SACRED JOURNEY HOME.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

In smoke and flame, a long journey home neared its end Friday.

In a ceremony at the University of Oregon, the remains of two ancestors of the Haida Nation long separated from their home soil were reunited with their descendants for the final leg of a pilgrimage that has spanned the continent. The ancestral remains were part of the collection of the UO Museum of Natural and Cultural History and almost the last of more than 450 Haida people returned home for burial.

Andy Wilson, a member of the four-person Haida repatriation group that visited the university Friday, said the nation has been working for more than 10 years to collect the ancient remains and bring them home. He called it both a duty to the past and a way of healing for the present.

"The important thing is to get them out of the museums and into the villages where everybody can pay their respects to them," he said. "We feel it's a healing process for our community to come together and pay respect to our ancestors."

It's an odyssey that began a century and more ago, when archaeologists and artifact hunters dug up the remains of ancient people whose descendants still call their home Haida Gwaii and that maps call the Queen Charlotte Islands off the British Columbia coast. Some collectors believed that the Haida - decimated by diseases from Europe - were on the verge of dying out, and they wanted to preserve a record of their culture; others just wanted trophies and decorations.

But the Haida survived and are thriving. And they are slowly reclaiming their past.

On Friday morning, Wilson and three companions donned traditional black-and-red regalia, each garment decorated with their clan crest, for a ceremony outside the Many Nations Longhouse. Joined by a half-dozen Native Americans from Oregon, they sang and drummed softly around a small fire before burning two cedar planks laden with traditional Haida food - salmon, roe, sea kelp and more - to nourish their ancestors on their journey to the next world.

As the flames consumed the offering, each person stepped forward and sprinkled sacred herbs into the fire, adding the aroma of sage, tobacco, sweetgrass and cedar to the burning wood. Afterward, the four Haida members went to the museum for a private ceremony in which the remains were placed in traditional bentwood boxes lined with cedar shavings.

Wilson said the repatriation effort began more than 10 years ago when a former curator of a Haida museum left for Los Angeles. It was later discovered that he had taken many remains and relics with him, and the nation contacted police and later retrieved the stolen pieces.

"As we got them back, we realized there's a lot more out there," Wilson said. "We began writing to museums asking for inventories of Haida cultural remains and burial material."

They spent two years going over the inventories and more time planning repatriation efforts and negotiating with museums to get the remains back. Beginning at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, they have worked their way back across the continent, collecting their ancestors and bringing them home.

Forty ancestors were returned from New York. Chicago's Field Museum and the Canadian Museum of Civilization each had 150; smaller numbers were recovered from several other museums.

Wilson complimented UO museum officials and said they have done everything they could to help with the repatriation, even though they have the fewest remains of all. The remains have been in the museum's collection since 1952; the museum stopped accepting human remains in the late 1970s and now involves the affected tribe when any are found.

On its way home from Eugene, the repatriation committee will stop at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia for the last four ancestors. The nation plans an "end of mourning" celebration in June to mark the end of the North American repatriation effort.

Wilson said the trips have been emotionally draining, knowing that their chiefs and elders are watching closely to make sure the remains are handled with respect. And it is difficult going to museums and finding ancestors stored in drawers.

"It is both sad and joyous," he said. "We're happy that people are giving them back to us and we can return them to their home. But we're really sad they were taken in the first place."

But he said he has seen a change in recent years that gives him heart. The tribe encountered resistance when it first began efforts to reclaim its ancestors, but now he finds that people are not only willing but eager to help them.

And it's not only museums. People who collected artifacts have begun to contact the tribe to ask how they can return them; sometimes they simply show up in the mail.

"There's quite a shift happening, and we can see it from our little island looking out at North America," he said. "I only hope it's happening in other places in the world."

CAPTION(S):

Wearing the "Split Raven" design of his clan, Andy Wilson of the Haida Nation of Canada performs a traditional dance at the Many Nations Longhouse on Friday. Wilson led a delegation to retrieve ancestral remains that had been held by the UO's natural history museum. Paul Carter / The Register-Guard Haida members Andy Wilson (left to right), Sue Gladstone and Darlene Hooper at the Many Nations Longhouse Friday.