Totem Pole Restoration on the Skeena, 1925-30: An Early Exercise in Heritage Conservation

Abstract

Between 1926 and 1930 the federal government and the Canadian National Railway restored thirty totem poles along the Skeena River of British Columbia. Done at considerable cost, the work represented the first achievement of preservation of these native monuments in their aboriginal location. Northwest Coast wood sculpture, large or small, had long been of interest to Europeans. Virtually every visitor to the area, from Baranoff, Perez and Cook in the eighteenth century to the most casual tourist, missionary and official of the twentieth, collected examples of it. The totem pole represented the most monumental example of the indigenous life and art of the area. It became a symbol of the Northwest Coast Indian. James G. Swan secured Haida poles for the U.S. Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia and from then on no international exposition and no anthropological seemed complete without at least one pole. In the museum age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the totem pole became for ethnological exhibits what the tyrannosaurus was to a paleontology display. As prize exhibition articles, poles were sought after, but they were not easy to obtain. They often stood apart from transportation routes and, even when accessible, were awkward and costly to move. Negotiations with their owners were usually long and complicated. Nevertheless, an increasing number flowed to private and public collections in Chicago, New York, Seattle, Milwaukee, Berlin, London, Sydney, Montreal, Ottawa and elsewhere. Dr. C. F. Newcombe of Victoria bought and shipped dozens of poles to almost as many institutions, as well as collecting a number for the B.C. Provincial Museum. Those poles not sent to museums were at the mercy of natural processes. Although red cedar, from which most were carved, is remarkably durable, it was not impervious to the dampness and vegetation of the coast. Rot at the base was the usual initial agent of the poles' destruction. Once fallen,