How a Wet’suwet’en Totem Pole Wound Up in Paris

The totem pole stands in the entryway of France’s Musée du Quai Branly, tall and elegant but somewhat out of place — the contours of its weathered exterior in stark contrast with its clinical surroundings.

Known as the K’ëgit pole, it stands 15 metres tall, rooted in the museum’s lower level and extending into the main-floor foyer. Strangers entering the museum breeze past, often without a glance. Its grace is paired with a loneliness. For nearly a century, the pole has been separated from its people.

But the pole’s family recently came to visit.

In October, members of the Wet’suwet’en Nation travelled to Paris and gathered around the K’ëgit pole for the first time since it was removed from Hagwilget Village in 1938. The visit marked the beginning of what is likely to be a years-long process to reconnect, educate and discuss what comes next.

“It was emotional,” Ron Austin says, pausing to remember the moment he first entered the museum and leaned over the railing to take in the full height of the pole.

“I shed tears for our ancestors,” says Austin, who holds the traditional Wet’suwet’en name Tsekot. “My grandfather was one of them that was in the group that was selling it. They didn’t want to sell it. But they had to let it go.”

The K’ëgit pole was carved in the mid-1800s for C’idimsggin’ïs, at the time Likhsilyu Clan’s highest-ranking Chief and a member of the House of Many Eyes. For the better part of a century, it stood overlooking the Bulkley River, Wedzin Kwa in Wet’suwet’en, at Hagwilget Village.

At the base of the pole is K’ëgit, a mythical shaman whose story tells the origins of the Wet’suwet’en clan system. It also bears an otter, tsantiy, another supernatural being and one of the clan’s crests. Austin believes a human figure perched at the top represents C’idimsggin’ïs, although it’s unclear who held the hereditary title when the pole was carved.

Austin, a master carver and member of the Likhsilyu Clan, is next in line to take the name C’idimsggin’ïs. The title has been vacant for years.

A sale made under duress

From Austin’s home in Hagwilget, it’s a 20-minute walk down a steep trail to the old village site. Established as a fishing village in the early 1800s, this lower bench once held a series of longhouses. Today, it shows little evidence of its previous occupation.

The K’ëgit pole once stood here alongside several others honouring clan Chiefs. The others likely decomposed into the earth long ago, following the Wet’suwet’en custom of allowing poles to remain where they fall.

By all accounts, the K’ëgit pole was purchased. In 1938, the Swiss American surrealist artist Kurt Seligmann visited Hagwilget in search of the oldest and largest pole in the region. The K’ëgit pole fit the bill. Seligmann spent several months negotiating its sale, a deal that included marrying a deceased person so that he could be adopted into the clan. Only as a clan member could Seligmann lay claim to the pole.

Seligmann paid $100, about $2,000 in today’s currency. But indications are that the transaction occurred under duress, with clan members believing they had little power to prevent a sale that had the blessing of the Canadian government.

“They didn’t want to sell it at first, but somehow Seligmann used the authorities, the Department of Indian Affairs, to negotiate,” Austin says. “They pressured the Wet’suwet’en into selling it.”

Austin blames the pole’s removal, which involved dragging it up the steep slope surrounding the old village site, for wearing away some of its detail. It was severed in two places and loaded onto a train bound for Vancouver, where it was shipped overseas.

“The rest was history,” Austin says. “They took it to France.”

The K’ëgit pole was raised in Paris’s natural history museum, Musée de l’Homme, in 1939. It remained there until 2003, when it was moved to Quai Branly.

Meeting an ancestor

When Ron Mitchell walked into Musée du Quai Branly in October, the pole greeted him with a sense of familiarity.

“It’s our pole,” he remembers thinking. “That’s our Wet’suwet’en totem pole.”

Mitchell holds the name Hagwilnegh, a title that surpassed C’idimsggin’ïs as clan leader around the turn of the last century. He was one of four Likhsilyu Chiefs that joined the delegation to Paris. As his eyes settled on the pole, he was struck silent with emotion. He paused, thinking about his great-grandparents, who were involved in its sale, and his father, who would have been 14 years old at the time.

“Good thing I didn’t have to speak right away, let’s just put it that way,” he says.

After the museum closed that evening, the group returned for a private audience with the pole. They performed a ceremony and sang, using a rattle to call on the ancestors. Mitchell spoke about the pole’s history and acknowledged those who had held the name C’idimsggin’ïs.

“When the museum was closed, it was a different feeling. It was sadness and heaviness and tears,” says Birdy Markert, a Likhsilyu Clan member who holds the traditional name ’Ilhdesinon.

It was one of several visits to the museum during the six-day trip to Paris. On one occasion, the group huddled in a tiny archive room, poring over photographs taken by Seligmann during his time in Hagwilget. Some saw images of ancestors for the first time — images of people like Arthur Michell, who held the name Hagwilnegh and helped to facilitate the sale.

Markert believes Arthur Michell, her great-grandfather, was influenced by his experience of being jailed in the early 1900s for protecting his land. It likely made him hesitant to go up against the authorities.

When Seligmann delivered the K’ëgit pole to Musée de l’Homme nearly a century ago, he provided it on loan. When he died in 1962, he left it to his wife, Arlette Paraf, who then donated it to the museum when she died.

But Paraf was not a clan member, Markert says. This means that, according to the Wet’suwet’en law of nec’ïdilt’ës, the pole should have returned to the clan.

Questions of ownership

France is in the process of wrestling with the spoils of its colonial history. The country has accrued hundreds of thousands of artifacts dating back centuries, as far back as the widespread looting that occurred during Napoleon’s rule.

Musée du Quai Branly, which was built 20 years ago to house Indigenous art, is France’s largest ethnological museum. It houses almost 370,000 items from around the world, many of them taken without consent. Less than one per cent of its collection, about 3,500 artifacts, is on display at any given time.

In 2018, a report commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron titled “Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics” called on the French government to return cultural items taken without consent.

Three years later, France repatriated 26 treasures looted from the West African country of Benin. But the extent of restitution has fallen short of expectations.

Because artifacts housed in state museums are considered public property, repatriation can be complicated, says Tyler McCreary, who grew up in Smithers, on Wet’suwet’en territory, and currently teaches Indigenous studies at Florida State University.

“They conceive of their holdings as the inalienable possession of the French people,” McCreary says. “The French cultural identity, I think, sees themselves as uniquely the protectors of global heritage.”

McCreary says that countries on the “European periphery” have moved faster to return cultural heritage — places like the National Museum of Scotland, which recently returned a pole belonging to the Nisga’a Nation.

“I think that’s in part because Scotland has a critical relationship to the history of empire,” he says. “They're implicated in it, certainly, but they have their own complicated way of understanding how British imperialism can erase Scottish identity.”

In France, state ownership means that legislative changes are required to repatriate cultural heritage. The country took steps last year to simplify the process, passing laws streamlining the return of Nazi-looted objects and human remains.

But the bill of sale that accompanies the K’ëgit pole makes its ownership more complicated.

“The question of ownership also seems so similarly absurd for a piece of the landscape. In my mind, that is not even something that can be sold,” says Ann Marie Murnaghan, an archival researcher at Toronto’s York University, who has been working with McCreary to better understand the pole’s sale and its impact on the Wet’suwet’en.

Also combing through Seligmann’s extensive archives is Joanne Connauton, who lives in Terrace and is doing her PhD research through Florida State University. Connauton helped organized the recent delegation to Paris, in collaboration with the Kyah Wiget Education Society, which oversees education in the Wet’suwet’en community of Witset. McCreary and Connauton, along with several people involved in the nation’s cultural revitalization, also joined the trip.

Connauton’s research examines differing cultural perspectives on ownership.

“I’m digging into this idea of what is important to a museum, in terms of preservation and restoration, as opposed to what's important in terms of restoration for the Wet’suwet’en,” she says.

While western museums favour the preservation of cultural heritage, Wet’suwet’en protocols dictate that totem poles, like people, have a life cycle that ultimately returns them to the earth.

“Our teaching is, when the pole starts falling, you leave it and you let it fall to the ground, because that’s its time,” says Drew Harris, a Likhsilyu Clan member who joined her mother, Wii Esdes Sandra Martin Harris, on the trip. “They’re stopping it from completing its life cycle.”

The K’ëgit pole has been soaked in chemical preservatives and filled with epoxy. It has been broken into three pieces and put back together. “It’s a pole with some trauma,” Markert says.

Not only would returning it to the earth likely be impossible, it would be irresponsible. The pole is filled with toxic chemicals that would leach into the ground.

The simple fact is, the K’ëgit pole didn’t fall, Mitchell says. It has a new destiny.

What comes next for the K’ëgit pole

The recent trip marked the beginning of a conversation among the Likhsilyu Clan, and the Wet’suwet’en more broadly, that will likely continue for years. That conversation will consider multiple options for reconnecting with the K’ëgit pole.

Among the possibilities is asking for the pole’s return through the process of rematriation. Unlike the traditional repatriation, which simply refers to the return of an item, rematriation takes a more holistic approach, Connauton says, by honouring cultural protocols and restoring relationships.

The recent trip to Paris is a first step in the rematriation process. But actually bringing the pole home presents challenges.

French bureaucracy aside, there is the question of where the pole would be housed. Preserving it would require a climate-controlled facility several storeys high, something that currently doesn’t exist on Wet’suwet’en territory. The cost to build the facility would be “astronomical,” Markert says.

The clan could build a replica pole, something that is also being considered.

But perhaps the greatest outcome from the recent trip is the potential for education. Markert, who is district principal of Indigenous education for the local school district, says plans are already underway to teach the story of the K’ëgit pole in the classroom. She hopes the recent trip will lead to an ongoing cultural exchange, where both Wet’suwet’en and non-Indigenous students, in collaboration with French schools, could visit and learn about the pole and its history.

In the meantime, the K’ëgit pole continues to greet strangers at Musée du Quai Branly. For its own clan members, simply performing a ceremony and taking photos with it required a series of bureaucratic hurdles.

Before the group left, Martin Harris placed a medicine bag with the pole. The small cotton pouch was filled with medicinal plants — juniper, devil’s club, cedar and kinnikinnick — that she had collected on the clan’s territories and laid under the sun and moon to dry, a ceremonial blessing.

Museum staff quickly scuttled the pouch into a freezer, fearing that the foreign organic matter could contain pathogens harmful to the museum’s artifacts.

Like the medicine bag, the story of C’idimsggin’ïs is “frozen,” the clan members say. It’s a story of love, adds Martin Harris — love for culture, love for art and love for story. It’s a tale that connects clan members to the territories, their spirituality and well-being, she says.

The clan hopes that, by reconnecting with the pole, the name C’idimsggin’ïs will become active again, and the Chief will resume their position in the feast hall alongside Hagwilnegh.

“It really did feel like a relative that we hadn't seen in a very long time. It felt old and wise. I felt like it was cared for, but it was still just very isolated and alone,” Martin Harris says. “You can still feel that it has a story and a purpose. That’s very clear.”