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I don't know. I do know that when you look at totem poles, you're not just seeing the
story the artist left behind, you're making up your own as well. Which is why when I was
I Ketchikan, I took the opportunity to visit the carving shed in Saxman, where you can
watch actual totem poles emerge beneath the knives of descendants of that first, bold
artist.
It's a large warehouse-like room, all walls and roof, with a skylight, and it smells oh so
sweetly of cedar. The day I visit, two men bend over hollowed out logs with homemade
tools in hand, knives, adzes of various sizes, ballpoint pens to rough out designs. They are
Nathan Jackson, a Tlingit and a fifth-generation carver, and Lee Wallace (“Haida-Tlingit-
Tsimshian, but mostly Haida,” Lee says).
Lee's my age, and it turns out we were at the University of Alaska Fairbanks at the
same time, me in Lathrop, him in Nerland. He was getting his degree in electronics while
I was studying journalism, and never the twain did meet, although it turns out we both
worked on the TransAlaska Pipeline, too. He went on to become a flight attendant for Wi-
en Air Alaska, until the airline went out of business in 1984, and Lee went back to fishing
with his father. They pulled into Hydaburg one day and Lee was approached by a group of
village elders. “Lee,” they told him, “you should try carving. You have it in your blood.”
They were right. Lee moved back to Ketchikan and Nathan took him on as an appren-
tice. “I haven't gone international,” Lee says, “but I've got stuff all across the country, in-
cluding a major museum piece in Indianapolis.” The Indianapolis pole was a recreation of
one his great-grandfather had carved.
Lee squirts the wood with a bottle of water, carving it with a three-inch blade in a
curved homemade wooden handle polished smooth from Lee's hand. “A gift from Nath-
an,” he says of the knife. He's working on a heraldic piece featuring the eagle for a private
collector in Chicago. It's slow work, one wood shaving at a time. Since traditionally the
pole is not sanded, the resulting smooth surface is a testament to how careful the carver
must be.
“The climate helps, it keeps the wood from drying out,” Lee says. The wood isn't aged
at all after the tree is felled. In carving totem poles, Lee says, “the greener the better.”
The art form goes back thousands of years. “Nobody knows how long,” Lee says, “be-
cause the poles only lasted about a hundred and fifty years. In the past the poles were nev-
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