This is where they’ll have the headstone “turning” before the potlatch. In the old days, they put up a totem, or mortuary, pole. Gravestones are among the accommodations to Christianity that worked better than outright rejection — like “accepting” an anti-potlatch law but saying you needed to hold a few more. By 1910, the majority of Haida had converted, and the potlatch, renamed “doings,” went underground, its elements dispersed. By the ’20s, covert potlatchers might have simply distributed movie tickets. It persisted tactfully.

The cemetery is plain, fenced, beside the ocean. A sign says Only Natives Allowed. Dick explains that a smallpox epidemic (as if there was only one, and all its victims are before us) devastated the Haida a century ago: “We went from 10,000 to 600.” The survivors fled into the woods, abandoning the dozen or so settlements that had thrived, including Cumshewa, where Charlie Wesley’s clan lived. Eventually, missionaries convinced them to return, but only to mission sites in Masset and Skidegate; now some former settlements are being reinhabited. Research says there were numerous smallpox outbreaks, starting in the late eighteenth century, reducing the population from a pre-contact level of over 10,000 to 588 by 1915. Today it has recovered to about 2,500.

On the way back, we stop to see Haida master carver Norman Price. I’d met him earlier at the garage where I was renting a car. He was having his Cadillac serviced. His face looks carved. I toy with buying something, till I learn that a little black pole twenty-five centimetres high, made of argillite, a form of slate only found here, costs $12,000. Lewis Hyde calls gifts “models of the creative process”: the artist received his talent gratis, and passes its outcome to others. He has a gift; he makes a gift. Back when I wrote plays, I thought of them as gifts to my friends. It seemed to suit something as concrete as a play (or a carving) more than, say, a novel. Price asks if I know Haida artist Bill Reid’s work. A bit, I say, and ask his opinion. “Too many details,” he replies, like the Emperor Franz Joseph II telling Mozart that he uses too many notes. We go next door to his workshop, which has a shutter to slide the ends of full-sized poles outside. It’s spare and clean, like his work. He’s the Count Basie of carvers.

After dinner, we return to the hall to watch a kids’ dance rehearsal. Dick wants to explain the dances in a way he won’t be able to tomorrow night, when he’s at the head table. The dancers aren’t all Haida. There are also local white kids. A scary figure, the hummia, enters first and chases away evil spirits. A teenager in a wooden raven mask, which clacks as he tilts his head side to side, catches that raven quality and suggests how uncanny these dances once were. There’s also a men’s competition dance, which could have been ferocious in its time. Dick’s grandkids come to have their masks, which he made, adjusted; it’s sweaty under there. These dances were banned, too; same language, same section of the Indian Act. Perhaps they were the cultural component of the challenge to the dominant patterns of the time. As American anarchist Emma Goldman, who visited Canada often in the first half of the twentieth century, liked to say, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” Officials like Duncan Campbell Scott denounced the dances’ barbaric, literally bloodthirsty, nature as they claimed to know it (dancers biting into living flesh!) — what anthropologists called its “Dionysian quality.” The bans weren’t repealed until 1951. After that, it was a matter of reclamation, which wasn’t easy, given the decimation of the people, their culture and language, the effects of residential schools.

When the rehearsal is over, we return to Dick’s home to transfer more cases of jam. He’s happy he and Alma are reclaiming their house. Driving back, we pass an outdoor pavilion where war canoes and totem poles are sculpted from giant cedars. It’s late and dark, but someone is there alone, working by a single light, like a mechanic under the hood. Dick says it’s Guujaw, who spends his days negotiating land claims and treaty rights; this is often the only time he gets to carve.

It’s Saturday morning, almost time for the headstone ceremony. I collect my rent-a-wreck and drive to the cemetery. It’s raining hard. As I enter, I’m hailed by George Westwood, a Scot who used to work at ctv in Toronto. He’s been here twenty-five years. He’s the undertaker. He gently suggests I remove my hat. Luckily I have an umbrella. He says it’s a shame I never met Charlie Wesley, and goes on to describe his funeral. There was an open casket with Charlie in full headdress, looking like a pharaoh — a government bureaucrat’s term — on two-and-a-half-metre planks held together by copper rods through the wood that, George explains, will oxidize so the coffin won’t disintegrate. We could have been the Athens of the Northwest Coast, he says — using the same “we” as Dick — if not for the smallpox. Wrapped in a gorgeous button blanket, he says he was close to Charlie and was adopted by the family a few weeks ago. As women of the family ceremoniously wash the headstone, Dick’s son-in-law, a Maori from New Zealand, his face tattooed in the Maori way, joins us. Then everyone heads to the new hall for the potlatch.

I’m apprehensive about passing the hours till it starts. But it’s no problem. People arrive and hang. It’s today’s activity: waiting for the potlatch. There are ranks of tables for 600, though there’s no guest list or seating plan. In the bleachers, kids wait to see if there will be room at the tables.

I meet Robert Russ, a youthful man studying on the mainland, who emcees these events. He was spotted by a “mentor” and groomed for it. He knows the “protocols,” a beloved word here: it concerns tradition and its recovery; it means how things are done, after being suppressed or forgotten. This one is unusual, he says, since it separates the mortuary potlatch, which we’re at, from the chieftainship potlatch, which usually follows immediately but won’t be held until spring. He has a sort of bureaucratic mind, says timing is everything in this rushed society (as people drift in and loll about); in the old days, a potlatch would take days, but he aims to get everyone out by 9:30 p.m. “You need a thick skin for my job,” he says. He gathers protocols and sends them to the chiefs, who add their own clan versions, which vary, like customs, from one First Nation to another along the coast. Once again, I abandon the delusion that they’re calling this a potlatch to suit me.

I find a spot with a good view of the head table. Two women from India sit down; they’ve just arrived as tourists and heard about the potlatch. A couple of grumpy locals join us. They make sarcastic cracks but stick around for the gifts. Somehow the transition to formal event takes place.

The chiefs are drummed in, wearing headdresses. Guujaw is among the drummers, underlining the difference between the political leadership he provides and that of the chiefs, who represent continuity with tradition and the solidarity of the nation. This is a strange distinction for us, but it remains prevalent in places with strong traditional ties, like Iraq and Afghanistan.