The first Heiltsuk nation celebrates the return of a precious part of history, lost in front of their people for more than a century.
The nation organized a special reunification ceremony for the Bentwood box last Friday which coincided with A party to mark the ratification of their written constitution.
“I was very emotional,” said Christine Smith Martin, CEO of Coastal First Nations, who helped facilitate the return of the American family’s box to the Heiltsuk nation.
“We really want to say to art collectors or anyone can have boxes similar to that, the right thing to do is to bring it home, to make sure that these boxes are home if they can because it is an important room for us, there are a lot of lessons on this box, there are many things that artists may not have seen.” “”
The wooden wooden boxes were specialized, waterproof containers made from a single piece of cedar wood which was steamed and bent, then closed with wooden ankles.
Elroy White, archaeologist, hereditary chief and elected counselor at the Heiltsuk, said that they had been used to transport commercial goods from top to bottom of the coast, as well as for the storage of important items such as instruments or badges. They were also used to store and prepare food.
He said that the Heiltsuk became well known for their skill in making boxes in the 1860s, after their population was decimated by the smallpox and met in a single community.
The ethnographers who visited the community documented them and passed the word, and soon collectors and academics from around the world began to look for them.
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“It was their premise, that they were going to preserve this cultural way of these First Nations, they were called at the time,” he said.
“They were sold, they were forced by the owners.”
The origin of this particular box is unknown, said Elwood, except that it crossed collections and galleries before being bought in Vancouver in 2020. It thinks that it was done time in the 1880s, but said that when objects pass through galleries, their back history is generally not shared, and information like the artist who made them lose.
It was then that Janet and Dave deisley, a couple of Salt Lake City, Utah, bought it at the Douglas Reynolds Gallery on rue Granville.
“After Dave bought the box, we had it for a few years,” Janet Deisley told Global News.
But the article never felt well in the couple’s collection, and they decided to return it – free of charge – reaching out to the Coastal Nations to get help to connect it to the Heiltsuk.
“The community in which these artefacts were created is where they belong to a spiritual meaning,” said Dave Diesley.
“I imagine that they felt what we feel when we had it in our office during this short period of time. You can feel. It’s like a piece of ancestor who wants to go home … You look at him and you see this story in there,” said Martin.
“I imagine that they felt this desire, because it is not only a box, there are minds attached to it, there are ancestors attached to it.”
The coastal First Nations accepted the box, but she stayed in their office for a while when they worked to organize an appropriate return.
White came to Vancouver to authenticate the box and work on the best way and the best time to go home safely.
“I knew that would not have a story, but the important part was…. It was always important for the Heiltsuk,” he said.
“Elroy went down and made a ceremony in our office, and we had a conversation to the box and let them know that they are going home now. It was a long journey as you can imagine, since the 1800s, because this box is far from their territory.”
Last week, the box was honored in the Big House Heiltsuk in Bella Bella as part of the constitution ceremonies, and the members had the opportunity to get closer and see a piece of their lost history.
“It was so sincere to see this, seeing the artists look at it and somehow emphasizes different things,” said Martin.
For whites, it is only a step of the processing process to repatriate the Heiltsuk culture which has been taken from the community and now lies in museums, galleries and private collections around the world.
The nation has spent decades building an articles database and has identified 34 institutions around the world which are home to more than 1,000 Heiltsuk articles.
They have repatriated four articles since 2022, including the headquarters of a historic chief who was returned to the community last summer.
This is the work that White intends to continue, and that Martin hopes that success will be more successful.
“I hope we have many more of these boxes,” she said.
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