During My Time - Margaret B. Blackman

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that is why he stands alone now at the eastern extremity of the islands.

      Button blankets worn by Florence Davidson (left) and other Masset Haida (photograph by Ulli Steltzer)

      The plane flies over the ancient beach ridges ancestral to the present sands of North Beach and along Tow’s backside. Yakin Point, where Tow paused in his westward migration, intrudes into the cold waters of Dixon Entrance, and beyond I recognize Kliki Creek where Nani, my anthropologist friend Marjorie Mitchell, and I went to collect spruce roots in the summer of 1974. We cross the mouth of Chowan Brook where Nani and her mother used to pick crabapples.

      Ten miles from Masset is the “elephant pen,” the local name for a Canadian Forces communications installation whose circular wires and fences look incongruous against the spruce and sand. The plane crosses the village of New Masset giving a glimpse of the Forces base and housing, the new hotel with the only beer parlor for miles around, the high school, the government wharf, the Co-op store. Water splashes the belly of the plane as it descends into the waters of Masset Inlet. Grudgingly, it struggles up on land coming to rest beside the tiny air terminal.

      Haida Masset is three miles from New Masset and every taxi driver knows how to find Florence Davidson’s house, or just about any other local house for that matter. Each time I return to the village, I mentally tick off the changes in its facade. Since I have been coming to the islands, the village has expanded as far southward toward New Masset as available reserve land will allow. It now moves westward, into the piled-up stumps of once timbered land. In January of 1977 traces of bright blue paint that adorned the exterior of Peter Hill’s little house in 1970 had been washed away by the frequent rains, Alfred Davidson’s fine large home had burned to the ground, Joe Weir’s house had been razed to make way for a more modern one, the Yeltatzies had added a large picture window to the side of their home, and a rental duplex had been built catty-corner to Nani’s house.

      The taxi turns down an unpaved side street and comes to rest just short of the Anglican Church and Robert Davidson’s magnificent totem pole. Despite the external changes in the village, Nani appears little different to me than she did in 1975 or in the years I knew her previous to that. She waits in the open door and enfolds me in a warm hug as I set down my suitcase.

      Nani lives alone now in a sprawling one-story house, originally designed and built with the comforts of a large family in mind. Her front door opens into the spacious “front room,” constructed as in other older Masset homes large enough to hold the entire adult population of the village. The front room has seen numerous feasts and potlatches, but normally it contains couches and overstuffed chairs pushed against its perimeter. The Sunday dining table sits in the room’s center; plants fill the front window, and Robert Davidson’s Haida designs, family photos, and religious mementos adorn the walls. Five bedrooms open off the large central room at its far end; at the opposite end, a leaded-glass door leads into the parlor—remodelled between January and June of 1977—panelled and carpeted in thick red plush. Many of our summer taping sessions were held in the quiet softness of this sitting room.

      My favorite spot in the house and the room where I have spent the most time is Nani’s expansive kitchen. I mark the passage of my Masset visits by the additions to her kitchen: new appliances, a new shelf, new flooring, a different color scheme. When I first came to Masset in 1970, the wash was done on the back porch in a wringer washer and Nani used to lug the heavy baskets of wet clothes across the yard to hang on the long clothesline, but by 1975 the old machine had been replaced by a new spin washer and dryer (gifts from a daughter and son-in-law), which occupy a prominent position in the kitchen. The village has had electricity since 1964 (and before, if one counts the portable generator that lighted the church and vicarage). Freezers and refrigerators followed in its wake, dramatically altering old patterns of food preservation and storage. Nani’s kitchen contains both of these appliances, and a second freezer, filled to the top with venison, herring roe, berries, and fish, sits on the back porch pantry.

      The most eye-catching feature of Nani’s kitchen is the long bank of open shelves along one wall, which display some two hundred bone china cups and saucers, plus everyday dishes and the mugs from which we drink our breakfast coffee and afternoon tea. An oaken table, one of the few pieces salvaged from a house fire in 1952, faces the large kitchen window. In many ways this table is the focal point of the household. At it most meals are taken, visitors are received and served tea, and here Nani sits to rest from her baking or to weave a cedar bark hat. I have spent much of my fieldwork time here, too: interviewing Nani, writing in my journal at night, drinking coffee and gazing at the ever-moving waters of Masset Inlet, talking with Nani and others over tea.

      By the summer of 1977, however, the view from the table had changed. I recorded the change, somewhat petulantly, in my journal.

      Florence in her kitchen (photograph by Margaret Blackman)

      I always liked sitting here and writing, looking up now and then to see Hannah (who lives next door) going in or out and collecting my thoughts as I watched the changing configurations of the western skies. But now a plank ledge runs the length of the window and the foliage of some fifty African violets sitting on it obscures much of the view. A fuchsia hangs from the ceiling and its embrace with a leggy geranium blots out Emma Matthews’ house ….”

      Even the long plank could not contain all the products of Nani’s amazing green thumb; I discovered yet more African violets atop the washing machine, their leaves aflutter when the machine entered its spin cycle.

      Nani’s house is seldom inactive, and then only for a relatively short period, as she typically retires at 11:30 and arises as early as 5 A.M. Usually there are other boarders; various children, children-in-law, and grandchildren drop by during the day, and the health aide stops in on her rounds of the village. Hannah Parnell and Dora Brooks, Robert Davidson’s lineage nieces, and Carrie Weir, a sister’s daughter, appear every day or so to visit and have tea; and, not infrequently, someone from New Masset comes by to introduce a visiting friend to Nani.

      Nani’s tremendous energy is evident in the wonderful creative confusion that pervades her home. On a typical day loaves and loaves of bread rise in the kitchen under the protective covers of fresh linen towels; the combined vapors from a pot of stew and the kettle of “Indian medicine” beside it on the stove mingle and steam the kitchen window; an unfinished cedar bark hat stands spiderlike on the front room dining table; a small cat darts under a chair rustling the wide dry strips of cedar bark draped over it; Nani’s crocheting lies where she left it on one of the front room chesterfields; the kitchen radio blaring messages to people in remote mainland communities competes with “The Edge of Night” emanating from the television in the front room; in the smokehouse adjacent to the house, Nani hangs halibut fillets on racks above the smoldering alder fire. Such was the setting in which Nani related her life story to me. Why she agreed to relate it is the result of several factors, among them her familiarity with anthropological inquiry, the compatibility of the life history mode with Haida values, and, not insignificantly, her relationship to me.

      From the time she was very young Florence Davidson was aware of the interest of outsiders in Haida culture and artifacts. Her father worked for C. F. Newcombe of the Provincial Museum in Victoria as an informant and artist, and Florence recalls Newcombe’s many visits to her father’s home. She is too young to have had personal memories of John Swanton, who relied upon both her father and her uncle as informants and resided with the latter during his fieldwork in 1900–1901, but she may have heard them speak of him. In the later years of her marriage the Davidson home was frequented by the occasional anthropologist. Wilson Duff, for example, interviewed Florence more than once about her father and his forebears, and Mary Lee Stearns visited the Davidson home several times in 1965–66 to interview Robert Davidson during the course of her study of contemporary Masset culture (Stearns 1975, 1981).

      Following the death of her husband in 1969, Florence emerged as a knowledgeable elder in her own right.

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