Wordy Wednesday: Freedom

Freedom is a word that everyone knows. But advocates of freedom, while often striving for equivalent human goals, have expressed their commitment in many ways. In the last few days, I've read about two famous freedom fighters: Mahatma Gandhi and Harriet Tubman. I feel that by familiarizing myself with these two famous people from such very different backgrounds, I might better understand the richness of the idea of freedom. In this context, I've also been thinking of the famous "Four Freedoms" defined by President Roosevelt in 1941.

Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman was the best-known "conductor" on the Underground Railroad in the decade before the Civil War. She rescued several hundred slaves and escorted them to freedom in sympathetic northern states and Canada. During war, she continued by working with the Union Army to rescue hundreds more slaves that were being held by Confederate troops. Born into slavery, she escaped but returned to the South many times to rescue others.

To learn about her, I read the book Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom by Catherine Clinton (published 2004). Because Tubman's work by definition was highly secretive, and because little documentation of the birth and parentage of slaves was recorded, the book presents the scant details known about her life in the context of the fight against slavery in the 19th century. Some quotes from the book:

The states north of the Mason-Dixon Line that had passed emancipation statutes were revered as a kind of Canaan— a place where blacks could work and worship, marry and raise children, freely pursuing life and liberties. Once they crossed over, fugitives would be unfettered by bondage. Most southern bondspeople had little or no contact with this free northern black world, but idealized what might await them once they fled. (Kindle Locations 713-716).

Tubman’s growing realization that all people of color— slave, fugitive, or free, in both North and South— were imperiled by the very existence of racial bondage made 1850 a critical turning point in her life, as her own personal journey to freedom expanded to include the aspirations of all slaves. (Kindle Locations 1079-1081).

When she spoke out against slavery, she was not attacking it in the abstract but had personally known its evils. She risked the horror of reenslavement with every trip, repeatedly defying the slave power with her rescues and abductions. These risks elevated the significance of her contributions to the UGRR [Underground Railroad] movement. (Kindle Locations 1313-1315).

Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi, from the New Yorker article.

Gandhi, of course, was the leader of the struggle to free India from British colonial rule. His method, non-violence, has been adopted by many subsequent freedom fighters. A current New Yorker article titled "Gandhi for the Post-Truth Age" by Pankaj Mishra explored the ways that Gandhi is relevant to our time. Two quotes:

People in the West, Gandhi argued, merely “imagine they have a voice in their own government”; instead, they were “being exploited by the ruling class or caste under the sacred name of democracy.” Moreover, a regime in which “the weakest go to the wall” and a “few capitalist owners” thrive “cannot be sustained except by violence, veiled if not open.” This is why, Gandhi predicted, even “the states that are today nominally democratic” are likely to “become frankly totalitarian.”

And this:

Satyagraha, literally translated as “holding fast to truth,” obliged protesters to “always keep an open mind and be ever ready to find that what we believed to be truth was, after all, untruth.” Gandhi recognized early on that societies with diverse populations inhabit a post-truth age. “We will never all think alike and we shall always see truth in fragments and from different angles of vision,” he wrote. And even Gandhi’s harshest detractors do not deny that he steadfastly defended, and eventually sacrificed his life for, many values under assault today—fellow-feeling for the weak, and solidarity and sympathy between people of different nations, religions, and races. 

Franklin D. Roosevelt 

In 1941, Roosevelt gave a speech in which he defined four freedoms relevant to the United States and the world, then threatened by German aggression.

Norman Rockwell's famous depiction of the Four Freedoms motivated the War Bond campaign in World War II. (Wikipedia)

Today, in 2018, these freedoms again are seriously threatened for at least some people who live in America, so I would like to leave you with the thought that one possible thing we can do to protect them is to vote next month!

Too preachy for me: Kingsolver's "Unsheltered"

Two complicated families, one living in 2016, one in 1874; both live in the same town, same address. They suffer from the same problems, including that in both cases, their houses are falling down and they don't have the money to rebuild them safely. Why no money? Because the man of the household in both cases is trying to make a living as an academic/teacher, and the pay is terrible. The danger of being without a roof over one's head -- that is, unsheltered -- becomes a metaphor for their problems: personal, political, social, and global. This is the fundamental theme of Barbara Kingsolver's new novel Unsheltered.

In both eras covered in the book, the majority of the population is refusing to acknowledge that times are changing. In the 19th century, bombastic demagogues attack the new intellectual currents, especially Darwinism. In the 20th century, the planet is due for self-destruction, and a bombastic demagogue is about to win the Presidential election.

The characters in the book discuss every aspect of the issues at great length. Too great. Each character stands for one aspect of the global problems with demagogues, resources, and the relationship between men and women and their place in society. It's Barbara Kingsolver, so these characters are totally believable, but the entire novel to me just comes across as preachy and too pat.

I'll describe just one character to try to illustrate how each character takes on a more or less allegorical significance, and talks about it all the time. Antigone, nickname Tig, is essentially the key to quite a bit of the philosophy that's constantly discussed. She's in her late 20s, but living with her mother Willa (laid-off journalist), father Iano (professor who lost tenure when a university failed and in his fifties, is back on the academic nomad track), grandfather Nick (retired laborer who hates Obama and immigrants despite having been one, and is an offensive racist and Trump supporter in the election that's going on), and nephew Dusty (infant son of Tig's brother who has more or less abandoned his child).

Tig and her family live in their inherited falling down house on the site that over a century earlier belonged to another threatened teacher named Thatcher, who had another falling down house. Thatcher was a follower of Darwin, and engaged in public debates of Darwinism that sound pretty much like "Inherit the Wind." Tig's journalist mother is researching Thatcher and his next-door neighbor named Mary Treat; she was a highly accomplished amateur observational biologist who corresponded with Darwin, Asa Grey, and other famous people. As it happens, Mary Treat and a few other townspeople are real historical figures among all the fictional people in the novel.

Tig had spent several years in Cuba and is now having a closer and closer relationship with her Puerto Rican boyfriend Jorge. He's a paragon of humanity who lives next door: same location as Mary Treat once lived. Tig alone of her family recognizes the paradoxes of too much consumption. She can see that the resources of the planet are limited, and humanity is about to experience a dramatic disaster. She tries to encourage responsibility,  re-use of everything, more self-sufficiency, and restraint in her life and in the lives of her parents. She's highly critical of the thinking that brought every one, including her parents to this point of no return when the planet will face hunger and want and so on. But she's much more understanding than her parents when it comes to her grandfather's rants about the people and politicians he hates and even when he attacks Jorge and his family because he hates immigrants and Hispanics.

Some might call this a novel of ideas, where almost every conversation, no matter how it starts, quickly gets to be about these big BIG issues: how to save the planet or why the tenure system is so terrible or how there's so much inequality. It just didn't work for me. I found especially the very long public debates of the 19th century characters to be irritating and somewhat trite, and the conversations of the present-day characters to be pretty predictable like the news analysis and commentary that I read every day.

But this is Barbara Kingsolver. I expect more from her -- I was hoping for a book as good as The Poisonwood Bible (published 1998) or The Lacuna (published 2009). There are flashes, but not enough. An example of the good: when Tig and Jorge cook dinner from almost nothing in the house while he tells about his family and their history, and they discuss the problems of Nick, who is in very bad shape. First Jorge, in what seems to be an empty larder, finds sugar and a bag of cornmeal.

"He adjusted the burner expertly, as if any normal household might have a twenty-year-old camp stove seated atop a defunct kitchen range. Willa didn't mind him taking over the situation....  

"She watched him stir salt, sugar, and butter into the water as it came to a boil. ... 

"'Mmm sorrullos,' Tig said happily. She tied an apron around Jorge's middle to keep his shirttail out of the fire and then stood next to him watching the saucepan boil, leaning on him slightly like a friendly dog. Willa executed her assignment, grating a pile of yellow cheese onto a blue plate. ...  

"Jorge ... was stirring cornmeal into the boiling water in a meditative way, thickening it into a yellow batter... Jorge took Willa's plate of cheese and stirred it into his batter.

"Jorge rubbed oil into his hands and began rolling the steaming batter between his palms into fat little cigars." (pp. 358-361)

Meanwhile while engaging in the continuing conversation, Tig slices and fries some plantains, and then Jorge fries his cornmeal cigars and refries the plantains, serving them to the hungry family. They bite into the plate of golden corn fritters. We the readers appreciate how this meal was made of the most basic and inexpensive and environmentally wonderful ingredients.

Yes, it's vivid. But too preachy, I think.

Some reviewers were more positive than I am. The New York Times review was highly positive. The review by Ron Charles in the Washington Post is maybe a little less enthusiastic; it's titled: "In Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Unsheltered,’ Trump is just the latest threat to Earth’s survival." This review says that Unsheltered is "the first major novel to tackle the Trump era straight on and place it in the larger chronicle of existential threats" and refers to it as "a collage of Democratic talking points acted out in the lives of a middle-class family slipping down the ladder of success." He liked it on the whole better than I did, especially the historic chapters, though I think agreed with me that it's a bit preachy.

The NPR reviewer, Ilana Masad, was more positive yet in her review, "Barbara Kingsolver Captures The Feeling Of Being 'Unsheltered.'" She summarizes her reaction thus: "Kingsolver doesn't give us solutions, but she reminds us to take comfort in one another when we can, and that hope is necessary even when all seems lost."

Well, I'm not so sure of this. My final reaction: disappointment.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki

Having just read and enjoyed Haruki Murakami's latest novel, Killing Commendatore, I decided to reread Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his years of Pilgrimage (published in English in 2014). While superficial similarities between events and characters in the two books are numerous, I feel as if it's a totally different type of book.

Reading it just after Killing Commendatore makes me realize that the magical realism in most of Murakami's books is what makes me so enthusiastic about them. Magical realism is absolutely not a part of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki. Rather, it's a totally realistic novel about a man who lacks something... who seems to be waiting for life to happen to him... to seem unable to seize the moment when something might happen to him. (Reminds me a little of Henry James, but that's not important now.)

I've noted how wonderful many details are in Murakami's books, especially food details (though I'm just more aware of food details). Tsukuru's diet is mostly plain:

"When he felt hungry he stopped by the local supermarket and bought an apple or some vegetables. Sometimes he ate plain bread, washing it down with milk straight from the carton. When it was time to sleep, he’d gulp down a glass of whiskey as if it were a dose of medicine." (p. 3). 

It's often someone else, like his girlfriend Sarah, who eats the good-sounding food while he watches.

"The waiter brought over the lemon soufflé and espresso. Sara dug right in. Lemon soufflé seemed to have been the right choice after all. Tsukuru looked back and forth between Sara, as she ate, and the steam that rose from her espresso." (pp. 233-234). 

At the very end of the book, he finally prepares a whole meal, which I think is a faint signal that he's becoming more than colorless:

"He grilled salmon with herbs in the oven, drizzled lemon over it, and ate it with potato salad. Tofu and scallion miso soup rounded out the meal. He had half a cold beer and watched the news on TV. Then he lay down on the sofa and read." (p. 345)

Every character in the novel seems to have some color word in their names, beginning with Tsukuru's four best friends in high school. At one point, there's a conversation in which a character is noted as especially vivid (this is in a story told by a friend of Tsukuru, not about anyone he actually knows) -- has a "certain glow." And the meaning of this vividness is that the character is suited to choose an early and certain death -- though he doesn't choose it. That's complicated, but I think it points to how colorless Tsukuru is. (p. 92-94)

In this section, there's another clue in a conversation between these people in the story his friend tells:

“Every person has their own color. Did you know that?” he [the character in the story] said. 

“No, I didn’t.” 

“Each individual has their own unique color, which shines faintly around the contours of their body. Like a halo. Or a backlight. I’m able to see those colors clearly.” (p. 93). 

I keep looking for clues about what the real subject of this book might be. The title of the book comes from Franz Liszt’s Years of Pilgrimage Suite -- Tsukuru is somewhat obsessed with one vignette from the suite, called "Le mal du pays," which could be translated homesickness, or maybe nostalgia or longing, and it's this feeling that most characterizes him. It's a kind of colorless feeling, which doesn't inspire him to much in the way of action, or lend him any vividness. It's not a bad novel, but maybe Murakami just succeeded too well in making a colorless character.

Duck Dinner

We were curious: could you make duck on the grill? Grilling season is just about over here, as the weather is getting quite
cold, so we tried it tonight, using a recipe for duck with cherries from Meathead: The Science of Great Barbecue and Grilling.

We had a few Halloween decorations on the table.

We invited our friends Alice and Byron.

Duck with cherries, steamed broccoli, and bread & butter.

We cooked a whole duck, which we had cut into serving pieces and partially boned. (The recipe actually is for just the duck breasts.)
Before grilling, you dry-rub the meat with salt & spices, score it, and sear it in a frying pan.

Len also made bread to eat with dinner.

From the neck and the trimmings, along with some vegetables, I made
duck stock, which was an ingredient for the sauce.

The cooking procedure for the duck could be simple, if you purchased already boned duck breasts and used reconstituted chicken stock as the recipe suggests. But we enjoyed cutting up the duck and using the bones and trimmings for stock: now there's lots of stock in the fridge for a nice cold-weather soup. The sauce ingredients -- dried cherries, stock, shallots, balsamic vinegar, and ruby port -- created a delicious sweet-sour contrast to the rich duck meat with a subtle smoky flavor from the grill.

I still like Haruki Murakami: Killing Commendatore

Killing Commendatore, the latest novel by Haruki Murakami, was published last week. Despite many similarities to Murakami's earlier novels, the plot and characters surprised me as compelling and fascinating.

The narrator (whose name we do not learn) is an ordinary man to whom out-of-the-ordinary things happen. Elements of magical realism are strong here: there are events that the reader is expected to believe in the course of the novel, but which are impossible in the world that the rest of us inhabit. The narrator presents them in a completely matter-of-fact way: they happened. Slowly the narrative moves from realistic description to magical and uncanny.  The mysterious parts of the novel are deeply connected to the Japanese experience of World War II, but I don't feel that it's an allegory. It just happens.

Matter-of-fact details are the core of what I like in this and other Murakami novels. His powers of observation are amazing, and when he tells you what he sees (or his narrator sees) you can grasp that it's something that has always stood before you but you never quite saw it before. Or heard, smelled, tasted, felt, or feared it.

The principal identity of the narrator is that he's a portrait painter. He describes with amazing clarity how he evaluates a subject for a portrait, sketches a likeness, prepares his canvas for a portrait, and how he completes the work. We also share the narrator's discoveries about the life and artistic accomplishments of the famous painter who owns the house where the narrator is living: a kind of a reverie on the differences between Japanese and Western painting.

The narrator hears and describes the sensations he gets when listening to grand opera (such as Mozart's Don Giovanni, in which the Commendatore is a character) or to jazz recorded on LPs and played on an old stereo system. He notices the different sounds that car doors make when the driver closes them -- sounds from a Jaguar, an old Peugeot, and others. He's intrigued by a mysterious rustling in an attic that turns out to be a horned owl making its way in and out of a broken vent.

Though the narrator says he doesn't care much about food, he describes it often (though not in as much detail as in other Murakami books). He notes, for instance, that his estranged wife's name, Yuzu, is the same as the name of the citrus fruit. When he's bothered, we learn how he absent-mindedly, of necessity, eats things like Ritz crackers with catsup or vegetables with mayo. If he's less bothered, he shops and cooks:

"When it began to get dark, I went to the kitchen, cracked open a can of beer, and began preparing dinner. In the oven, I broiled a piece of yellowtail that I'd marinated in sake lees, then sliced pickles, made a cucumber-and-seaweed salad with vinegar, and fixed some miso soup with radishes and deep-fried tofu. Then I sat down and ate my silent meal." (pp. 364-365) 

Although the narrator can remember what he ate at various places, he says he has no ability to recall the flavors of his food -- he's a painter, he says, so he can only recollect exactly what something looked like. In the course of the novel we see many examples of this memory and how it serves his portrait painting. (p. 292)

Sometimes the narrator notes pleasant aromas or putrid smells, but often, he remarks on the absence of smells. Certain locations strike him as creepy because they have no smell. Another of his sensations is a vivid claustrophobia, associated with the long-ago death of his little sister and his unending grief for her. He notes the details of clothing that characterize a man or a woman, and describes their facial features, beauty or lack of beauty, and body types (though I have trouble creating my own mental image from these descriptions). He explains what it's like to look through powerful binoculars. He evokes the strong visual element of Japanese landscapes: the mountains, the sea coast, the deep forest.

Several times, the reader is told of the significance of the Japanese characters with which people's names are written -- this may be more meaningful to one who knows Japanese. One example:

"My name is Menshiki," says an important character when introducing himself to the narrator. "The men is written with the character in menzeiten -- the one that means 'avoidance' -- and the shiki is the character iro, for 'color.' ... 'Avoiding colors' is what it means. ... An unusual name. Other than my relatives I rarely run across anyone who shares it." (p. 80)

Is there a possible connection to Murakami's 2014 novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage? I'm not sure about this and many other parallels to his earlier novels. I wonder, in fact, what it all means. Details. Details!

What Other People Say about Killing Commendatore

Up to this point, I have presented my very subjective description of how I reacted to descriptions and characters in Killing Commendatore. I wrote the above account without having read a single review of the novel. Now for some quotes that I found after what I've written so far:

In the Guardian: "Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami review – a rambling voyage of discovery" reviewer Xan Brooks writes --

"Who are the spirits? Who are the real people? The hero’s married lover amounts to little more than a dispenser of expository dialogue and sexual favours (indirectly responsible for the book being classed as “class two indecent” in Hong Kong). Worse, the gnomic, fantastical Commendatore turns out to be a more rounded character than Menshiki’s reputed daughter, a preternaturally self-possessed 13-year-old who speaks as though she’s been fed through Google Translate. Significantly, Murakami’s painter likes to leave some of his portraits unfinished. One has the sense that the author does, too. 

"Paradoxically, it’s this incompleteness that this beguiling, confounding – and yes, sometimes infuriating – novel is concerned with: the sense that everybody is unfinished, a work in progress, and that any clear-cut resolution is therefore a lie. Murakami’s mountainside setting is full of wormholes and blind spots, arrivals and exits. His plot, such as it is, unfolds as the narrator experiences it, which means that it’s thick with loose ends and cul‑de-sacs. His character is casting about for the correct way forward. He’s attempting to script a fresh adventure that will give his battered life meaning and distract him from his divorce, so his story sets forth as a tale of creative rebirth. Then it switches lanes to become a study of male friendship; then a haunted house story; then a father-daughter mystery yarn. Each route is valid but it can only take him so far. 'In this real world of ours,' he explains, 'nothing remains the same for ever.'"

Hari Kunzru at the New York Times wrote a review titled "In Haruki Murakami’s New Novel, a Painter’s Inspiration Is Supernatural." He points to some of the influences and parallels to other Japanese culture:

"The 18th-century ghost stories of Ueda Akinari (most familiar outside Japan through Mizoguchi’s 1953 film “Ugetsu”) and the demonological compendiums of Toriyama Sekien hover in the background of “Killing Commendatore,” as they do in so much contemporary Japanese horror and fantasy, notably the anime of Hayao Miyazaki (“Spirited Away,” “My Neighbor Totoro”). Though “Killing Commendatore” does not address authenticity in specifically national-cultural terms, the novel is preoccupied with the possibility of making art infused with depth or spirit. The mechanical painter of commissioned portraits comes under the influence of the man whose house he’s living in, and is moved to make works with real expressive power. 'What I’d created was, at heart, a painting I’d done for my own sake.'"

"Haruki Murakami turns his gaze toward middle age" is the title of the review by Charles Finch in the Washington Post. Finch writes of the book's "exhilarating portrayal of how it feels to make art. In long, powerful passages, Murakami describes painting with the intensity of what seems like just-concealed autobiography." The reviewer connects connects this to the way that "only in the calm madness of his magical realism can Murakami truly capture one of his obsessions, the usually ineffable yearning that drives a person to make art."

Wordless Wednesday: Whale Museum, Friday Harbor, Washington

Murals and Public Art in Alert Bay

As we walked from the dock where the Sea Bird was moored to the U’mista Cultural Centre and then to the "Big House" for a dance performance, we enjoyed a wide variety of outdoor artwork in the small town of Alert Bay, B.C. We saw totem poles, wall paintings on the sides of houses and shops, wood carvings, and other decorations, including murals that were more like graffiti in modern cities than like tribal art.

The "Big House" where over 1000 people can watch ceremonies such as 21st century potlatches. We were here for
a dance performance presented to the Sea Bird passengers and a group of school children. (Blogged HERE). A few days
after our visit. the Big House was to host a very large potlatch for tribal residents of the entire area.

What did North Coast American Indians Eat?

Salmon and fry bread -- two Native American foods served after a dance performance we watched last week in Alert Bay, B.C.
Accompanying them, our hosts from the community offered us jam made from several different fruits, as well as maple syrup.

After we attended a dance performance with refreshments at the "Big House," or Indian meeting place in Alert Bay, I thought about the foods of the British Columbia First Peoples would have eaten before European contact. Salmon, which is widely available in the seas, streams, and rivers of the area, was the most important source of nutrition for the area in the past, and was eaten fresh or was dried and traded with people who lived further from water.

In contrast to salmon, fry bread -- popular with Indian tribes throughout the US as well as here -- is made entirely from introduced European foods: wheat flour, baking powder, and fat, usually lard. The jams, which were very delicious, could be made from local native berries, but the sugar in the jam is not native. Northwest coast maple trees do produce sweet sap, which I believe the Indians used traditionally -- though I don't know whether their product was boiled down as much as modern Canadian maple syrup.

Museum reconstruction of early First Nations kitchen.

The fascinating First Nations galleries in the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria also left me curious about the hunting and gathering activities of the peoples in the area we visited. Clearly, the riches of the region were bountiful, and the people made good use of them. Though they lived in villages, they were able to live by fishing, hunting, and gathering forest products, not needing agriculture. The only domestic animals that I know of were dogs -- very interesting dogs with wooly hair useful for weaving; now extinct. Their houses, wood-carvings, totem poles, fishing gear, woven blankets, and other material goods were extremely effectively designed and manufactured. They traded with other local tribes as well as engaging in very long-distance trade with native people elsewhere in North America.

Map of our route on the Sea Bird from Seattle to Alert Bay.

The Kwakwaka'wakw, whose village we visited in Alert Bay are one of the tribes of the Salish Sea region, which spans both the US state of Washington and the Canadian province of British Columbia.

Before the Europeans, the Indian inhabitants of the region lived in villages both on the coast and in the interior. They spoke a number of different languages, but were deeply connected by trade and inter-tribal relationships, including a lingua-franca with a few hundred words all could understand. Goods were transported in large canoes made from the very tall cedar trees of the region. I was particularly fascinated to learn of the many ways the First Nations invented for taking fish. For a very complete study of this subject, see "Traditional Animal Foods of Indigenous Peoples of Northern North America," a very complete site with many links from McGill University. 

Fishing and Hunting for Whales

"Little Ike (Yurok) fishes for salmon with a plunge net at pame-kya'-ra-m,
Klamath River, California, before 1898." (source)

"Yelm Jim’s fish weir on the Puyallup River ca. 1885." (source)

Salmon fishing was one of the most important endeavors of the native people, yielding large catches that could be used immediately or preserved and traded. The people fished from shore with nets and spears, they fished from canoes in open water, and they built fish traps the width of entire streams to take the salmon during their late-winter and spring runs upstream to spawn. In the museum in Victoria we saw quite a few examples of the way the traps and nets were constructed from wood and various types of fiber.

A smaller type of fish, the eulachon, also migrates up the streams and rivers to spawn, and was a very valuable source of oil for the Indians, who still enjoy using it. A eulachon fish could be dried so that its oil was preserved, and then used as a candle -- hence its other name, the candlefish. Eulachon oil was a very important trade item. These smaller fish were caught in woven baskets. The Indians also used nets to fish from boats in the open sea, and fished with hooks and with spears. They took halibut, smelt, shell fish, and seaweed.

Cooking the fish might be done over an open fire, but the Indians also made water-proof cooking boxes from cedar and other wood. A rock heated to a high temperature in a fire could be lifted into a box with water, fish, and vegetables to be cooked. Elaborately carved boxes were used for many other purposes as well.

Modern Lummi Indians using traditional reef nets for fishing, 2013. (source)

Indians from northern California through the Canadian Provinces and up to Alaska today all fish for salmon. Some have returned to using traditional nets suspended from two canoes (see image) as well as fish traps.

Unfortunately salmon of all sorts are threatened by a number of different environmental hazards. Over a century of dam-building and other construction in and near the streams where salmon spawn have vastly reduced the number of fish, as has commercial fishing both in the streams and at sea.

Another major source of damage, especially of disease, is the salmon farms that have been built in the last 25 years. The salmon farms and many other dangers to the salmon also severely affect the population of orcas that live permanently in the region, because the local pods of orcas depend on eating salmon almost exclusively, especially chinook salmon. Weighing up to 16,000 pounds, the orcas need to eat a whole lot of salmon! (Transient orcas feed mainly on smaller marine mammals, so they are less dependent on salmon.)

The opinion of the people of Alert Bay of the salmon farms in their waters.

Whales and seals were another source of food and oil to the native people. Remarkably, whale hunters in canoes were able to spear these huge beasts. In the museum in Victoria, we saw some photos of native hunters and learned that the man who speared the whale was rewarded with the most desirable part: the heart. Beached whales were also used for food and as a source of bone for carving and tools, as were bones of other marine mammals.

Onboard the Sea Bird, we enjoyed several lectures by the Cultural Specialist Owen B Walker.
For his lecture on the First Nations and their fishing methods, he wore a traditional hat including ermine fur.

Alert Bay and the U’mista Cultural Centre

Alert Bay, a small town in British Columbia, is a cultural and social center for the Kwakwaka’wakw tribe of Canadian First People. About half the 1500 inhabitants of Alert Bay belong to the tribe. Our visit there last week was fascinating and highly informative. We began by walking along the shore from the dock to the U’mista Cultural Centre, a museum where we learned some of the history of the people and saw a magnificent collection of masks, rattles, and other ritual objects that were taken from the Kwakwaka’wakw in 1921 and recently returned.

The historic masks from  the museum collection are off-limits to photography.
The photo above shows some newly acquired art works.

Besides the remarkable collection of masks, the museum has wonderful textiles.

Screen shot of the Virtual Tour of the historic masks of the Kwakwaka'wakw, which are not allowed for museum goers' photos. To see this remarkable collection on the Cultural Center website, click HERE.

Also lost and recently found: this Chilkat blanket, made by a Tlingit noblewoman
named Anisalaga in the 1880s. The blanket disappeared after Anisalaga's death,
and was found and returned to the museum in 2014. I enjoyed looking at it.
Photo source: "Lost for generations, a blanket returns home."

From the website of the cultural center:

"The Kwakwaka'wakw (pronounced: KWOK-wok-ya-wokw) of British Columbia have built a rich culture that reflects and acknowledges the riches in our natural environment. Our songs, stories, dances, and ceremonial objects honor the animals, rivers, cedar trees, salmon, and all those things that help to sustain the Kwakwaka'wakw physically and spiritually. Since a time beyond memory, the Kwakwaka'wakw have been hosting potlatch ceremonies and potlatching continues to play a central and unifying role in community life today." (source)

The "Big House" where over 1000 people can watch ceremonies such as 21st century potlatches. 

After the museum, we came to the Big House for a dance performance presented to the Sea Bird passengers and a group of school children. A few days after our visit the Big House was to host a very large potlatch for tribal residents of the entire area. Below are my photos of the dance performance inside the Big House:

After the dancing, the hosts served us roast salmon and fry bread with delicious
jams and maple syrup. Most interesting food of the trip. The tribe is currently
fighting against salmon farms and the damage they do, so we definitely
were eating wild-caught salmon!

A Bit of Historic Background

The major cultural and economic institution of the Kwakwaka'wakw, who lived in Alert Bay and surrounding territory, was the potlatch. Before European contact, a potlatch reinforced tribal social structure, involving gift-giving, recognition of the status of chiefs and tribe members, and celebrations of life-cycle events. Although the Indians lived in villages, they did not practice agriculture, but relied on the rich resources of the seas and rivers (especially salmon and shellfish) and of the forests (especially cedar trees and forest game). The potlatch offered a method for exchanging goods -- food, weavings, and many other products -- between tribes, as well as a way for each chief to assert his rights over these resources.

After the arrival of Europeans at the end of the 18th century, the Indian population declined drastically as a result of introduced diseases and contemptuous exercises of power by the British-colonial authorities. Throughout the 19th century, potlatch ceremonies evolved, with more and more ostentatious gift giving, as well as outright destruction of goods. In 1885, at the urging of British settlers, the potlatch was outlawed, though it continued in some form for a number of years.

In 1921, after a Christmas potlatch that was considered illegal, the abusive officials confiscated -- or more accurately, they stole -- the Kwakwaka'wakw's cultural treasures from the Alert Bay Indian population. These 600 or so ritual items were first displayed in a local Anglican Church, an insult to the objects' tribal religious significance and to the tribal practice of keeping them hidden except when in ceremonial use. Subsequently, the officer in charge of Indian Affairs and the police chief sold the collection for their own profit.

Eventually, these sacred objects were dispersed to to museums and collectors in Canada and around the world. Exceptionally, in the late 20th century, legal action and moral pressure succeeded in having a substantial number of items returned to Alert Bay from major museums in Canada and the US and from some collectors. The Cultural Center was built in the 1980s to house and preserve this collection. Today, several hundred items can be viewed here.

Potlatch ceremonies resumed when the ban was lifted in 1951, and continue at present. The Kwakwaka'wakw have restored the potlatch's ancient significance as a way to reinforce tribal social and economic relationships, though the museum's items are not used in the rituals. However, many tribe members believe that these items should be returned to the original families rather than possessed collectively by the museum.

The potlatch both now and historically is a complex and frequently discussed subject, studied and documented by generations of scholars. "The events, particularly at their most extreme in the 19th century, became a staple of anthropology textbooks (which referred to the Indians as the Kwakiutl) and helped inspire Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption." (Quote from: "Tips From the Potlatch, Where Giving Knows No Slump." Other sources: "The History of the Potlatch Collection," "Arson imperils the cultural heart of Alert Bay," "The Potlatch Ban," "Nortwest Coastal People," and the "Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest.")

One mask on display in the museum has a particularly interesting history. French writer André Breton (1896-1966) purchased it in 1964. After his death his extensive collections of tribal art were being sold, and the presence of this mask came to the attention of the people of Alert Bay from whom it had been stolen. "In 2003, his daughter, Aube Elléouët-Breton, travelled to Alert Bay to return the headdress - and make a $40,000 donation. She was greeted with a joyous celebration at the Big House." (source).

This mask, now in the collection of the U’mista Cultural Centre, was once owned by French surrealist
André Breton. Photo source: "Surrealism: Aboriginal Artwork's Long Journey Home" by Kevin Griffin.

The mask appears in this photo of Breton's study from 1968. It stands in the center, on a Northwest Coast Indian bentwood box.
I have always been fascinated by the surrealists and their interest in tribal art, and this new information is wonderful to me. (Photo source: Link)