by Charles Lillard

IN THE EARLY 1970'S VARIOUS VANCOUVER/ Victoria- based writers began moving to the Queen Charlotte Islands. This made one of the remotest areas in British Columbia part of literary Canada. It was also a shot-in-the-arm for the Island's fabled mystique, something which was about to die of an overdose of isolation and exploitation. To live in the Charlottes in those days was to live inside a mystery. No one knew a great deal about the area, and what they did know was often wrong part of the great mosaic of coastal folklore. It didn't do one much good to consult the nearest public library because Island literature was mostly unknown.

About the only source book readily available was Kathleen E. Dalzell's The Queen Charlotte Islands 1774-1966 (reprinted by Queen Charlotte Islands book dealer Bill Ellis, now available from Harbour Publishing). Dalzell's second and more interesting volume on the Islands, The Queen Charlotte Islands, Of Places and Names, was self-published in 1973 and not widely distributed at the time (it's now available from Harbour Publishing). In some ways little has changed since the early 1970's. Except in university libraries there are no adequate gatherings of Island material.

In putting together a mental picture of the islands, the best starting place is Dalzell's work. Next, and in no particular order of merit, comes Anthony Carter's This is Haida (Indian Heritage Series, 1968); my editions of early missionary accounts, In the Wake of the War Canoe (Sono Nis) and Warriors of the North Pacific (Sono Nis) and Emily Carr's Klee Wyck (Irwin).

There's also a brief but important account by Ed Rickett's (he's "Doc" in Steinbeck's Cannery Row) of a visit to the Charlottes in 1945. It was published in a book called The Outer Shores: Part One, Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck Explore the Pacific Coast (Mad River Press, California 1978).

But these titles don't give the reader a taste of what it was like on the Islands in the early 1800's, Although William Henry Collison's accounting In the Wake of the War Canoe begins in 1876, the Hudson's Bay Company already had a Charlottes post by then, and the maritime fur traders had been visiting the area annually, and in large numbers, since the 1780's.

The Charlotte Islands were the first landfalls made by European explorers along the coast of what is now British Columbia. It was also the first area to be explored and charted. (Nootka Sound was to prove more important, but the Islands are first in any West Coast chronology.) But there is unfortunately no one-volume account of this earlier and important period.

One pleasant introduction to this maritime period is John Frazier Henry's Early Maritime Artists (D&M 1984); it's a sight to please both eye and ear. Soft Gold (Oregon Historical Society) with its ethnological annotations by Bill Holm, and an historical introduction and annotation by Thomas Vaughan, is not to be bypassed either.

Two important hard-to-locate studies that put the islands into the context of Northwest Coast exploration and fur trade exploitation are Warren L. Cook's Flood Tide of Empire: Spain and the Pacific Northwest, 1953-1819 (Yale University Press) and that classic of 19thcentury West Coast history, Hubert Howe Bancroft's two-volume Northwest

Coast (volumes 27 and 28 in Bancroft's Works, out-of-print). While this latter work is dated, it remains the best self-contained work on the subject. John Boit's Log of the Union (recently published in Oregon), William Beresford's A Voyage Around the World: The Journal of Fray Tomas de la Pena, (published in California at the turn of the century, out-of-print) and The Journal of John Work (out-of-print) are among the firsthand accounts of island exploration and trading that repay the reader who searches them out. But these accounts are outsiders' versions. The Haida, had anyone asked them before the smallpox and related epidemics of the 1860's began to decimate the people, could have given us a true history of Island exploration and settlement.

Writers of every cast of mind have done their best to recreate the Haida world. Perhaps the primer for anyone beginning to dig into this almost-lost period is John and Carolyn Smyly's Those Born at Koona (Hancock). Another point of departure might well be Margaret Blackman's During My Time: Florence Edenshaw Davidson, A Haida Woman (D&M), a rich account of a noble Haida woman's life.

Whether or not one considers Marius Barbeau to be the Robert Graves of West Coast studies, his Haida Carvers in Argillite (National Museum of Canada 1957), Haida Myths Illustrated in Argillite Carvings (out-of-print) and the two volume Totem Poles (out-of-print) should not be ignored. The biggest problem for a reader in British Columbia will be finding Bareau's books.

Two of the many excellent studies on Haida culture are George F. MacDonald's Ninstints: Haida World Heritage Site (UBC Press) and Marjorie M. Halpin's Totem Poles: An Illustrated Guide (UBC Press).

Surprisingly, considering the many literary types who've spent time in the Queen Charlotte Islands, there is not much literature set on the Islands. D.E. Hatt's Sitka Spruce,Songs of The Queen Charlotte Islands may be the first book of poetry to emerge from the area. The Arrow-Maker's Daughter and Songs of the Western Islands were' two attempts by Hermia Harris Fraser to make Haida mythology a useable history. Sean Virgo's Deathwatch at Skidegate Narrows (Sono Nis) is a more recent attempt to come to terms with a Haida past.

Lurline Bowles Mayors The Big Canoe was a similar experiment in fiction. Trevor Ferguson's High Water Chants and Susan Musgrave's The Charcoal Burners place man against the elements and himself. Call the Beast Thy Brother (Berkley Medallion) is a Queen Charlotte Islands western.

A.M. Stephen's The Kingdom of the Sun (out-of-print 1927) explores the theme that won't die: the earliest possible European contact with the Haida. A gentleman adventurer named Richard Anson, who sailed aboard Sir Francis Drake's Golden Hind, is cast away among Haida where he falls in love with Auria, an ethereal Haida princess.

Norman Newton's Fire in the Raven's Nest (New Press 1973), Gary Snyder's He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village (Grey Fox, California 1979) and various poems by Susan Musgrave like all the best work about the Charlottes further lead the reader willingly or not into the mystique of those islands west of west. Charles Lillard has included the first up-to-date bibliography of the Queen Charlotte Islands in his new book, The Ghostland People.

[Summer/BCBW 1989] "QCI";