How Far Will You Go to Write? asks Kathleen Jones

This is my journey to the Edge of the World, where Captain Cook accidentally stumbled into Haida Gwaii while he was looking for the Pacific exit of the fabled North West Passage.  Beyond this expanse of sand is the Pacific Ocean - the biggest mass of water on the planet;  to the north is Alaska and the North Pole.

“Where your world ends, ours begins”

Haida saying

For months I’d been feeling depressed, anxious and powerless. There seemed to be no solution to the perfect storm of economic and environmental chaos that was (and still is) approaching. My own personal life felt just as stormy and unsolvable. But at the moment when I felt most depressed, I read a book by an American poet called Robert Bringhurst. It was called A Story as Sharp as a Knife. At first what drew me to the book was the discussion about narrative. I’m a writer, and I’m fascinated by narrative. Story telling is fundamental to the human psyche, even our brains are structured to construct narratives. Every time we access a memory, our brain re-assembles its components as a story, making it slightly different every time. So this new and poetic approach to story-telling had a deep fascination.

Bringhurst was writing about a First Nation people called the Haida, who lived on remote islands off the coasts of British Columbia and Alaska, on the eastern edge of the Pacific Ocean. Over a hundred years ago their oral literary tradition, which had been developing for nearly ten thousand years, was transcribed by an anthropologist. Most of the stories, told as poems, had never been translated until Bringhurst began to study them. The way the Haida structured their poems and stories was quite different to the literary traditions we have here in the west, and that fascinated me.  Here was a tradition as old as the Greeks, but offering a different model to follow.

A Haida village before it was abandoned.

They also had a mythology which was not simply about a group of humans who were gods in disguise, but which was animist in origin - regarding animals as supernatural beings and placing humans firmly within the world’s ecology as a cog in the works, rather than a superior being who was in charge of it all. ‘Everything is connected to everything’, was one of the Haida sayings and it summed up their philosophy. There had to be balance in all things in order for the world to function. This was reflected in their literature too, their literary forms involved a balancing of themes and events.

I read all the translations I could source, and everything I could find out about the Haida.

Haida sculptor Bill Reid's carving of the myth 'Raven and the First Men', where the Raven finds human beings in a giant clam shell.

Here, it seemed, was a people who knew how to live in the world without killing it. Perhaps they had an answer to the ills of the twenty first century. Perhaps they could teach us how to live without destroying the planet that supports us. I knew that somehow I had to get there.

Riding the Dog - it's more than 9 hours to Port Hardy

It took a long time to find the money, but I finally made it (thanks to the Royal Literary Fund) in May 2015, flying to Vancouver, crossing over to Victoria, making my way up Vancouver Island by Greyhound bus, and finally a flight to the islands of Haida Gwaii - over a thousand miles from Vancouver. I was incredibly nervous - would I be disappointed?  Would there be anything to write about? I needn't have worried. The big surprise was that I didn't write about any of the things I'd planned;  the story I found when I got there was far bigger than anything I'd imagined.

Alison, a Haida woman in her Haida robes which she is now free to wear.

I found myself in the middle of the nation-wide debate about a process called Truth and Reconciliation - arriving on the eve of publication of an important Commission's report into the treatment of First Nation people and particularly their children.  The chair of the Commission used words such as 'cultural genocide'.  When the colonists arrived in British Columbia there were three indigenous people to every European immigrant, yet they were never consulted about what should happen to their land and laws were quickly passed (a succession of 'Indian' acts) to ensure their dispossession and marginalisation. Their traditional ceremonies were made illegal (you were imprisoned for taking part), their language forbidden and their children removed for 're-education'. One British Columbia politician actually stated that the policy was 'to kill the Indian in the child'. But what happened was that they often killed the child too.  There are those who believe the genocide was not just cultural and there's a lot of evidence on their side.

From the age of 5 to 15, children were placed in residential schools (known as the Schools of Sorrow), run by various religious and state organisations.  Many thousands of children died from neglect and cruelty.  They weren't fed or clothed properly and their emotional needs were ignored - including contact with their families.  Many thousands of others were physically and sexually abused in a manner that became routine. The last school in British Columbia closed in 1986; the last in Canada not until 1996.

In the Haida communities a population of more than 20,000 was reduced to about 500 over two decades in what became known as 'The Great Dying' as epidemics of TB and Smallpox swept through.  The Haida had become displaced, their lives disrupted, their traditional medicines and healthy lifestyles outlawed and they had become vulnerable to European infections in the same way as natural disasters all over the world often lead to outbreaks of disease. There are even stories of the deliberate infection of communities in order to solve 'the Indian problem' by removing them.

The rotting house poles at one abandoned village - Skedans

This was not the story I had come to write, but it was one I couldn't escape.  It was all around me. The abandoned villages, the tenacious survivors putting their languages and traditions back into place, using the very legal system that had dispossessed them to regain possession of their lands and their rights. What also excites me is that the First Nation people are now leading the way in the environmental battle against pollution and exploitation.  They aren't going to allow the west to trash their communities again.  No Enbridge signs were everywhere, as they fight an oil pipeline from the Alberta Tar Sands that would put their World Heritage status islands, and their livelihoods, at risk. We need to give them as much support as we can.

And I had a wonderful time in the vast wildernesses of Haida Gwaii.  I slept in Margaret Atwood's bed (she loved it apparently, despite having to traipse through the kitchen to find the bathroom).

I met a multi-millionaire still driving his own taxi at the age of 89, a poet married to a bank robber (seems a good way to fund poetry!) and one of the script-writers for Frasier and House.  I had an encounter with a bear on a remote beach (well.... its footprint at least - it was too scared to introduce itself!)

Grant A Mincy wrote in The Ecologist that ‘The joy of the wild is rooted deep in the human spirit and without it our lives are starved of a vital nutrient.’ That was how I felt when I arrived, but I found the peace and calm I needed between forests and oceans. Did I find 'The Wild'? Kathleen Jamie writes that ‘Wild is a word like ‘soul’. Such a thing may not exist, but we want it, and we know what we mean when we talk about it.’  I went a long way to find it.

Now I'm writing a book about the journey, which seems to be writing itself at the moment.  Will it be any good?  Or will it be a kind of  'What I did on  my holidays' essay?  Until I finish it I've no idea, but I'm loving every moment as I re-live the experience!

Kathleen Jones is a biographer, novelist and poet who publishes on both sides of the fence.  She blogs at 'A Writer's Life', is often to be found wasting time on Facebook, and Tweets incognito as @kathyferber 

Her latest novel, which was included in 'Outside the Box',  is The Centauress, available on Amazon.

"Bereaved biographer Alex Forbes goes to war-ravaged Croatia to research the life of celebrity artist Zenobia de Braganza and finds herself at the centre of a family conflict over a disputed inheritance. At the Kaštela Visoko Alex uncovers a mutilated photograph, stolen letters and a story of indeterminate gender, passion and betrayal. But can she believe what she is being told? In order to discover the truth about Zenobia, Alex travels to Istria, Venice, New York and London and, in working through the narrative of Zenobia’s life, Alex begins to make sense of her own and finds joy and love in a new relationship."