Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
— 24 —
Carving History in Ketchikan
WHEN I WAS IN
school at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, you could always tell the girls
from Southeast by the fabulous silver bracelets they wore, exquisite, glowing pieces carved
with Tlingit and Haida and Tsimshian symbols. It was then that I first learned the legend of
Raven stealing the sun, the moon and the stars, not to mention all the legends of Raven
stealing pretty much every woman whose man's back was turned. The—I can only call
them seductive—swoops and swirls of the ovoids and U-shapes and S-shapes formed eyes
and beaks and claws, and the bodies of eagles and killer whales and seals, and the best of
them seemed alive, a window on another world in a small band of silver, wrapped around a
girl's wrist.
I remember the shock of recognition I suffered the first time I saw a totem pole, with the
S's and U's and ovals of the Southeast girls' bracelets repeated in cedar logs of wood ten,
twenty, forty feet high, stained with red, black and blue paint.
“He was a bold man that first eat an oyster,” said Jonathan Swift. All respect to Dr.
Swift, but I wonder about the first bold man to carve a totem pole. Those cedar trees get a
hundred feet high. It must have seemed an immense undertaking. Was it deliberate? Did he
lose a loved one and march out to carve a memorial that would give testimony until the tree
crumbled? Or was it an accident, perhaps all he wanted to do was carve his sweetheart's
initials in the nearest piece of wood, only his knife wouldn't let him stop until the whole
trunk was a story of her? And then his neighbor admired it and wanted one, and then the
next village over wanted one to commemorate a potlatch, and two villages down, a clan
chieftain died and his family wanted a memorial, and a generation later it was a cultural
imperative on the Alaskan Panhandle from the Chilkoot tribe to the Muckleshoot tribe.
