature from the sea. She is the sister of the reincarnated sea god
who is born to a human mother, laced into his cradle, and returned
to his rightful place on the floor of the sea. Skaay, in that case, knew
the story of the Dogfish Woman well - but the story of the Dogfish Woman's human mother, her uncles and the spirit-being who
was her brother is the one that he decided Henry Moody and John
Swanton ought to hear.
Qqaaxhadajaat, not her brother, is the figure who fascinated Daxhii gang, and he carved and drew her image often over the years.
Boas did not grasp the depth of this relationship - even after Daxhiigang had explained to him, and Boas had recorded, that the image
belonged to the Yaakw Llaanas family. Yet this was the clue, if Boas
had thought about it, revealing how the story and the drawing had
become not just heraldic furniture but vehicles of an intensely personal meditation on the permanence of love in a world filled with
death and sudden disappearances.
To those who think the myths, the creatures who inhabit them
are real and not fictitious. One of the members of the Yaakw Llaanas
family - thus one of the spiritual daughters and potential reincarnations of the woman captured by the dogfish - was Kkwaayang,
Da xhii gang's wife. One potential reincarnation of the abandoned and
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chapter six: The Anthropologist and the Dogfish
bereaved human husband of the Dogfish Woman was, therefore, of
course, Daxhiigang himself.
Stylized and hieratic though it appears, Haida art can be and frequently is that personal and intense. This does not mean that the art
requires a personal explanation by the artist, nor does it mean that
the art is obscure. Daxhiigang took the story of the Dogfish Woman
very personally indeed - and so did his successor, the Haida sculptor
Bill Reid. But they are not the only people on the Northwest Coast
who have understood a link between dogfish and lost love. A Haida
man known as Giikw of the Daayuuwahl Llaanas ( c. 1820-1907)
wove such a link into a family history that he dictated to Swanton
at Hlghagilda sometime during the winter of 1900-1901.15 More
than a decade later and nearly a thousand kilometers south - on
Tuesday, 7 October 1913, to be precise, in the village of Ts'uum'as on
the west coast of Vancouver Island - the Nuuchahnulth mythteller
Qiix_a (known in English as Big Fred) told Edward Sapir a handsomely crafted and detailed story, in the Nootka language, about a
man who tried to retrieve his wife after she was kidnapped by creatures from the sea. Sapir, with his European education, heard in it
many resemblances to the Greek story of Orpheus. A listener from
the northern Northwest Coast would have recognized it at once as
the story of Nanasimgit - part three of the trilogy that Sghiidagits
dictated to Swanton on 5 October 1900. But there is one intriguing difference. As Qiix_a tells the story, it is not a killer whale but a
dogfish who abducts the hunter's wife.16
Is there a reason for these connections that is independent of the
logic of the myths ? I do not know. But perhaps it is not irrelevant
that, of all the sharks and rays, dogfish are the nearest to human
form and scale. On the Northwest Coast, they are also the most
frequent in the vicinity of human villages. Sharks and rays also differ from most fishes in having what mammals like ourselves can
recognize as a sex life. Their eggs are fertilized internally, like the
ova of warm-blooded animals, not externally, like the roe of herring,
halibut and salmon. The male dogfish penetrates the female. Dogfish,
like other sharks and rays, also appear to be doubly potent, since
the males have two penises (actually claspers) and the females two
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vaginas. In Haida - but not so far as I know in any other language
of the Northwest Coast - the link between adultery and dogfish
is reinforced by a pun. The dogfish is called qqaaxhada in Haida;
qqaaxhii is one of the Haida words for penis.
And then there is the matter of the fins. Killer whales, in ordinary
life, have large and impressive dorsal fins, but only one dorsal fin
each. In Haida myth and Haida art - as in the Nanasimgit story told
by Sghiidagits - they frequently have double dorsal fins. Dogfish
- evidently doubly potent in this respect as well - have two dorsal
fins even in daily life.
Humans and dogfish, then, like men and women, are close in
some respects, and in others blatantly different. Some of their differences, however, are subtle and complex. Where physical love is
concerned, one difference of importance is the skin. Dogfish skin is
rough - so rough that Haida carpenters and carvers use it for sand—
paper. Sometime in the 1930s, a Tsimshian mythteller known as
Arthur Lewis told the Tsimshian/Nisgha ethnographer Gwusk_'aayn
(William Beynon) a story in which the Raven visits a village of beautiful women. They allow him to make love to them one by one - but
he wears his penis to shreds as he does so, because they are sharks.17
A man whose wife is potentially a dogfish is a man potentially too
fragile to make love to the very woman he loves most.
*
Now that Daxhiigang has taught us a little about the relationship
of mythtellers and myths, we might think back to Ghandl and his
story of the young man who meets and falls in love with a woman
from another world. Love is tested in the story, and it seems to meet
the test, yet the marriage quickly fails. I do not know the date of
Ghandl's blindness, nor whether he himself was ever married, nor
how his disability affected his relationships with women. But from
his poetry alone we know that Ghandl was an expert on the potency
of vision, the impermanence of joy, the durability of love, and the
unsustainability of all love's practical conditions. His understanding
of these matters is palpable in many of his poems, and especially
in the way he tells the tale of the man "who was just about to go
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out hunting birds." In Ghandl's poem, as in Daxhiigang's drawing,
the human is contained within the hieratic, and that containment
proves to be a source of power. Human features and emotions are
rendered potently as human, and as more than human, both at the
same time.
We might think back, too, to the story of Nanasimgit, which
Sghiidagits told to Swanton on his first official call. Did Sghiidagits
choose to tell a Tsimshian story just to keep the anthropologist at
bay ? Was the headman of the village artfully avoiding a stranger's
curiosity, protecting himself and his culture by dishing up a story
full of foreign names, set in foreign places, when he might have
told a story closer to the bone ? Or could this myth, known in one
form or another, in 1900, to every native person up and down the
Northwest Coast, be a means of real self-revelation ?
The Sghiidagits whom Swanton met in 1900 was in his early
sixties. He had served as headman of the village since his elder
brother's death in 1892.18 In the 1870s and 1880s, when the old poles
and houses of Hlghagilda still stood, the senior male members of his
lineage (Na Yuuwans Xhaaydaghaay, the Big House People) lived in
three adjacent houses at the center of the town.19 The memorial and
mortuary poles for all three houses stood together in front of the
middle house. In 1882, when more than sixty poles were standing in
the village, there were six poles here in the Big House Family yard.
Three of them were mortuary posts, and all three held the bones of
women. Though each was independently designed, these three poles
portrayed a single theme : a woman being carried between worlds
by a two-finned killer whale.20
The names of these three women are now lost, but all three were
apparently deceased wives of headmen of the town. The last of these
three mortuary posts was raised in 1881. In 1883, Hlghagilda acquired
a new name - Skidegate Mission - and with it, an industrious new
resident, whose first priorities included the construction of a church
and European-style graveyard.
Swanton did not see any of the houses or the poles in the Big
House Family complex. Between 1889 and 1894, the poles were
emptied and cut down, the bones were buried, and the houses were
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