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By Root 1861 0

to the Gitksan (or Gitxsan) nation. At the time of my visit, the Gitksan had just lodged a lawsuit with the governments of both British Columbia and Canada. They wanted the province and the nation to recognize that the Gitksan had lived there a long time, had never left, had never agreed to give their land away, and had thus retained legal title to about eleven thousand square miles of the province. They were very willing to negotiate, they said, but they were not willing to not be negotiated with.

Flying in, I could see why the Gitksan were attached to the area. The plane swept past the snowy, magnificent walls of the Rocher de Boule Mountains and into the confluence of two forested river valleys. Mist steamed off the land. People were fishing in the rivers for steelhead and salmon even though they were 165 miles from the coast.

The Gitanmaax band of the Gitksan has its headquarters in Hazelton, but most members live in a reserve just outside town. I drove to the reserve, where Neil Sterritt, head of the Gitanmaax council, explained the litigation to me. A straightforward, level-voiced man, he had got his start as a mining engineer and then come back home with his shirtsleeves rolled up, ready for a lengthy bout of legal wrangling. After multiple trials and appeals, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 1997 that British Columbia had to negotiate the status of the land with the Gitksan. Talks were still ongoing in 2005, two decades after the lawsuit first began.

After a while Sterritt took me to see ‘Ksan, a historical park and art school created in 1970. In the park were several re-created longhouses, their facades covered in the forcefully elegant, black-and-red arcs of Northwest Coast Indian art. The art school trained local Indians in the techniques of translating traditionally derived designs into silk-screen prints. Sterritt left me in a back room of the schoolhouse and told me to look around. There was more in the room than he may have realized, for I quickly found what looked like storage boxes for a number of old and beautiful masks. Beside them was a stack of modern prints, some of which used the same designs. And there were boxes of photographs, old and new alike, many of splendid artworks.

In Northwest Coast art the subjects are flattened and distorted—it’s as if they’ve been reduced from three dimensions to two and then folded like origami. At first I found all the designs hard to interpret, but soon some seemed to pop right out of the surface. They had clean lines that cut space into shapes at once simple and complex: objects tucked into objects, creatures stuffed into their own eyes, humans who were half beast and beasts who were half human—all was metamorphosis and surreal commotion.

A few of the objects I looked at I understood immediately, many I didn’t understand at all, some I thought I understood but probably didn’t, and some maybe even the Gitksan didn’t understand, in the way that most Europeans today can’t truly understand the effect of Byzantine art on the spirits of the people who saw it at the time of its creation. But I was delighted by the boldly graphic lines and dazzled by the sense that I was peeking into a vibrant past that I had not known existed and that continued to inform the present in a way I had not realized. For an hour or two I went from object to object, always eager to see more. In assembling this book, I hope to share the excitement I felt then, and have felt many times since.

INTRODUCTION

Holmberg’s Mistake

A View from Above

IN THE BENI

The plane took off in weather that was surprisingly cool for central Bolivia and flew east, toward the Brazilian border. In a few minutes the roads and houses disappeared, and the only traces of human settlement were the cattle scattered over the savanna like sprinkles on ice cream. Then they, too, disappeared. By that time the archaeologists had their cameras out and were clicking away in delight.

Below us lay the Beni, a Bolivian province about the size of Illinois and Indiana put together, and nearly as flat. For