Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams, this is the Red Eye Podcast, produced at the studios of Vancouver Cooperative Radio. In this episode, Lorraine Chisholm talks with Sarah Florence Davidson about the book she co -wrote with her father, Haida Carver, Robert Davidson.
Speaker: The potlatch ceremonies of indigenous peoples on the west coast of British Columbia were an intrinsic part of their cultural, social, and religious life. The Canadian government banned the potlatch from 1884 until 1951 in an attempt to extinguish indigenous culture.
Speaker: Potlatch's Pedagogy, Learning from Ceremony is a new book that explores the efforts to reweave the threads of Haida culture through the potlatch. It uses the reinvigoration of the potlatch ceremony as a model for learning and teaching.
Speaker: The book is a collaboration between Sarah Florence Davidson and her father, Robert Davidson. Robert Davidson is one of Canada's most respected and important contemporary artists who was instrumental in helping to revive many Haida cultural practices. Sarah Florence Davidson is a Haida educator and scholar with a PhD in literacy education.
Speaker: She's currently an assistant professor at the Teacher Education Department at the University of the Fraser Valley, where she works with teacher candidates to bring indigenous content, perspective, and pedagogies into their classrooms. And Sarah Davidson is with me in our studio. Hello, Sarah.
Speaker: Hello, thank you so much for having me. Oh, it's really our pleasure. Now your book is focused around the potlatch cultural practice, which, as I said, the Canadian government actively made a concerted effort to suppress. How did the potlatch fit into Haida society?
Speaker: It was really a core part of our society and the place where all of our knowledge was transmitted. It was also the place where if we wanted to have chiefs
Speaker: take on their chief names or to pass on knowledge, we used the potlatch. It all took place at the potlatch. It was also really an important part of our identity. So if we were transitioning into new identities, so if we were transitioning from being a child into puberty through puberty, that would be where this would take place. And
Speaker: Really, it was where all of our stories and where our knowledge took place. And when my father speaks about it, the potlatch was integral to our law and maintaining our law. So it was really a core part of our community and especially with regard to knowledge and cultural transmission to future generations.
Speaker: As I was reading the book this week, I realized how much a hub the potlatch was for so many different kinds of activities in the Haida community. It really was. And so when that potlatch band took place,
Speaker: It really stifled a lot of our ability to transmit that knowledge and as a result of that ban, we ended up, I mean a lot of people went sort of underground to share the knowledge and we talk about that. My father's
Speaker: grandparents were able to share that knowledge through other means so through the Christmas dinners and through picnics and there were some underground potlatches but it did stifle a lot of the transmission of that knowledge and so we have this big kind of gap in our knowledge as a result of that potlatch ban.
Speaker: I was quite shocked when I moved to BC. I didn't really know much about the potlatch before then. I went to the Eumista Cultural Centre and they have a beautiful display there of potlatch, different artifacts, but also just explaining what the Canadian government did. I was truly shocked at the time and didn't know.
Speaker: Maybe you could just describe a little bit of the ways in which not only the outlawing of the potlatch, but residential schools and this sort of campaign of the Canadian government to lead to extinguish and suppress that culture. What were some of the things that became severed in that process?
Speaker: So through the residential schools one of the biggest challenges was the not being allowed to speak language and that has had a huge impact on so many communities to not
Speaker: be able to share the language and to speak in the language. Like if you think about when we speak in languages that are not our first languages, we lose a lot of that identity. We lose a lot of the knowledge that is not translatable into those other languages. And so I think about with my father, his family didn't want him to learn the language.
Speaker: and for reasons both his parents went to residential schools.
Speaker: As a result of not being able to speak Haida, things were translated for him to understand, but I think a lot of those core ideas were not, some things in Haida are just not translatable into English. And so we lose that connection to our ancestral knowledge.
Speaker: I think about the dances and I think about the missionary's commitment to removing our ability to connect culturally through our dances.
Speaker: So I in doing the research for the for the chapter on sort of talking about the potlatch ban and talking about the Indian agent and talking about residential schools and how that severed our connection to our ancestral knowledge I I really came to understand
Speaker: how much we lost with the language and just not having access to those ideas. And there was a time in my life, I mean, I've always spoken English, and so there was a time in my life where I sort of thought everything was translatable into English, and I've come to know through, you know, performing our songs and learning our songs, that there are ideas that exist in the Haida language
Speaker: that I don't have access to because my first language is English.
Speaker: Your father is a renowned and very prolific Haida artist. He works in a lot of different mediums, but he left Haida Gwaii for Vancouver to finish high school when he was around 16 or 17. And I was really struck by his surprise to find out for the first time at that age that there was a very beautiful and powerful body of work that was Haida.
Speaker: And I think what was really interesting for me in researching this book is that I hadn't realized that my father was alive during the potlatch ban. And I think that as human beings, we don't know what we don't know. And so he grew up on Haida Gwaii not knowing that there was anything else.
Speaker: And I think in coming to Vancouver, he then had access to these beautiful pieces that had been stolen from the community. And I think that that really opened his eyes because I think that it moved him beyond and to think beyond what he had grown up with and started to get him to think about
Speaker: What was our life like? Who were the Haida people before contact and before contact with the missionaries? It's just so shocking when I, as an outsider, have seen those amazing Haida carvings and to think that someone who lived on Haida Gwaii, those were disappeared from their culture.
Speaker: In the book, there's actually a story that he told me a couple times when we were doing the interviews for the book. The story of going to, you know, once he had returned from Vancouver and seen the Haida art that was in Vancouver, he returned home
Speaker: and wanted to see what was there in the, you know, perhaps he had missed it or you know, it wasn't there and he talks about knocking on each door and only coming up with about a box full of what remained of our art. And so it's no doubt that he didn't know it existed because it was hidden away and I think that that experience was really transformative for him.
Speaker: Now in 1969 your father was 22 and he decided to make a totem pole and it would be the first totem pole raised in Old Masset for almost 80 years. It's an amazing story. In the book you describe how he had never done anything like that and really had no idea what he was getting into. So why did he decide to take that on?
Speaker: He told me this beautiful, beautiful story of going into the elders' houses. A lot of them had had
Speaker: Well, the missionary's goal was to transition or to force the Haida to give up on Haida beliefs and Haida cultural systems and take on Christian beliefs. And he described going into this home where there were elders and
Speaker: seeing something missing or something lost. And he had this idea that he wanted to give the elders something to celebrate in the way that they knew how one more time. So this idea that they might have memories, not that they had been alive when the last pole raising had happened, but that they would have memories of this past.
Speaker: when our culture was lived and alive, and he thought that by bringing this pole, and by carving this pole and raising this pole, he would provide an opportunity for them to celebrate in this way that they knew how.
Speaker: And it's funny, I mean he sort of talks about it, and for me growing up I had always known the story of my father and how young he was. And let me tell you, I did think he was older when I was much younger. When I hit 22 I realized he wasn't that old. And so I had always grown up with this story, but it wasn't until much later that I realized
Speaker: how amazing it was and he talks about it being this young kid coming in and thinking he's going to just raise a pole and he had no idea what that would mean for the community and he described how before he'd sort of seen art as a commodity and this raising of the pole helped him to understand the depth of knowledge
Speaker: that exists with our art and that it's not just art that there is ceremony and ancestral knowledge connected to our art. And so he talks about this pull raising and kind of going in and you know he's going to do this thing and then all of a sudden realizing when the elders came forward with all of this knowledge that he was just scratching the surface. I mean he really didn't know much at all and it was really the elders who had all of that knowledge.
Speaker: And in addition, he talks about how he didn't really know much about carving at that scale either. And then along comes this like giant cedar tree and it's like, okay, I'm going to carve this into a totem pole from this fuzzy photograph that I have of a totem pole. Well, and I love the story of him going to see Bill Holmes and saying, oh, how long did it take you to carve that 10 foot pole and then doing the calculations to figure out how long it might take for him to carve the large pole.
Speaker: Now you've brought a recording of an interview you had with your father while you were working on the book and that's kind of part of the book is pieces of these interviews. Tell us a little about what we're going to hear and the events that your father was talking about.
Speaker: So part of the process in, when my father decided to raise the pole, he talked about the fact that there wasn't a lot, people weren't sort of, maybe they didn't know that it was really going to happen or believed that it was really going to happen, especially given his inexperience. But once the pole started, was carved and sort of coming close to being finished,
Speaker: the elders then started having gatherings to talk about what they remembered or what they knew that had been passed down about poll raisings and so I think it was these conversations that really helped my father to understand the depth of what it was that he was doing and so with that there were these meetings with the elders and so he would
Speaker: go to these meetings and they were recorded and often they took place in Haida. So this clip is really part of that conversation with my father about some of those meetings and really trying to think about what are the protocols connected to raising poles. Okay let's listen to that now. So what do you think it was about the pole raising that made you want to learn? It was the art. It was more
Speaker: I was really addicted to learning our history. I remember thinking before I carved the thorn pole that I was going to teach these people a few things. Little did I know that I wasn't even touching the surface in my knowledge.
Speaker: And the people were very, very concerned, that generation, were very, very concerned that it had to be done right. And Nonny and Chinni hosted many meetings. And it was all in Haida, so I sat with Uncle Alfred
Speaker: And on the pole raising day, pardon me, leading up to the pole raising day, there was a company doing some work. I can't remember what they were doing. I think it always had to do with the DMD, you know, when they were putting in the communication, what they called the elephant pen. They had cranes there.
Speaker: And they offered to raise the ball with a crane, hydraulic crane. And I posed the question in the meeting, and they said, now we want to do traditional. And so the stories came up. They would talk for hours. And every one of them
Speaker: a bit of information. So they were living their history. They knew who was related to who. Today we don't have that knowledge. I mean, I have a sample of it. If I know
Speaker: Nonny or their mother or their Nonny, I can tell, what clan they belonged to. But Nonny, they knew it was part of their life.
Speaker: That is an amazing clip. And it's sort of part of a series of conversations that you had. I cried all the way through that chapter. I just want to say. But one of the amazing things to me was also when they started having the meetings. And I think it was your grandfather maybe who was singing songs. And then other people were contributing other songs.
Speaker: Yeah, my great -grandfather was singing and so there were several elders who had some of those songs and were able to share them and so those recordings still exist. They've contributed to my father's own learning of the songs and in turn my learning of the songs.
Speaker: And what I loved in hearing about those meetings is this idea that all the different elders held different pieces of knowledge and when they came together they had so much of it and it sort of inspired this metaphor that my father talks about with all of us holding a thin thread and when we come together it forms a rope.
Speaker: And what I talked about in this book is that as an educator, it's sometimes difficult to figure the role that I hold in sharing cultural knowledge and passing on cultural knowledge. And so I saw this book as the thread that I held and the contribution that I was able to make to my community, both documenting the information and putting it in a form that is accessible to a wider audience.
Speaker: I'm very, very privileged to be able to call my father or to go and visit him in his studio or even text, he texts me, to be able to access a lot of the knowledge that he has, but I recognize that not everybody is in a position to be able to access this cultural knowledge and so I was hopeful that this book would sort of provide that opportunity to do that.
Speaker: Where does the raising of that totem pole fit now in the history, the continuing history of the Haida community, especially like reclaiming and relearning the culture that Canada had mounted such a concerted campaign to squelch?
Speaker: I don't know a lot because it happened before I was born, but I will say that when I talk to different people just informally about writing this book or just about the event of the poll raising,
Speaker: A lot of people talked about how much it meant to them to have that, to experience that. And I think about the people who were young at that time, because that, from my perspective and not having been there, it really was a beginning of a revival and a beginning of Haida people.
Speaker: starting to live their living our culture as opposed to remembering it or I think we went through a lot of years with the potlatch ban where we were working to remember and hold on to our knowledge and I feel like that the raising of that pole transformed the height of people from remembering and trying to hold on to to actually living and
Speaker: in the way that the art and the polls were intended to be part of us living our culture. And that conversation we heard a little conversation you had with your father. They were an important part of the creation of the book and the way you work together to collaborate. How did that process work?
Speaker: It was a really interesting process. So my father, basically, I mean, just in sort of from a kind of a step by step guide, I interviewed him. And so I would do the interviews, I would record them, and then I transcribed the interviews, and I would send those transcripts back to my father to review. And then from there, for the beginning part, when we're talking about the SCADA principles, I started looking at all of the stories he was telling me and looked for themes.
Speaker: And so that part, but at every step of the way, I went back to my father and had him check. So for example, when I found those themes through the stories, when he was telling me stories about learning, that's where those themes came from. But I would go back to my father and say, this is what I'm understanding from these stories you're telling me. Is this something you're comfortable with? Is there something I've misunderstood? And so we would have another interview.
Speaker: And then we would address any things that I had misunderstood or that he wanted to further clarify or provide additional information on. And then with regard to the book, it then came to I would write these sections. And my father would read through the book. But part of the reason you'll notice that it's co -authored, even though
Speaker: It was it was put together, you know, I put it together and I wrote the parts in between and chose the sections But I it was really important to me to have it as a co -author because it's my father's story It's my father's stories and I think sometimes we don't recognize oral contributions And it's really really important for me to model how we respectfully work with indigenous peoples and how we honor those oral contributions
Speaker: You mentioned the Skoda principles, did I say that right? Skoda. Skoda, okay. But the experience of your father sort of carving and raising the totem pole and exploring the potlatch subsequent to that illustrates some of these principles that you've brought out, these themes. Give us a glimpse into that, what you found there.
Speaker: So the interesting thing about those principles is that they are specifically based on the stories that my father told. So just briefly, I worked as an educator with indigenous students and I was sort of inspired by my father's story. And I thought perhaps that the story of him going traveling to Vancouver to finish high school, that something in that commitment, there was something for me to learn in terms of supporting
Speaker: indigenous students and so I went to him I thought oh you know I'm gonna ask him and and in my naive moments I thought oh my dad's gonna give me this great list he's gonna tell me exactly what transpired and what happened and I'll be able to then take it away and apply it as a teacher well
Speaker: That's when he started telling me these stories about how he had learned and I appreciated that because I was able to work through them and that's where these SCADA principles came from. So we talk about strong relationships, authentic experiences, curiosity,
Speaker: observation, contribution, recognizing and encouraging strengths, power of the mind, history and story, aspects of spirituality, and that all of those contribute to learning. I would like to just mention in British Columbia, we have what are called the first people's principles of learning, which are a broader
Speaker: learning framework that have been developed by Finask in collaboration with communities. And so one of the ideas that we had was thinking about what does it look like locally? So that's something that we think about British Columbia -wide. These principles are really deeply rooted in on Haida Gwaii and their Haida principles. And so in my work to encourage educators to
Speaker: to connect with the local, I offer this as a model of what does it look like to think about or connect with local principals for learning. And I think that's something that comes across in the book as well, that it's so important to recognize it's not like there's not a blanket First Nations approach to everything that these are very specific nations and practices.
Speaker: Yes. And I think that it's really, really important. Some of the work I teach, as you mentioned, educators in Indigenous education and a lot of the work that we do is to understand the diversity of Indigenous peoples. And so I offer this more as a model.
Speaker: as opposed to a how -to of what we should be doing on this traditional territory. It's sort of a model for people to think about how do we connect with those local nations and bring those ideas into our classrooms. So what's your thinking on how something like this, some of these principles like learning through contribution, those kinds of things could contribute to a contemporary school, like a practice in the classroom.
Speaker: I'm really, really glad that you chose contribution. Because that principle has been a really key understanding for me that has really transformed my thinking about how do we work with Indigenous students. Now, I don't want to then provide, say, blanket things about Indigenous students. But one of the things that I've noticed has been that a lot of the Indigenous students with whom I've worked have been very committed to
Speaker: contributing to their families and their communities. And so that's a really different way of thinking. So when we think about making education relevant for Indigenous students, we need to be thinking about how is what I'm teaching now, how does that support them to make contributions to their families and communities? And if it doesn't, it's not going to be relevant to them.
Speaker: And so in my own education, that was my motivation to finish. It wasn't about having a PhD, it was about what is it that I can do to make a contribution back to my community? And I think when we fail to recognize that, then we are doing a disservice to Indigenous students in particular, because it's a really different way of thinking and it's a different motivation.
Speaker: And so we need to find ways to support that and to really think about how we're approaching education in mainstream schools to support people. And I would say everybody is motivated to some extent, but I've noticed with the Indigenous students, and I've spoken about it with Indigenous grad students, and it's the same thing. We are pursuing our education for the purpose of making a contribution to our communities.
Speaker: Well, it's been, for me, brilliant reading the book and just trying to immerse myself in it and then having this conversation with you today. I could have you here for a week, but I'm sure you have other things to do. But I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. It's wonderful. I've been speaking with Sarah Florence Davidson. She is the author with her father, Robert Davidson of Potlatch's Pedagogy, Learning Through Ceremony, published by Portage and Maine Press.
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