Entering Time: The Fungus Man Platters of Charles Edenshaw

Also by Colin Browne

POETRY

Abraham

Ground Water*

The Hatch*

The Properties*

The Shovel*

PROSE

I Had an Interesting French Artist to See Me This Summer: Emily Carr and Wolfgang Paalen in British Columbia

Motion Picture Production in British Columbia, 1898–1940: A Brief Historical Background and Catalogue

*PUBLISHED BY TALONBOOKS

Entering Time

THE FUNGUS MAN

PLATTERS OF

CHARLES EDENSHAW

COLIN BROWNE

© 2016 Colin Browne

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from Access Copyright (The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency). For a copyright licence, visit accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Talonbooks

9259 Shaughnessy Street, Vancouver, BC Canada V6P 6R4

www.talonbooks.com

First printing: 2016

ePub edition: 2022

ePub ISBN 978-1-77201-568-3

Interior and cover design by Typesmith

Cover illustration by Claude Davidson, silkscreen print based on Charles Edenshaw platter in the Field Museum, Chicago, 1978, Estate of Claude Davidson Interior illustrations by Cindy Mochizuki

Talonbooks acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Browne, Colin, 1946–, author

Entering time : the Fungus Man platters of Charles Edenshaw / Colin Browne.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-77201-039-8 (PAPERBACK)

1. Edenshaw, Charles, 1839–1920 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Haida sculpture. 3. Haida mythology. 4. Canadian poetry – British Columbia – Pacific Coast – Native authors – History and criticism. 5. Art and mythology. I. Title.

E99.H2B76 2016704.0397’28C2016-905802-6

In memory of

Kythé Browne

(1917–2011)

&

Alexander Hutchison

(1943–2015)

Everything is an attempt

To be human

—WILLIAM BLAKE

First Book of Urizen Plate 10 (1796)

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Prologue

1 | For the Perpetuation of the World

2 | Raven

3 | Da.a xiigang

4 | Trade

5 | Three Argillite Platters

6 | Below the Canoe

7 | The Bracket-Fungus Steersman

8 | Raven Travelling / Xuuya Kaagang.ngas

9 | Why Fungus Man?

10 | The Polypores

11 | A Walk in the Forest

12 | Clamshell or Cockleshell?

13 | In Time

Coda

Acknowledgments

A Note on Orthography

Notes

References

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Where then are we? Where do we find ourselves? With whom can we still identify in order to affirm our own identity and to tell ourselves our own history? First of all, to whom do we recount it? One would have to construct oneself, one would have to be able to invent oneself without a model and without an assured addressee.¹

—JACQUES DERRIDA

Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin

PROLOGUE

For my mother, Kythé, and her extended family – her mother, her sisters, her aunt and uncle, their son and daughter – 1939 was the year that everything changed, irrevocably. For years they had clung to an economically precarious existence on the southeast coast of Vancouver Island, in a village on the edge of a circular bay that enthusiastically promoted itself as the Salmon Capital of the World. The village was supported by logging and commercial fishing, but the few men in my mother’s family did not labour in these industries. They were all, to one degree or another, like her father, my grandfather, a man who appeared to have had the wind permanently knocked out of him.

An educated Scot, he had sailed to Canada in the first decade of the twentieth century, clerked in a bank with his brother, and by 1914 had established a small, thriving ranch in the hills above Kamloops. He was married, with children, and with another on the way, but when news came of his brother’s death in France, he felt pressure to do his part. In 1917, he took the train to Vancouver and joined the Seaforth Highlanders, listing his occupation as Gentleman, a title that carried little weight in western Canada but which would have been the first step toward obtaining a commission as an officer. He had sciatica, which often laid him up behind the lines. My grandmother told me he was buried alive and that his sergeant had dug him out. When he returned from overseas, he was a different man. He found it impossible to return to the log cabin he’d built with such pride. It was too small and dark. The land, as beautiful as it was, would never yield a decent living. A series of failing enterprises and short-term moves with his family followed, and by the early 1930s he had returned alone to Scotland to eke out a life on a bleak family estate. The only time he spoke about his experience in France was when a son-in-law asked him, years later, what he recalled: The worst thing, my grandfather said, was to watch the men hesitate as they climbed over the top and fall back into the trenches, shot by their own officers.

I spent hours as a child looking through the old black-paged family albums, fascinated by the sticky corners, as if they were somehow able to stop or contain time. Most of the snapshots commemorate picnics on blankets with Thermoses of tea and a clutch of children in saggy bathing suits with sun in their blond hair. My mother and her three sisters are often shown standing single file, youngest to the eldest. On the reverse side their names are written in ink with the wide nibs popular in fountain pens at the time. Occasionally there is a visit to a horse. The mothers are in charge. If there are men, they are usually off to the side in tweed jackets, their minds elsewhere, perhaps worried about money, or carpenter ants, or filling the woodshed by September. There is a sense of proprietorial ease, but also a feeling of contingency, of self-conscious provisionality, as if this family group, roosting in a far corner of the Empire, as much as it claimed the sweet air and the natural beauty for its own, is not entirely at home.

My people were cuckoos, laying their eggs in another’s nest. They spoke with British accents. The mothers had been sent to Roedean School in England, recently established to prepare girls for entry to the new women’s colleges. The husbands had fought in France, where just about everything had been shaken out of them. And if they lived in genteel poverty, my family was also blessed with abundance. They built board and batten cottages and fertilized their roses and berry patches with Pacific kelp. Hollyhocks thrived in the sea air, along with beans and marrows and carrots. Salmon rushed up the rivers from early summer until the fall and could be coaxed to take a fly. Firewood was plentiful, and the woodshed a good place to cache a bottle. In their gumboots and heavy sweaters, this family appears before me now like startled characters who left the stage at intermission and who were later discovered in another country, heading west. They would not have thought of themselves as colonists – colonials, maybe, though it may be a fine distinction. They regarded themselves not as masters but as grateful subjects, a condition that allowed them to exempt themselves from responsibility for exploitation and inequality. Although she was born in Nevada of British parents and eventually returned to the U.K. to live with her husband, my grandmother thought of herself as Canadian. You were free, she exclaims in my film Strathyre (the name of my grandfather’s ranch), really free to come and go as you pleased. Indeed, as a British subject she had every right to live and travel freely in Canada. All Canadian citizens were British subjects at that time.

When Canada declared war on Germany in 1939, my family submitted once again to the unforgiving twentieth century. The Depression, which had seemed to drag on forever, was suddenly over. There were jobs. Gloom and compromise were overwhelmed by a sense of purpose, or indignation, or vengeance. The time for conciliation with despots and demagogues was over; there was a job to be done. Sworn pacifists became patriots almost overnight, as did the province’s lumber and cannery barons, who had a keen nose for new business. The two-faced mother country was under siege, and the sons and daughters of its distant empire, in an ancient act of fealty, flocked once more to the railway stations, moved by the timbre of the King’s voice.

My great-aunt and -uncle operated a rustic fishing lodge overlooking the bay. It had crocheted counterpanes and worn carpets and lots of ashtrays, and a reputation for being the sort of place where well-heeled guests, sometimes movie stars or the occasional duke or lord, would check in quietly and spend a week out on the water in a clinker-built dinghy. With a woodstove in the kitchen, my great-aunt made bread every day and prepared the meals. Her husband saw to travel arrangements and repairs. My mother, who had an admirable reputation for aggressive play on the tennis court and grass-hockey pitch, often worked as an unpaid chambermaid or by helping my great-aunt in the kitchen. Extra girls were hired during the high season to rush plates, glasses, and silverware in and out of the dining room, and to wash and return them as quickly as possible.

On Labour Day weekend, 1939, the fishing lodge filled up quickly. A few miles north, the annual Maple Bay Regatta was in full swing. The sun was high, the sky clear, sails twisted in the blue sea. As the fish stopped biting, fishermen brought their catch to the kitchen to be served up for their dinner. My great-aunt told me that on that weekend everyone’s ears were glued to the radio.

There was to be a banquet on Saturday night for some of the visiting yacht-club commodores. And as the sun went down, the young people gathered on the veranda with cases of beer. They stayed up all night talking politics, dancing, whispering, and watching the shooting stars. In the dining room, the whisky flowed and the yacht-club commodores traded improbable assertions about troop strength and naval readiness. In my mind I see the young ones on the veranda curled up on couches and asleep on the floor as the sun rises over Salt Spring Island. I can taste the air. A light fog hovers on the surface of the bay. The radio is playing softly. A confident male voice with a slight British accent reports on stiff resistance in Poland, followed by the marine weather forecast and anticipated temperatures in the low seventies.

My great-aunt’s only son swore that night he would never fight in a European war. A few days later he drove into town to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force. His friends went off to work in the cities or mills, or they disappeared, only to show up a few weekends later in ill-fitting battledress. My mother also paid a visit to the recruiting office. She joined the RCAF and within a year was working in an underground war room in London charting the flight paths of incoming German aircraft. She and her colleagues, billeted in a dormitory, were forbidden to walk together and were required to choose a different route each day to the unidentified door that concealed the entrance to their workplace. My mother was certain that one afternoon she was approached by a young man who was a spy. Having been entrusted with sensitive intelligence information during the war, she refused to speak about her experiences and took her secrets to the grave.

After Pearl Harbor, the old and middle-aged men in the Salmon Capital of the World joined the Pacific Coast Militia Rangers and patrolled logging roads, half-hoping to find signs of enemy encroachment. My great-aunt, along with the other women and girls in the family, was prepared for the sight of Japanese commandos landing on the rocky beach below the lodge. One by one the women would submit to being shot by the great-aunt, who would then turn the gun on the dog, and, finally, on herself. When I quizzed her about the gun, she seemed to recall that it was a Thompson submachine gun issued to her husband for the purposes of civil defence.

Like their fathers before them, those who returned from the war after VE Day and VJ Day kept their silence. They did not speak about the anxiety that had lodged in their hearts, and even if a vocabulary had existed at that time with which to speak about what they’d seen and heard, no questions were asked. In 1945, my great-aunt turned fifty. Her beautiful son, my mother’s favourite cousin, lay buried in a British cemetery, the result of an accident during pilot training. She and my great-uncle loaded everything onto a barge and had it towed to Salt Spring Island. There, in a rambling old house on a tidal inlet teeming with butter clams, returning young men and women were given a bed and three meals a day. They earned their keep by fencing and tilling the garden, building sheds and wharves, fixing equipment, splitting and stacking wood. They moved as if among ghosts. Each year families from Penelakut (formerly Kuper Island), who had been harvesting the tidal estuary for centuries, returned to the clam beds, taking shelter in the brand new boathouse. There was a semblance of normalcy to the daily and the seasonal round, but I can’t help thinking that both the clam diggers and the new people in the house moved through each day with a sense of dislocation, and that the air, which was as bright and fragrant as ever, must have felt a little thinner.

A person reading the newspaper in the summer before the war might have been tempted to think, all things considered, that human beings were innately good. After 1945 no one would make that mistake again. I suppose this loss of innocence was a kind of freedom, although freedom is not distributed equally, and if one had wanted to learn a lesson from the war it was that one’s own freedom is always at the expense of another’s. The fishing lodge, where the guests had gathered, on the veranda with a gin and tonic and toasted to God’s country, was torn down and replaced in the 1960s by a shameful brick monstrosity. The only thing the two structures share is the piece of land they were built