This morning we heard from John Broadhead, who's part of the Gowgaia Institute which is a kind of now dead-ish organization that focused on environmental issues, mapping and creating knowledge for the Haida title case during the worst of the logging industry. Gowgaia, specifically John himself and another geographer, produced some incredible maps including this one.
Plus I scored a beautiful print of the same map. It shows the modeled data of the salmon runs on Haida Gwaii. The really big red river in the middle of Graham Island is the Yakun River, which is sort of the breadbasket of the sea for the interior parts of Haida Gwaii. We've been hearing a lot about the oceans and fisheries in class lately, partially because of our courses and partially because it's also the focus of the Enbridge oral history hearings that are going on right now. The ocean is incredibly, incredibly important to the Haida and their way of life, the non-Haida people and then general ecosystem of the islands. No part of Haida Gwaii land is more than 20km from salt water and about 25% of the land base is within 1km of the sea.
In the afternoon, we headed over to Skidegate to visit the elementary school and lose brutally at dodgeball to the grade 7 class. Twice. It rocked. Then we went over to SHIP, the Skidegate Haida Immersion Program. It's an amazing organization that's been around for about fourteen years that's focused on saving, reviving and teaching the Skidegate dialect of the Haida language. There are three dialects of Haida left, Skidegate, Massett and Haidaborg (from the Alaskan Haida). SHIP consists most of the Elders from Skidegate, some of whom are more fluent in Haida and work to document and preserve the language, including figuring out how to write the words using they alphabet they devised and going over maps of Haida Gwaii with a fine-toothed comb, documenting place names all over the islands. The maps they produce are invaluable to the Haida title case (which is currently in the judicial system but inactive I think) as it shows continual, exclusive occupation of Haida Gwaii by the Haida people. There are other Elders and a few youth involved in SHIP more on a learning level. Together they've also created school curriculum and the elementary school in Skidegate and the high school in Queen Charlotte both have mandatory Haida language curriculum now. We played bingo with the Elders.
After that we headed over to Ben Davidson's gallery to see some of his carving and photography. So beautiful!
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| Raven stealing the moon. |
And this evening we're heading back to the K'aay Centre to watch Jenn, our esteemed leader, present the Haida Gwaii Higher Education Society on Social Enterprise Dragons, a Dragon's Den-themed program for non-profit organizations. We made the top three finalists, fingers crossed for tonight!
This maps is soo cool : ) also, I know the ocean is everywhere on the island because sometimes I make maps and layer an outline of the ocean on top the landmass to improve the cartographic represenation of the coastline...this works well along most of BCs coast where you do not notice if you loose a km or so of shoreline, but when I do this and zoom in to Haida Gwaii the whole island virtually disapears! Haha... I think I need to do some fieldwork this summer, official mapping research paid for by help of course. In a tent. Thanks for your great posts Caity Blue : )
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