The documentary opens with a pan up a totem pole in a Swedish museum, far away from where it was carved in the 19^th century on the northwest coast of Canada. The historic pole is shackled by a collar and suspended—imprisoned—in wires. The symbolism reverberates through the film, which I stumbled on while I was searching out information about my old high school friend Derek Wilson, an artist, jeweler, carver and Hereditary Chief of the Haisla nation in northern British Columbia.

The film is called Totem: The Return of the G’psgolox Pole, and it’s a National Film Board production about the struggle to bring the pole home to the Haisla people, which would make it the first totem to be repatriated from a European museum. 

Derek was one of the carvers of a replica pole that was sent to Sweden, part of a complex deal to return the historic original. I found it immensely moving to see him on camera, quietly teaching Haisla history and culture to local children, and later to children in Sweden. This wasn’t only because of his articulate comments, but because my old friend had died a few years after the film was made. I had gone looking for information about his later life, and ended up finding his digital ghost. 

There’s also this: in writing about Derek last week, I mentioned a moment I’ve always remembered from high school in North Vancouver, when we were hanging out in the school quad. This was when I turned around in circles with my arms raised saying, “It’s such a beautiful day!” After watching me steadily for a moment, Derek replied, “We don’t say that. When you say that to someone, you’re implying they’re too stupid to notice.”

I was fourteen, and this is how I learned that people in different cultures don’t just wear different clothes and sing different songs, but live according to radically different assumptions, each as rich as the other. These clashing assumptions lie at the heart of the G’psgolox film, since they posed an enormous stumbling block in the negotiations to bring the pole home. One of the central questions raised by the documentary is whether the Haisla and Swedes, with their very different cultures, could eventually reach an accord. 

And, implicitly, whether any of us ever can. 

Here’s one point of contention. The pole was the creation of the coastal people, first raised in 1872 by a chief called G’psgolox. But as the Swedish museum director Per Kaks points out, a little bit of money changed hands in 1929, when things were particularly tough for Indigenous people on the coast. The Swedish consul in Prince Rupert paid some of them to let him cut it down, despite the strong objections of other people. 

Consul Olof Hanson also arranged for a Canadian export permit, and sent the pole to the Folkens Museum Etnografiska in Stockholm, where the director of the time badly wanted to display a totem of his own, making the Folkens like other museums in Europe and North America. All this meant the Swedes considered the pole to be their legal property under Swedish law, and no longer the property of the Haisla. 

After years of talks, the Swedes finally agreed to release the pole, and not only in return for the replica Derek would help carve. Officials at the museum also wanted the Haisla people to build a special structure to house the historic pole back home on the coast. The Swedes considered it to be an important part of the world’s cultural heritage and wanted very sincerely to protect it. 

Yet, living in a damp coastal climate, the Haisla are used to the poles they carve falling down in about sixty years. Afterward they disintegrate, reabsorbed by Mother Earth, which the Haisla consider a right and fitting thing to happen. They wanted to bring the pole home so they could free it to return to the soil.

In the spirit of compromise, the Haisla elders agreed to try to build a climate-controlled structure to house the G’psgolox pole. Yet there was no guarantee they’d be able to raise enough money for a structure, especially since some among the Haisla people didn’t really want to build it. Even as Derek helped install the duplicate pole in Stockholm, it was far from certain the original pole would ever go home.

Totem was directed by Métis filmmaker Gil Cardinal and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2003. Given the continuing controversy about the return of Indigenous art from museums around the world—the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece, for that matter—it remains contemporary. Maybe the word is timeless.  

After the opening shot of the tethered pole, we hear its origin story in voiceover. (This is an NFB film, after all). G’spgolox was the chief of the Xanaksiyala people, who now live with the Haisla on the coast in Kitlope territory. It’s known that his children were among the many who died in the epidemics of influenza, tuberculosis and smallpox that ravaged the people of the coast.

The story goes that as G’psgolox wandered the forest in mourning, he met a mythical being, Tsooda, who offered him solace, and suggested he raise a mortuary pole honoring his family. For his children to rest peacefully, everything must be put in place. So G’spgolox hired two chiefs of the raven clan to carve the pole, which features Tsooda at the top. It was raised at the site of a now-abandoned Xanaksiyala village, Mis’kusa, where it stood until the Swedish consul got a local man to cut it down.

The pole became a topic of Kitlope stories, anger and mourning. Eventually some of the elders began to search for it, and in 1991, elder Cecil Paul found it pictured in an anthropology textbook, with a note saying that it was held in Stockholm. After three years of discussion, museum director Per Kaks recommended that the pole be returned to the coast. But not without conditions, which Haisla elder Louise Smith, a descendant of Chief G’psgolox, said they agreed to voluntarily. The Swedes had taken the pole, but they’d also taken care of it. 

This is where my friend Derek comes in. Derek was the nephew of master carver Henry Robertson, who headed the artistic side of the project. Under Henry’s guidance, Derek joined his brother Barry and Henry’s granddaughter Trisha Robertson in carving not one replica of the G’psgolox pole, but two. One would be raised on the site of Mis’kusa village, the second taken to the museum in Stockholm. 

Henry Robertson appears in the documentary as a thoughtful and gentle man who had been born in 1934 in Kemano, B.C. His grandfather had been one of the carvers of the original pole, and Henry had learned to carve under the tutelage of his father. He’d also received a different type of training, having been sent to a residential school as a child under the racist program detailed in Tanya Talaga’s new book, The Knowing.

As he says in the documentary, Henry was told he had been taken there “to learn the white man’s ways.” When the school principal learned he was carving some small totems, Henry says the principal slapped him around, sticking a pencil so deeply into the palm of his hand that the lead stayed in, and had to be cut out with a razor blade.

After Henry tells his residential school story onscreen, we hear Derek’s voice, a gentle tenor.

“I see museums as something parallel to the boarding schools in the fact that all the artefacts are in there and basically shut off from our people. So they won’t be used again,” he says.

“Because of what happened to our people in the past, all of our people seem to do things halfway and then they quit. That’s one of the things we want to show young people (with this project), that once you start something, you have to finish it.”

We see one replica eventually raised in Mis’kusa, where the original G’psgolox pole had stood. As promised, the other was sent to Stockholm, not quite finished, so the Swedish people could see Derek and the others working on it. The documentary notes that it was deliberate decision to put the carvers themselves on display, subtly making a point about the exoticization of Indigenous culture. 

Yet Derek’s words sing.

“We believe in sharing,” he says, speaking at a cocktail party hosted by the Canadian embassy in Stockholm. “That’s why our law made us come here and do that, because we have to share with you.

“Share with you our happiness, and at the same time, share our pain and suffering. But to see that pole up there brings both sadness and happiness in my heart. Sadness in the fact that was has happened to our people is represented by what you see up there. And happiness at the same time, to see that finally our people are being recognized as human beings. 

“Our people are finally being recognized as people, not objects of archeology or objects of anthropology. New history that pole is creating, and when it’s finally finished, when you look at it, each and every one of you in here will be part of that history, because you’ve witnessed something like that being done.

“I want you to look at that pole and see yourself in that pole. I want you to look at that pole and see your neighbours in that pole, and accept that pole as a friend, and accept each other as a friend.”

The replica pole was given to the people on Sweden on Oct 1, 2000.

Then the film crashes to earth. A closing title card reports that because the Haisla had been unable to raise the money for a new climate-controlled building, and neither the Swedish nor Canadian governments would fund it, the museum refused to return the original G’psgolox pole.

***

Fortunately, there’s a coda. In 2007, director Gil Cardinal released a 26-minute follow-up documentary, Totem: Return and Renewal. We learn that the Swedes finally agreed to send the pole home, despite the lack of a dedicated building. Museum director Per Kak comes across in both documentaries as a thoughtful man who always supported the return. In the end, he not only dropped any conditions, he began to work on an international program to return Indigenous holdings to their makers. 

Maybe there’s some hope for inter-cultural communications after all.

The G’psgolox pole spent a couple of months on display at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver—lying down, since once poles fall, they’re never supposed to be raised again. Then it travelled north to the town of Kitimat, near the Indigenous Kitimaat Village, where it was kept in the long back room in a shopping mall where elders could teach children about its meaning and their culture. Afterward, it was returned to the forest.

So the story has a happy ending. Satisfying to learn. 

Except that I couldn’t find Derek anywhere in the second documentary, even in the background. I knew he’d had a stroke some years before he’d died in 2011, so maybe he was already too ill to take part. At least he lived long enough to see the pole returned, and I hope he knew it. 

I watched Return and Renewal a second time, just to be sure Derek really wasn’t there, then watched the first documentary again, too. Afterward, I sat thinking about how strange it must be for the family and friends of dead movie actors to see their films. I also tried to figure out how I felt so see someone I’d known as a teenager grown into a wise and generous man. 

I realized that although I have no real claim for this, I felt proud. Proud of Derek and proud to have known him. I felt sad that he was gone too early, and touched at seeing the ways he was still the kid I’d known, and also not. 

At the same time, I admit to thinking it was too bad the NFB documentary didn’t gossip, letting out some pleasantly irrelevant details about Derek’s life that I would have liked to learn. It didn’t bring out his sense of humour, either. When he spoke about the way Indigenous people can be considered objects of anthropology and archeology, I thought about something else he’d said in school. 

“The anthropologists who come to study us?  We’re not going to tell them anything important, so sometimes we just make shit up.” 

He broke out in a grin, mischief all over his face.

I recently saw another dead friend on film, so I thought about Michael as well. His name was Michael Finlay, and in this case the film was shot by the bodycams of police officers after Michael was randomly assaulted on the street in Toronto. I’ve written a fair bit about Michael, who died later that week of his injuries. The bodycam film was played at the hearings of the man later convicted of manslaughter in his death. 

“It feels as if I got checked into the boards, ” Michael told the cops, bringing me close to tears, since we’d played hockey together when we were young.

The man who was convicted in his death was Indigenous, a member of the Blackfoot Confederacy in Alberta. His psychological assessment remained largely off the record, but from what was said in court, it was clear he’d had an awful childhood, and had spent his life rocketing between crime and prison. He’d built up a long criminal record before he pushed Michael to the ground, citing no reason for doing so, but saying he felt no animosity toward our friend. 

In any case, as I sat thinking about the documentaries—and Derek and Michael—I also hoped that the G’spgolox project would help heal the generational wounds of people whose family members had been lost to epidemics, residential schools, brutality, racism, poverty and neglect. I hoped other belongings could come home to other Indigenous nations and help the healing. Wished that Derek was still here—a natural teacher—to help children understand their heritage.  

Also to tell more jokes. 

Sleep well, my old friend.  

The National Film Board makes the original, 70-minute documentary called Totem: The Return of the G’psgolox Pole free to watch here.

The follow-up 26-minute long doc, Totem: Return and Renewal can be watched here, also for free.

I’ll write about Tanya Talaga’s book about residential schools next time. It’s long, thorough and hard to read, given the subject matter. But in the meantime, please do yourself a favour and watch the documentaries.