Travelling to the Edge of the World

Acknowledgements

First of all I would like to thank the Wild Women of Moniakh Mhor (you know who you are) who helped to nurture the idea for this book. My life partner and editor, Neil Ferber, has also been essential to its development. Thanks also to Sharon Blackie and David Knowles for their encouragement and for publishing some of my ‘Haida Gwaii’ poems in their magazine Earthlines and the Two Ravens Press anthology Entanglements. To all the people of British Columbia and Haida Gwaii who made me so welcome, talked to me, gave me hospitality, and answered my many, many questions, I owe a huge debt. Particular thanks to Barbara, Katie and Bill, Rachael, Rachel, Reg, Jennifer, Susan, James, Lisa, Sherry, Barnaby, James, and the owners and staff of the Copper Beech and Haida House guesthouses. Names have been changed to protect the privacy and identity of many of the people who helped me so generously. Thanks also to the Royal Literary Fund, because without their financial help, I wouldn’t have been able to visit British Columbia. All the photographs in this book, unless otherwise attributed, are copyright to the author and may not be reproduced without permission. For the other images, every effort has been made to trace the owners and the author would be very happy to be contacted by anyone who could not be found. No reply was ever received from the Cultural Committee of the Haida Nation, so I can only assume that the nature of this book did not infringe any ethical standards

Travelling to the Edge of the World

‘Where your world ends, ours begins.’

Haida saying

For months I’d been feeling depressed, anxious and powerless. There seemed to be no solution to the perfect storm of economic and environmental chaos that was (and still is) approaching. My own personal life felt just as stormy and unsolvable. But at the moment when I felt most depressed, I read a book by an American poet called Robert Bringhurst. It was called A Story as Sharp as a Knife. At first what drew me to the book was the discussion about narrative. I’m a writer, and I’m fascinated by narrative. Storytelling is fundamental to the human psyche, even our brains are structured to construct narratives. Every time we access a memory, our brain re-assembles its components as a story, making it slightly different every time.

Bringhurst was writing about a First Nation people called the Haida, who live on remote islands off the coasts of British Columbia and Alaska, on the eastern edge of the Pacific Ocean. Over a hundred years ago their oral literary tradition, which had been developing for nearly ten thousand years, was transcribed by an anthropologist. Most of the stories, told as poems, had never been translated until Bringhurst began to study them. The way the Haida structured their poems and stories was quite different from the literary traditions we have here in the west and that fascinated me. Here was a tradition as old as the Greeks, but offering a different model to follow.

They also had a mythology which was not simply about a group of humans who were actually gods in disguise, but which was animist in origin — regarding animals as supernatural beings and placing humans firmly within the world’s ecology as a cog in the works, rather than superior beings who were in charge of it all. ‘Everything is connected to everything’, was one of the Haida sayings and it summed up their philosophy. For their world to function, there had to be a balance in all things. This was reflected in their literature too; their literary forms involved a balancing of themes and events. I read all the translations I could source and everything I could find out about the Haida.

Here, it seemed, was a people who knew how to live in the world without harming it. Perhaps they had an answer to the ills of the twenty-first century. Perhaps they could teach us how to live without destroying the planet that supports us. I knew that somehow I had to get there.

1. The Kick

‘Wild is a word like soul. Such a thing may not exist, but we want it, and we know what we mean when we talk about it.’

Kathleen Jamie

The sun is shining as I leave Cumbria in mid-May. The trees are just coming into leaf and there are lambs in the fields. The Lakeland fells on one side and the Pennines on the other, have shadings of white where wintry showers have fallen overnight. Big puffs of cloud are being driven across the blue sky by a cold north-westerly wind. It’s as good a leave-taking as you get. From the train I can see the stone walls that divide the landscape, marking out old fields scattered with erratic boulders left behind by ice age glaciers. I wonder what it will all look like in four weeks time when I come back.

If I come back.

The thought stops my breath for a moment. So many things can happen. I always have these moments of anxiety when I go away. Travelling is a risk and going alone even more so, but sometimes it’s the only way to travel. That I intend to come back is never in doubt. As a third generation immigrant to northern England, I feel that, if I belong anywhere, it’s here. Although I’ve lived all over the world at various times in my life, I’ve always felt myself in exile when living anywhere other than Cumbria. But, sometimes it seems as though I was born to be a nomad. There’s an English nursery rhyme that predicts your future according to the day on which you were born, in lines that were often quoted to me when I was a child.

Wednesday’s child is full of woe,

Thursday’s child has far to go.

I was born on a Thursday in a small farm-worker’s cottage in a hamlet too small to be visible on a map. Eden is on my birth certificate; the Eden river valley, a small paradise in a wild landscape. When I was three my father moved us up to the Scottish borders to live on a croft in a place so wild there was no road to it. The front and back doors opened straight out onto the fellside and cows and horses were stabled next to the living accommodation. There was no electricity or telephone, water came from a spring and the only toilet was an earth closet.

My parents were ‘off-comers’ — my mother a land girl displaced by the war; my father the child of an Irish immigrant family, mill workers, cattle drovers and small farmers, displaced by poverty. He loved the land, loved farming, but couldn’t afford to buy his own farm, so he laboured for another land owner in return for the croft. The people who wrenched a living from the land around us belonged to that land as my parents never could. They all traced their ancestry back a thousand years to the Vikings who had settled there. Our neighbours never used their surnames but were known by their holdings; Willy the Crewe, Bobby the Row, Maggie the Inskip. The landscape was named in Norse. A river valley was a Wath or a Syke, streams were Becks, hills were Fells, and the small strip of tree shelter behind the house was a Garth. The dialect spoken by everyone looked towards Oslo rather than London. It was a strong language, with few passive verbs or feminine word endings; if you were busy you were ‘thrang’, talk was ‘crack’. It was muscular on the tongue and picturesque on the ear. The Queen’s English spoken at home or at school seemed colourless by comparison.

Most people over fifty had never been further than the nearest small town in their entire lives and many of them could read or write little more than their names. Having no electricity, there was no television to fill the evenings. People walked to each other’s houses and had ‘good crack’. As they talked, they peopled the landscape around me with stories. Old Sworley who had hanged himself in the barn believing that he had killed his wife by pitching her down the well (in fact she’d managed to climb out and run off to the town). The woman whose ghost was supposed to walk the track on winter nights, where her children had been lost in a snow storm. How people had burned their furniture to keep warm through the winter of ’47. How Billy the Hope had spent three days floundering through the snow with a horse and sled to fetch the supplies for his starving family. His story, as they told it, was a tale worthy of a Greek epic.

And on those fireside nights I learned my own family stories, as I listened to my father and grandfather talking about ancestors who went across the sea on sailing ships to bring back cargos of bananas and marry exotic women; of others who drove herds of cattle from Ireland to London, or despaired over errant children, disinherited their offspring and fought bitterly over religion. These were stories they had learned from their own grandparents. I was aware, even at nine or ten, that I was listening to an unbroken memory line going back two hundred years — stories passing like heirlooms from one generation to another. The tellers seemed to know exactly what great-great-grandmother Bridie had said to her daughter Frances Theresa when she came home with a baby she wasn’t supposed to have, fathered by a footman at the house where she was in service. The fine rooms, the uniforms, the very porcelain crockery she washed in a lead lined sink were all there in the story, leaping like a hologram in the firelight before my eyes. The account of my great-great-uncle Edward who had stood preaching the gospel of temperance outside his father’s pub on a Tyneside quay, was pure Catherine Cookson. It was hardly surprising that I grew up with a love of history, language and narrative that was somehow equated with the wild, untamed landscape beyond the kitchen door.

Now, I live on the banks of the River Eden, not far upstream from the place where I was born, in an old mill perched on the edge of the river where it enters a natural gorge between sandstone cliffs. I can watch the river’s variations through my window as I write, the delicate patterns of light and shade, the constant changes of mood. The murmur of the weir provides a continuing soundscape through every night and day. I know the riverbank intimately. When I wake in the morning I can watch herons disputing territory above the weir, red squirrels bolting across the footbridge, spawning salmon in the gravel beds. Once, on a deserted morning, a family of three otters walked along the foot of the weir, and once we surprised a bird of prey lifting a duckling off the water. The river is a source of continuing fascination and delight.

So why am I leaving my own little paradise to travel to the edge of the world? It all began with a growing disillusionment with Western politics and particularly with the West’s attitude to environmental issues. There has, for a long time now, been a hollow, anxious feeling at the pit of my stomach. The news, both environmental, political and economic, makes me sad and frustrated because I care deeply about the state of the world we live in but I don’t seem able to do anything about it. What will the future hold for my children, or my lovely grandchildren growing up so optimistically in a world that should be full of promise, but which now feels quite the opposite?

In the Mediterranean and the Andaman seas, refugees and asylum seekers are drowning in their thousands as they are turned away by affluent countries who could well afford to help. All over the world, big corporations are turning sections of the land and the ocean into wastelands that are too polluted to be safe. There are very few places in the world that man has not tampered with, and these days we do it by remote control, polluting an atmosphere and ocean that have no boundaries. The results are more than just environmental. Climate change and economic instability cause conflict. Some of the poorest countries are at war with each other, creating a living hell for the people who have to live there. In our own society, inequality is increasing at an alarming rate, fuelled by the Austerity measures adopted by our governments as an answer to the banking crisis. As one economist put it, the result has been that ‘money is being transferred from the have-nots to the have-yachts’. Long-term this, too, can only lead to conflict.

Then, in the autumn of 2014, I flew to Singapore and was horrified to be greeted at the airport by a notice exhorting all pregnant women, the elderly and people with breathing difficulties to stay inside with their windows and doors tightly shut because air pollution had reached a critical level. The city was hidden under a brown smog. You could see across the street, but only just. I thought that at least this must be some kind of environmental crisis, but no, people told me, this happens often. You have to stay inside. If you go outside you’d better wear a mask. Everyone behaved as if this was quite normal and I found it unsettling.

Singapore is supposed to be one of the cleanest cities in Asia and it’s situated on the coast where sea breezes should keep the air fresh. What had gone wrong? Singapore, like most big cities, especially in hot countries, has a high level of pollution from cars and industrial activity. Also, like most big cities, it shares the air it breathes with its neighbours. The slashing and burning of the rainforest in Indonesia sends clouds of thick smoke across the country when the wind is in the right direction. It’s estimated that more than three thousand square miles of forest was destroyed in Indonesia last year.

China has one of the highest pollution records of any country. In its biggest cities the air is so polluted it is carcinogenic and people cycle round the streets in masks. The death rate from respiratory diseases is significant. But nowhere in Singapore, or China, have I seen anyone standing in the street with a placard protesting that the air they need to breathe to keep them alive is being poisoned. People shrug their shoulders, accept it as a fact of life and put on a mask. Why are we so accepting of something so unacceptable? Why aren’t people on the streets in their tens of thousands demanding that their governments do something so that their most basic need can be met. Clean air to breathe. You don’t breathe; you don’t live. It’s that simple.

But it isn’t. In a modern economy, people have to work to live and, just as they risked life and limb in Victorian factories and sweat shops, people put up with the consequences of their employment because it puts bread on the table and allows them to buy the clothes on their backs and the cars in their garages. They are part of a self-perpetuating cycle they can’t get out of. The production of goods, power, drugs and chemicals that is required in our daily lives is damaging our environment, yet we seem unable to see a way out of the loop because we need the employment they provide in order to live and we want the goods that are produced. In the war between the environment and economics, economics definitely seems to be winning out.

But that situation, bad as it is, wasn’t the whole story behind my depression. I write for a living and inside myself there was a creative restlessness and dissatisfaction with an increasingly stale European literary tradition. Everything in poetry and prose seemed to have already been written. My connection with the natural world around me seemed also to have been broken. The girl who had run barefoot on the open fells among the larks and the curlews had vanished and the spontaneous joy she felt at being part of this wild landscape had long since been crushed under tax returns, publishers’ deadlines, student reports, blog posts and bank statements. I felt flat, exhausted, despairing and powerless.

Then, at my lowest moment, I found a book by a Canadian poet, Robert Bringhurst, called A Story as Sharp as a Knife. It told the story of a group of First Nation people who inhabited remote islands off the northern coast of British Columbia and had a literary and artistic tradition reaching back more than ten thousand years. Their world view was, like most First Nation traditions, holistic, seeing human beings as part of the whole cycle of life on earth, part of an organism, a fragile ecosystem that commanded the utmost respect. Their world, which emerged after a great flood, was pulled up out of the water by the Raven, who discovered human beings hiding in a giant clam shell and, thinking that he could have some fun with them, tempted them out. The more I read of their myths and legends, the more I wanted to go. I dreamed of standing on North Beach, a spit of land where you can look straight out across the Pacific, where the Raven found the clam shell. I wanted to go somewhere truly wild, where the echoes of some of those first narratives still lingered.

But I was also aware that there was a darker side to their history. The Haida people were, like many of the First Nation people of North America, the victims of an unacknowledged colonial genocide.1 Before 1860 more than twenty thousand people lived on these islands, as hunter-gatherers, with a cultural tradition stretching back more than ten thousand years. Within two decades of European colonisation the population had been reduced to around five hundred and their way of life had become unsustainable. Between the saw mills and the fish canneries and the missionary stations, the Haida tried to keep some remnants of their culture intact. Their children were taken away from them to be sent to residential schools where (apart from suffering appalling abuse) they were forbidden to speak their own language. Haida traditions went underground and soon only the old people remembered which families belonged to the Raven or the Eagle clans, and the significance of the stories that had been handed on from generation to generation was sometimes lost.

Dispossession was almost complete. The British Columbian Commissioner for Land remarked at the end of the nineteenth century that the Haida had no claim to their land because ‘they can put no value on it and it has no utility for them’. Because they did not exploit or cultivate it, and because land ownership was a totally alien concept (how can you ‘own’ something that existed millions of years before you did?) their land rights were taken away to be given to ‘some industrious people’ ie colonial immigrants. The Indian Act of 1876 left the native people of British Columbia very little and gave them the legal status of children. It was the ultimate act of dispossession and repression, and it has never been repealed.

But the Haida stayed and they remembered, and eventually they fought back with lawyers and high court writs, and now the ‘Queen Charlotte Islands’ are once more Haida Gwaii, home to the Haida Nation.

The old women who were still native Haida speakers, passed on the language and the traditions. One small boy, who slept with his grandmother, Old Nanaay, remembered waking up and watching her getting dressed, surprised to see her body covered in tattoos across her chest and down her arms. What are they, Grandma? he asked. Boy, that’s who you are, she replied. Her tattoos told the story of her clan relationships, like the carved poles still rotting in the forests where the ruined Haida houses had been swallowed up by new growth. But she was one of the last of her generation to wear ‘the marks of her lineage’ on her body.2

So that is why I’m on a plane, at 38,000 feet, enduring all the discomforts of long-haul travel to visit a group of islands off the north western coast of British Columbia and Alaska called Haida Gwaii. I don’t know what will happen, or what difference it will make to my life; I just know that I have to do it.

2. Vancouver

‘The fundamental basis of any society is its relationship to nature.’

The Ecologist, ‘Exposing Technocracy’, June 28th 2015

My carbon footprint is enormous and quite unjustifiable. But with a partner in Italy and children in New Zealand, Cambodia and Cuba, as well as travel for my work, it seems an insoluble problem. It’s a great irony that the people who are most concerned about their impact on the planet’s ecosystems seem to need to travel to get their message