Educational Media Reviews Online

One day in 1929, a totem pole which had stood since 1872 near the village of Kitamaat in the Kitlope Valley of northwestern British Columbia, disappeared without a trace. For more than sixty years the whereabouts of the marker remained a mystery to the Haisla people, whose chief, G’psgolox, had it erected to commemorate his family’s miraculous deliverance from an epidemic of European diseases. When a villager who remembered his grandmother’s stories spotted an image of the totem in an anthropology text, the Haisla at long last learned that their carving had become the property of the Swedish government, an object in the collection of the National Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm.

What follows is the remarkable story of the Haisla people’s emotional reunion with their sacred marker in Stockholm, and of the rekindling of personal and historical connections within their community at home. The G’psgolox Pole, which, in Haisla tradition would have weathered where it stood and long since returned to the earth, has instead been preserved for posterity. An irony not lost on the Haisla, it illustrates the sharp divide between Native American and European attitudes toward cultural artifacts – and in a larger sense, toward the meaning of life itself.

This provocative and moving documentary was made with extraordinary respect and sensitivity for both the Haisla and Swedish points of view. The dignity with which people of the two cultures interact is uplifting and permeates the story and the pace at which it unfolds. The film is rich in sound and imagery – landscapes, faces, stories, voices, drums, chants, carvers – and like the totem itself, serves as a link between people past and present. Totem: The Return of the G’psgolox Pole is highly recommended for libraries and programs with general collections or collections in Native American studies, anthropology, history, art, and museum studies.