You’re probably beginning to wonder where your book is. It’s in rewrite. My brilliant editor has asked for some fairly dramatic changes. And since I agree with most of her ideas I making them. I expect to get the manuscript back to her before the end of this month. Hopefully she will love it and send it on to it’s designer, copy editor, proofreader and libel lawyer. I can’t tell you how long they will take, but I’ve always been surprised at how slow they are. So all I can ask you for is the patience of the Haida, who have waited about ten thousand years for someone to tell this part of their amazing story.

                                                                  The Argument

 In the course of petitioning federal and provincial governments for self-determination the Haida have inadvertently created a generic argument for sovereignty and aboriginal title, an argument that should work almost anywhere in the world. It's fairly simple, is addressed to the colonizer and starts with the obvious: 

 • We have lived here for a very long time on land we have always assumed was ours. 

 • We were here long before you “discovered” us and our homeland, which we have never left. 

 • For all this time we have thrived alone, without foreign assistance, on the resources of our land and water. 

 • Despite the fact that we were secure on lands we stewarded, in a culture we developed, with a religion we owned, under laws and life ways of our own making, you assumed when you first observed us, that we were a bunch of ignorant, heathen savages who had no idea how to manage land, forage and cultivate food, harvest medicines, worship our creator, trade with neighbors, conduct our ceremonies, build homes, create art or govern ourselves. And you coveted our land, and the resources on and beneath it.

 • So you conquered and subjugated us, and behind the superior fire power of your weapons, you assumed title over our land and sovereignty over us.

 • You kidnaped and “educated” our children, erased our language, sold our resources to others, extinguished our rights, attempted to convert us to your religion and turned the best of our rituals into crimes. 

 • We eventually asked you to reconsider your actions and the assumptions that informed them. You agreed to do so. 

 • Amicably we negotiated an agreement of understanding, or a governance protocol, a land use co-management plan, or a treaty. And amicably you signed it. 

 • But before the ink was dry you broke it, and returned to confiscating our land and selling our resources to people we had never met. 

 • While we are close to giving up the idea of sharing sovereignty with you, we have decided, one last time, to file a claim in your courts, where … 

 • … we seek only what we believe we deserve — self-determination, sovereignty and Aboriginal title to our land; not to some of it, but to all that we say is ours. 

Some of you have asked me why there aren't any proper names of Haida leaders and heroes in the updates I've been sending. Here is a short passage from my Preface which explains why that is.

       "You will notice as you read along that I have used very few proper names. That will seem strange to many readers, particularly those who enjoy reading about colorful personalities or have read enough Haida history to know that there were definite heroes, bold and sacrificing men and women, in their long battle for freedom and self-determination. But I have minimized using names and profiling heroes because the Haida are a profoundly anti-narcissistic culture, and it’s their story that they want the indigenous world to know, not celebrity biopics and colorful anecdotes about colorful elders, warriors and hereditary chiefs. This does not mean that they’re aren’t creative, selfless, tireless Haida leaders, who have served faithfully in key positions of power. In fact in Haida Gwaii I found some of the most remarkable people I have ever met. 

        But one of the characteristics that stood out for me about Haida leaders, men and women alike, is that they do not strive for fame or name recognition. What they do, they do for their community, not just for themselves, their immediate family or historical recognition. Nor do they take well to having their leaders receive hero status either in the community or in mass media. As one former Haida Council President observes: “Focusing on the individual is not the Haida way.” OK, I’ll tell you his name. It’s Guujaaw, who is an affable, mischievous, humorous and brilliant man, and a talented artist, who inspired and lead many of the decisive Haida battles of the past half century. Forgive me Guujaaw. I won’t do it again. 

        Of course the Haida are acutely aware of what Guujaaw and other leaders have accomplished, and those men and women are held in high esteem on Haida Gwaii. But fame is not their goal, which is, in a word, independence, which they know is something that is never won by one or even a handful of people. It is won by a nation, as the story in this book attests."

Some of you have asked me why there aren't any proper names of Haida leaders and heroes in the updates I've been sending. Here is a short passage from my Preface which explains why that is.

       "You will notice as you read along that I have used very few proper names. That will seem strange to many readers, particularly those who enjoy reading about colorful personalities or have read enough Haida history to know that there were definite heroes, bold and sacrificing men and women, in their long battle for freedom and self-determination. But I have minimized using names and profiling heroes because the Haida are a profoundly anti-narcissistic culture, and it’s their story that they want the indigenous world to know, not celebrity biopics and colorful anecdotes about colorful elders, warriors and hereditary chiefs. This does not mean that they’re aren’t creative, selfless, tireless Haida leaders, who have served faithfully in key positions of power. In fact in Haida Gwaii I found some of the most remarkable people I have ever met. 

        But one of the characteristics that stood out for me about Haida leaders, men and women alike, is that they do not strive for fame or name recognition. What they do, they do for their community, not just for themselves, their immediate family or historical recognition. Nor do they take well to having their leaders receive hero status either in the community or in mass media. As one former Haida Council President observes: “Focusing on the individual is not the Haida way.” OK, I’ll tell you his name. It’s Guujaaw, who is an affable, mischievous, humorous and brilliant man, and a talented artist, who inspired and lead many of the decisive Haida battles of the past half century. Forgive me Guujaaw. I won’t do it again. 

        Of course the Haida are acutely aware of what Guujaaw and other leaders have accomplished, and those men and women are held in high esteem on Haida Gwaii. But fame is not their goal, which is, in a word, independence, which they know is something that is never won by one or even a handful of people. It is won by a nation, as the story in this book attests."

The huge, often violent struggle over land and land rights throughout the world has often come down to a simple one syllable word. Here's a paragraph from The Haida Gwaii Lesson that describes the conflict.

       "It has always been rather difficult for the European colonial mind to understand native peoples’ relationship to land, or grasp the difference between living on and living with the land. In all their struggles, communications and litigations with government and extractive industry, that tiny one-word difference has been the hardest message for the Haida to get across. That is why they felt compelled in 2004 to draft and issue a Land Use Vision, which is merely a statement of their land values and a description of a land tenure system they believe will work for them and the government. For them living with the land is not only right living, it is in the end the only way to survive. Living on the land is seeing it as a platform, a substrate upon which life and economics proceed without much concern about what’s underfoot. Living with land is the aboriginal way. And individual ownership of it is to most aboriginal communities of the world a mistake. In the aboriginal worldview land does not belong to people, people belong to the land."   

 For full text of the Haida Land Use Vision go to :

 http://www.haidanation.ca/Pages/documents/pdfs/land/HLUV.lo_rez.pdf 

A nice lady walked up to me last week and said: "Our book club is reading your book." "Which one? "  I asked (I've written seven). "The one you're writing," she said. So this update is for her and her club.

Many of you still refer to Haida Gwaii as "The Queen Charlotte Islands" or "The Charlottes." You really have to stop doing that. This short paragraph from the last chapter explains why.

        On June 17, 2010 the Haida invited the Premier of British Columbia to visit their islands for a sacred ceremony. He agreed to come and arrived to find a large gathering of the most powerful and respected members of the Haida Nation, all dressed in full ceremonial garb. They had invited him there, they said, to give him something … well to give something back. It was the name “Queen Charlotte Islands” which a British colony had bestowed upon the islands 150 years ago. The name for the entire archipelago would once again be “Haida Gwaii.” And the Haida wanted the Premier to know that they were not renaming the islands or “taking back a name. We’ve always known this place to be Haida Gwaii. We’re giving you back a name given to us by the Crown.” Before the Premier could express his gratitude the President of the Haida Nation added this: “What we are really doing here is unwinding colonialism.”

When you signed up to support this project one of you told me that the Haida were slavers. I knew that North and South American tribes frequently enslaved each other, but I wasn't sure abut the Haida. Here's what I learned.

This will be a sidebar in the book:

                                                               HAIDA SLAVERY 

 There are dozens of conflicting accounts and descriptions of slavery on Haida Gwaii, about the ways slaves were taken, traded, bought, sold and treated. Here, based on multiple common accounts, is what seems certain: The Haida had slaves. Truth is many north and south American tribes enslaved each other, and Africans, and in at least one well documented case, The Haida’s, they enslaved white people. 

 At one point up to thirty percent of he Haida population may have been slaves. Most Haida slaves were the defeated warriors of other First Nations that had the temerity to attack Haida Gwaii. With their prisoners of war the Haida had three choices. 

1. Kill them? Too harsh. 

2. Send them home? Really …. to be rearmed and sent back for another assault? Dumb idea. 

3. Enslave them humanely, for a probationary period, try to rehabilitate them. Then either release them or invite them to stay on. 

 Option three appears to have won. So prisoners of war were definitely one source of slaves for the Haida. But there are also accounts of Haida going on lightening raids to kidnap or capture slaves from neighboring tribes. And what seems certain is that the Haida may have been the first, and possibly the only non-white civilization in history to enslave white people. The whites were mostly British soldiers who either committed crimes while on leave, or worse made eyes at a Haida woman. That could get your ship burned to waterline with all your fellow sailors taken prisoner. Among the Haida’s white slaves were also gold miners, thieves and whiskey traders. 

 Haida slaves were a commodity, traded frequently for other commodities and occasionally used to pay debts and buy wives. Slaves were allowed to marry, even to a Haida woman if she’d have him. But the children of slaves were enslaved. Slaves did menial work and paddled war canoes. 

 Where the legend gets dicey is in conflicting accounts of how the Haida treated their slaves. Rumors range from generous to brutal, from kindly to vicious. There’s an oral history of a white slave remarking that he’d been well treated and never had a better meal than he’d had while enslaved by the Haida. But there are also possibly apocryphal tales of Haida sacrificing slaves as an offering to visiting dignitaries, and refusing the bury them on the islands when they died, instead simply throwing their corpses into the sea. 

 What most historians seem to agree with is that the Haida kept their slaves for a limited period, ranging in accounts from seven to ten years, at which point they were with either released or invited to stay in Haida Gwaii as second class citizens. Some even married into the tribe, although until quite recently the Haida seemed to remember who was and who was not descended from slavery. And for some reason former slaves and their descendants all seemed to have settled in one community.