Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
er touched.” Today, the poles are capped with lead, zinc or copper plating to prevent split-
ting, and are water-proofed, which extends their lives. There are five kinds of poles: her-
aldic, memorial, mortuary (with the cremated remains of the deceased placed in a cavity,
and possibly belongings, too), potlatch, and the story pole. They formed part of the Pacific
Northwest Native American's cultural history. They were never worshipped.
When I ask Nathan to tell me the story of the eighteen-foot pole he is working on, he
says it is the story of Ktz (pronounced “cots”). “I'm paraphrasing because the story has to
be told by clan members,” he says, and the story is not of his clan. Loosely, then, the story
involves Ktz, a Tlingit monster who captures a bear and is turned by the bear's touch into
a woman. I'm thinking it might be more than clan discretion that is keeping Nathan, a dig-
nified elder, from telling me, a younger woman, the whole legend, but never mind. The
pole is going to the Peabody Museum in Boston, to be dedicated in November 2001.
A tour guide leads a group off a cruise ship inside the carving shed. A slender blonde
woman, she lifts one end of Nathan's eighteen-foot pole easily in demonstration. “In
Alaska we have a saying,” Nathan says. “Men are men, and the women are, too.”
I look at Lee's five-foot pole, and for the first time realize that one side is hollowed out.
“How do you hollow out the inside of the pole?” I ask. “Chain saw,” he says. Whew. I was
imagining hours, days, weeks with an elbow adze.
Lee has a few small (comparatively) pieces on display, my favorite a raven with a
moveable beak that when you click it closed sounds exactly like the raven who roosts in
the spruce tree out in front of my house during the spring. Lee takes it down off its stand
and moves toward a little boy, the raven mask talking,
kwok, kwok, kwok
(okay, that's MY
interpretation of raven talk). The little boy has a huge grin on his face, but he keeps his
hands prudently behind his back.
The carvers insist on traditional designs even for private collectors. “We want to keep it
Northwest,” Lee says, which was why when Randy Travis' agent wanted a pole with a
horse on it, Lee said no. “No Stars Wars poles,” Nathan agrees. “Sometimes people want
matching colors with their decor,” Lee says. “'Could we have some mauve in there?' No.
Our colors or no colors.”
From Saxman I went to the Totem Heritage Center in Ketchikan, created in 1976 to pre-
serve and exhibit 33 totem poles recovered from three Southeast villages whose popula-
