Made my deadline. The Haida Gwaii Lesson, draft one, is now in the skilled hands of it's gifted editor Jennifer Sahn, who brought me and the book into Inkshares. Jennifer and I have produced many works together. I write them, she makes them sing. She is one of the few editors I have worked with in my fifty writing career who I ever care to set eyes on again. 

It took me about a year to research and write about the five centuries that colonialism took to destroy a few thousand Indigenous cultures around the world. It should take much less time for those communities to recover what they’ve lost. Many of them are working hard on that. Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul calls it a “comeback.” 

The success of the Haida and other Canadian First Nations’ land claims have inspired aboriginal peoples throughout the Americas and beyond. Hopefully this strategic playbook will soon be in print, in many languages, and will smooth the path to sovereignty and land title for millions of people around the world.

Thank you once again for your support.

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."

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.

Hi,

Still crankin' away. But I thought you might be interested in some insight into how power works for the Haida people, who seem to have found a unique and creative way to organize and express it in their day to day lives. 

Surface power, the power that governments have to deal with, the power that media covers, and lawyers interpret, resides in the Council of the Haida Nation (their federal government). But true power in the Haida Nation is covert. It derives from deep guidance transmitted by spiritual ancestors through small, select committees (one behind each powerful man) of living elder women, described to me by one of them, April Churchill, as "women past their moon.”  Before a chief or other patriarch steps out of the community to broker power, he spends time with his five or six member committee of elder women, who counsel him on how to deal with external powers. This method of power transmission may seem excessively spiritual, even a little "woo-woo" to the modern western mind. But it has some material support. 

A central purpose of all indigenous oral traditions is to keep wisdom alive. In most aboriginal languages there is a word for the people who store and transmit the wisdom of ancestors that was given to them orally by their elders. Wisdom Keepers are selected by their community  to be keepers of wisdom because the people who interact with them every day regard them as wise enough to sort out ancestral advice that still makes sense, still works. Pass that wisdom on as guidance and toss anything that turned out to be bad judgment into the dustbin of history. The selection of Wisdom Keepers differs from community to community. The women-past-their-moon model is not uniquely Haida, but it’s rare.  

 The system seems to work in Haida Gwaii because Haida men in power truly believe that it is only through elder women, women who they’ve known all their life, women past their moon, derided in most cultures as "crones" or woman past their prime, that wisdom that truly works can be objectively selected and accurately transmitted. 

What I describe in the rest of this book attests to the strong possibility that Haida men are right about that. Something is certainly working for the Haida, whose methods and expression of power in Canada and British Columbia is paying big dividends for them. 

I'm beginning to realize why the Haida are so exceptional, and why they are winning their struggle for sovereignty. It's not their carving (which is world famous) or their weaving, or fishing, or forestry, or their art, all of which they excell at. It's their philosophy; and it's so simple.

They know that they come from the sea, so they respect it in ways that few other cultures do. And they know that the land has to be cared for as well as their children if they are to survive. So the essence of their agenda is care of the land and the sea. 

"It's that simple, and our agenda hasn't changed for ten thousand years," a wise matriarch told me yesterday. And it's why they will never surrender title -- "Haida Title" -- to their islands or the sea  around them, where they have thrived for millennia. And it's why they are gradually winning back a homeland lost to the Crown a mere 200 years ago.

Hi. 

This is a pre-departure postcard from edge of the world, setting for The Haida Gwaii Lesson, the Inkshares book you are supporting, and to where I am headed tomorrow. 

I will stay on the islands (there are 158 of them) indefinitely; for as long as it takes to gather what I need from the amazing and exceptional Haida people about their long, determined and successful struggle for land title and sovereignty. 

Their homeland is remote and communications uncertain, so you may not hear from me again until I’m home, probably some time before summer ends, hopefully full of insight and inspiration which I will share with you then.

Thanks again for your support.

Mark Dowie