By Joshua Hunt.
An unfinished boat hidden on a remote island in Alaska illuminates a missing chapter in the history of traditional Haida and Tlingit canoe building.
When I first see the canoe, in May, it takes a moment to distinguish the long, shapely slab of cedar from the patch of earth that has spent more than a century trying to reclaim it. Covered in moss and ravaged by decades of slow rot, the narrow boat lay in the same spot where Indigenous Alaskans had carved it from the trunk of a western red cedar. They did this in the place where the tree fell—first by cutting it into two pieces, then by fashioning the canoe from the lower portion of the tree so that it sits between the stump and the abandoned upper part of the trunk like a philosophical question made real: excised and reshaped but never moved from where it fell, is it not still part of the tree? Seaworthy but destined never to touch the sea, is it not still a boat?
I’d traveled halfway around the world for a glimpse of this forest-floor tableau: a long flight from my home in Tokyo, Japan, to Seattle, Washington, followed by a shorter trip to Ketchikan, a small town in southeast Alaska where I spent much of my childhood. From there, a very small plane took me to Prince of Wales Island to meet my guide, Stormy Hamar, who shepherded me to the canoe site by car, then on a small skiff powered by a 60-horsepower outboard engine, and eventually on foot. With no clear path to follow, we made our own way from the shoreline to the island’s lush, hilly interior, climbing over trees felled by wind, crawling beneath spiky tendrils of devil’s club, passing through shallow streams and around walls of dense brush.
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