'The power and determination needed to look towards the future': Reconciliation Pole installed at UBC

The Province
April 2, 2017

https://goo.gl/FYszI6

Jim Hart with his totem pole art at UBC in Vancouver, B.C., March 31, 2017.

A crew prepares Jim Hart's totem pole art at UBC in Vancouver, B.C., March 31, 2017.

A carved pole installed Saturday at the University of B.C. contains thousands of copper nails that serve as a reminder of Canada’s traumatic colonial past.

Each nail — hammered into the 16.8-metre-tall, 800-year-old red cedar pole by residential-school survivors, affected families and school children — represents an indigenous child who died at a residential school.

Officially known as the Reconciliation Pole, the monument tells the story of the school system, which was founded in the 1800s and not shuttered until 1996.

“My hope for the pole is that it moves people to learn more about the history of residential schools and to understand their responsibility to reconciliation,” said James Hart, Haida master carver and hereditary chief, in a media release.

“The schools were terrible places. Working on the pole has been difficult but I have loved it too. We need to pay attention to the past and work together on a brighter future.”

UBC graduate Rob Hall travelled to his alma mater from Victoria with his mom Sandy Johnson to watch the raising.

“We thought it would be a good thing to do,” Hall said. The day had proved to be full of meaning, he said. A pod of killer whales were swimming near the Tsawwassen ferry terminal on Saturday morning as the pair arrived on the mainland. 

“It was like they were welcoming us,” Hall said.

They then spotted eagles overhead as they passed through Delta on their way to the Point Grey campus.

“To see UBC do something near where I grew up means a lot,” Hall said.

Johnson raised her son in Victoria but grew up in the Nisga’a village of Gitlaxt’aamiks, north of Terrace. “Near the bears,” she said with a laugh.

As the pole was raised, she said she had thought about “those that were long gone.”

She was sent to a residential school as a child, so seeing her son graduate from UBC filled her with pride. “He broke the cycle,” she said. 

“It’s almost like full circle,” Hall said of where the pole was raised. “This is where my career started.”

The pole was commissioned by the Audain Foundation and UBC and is also meant to symbolize the path toward reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada, according to a UBC media release.

The pole’s bottom half, featuring salmon, a bear and a raven, represents the time before Indian residential schools. A schoolhouse fashioned after a residential school is carved in the middle.

The pole’s top half represents the time after residential schools and features spirits, family and a canoe. An eagle about to take flight on top of the pole represents “the power and determination needed to look towards the future,” Hart said.

Hart carved the pole in Haida Gwaii before it was barged down to Vancouver, where he spent several months completing it on the UBC campus.

It was installed Saturday in a Haida ceremony and faces the future site of the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre, which opens in the 2017-18 academic year.

Elder Barney Williams says the raising of the pole is a celebration of indigenous peoples’ strength and resilience for having survived a school system marred by physical, sexual and mental abuse.

Williams says he hopes the Reconciliation Pole sparks discussion and teaches all Canadians about the dark history.

“As a country we need to reconcile, because this is not just a First Nations’ problem, it’s a Canadian problem,” he said in an interview.