Photo: Residents of the Haida town of Hydaburg, Alaska, paddle a dugout canoe.

I was taking my photographic exhibit of Southeast Alaska off the wall at the Center for Wooden Boats, where it had been hanging for two months, when Saaduuts, CWB's artist in residence, walked through the gallery.

"Do you recognize any of these places?" I asked him. (Saaduuts is from Hydaburg on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska.)

"Oh yes, I've been all over that area," he answered.

He stopped in front of a picture of old lanterns hanging from a rafter in the village of Myers Chuck.

"You need to look for connections," he told me. I looked at the picture, wondering if he was telling me I should be taking pictures differently or hanging them in a different order. But I was busy wrapping up photos and didn't pursue. Saaduuts walked away to look at a photo of totem poles in the town of Klawock on Prince of Wales Island. "Did you see their canoe?" he asked me.

"We didn't see a canoe at Klawock," I answered. "But we saw one at Hydaburg." (In Ch 3.3 of Glaciers, Bears and Totems, I described the adults and toddlers of Hydaburg paddling around the Hydaburg Marina in the canoe while older children raced in metal canoes.)

"I made that canoe," he told me, "with the help of schoolchildren from Seattle."

I hadn't know that, hadn't thought to ask where the canoe came from when we were there, assuming it came from Hydaburg. The idea that schoolchildren in Seattle had built the canoe made me think of both Hydaburg and the canoe differently. I had admired the efforts the people of Hydaburg were making to educate their children in their culture. But I had thought of them as doing it on their own. Now I saw Hydaburg as part of a wider effort by people helping each other to revive their cultures. It was a connection from Hydaburg to Seattle and to the Center for Wooden Boats, an organization whose board of Trustees I sit on. Now I understood what Saaduuts meant about "looking for the connection"!

That evening I googled "Hydaburg canoe" and found an article about Saaduuts and the canoe in the Juneau Empire. According to the article, the canoe had been made at Seattle's Alternative School No. 1 and had been donated by the schoolchildren to Hydaburg. You can read about it here: http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/040604/sta_canoe.shtml.