Chapter 30

We get to the Royal BC Museum, and I am surprised at how inexpensive it is. I remember my mother always saying how she always came here as a child, and it was free. It is a shame that the government gives it less and less support as time goes on. It is one of the biggest and best museums I have ever seen and has a little bit of everything. The really sad thing is it isn’t big enough. The majority of the artifacts are stored in a vault, under the museum, because there is no place to display them. Over the years, because the vault doesn’t have a good enough HVAC system, the artifacts slowly decay.

As usual, we start with the permanent exhibits. They are the smaller exhibits that make up the top floor and outskirts. These displays are changed at most every six months and then only minorly.

No matter how small a group you bring to a museum like this, everybody wants to spend different lengths of time on each exhibit, so you split into smaller groups. I notice that Kim isn’t all that attentive to the displays, but is always off with one of her sisters and never with me.

As usual, it is Carol that is most attentive to me. Dahlia is a close second, but she occasionally takes off with Kim and Moira or just Kim. Every now and then, Moira joins me.

In my first life, spending so much time alone, I became a bit of a history buff. With most of the displays, I have a bit more to add than what is written on the plaque, so I keep whoever is with me entertained. I even have a few tourists listening in.

The largest portion of the ground floor is the temporary display. It is the largest section of the museum, and today it has a natural history of the local fish displayed. It isn’t something I know a lot about, but Carol and I are rather interested in it. Unfortunately, we are running out of time, and the rest of the girls want to see the last display.

To my great disappointment, the only way out of the temporary display area is to either go through a fire door and set off the alarm or go through the native exhibit.

I don’t hide my disdain very well. Moira asks, “What is wrong?”

“Follow me.”

I take the girls back to the beginning of the exhibit, where there is a sign saying this is an exhibit of ALL the natives that lived in BC. I then show them the map on the wall that shows where each nation is from.

“Note the sign and look at the map.”

Only the natives represented in the museum are labelled on the map. Starting from the top of the map, I start naming native nations and pointing out their old territories. The north is the relatively uninhabited region. After listing a dozen nations, I’m only a little more than halfway down the eastern half of the map. The girls get my point.

“It isn’t just that they pretend the vast majority of the natives never existed. They portray a lie. Yes, the artifacts are real, but they portray the natives living a quiet, peaceful life when it wasn’t that way at all. There were wars, constant raiding, and more acts of genocide than you can imagine.”

It is the first time that Kim speaks to me since the restaurant, saying, “I doubt everywhere was like that. What about here?” She points to the Queen Charlotte Islands. “It says that there are only Haida here, and the islands are so far away from any other land; nobody else could get there.”

Carol adds, “Aren’t they the ones who hunt a whale every year as their tradition and have to put up with the white man protesting it?”

I shake my head in disgust and say, “I’m sorry, I’m not mad at you, girls. You are only spouting forth the lies you have been told.”

Dahlia isn’t being condescending. She sincerely wants to know, “How do you know what is true and what is a lie?”

“I don’t expect you to know because I don’t talk about it. I look like a white man and my family that you know are all white men. The truth is, going back four generations in my family, each generation is made up mostly of people who are half native half white. I am just under half native. In my time, I have learnt if you want to know a people’s history you can’t ask them. They revise their history to look like a bed of roses and hide the truth. The Haida are one of the ones that I know the most about because almost every nation from Prince Rupert to the Baja Peninsula has stories about the Haida.

“Let’s go back to ancient Haida history. They used to live on the mainland, and the natives at the time were relatively prosperous. Unfortunately, the Haida didn’t believe in farming or even hunting for themselves. They were raiders and weren’t too smart about it. They would raid a village, rape and kill everybody except a few slaves and move on. They were some of the most brutal people in all of human history. I will never tell you the kinds of things they did to those they were raiding because I guarantee that what they did is worse than any of you can imagine. Any slave that made it back to the Haida village was likely scarred and deformed to the point where they could never heal properly.

“Eventually the rest of the nations set aside their wars and other grievances, then hunted the Haida until they thought the Haida were extinct. The remaining Haida sent a bunch of canoes to sea, looking for a place to hide. The canoe that found the farthest island, they followed to their new home. That is why they are now in the Queen Charlotte’s.

“The whaling canoe that you see on TV. That isn’t a whaling canoe. That canoe is big enough to hold every man from a single tribe. If you study the anthropology of seafaring people, you would know that no people in human history hunted whales with such boats and survived. Typically when hunting whale, you lose at least one of your boats. If you look at a typical whaler, it is a large rowboat with a bulbous hull. The hull’s shape adds to its strength, so a whale can ram it without destroying it. A canoe is the opposite of bulbous. If they hunted whale in those canoes, ALL the men in the tribe would be killed, and there would be no more tribe. They hunted whale in smaller canoes, and it was a rarity. It wasn’t an annual event. They only did it if they couldn’t steal enough food for the winter.”

Carol asks, “Why did they have such big canoes?”

“They are war canoes. In the summer, fish and other foods are plentiful. The men didn’t have to worry about the women being able to fend for themselves, so in the spring, the men would jump into a war canoe and go raiding, often going as far south as Mexico. They got a reputation for being the most fierce warriors on the ocean. Nobody was foolish enough to fight them on water or the beach. Your only hope was if you built your village inland and left your boats on the beach. They never lost their brutality until the white man came, and they were forced to stop raiding.

“The Comanche were the natives the American soldier feared the most and have a similar history to the Haida. There were many myths about them. In fact, many soldiers thought the Comanche were bulletproof. Despite being the most feared of all native nations, they refused to ever go near the ocean because they were afraid of the Haida.”

“All the histories here can’t be wrong,” comments Dahlia.