Ha’gwil y’yeen, Ha’gwil y’yeen, Ha’gwil y’yeen

Lax hlanaahlx xsinaahlxwhl Ga’ Nil ye’etxwm

Walk on, walk on, walk on,

On the breath of Our Grandfathers.

Guardian Spirits

of the Territories

You are the Stewards

of this land

Only the growth rings

of the Trees

Know how long this law

of stewardship is

Like the lens

of the camera

These markers have witnessed

and recorded

The changes that have

taken place

From the silent footsteps

of our ancestors

To the numbing sounds

of clear cut logging

Like the negatives

of a photograph

Transparent - yet full

of information

These images are

encoded...

It is a privilege to write a foreword to Michael Blackstock’sFaces in the Forest: First Nations Art Created on Living Trees.This book is an important guide to understanding how the First Nations experience the sacred forest and create art, and how their traditional knowledge can be respected and integrated into today’s forest practices. I had the good fortune to witness the creation of the original manuscript from which this book has grown. Michael wrote his thesis as a requirement for a master’s degree in First Nations Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia. This work continues the...

Jimmy Burton and I went up north there, and it was cold. We snowshoed all day. We wanted to get to this cabin. And we had to go around this big swamp about four or five miles long, in the pine valley it was swamp, all of it. There was a space in between and we crossed that, and the cabin is way down that end. Geez, I wonder if we can just go across there? There’s a place where there was a hole there [in the ice], it was melted you know. We go far enough around, he was...

Tree art is a mystery to most people, even though it has existed for centuries. Explorers, ethnographers, archaeologists, and forestry professionals have traversed a landscape where tree art was unimagined, and consequently it remained unseen. On the other hand, some First Nations Elders are keenly aware of tree art and its meaning. To see the unseen, one must have “new eyes.” Hyemeyohsts Storm (1972, 78-80) tells a Plains Indian story of how Jumping Mouse gave one of his tiny eyes to the ailing Buffalo. The Buffalo recovered because of Jumping Mouse’s gift, and then became a great gift for the...

Langdon Kihn was an American artist who traveled to Hazelton, B.C., in the early twentieth century. He painted landscapes and portraits of Gitxsan chiefs.¹ He wrote a short article in 1926 about his experiences with the Gitxsan, in which he offered a beguiling invitation: “I am neither a historian nor an ethnologist, just an artist pure and simple, and want to take my reader into an artist’s paradise. Not necessarily an artist’s paradise but any one’s paradise” (Kihn 1926, 170). As your guide I offer you a similar invitation to discover tree art and its impressions upon your spirit. Upon...

As I gaze into the flickering flames of the campfire, I remember a Tsimshi-ari pre-contact oral history about a man who carved a wooden image ofhis lost child. Boas gives the Tsimshian equivalent for a wooden image: “g-a’dEm ga’ng-e”; his literal translation is the “person of wood.” Notethat this is very similar to the modern Gitxsan “Gyetim Gan.” Boas re-corded the story told by Moses and it begins when a young boy is takenby a star. The boy’s father cried and sought help from a woman shaman.She told him the star had taken his son and tied him to the edge...