Photo: Miniature totem poles carved by members of Canada's First Nations in Ye Old Curiosity Shop, Seattle

A few weeks ago, when I was preparing a talk on my book Glaciers, Bears and Totems.. to be given at the Vancouver Boat Show, I asked myself, "What would interest British Columbia boaters in Alaska?" British Columbia has plenty of its own bears and totems. Were there other things besides glaciers that would interest them? Of course, there's the obvious, that you have to sail the entire coast of BC in order to reach Alaska, but that was too easy. I settled on shared history and in a few minutes had a list of historic connections:

1. Ketchikan's fishing industry owed some of its early growth to Canada's trans-continental railroad with its terminus at Prince Rupert, BC.
2. Tsimshians from Metlakatla BC emigrated to Metlakatla AK in 1879 as a result of a controversy with the Anglican Church.
3. Kaigani Haida crossed the Dixon Entrance from Haida Gwaii to settle on Prince of Wales Island in the early 1700s and still maintain their ties to Haida Gwaii.
4. The Cassiar Gold Rush of 1862 on the banks of the Stikine River in BC spurred the growth of the Alaska town of Wrangell.
5. The 1898 Klondike Gold Rush in Canada's Yukon opened up Alaska to development and changed it from Seward's Folly to "our Alaska."

Happy with this list, I started to put together my talk. But I quickly ran into a problem. I like to begin my talks by reading the opening paragraph of the introduction to Glaciers, Bears and Totems:

I saw my first Alaskan totem poles, in miniature, in Ye Old Curiosity Shop on Seattle's waterfront when I was a child of six or seven. Along with the shop's famous shrunken heads and Sylvester the mummified corpse, the totem poles fascinated me. I knew that the strange brightly painted carvings of eagles, ravens and bears were from an exotic place.

Should I open a talk in Vancouver with a scene from a Seattle store? I couldn't expect BC boaters to relate to Seattle's Ye Old Curiosity Shop.. Then I realized with a start that there was a connection: the miniature totem poles were carved by members of the British Columbia First Nations from Nitinat on Vancouver Island. Last September, one of those carvers, a street person named John Williams, had been shot by a Seattle policeman when crossing a street. The resulting protests and media attention, including articles in the Seattle Times., had brought out the story of several generations of carvers who had sold their work in the store on Seattle's waterfront. In January I had met another of them while waiting for a bus at Seattle's Pioneer Square. I was reading a story about the policeman who shot Williams, when an elderly Native man standing next to me asked if he could read the front page. "He shot my brother," he told me, pointing to a picture on the page.

"Are you a carver too?" I asked him.
"Yes, "he replied. "I sell carvings to Ye Old Curiosity Shop. And this is my sister," he said, nodding to a gentle-looking woman standing next to him. I looked at them and the sadness of their story hit me for the first time. I had read the story, but until that day, hadn't fully absorbed it.

When I wrote the introductory paragraph about Ye Old Curiosity Shop over a year ago, I hadn't known who the carvers of the miniature poles were; I had relied on a childhood impression that I was looking at Alaskan totems.

So even after Glaciers, Bears and Totems: Sailing in Search for the Real Southeast Alaska has been published, I am still searching for the real Southeast Alaska. And I can claim a Canadian connection in the very first paragraph. Unfortunately, it is not a happy one.