 Skip Wallen | Dance of the Halibut Spirit 1 |
It should be stated at the outset that my title is misleading. These notes re-captured my attention immediately when I recently happened upon them 43 years after they were written. They may even be important from the perspective of cultural anthropology. The dance was my intended purpose in writing them, but the notes stop short of the denouement suggested by the title. The title remains because the notes to complete the story exist somewhere in the mountain of writings accumulated during my fifty years in Alaska. I hope to finish the story when they are found. For now, I’ve not tried to finish it from memory.
The tape recording I made of Tseexwáa singing and performing the dance, also loose in my papers and records, is another matter. Remarks about that can be found at the end of the narrative.
Meanwhile, there’s much here on halibut, on the making of traditional halibut hooks, on fishing for halibut in Glacier Bay, and twice “abducting” an old man, a respected Tlingit elder, possibly, if Pop Dalton was right, the surviving Wooshkeetaan who knew the words to the dance and the dance. “Pop” in these notes is George Dalton, Sr., the head of the Tlingit family into which I, and later my wife Lynn, were adopted and with whom we participated in family events, potlatches, subsistence hunting, fishing and gathering, and most everything to do with Tlingit culture for over 45 years. He and Mom Dalton passed years ago. The notes stir fond memories of a bygone world and of life in Juneau, Hoonah, and Glacier Bay, Alaska, in the 1960s and 70s.
[Tlingit words are included for the record, using spellings created by linguists where possible. Pronunciation of these words requires a knowledge of the phonemes represented in the spellings. Failing that I’ve spelled them the best I can after listening to Tlingit speakers. Tlingit words are in italics in the following story.]
Raven Nest House. The Dalton house on the beach in Hoonah.
This whole thing about the halibut started under Pop’s house in Hoonah. Like every waterfront building in Southeast, the house stood on pilings and reached out over the beach or the sea, depending upon the tide. The rickety deck at the seaward end supported an outhouse in one corner. Drying sealskins, deerskins, nets, wire, firewood, sawhorses, splitting maul, inflated seal stomach floats, fishing tackle and more, covered much of the remainder. In the summertime amidst all this stuff, a few potted plants belonging to Mom Dalton perked up their flowering colors just outside the back door. The other end of the house faced a narrow gravel road, narrow enough in places that when cars met going opposite directions, there followed either a courteous ‘you first’ or an argument and test of wills. The road ran just above the reach of tides the half mile or so from the Point into town. The front door stoop, dusty when the sun shone or muddy when rain fell, so most-times muddy, angled up close to and almost level with the thoroughfare. A person stepped out of the house with caution in case a car was trundling by. It was never very busy, though. When a ferry from Juneau or Sitka tied up, a few cars, some arriving, some leaving, would come by both ways, rattling the windows of the house. The beach, sloping away at a moderate angle from the edge of the road, put the floor of the house ten or twelve feet high at the seaward end, way too high to reach from the beach, and high enough to keep the highest tides from flooding in. But upslope, closer to the road, one could stand under the house and easily reach among the floor joists. That’s where Pop cached more things needed for wresting a subsistence living from the surroundings. Whatever he did not have cached here or on the deck above or in the house he had hidden in several secret wilderness caches, near and far within the range of his skiff, which pretty much included the northern half of the Alaska panhandle.
Pop didn’t build this house. He acquired it in the early 1940s from a defunct cannery in Excursion Inlet where German prisoners of war had been conscripted to dismantle a forward military installation following the Aleutian Campaign. Its wainscoting, wooden floors, wood stove, and other details spoke of the era of early canneries and frame houses in Alaska. It stood on pilings partly in the woods at Excursion, and Pop told me he sat and planned for weeks over how he was going to lower it onto float logs and get across the twenty miles of treacherous tide and wind-driven waters of Icy Strait between Excursion and Hoonah. Gambling on an opportunity of favorable conditions, he left the sheltered inlet with the house on float logs in tow behind his seiner Washington, risking everthing! There must have been heart-stopping moments midway in the Strait, but safely across, he and the house arrived off Hoonah’s Cannery Point to the throb of welcoming drums and the singing and cheers of the villagers. The house was beached at a temporary location and eventually jacked up onto pilings at its final site.
Celebrated highliner fisherman George Dalton Sr.’s name, coupled with that of his vessel inevitably prompted the obvious joke: George Washington! Mom Dalton remembered a time when the Washington, after a fabulous series of successful seines, approached Hoonah so loaded to the gunwales with salmon that bets were being placed on whether or not she could reach the cannery. Even the wake of a carelessly passing vessel might sink her. Fellow fishermen (all knew one another in the small village) came to the rescue. Slowly and cautiously they approached to port and starboard, tied their vessels alongside, and escorted George Washington the last distance to safe harbor.
But coming back to the occasion under discussion, we were on the beach near the house, ahead of a rising tide, pulling in his skiff. Pop, leaning on the skiff for a breather, said, “We let the tide do the res’ of the work.” Within a couple hours the tide would be high, floating the skiff in to where he wanted to work on it. In order to secure the boat meantime, I ducked under the house to grab a length of mooring line, a loop of which snagged on a wooden peg. When I went to free it, something atop a slat between the joists caught my eye: a little piece of weathered carving sticking out. Reaching up, I pulled out museum-worthy artifacts: two old traditional wooden halibut hooks. I knew what they were but had never held one.
The thrill of this discovery gave me in a minor way, a sense of the emotion archaeologist Howard Carter must have felt at the bottom of his excavation peering at artifacts through the first crack knocked into Tutankhamun’s tomb chambers. “What do you see, Carter?” “I see things. Wonderful Things.” Turning the new found treasures over in my hands, I noticed tooth marks along their shafts. These were working hooks, battle tested veterans, chewed and frayed by the teeth of big fish. I recalled having seen a halibut caught on a similar device at Nikolski Harbor on Umnak Island in the eastern Aleutians and was thinking about this when Pop called, “Son, bring a line!” I stuck the hooks back and returned to work. Later, when I mentioned them, Pop said, “Aha! Now you find sumpthin! You got to claim dem! That gonna bring you luck!”
The find prompted me to a deeper investigation of traditional Tlingit halibut hooks. I call them “Tlingit halibut hooks” because that was my direct experience with them, but they weren’t unique to the Tlingit. Hooks of similar design, though with local variations, were made and used by tribes along the Northwest Coast from Oregon to Alaska. They would more accurately be called Northwest Coast Halibut Hooks. In fact their use was not even limited to the Northwest Coast. As mentioned earlier, a few of the devices, although rare in the Aleutian Islands, also show up there, a thousand miles west of Tlingit Anee’ –Tlingit land—recognizably northwest coast in design and shape but with Aleut figures carved in them. They must also have been used by people inhabiting the coast between the Aleutians and Southeast Alaska.
These hooks favor big fish. Small halibut, “chicken” halibut, are not as able physically to be caught in them as large halibut. Hundred pounders and larger halibut called “soakers” or or “barn doors” or “shooters” (so big they have to be shot before safely bringing on board), whose mouths are large enough to take them in, are more often caught. As evidence of their ability to select big fish, Pop told me that years ago, when more of the old wooden hooks were still around, during commercial long lining for halibut in the Gulf of Alaska (long lining employs a main line, or skate, to which shorter lines-gangens-are attached at intervals, each with a baited steel hook) Tlingit fishermen would substitute some of the traditional hooks and then later, when hauling gear aboard, bet on which kind of hook—the old or the new—had caught the next soaker coming up the line, often winning when bone, alder and yellow cedar out performed steel.
Pop didn’t build this house. He acquired it in the early 1940s from a defunct cannery in Excursion Inlet where German prisoners of war had been conscripted to dismantle a forward military installation following the Aleutian Campaign. Its wainscoting, wooden floors, wood stove, and other details spoke of the era of early canneries and frame houses in Alaska. It stood on pilings partly in the woods at Excursion, and Pop told me he sat and planned for weeks over how he was going to lower it onto float logs and get across the twenty miles of treacherous tide and wind-driven waters of Icy Strait between Excursion and Hoonah. Gambling on an opportunity of favorable conditions, he left the sheltered inlet with the house on float logs in tow behind his seiner Washington, risking everthing! There must have been heart-stopping moments midway in the Strait, but safely across, he and the house arrived off Hoonah’s Cannery Point to the throb of welcoming drums and the singing and cheers of the villagers. The house was beached at a temporary location and eventually jacked up onto pilings at its final site.
Celebrated highliner fisherman George Dalton Sr.’s name, coupled with that of his vessel inevitably prompted the obvious joke: George Washington! Mom Dalton remembered a time when the Washington, after a fabulous series of successful seines, approached Hoonah so loaded to the gunwales with salmon that bets were being placed on whether or not she could reach the cannery. Even the wake of a carelessly passing vessel might sink her. Fellow fishermen (all knew one another in the small village) came to the rescue. Slowly and cautiously they approached to port and starboard, tied their vessels alongside, and escorted George Washington the last distance to safe harbor.
But coming back to the occasion under discussion, we were on the beach near the house, ahead of a rising tide, pulling in his skiff. Pop, leaning on the skiff for a breather, said, “We let the tide do the res’ of the work.” Within a couple hours the tide would be high, floating the skiff in to where he wanted to work on it. In order to secure the boat meantime, I ducked under the house to grab a length of mooring line, a loop of which snagged on a wooden peg. When I went to free it, something atop a slat between the joists caught my eye: a little piece of weathered carving sticking out. Reaching up, I pulled out museum-worthy artifacts: two old traditional wooden halibut hooks. I knew what they were but had never held one.
The thrill of this discovery gave me in a minor way, a sense of the emotion archaeologist Howard Carter must have felt at the bottom of his excavation peering at artifacts through the first crack knocked into Tutankhamun’s tomb chambers. “What do you see, Carter?” “I see things. Wonderful Things.” Turning the new found treasures over in my hands, I noticed tooth marks along their shafts. These were working hooks, battle tested veterans, chewed and frayed by the teeth of big fish. I recalled having seen a halibut caught on a similar device at Nikolski Harbor on Umnak Island in the eastern Aleutians and was thinking about this when Pop called, “Son, bring a line!” I stuck the hooks back and returned to work. Later, when I mentioned them, Pop said, “Aha! Now you find sumpthin! You got to claim dem! That gonna bring you luck!”
The find prompted me to a deeper investigation of traditional Tlingit halibut hooks. I call them “Tlingit halibut hooks” because that was my direct experience with them, but they weren’t unique to the Tlingit. Hooks of similar design, though with local variations, were made and used by tribes along the Northwest Coast from Oregon to Alaska. They would more accurately be called Northwest Coast Halibut Hooks. In fact their use was not even limited to the Northwest Coast. As mentioned earlier, a few of the devices, although rare in the Aleutian Islands, also show up there, a thousand miles west of Tlingit Anee’ –Tlingit land—recognizably northwest coast in design and shape but with Aleut figures carved in them. They must also have been used by people inhabiting the coast between the Aleutians and Southeast Alaska.
These hooks favor big fish. Small halibut, “chicken” halibut, are not as able physically to be caught in them as large halibut. Hundred pounders and larger halibut called “soakers” or or “barn doors” or “shooters” (so big they have to be shot before safely bringing on board), whose mouths are large enough to take them in, are more often caught. As evidence of their ability to select big fish, Pop told me that years ago, when more of the old wooden hooks were still around, during commercial long lining for halibut in the Gulf of Alaska (long lining employs a main line, or skate, to which shorter lines-gangens-are attached at intervals, each with a baited steel hook) Tlingit fishermen would substitute some of the traditional hooks and then later, when hauling gear aboard, bet on which kind of hook—the old or the new—had caught the next soaker coming up the line, often winning when bone, alder and yellow cedar out performed steel.
Three of George Dalton Sr.’s halibut hooks. The one on the right depicts the legendary Strong Man, Dukt-Ootl.
It’s time to take a minute for a general description of one of these hooks in order that the details that follow make sense to my reader. Forget about the ubiquitous and familiar bent wire hook with a barb on one end and an eye on the other. This is a different approach to fishing tackle, something between a hook and a trap. Their specific construction varies up and down the coast. The ones I know are from Southeast Alaska. In Tlingit, the hook is called náakw. Pop made them out of two pieces of wood, one alder and one yellow cedar, as was the custom in this area, each about 12 inches long. He carefully carved each piece so that when the two were lashed together at one end they would form a kind of lop-sided “у” shape, the lashed joint being around the ‘stem’ of the “у.” The alder piece or ‘arm’ was straight, had a figure carved on one side, and was pierced midway with a hole through which a line would be attached. The cedar arm was shaped with a crook so that when joined to its companion, it angled away from the alder arm by 25 to 35 degrees. This arm bore a bone or metal barb at the end distant to the lashed joint. The barb pointed back at an angle toward the crook in the “у.” All three lashings, the two joining the arms and the one fastening the barb, were originally made of spruce roots, substituted in later versions by rope or line. The baiting and deployment of this gear will be described later, and the ingenuity of the design will become apparent as we go along.
I didn’t want to risk losing the old-timer antique hooks from under the Hoonah house on a fishing expedition, so I asked Pop if he would make a new one with which to catch a halibut. (The two hooks found under the Dalton house are now in the Alaska State Museum) He hadn’t made hooks for years, and I think the two I found were the last of them. But that spring on one of his trips into Juneau, Pop began the project. With snow melting but still heavy on the ground in Perseverance Basin, the mountain valley above Juneau, we cut small alders, three to four inches in diameter, on the banks of Gold Creek. We bucked these trunks into 12 and 14-inch lengths and split each in half lengthways to produce the blanks from which one of the hook’s arms would be carved. For the other arm, Pop had a couple chunks of yellow cedar (Alaska cedar which he split with a froe to produce the blanks.
I didn’t want to risk losing the old-timer antique hooks from under the Hoonah house on a fishing expedition, so I asked Pop if he would make a new one with which to catch a halibut. (The two hooks found under the Dalton house are now in the Alaska State Museum) He hadn’t made hooks for years, and I think the two I found were the last of them. But that spring on one of his trips into Juneau, Pop began the project. With snow melting but still heavy on the ground in Perseverance Basin, the mountain valley above Juneau, we cut small alders, three to four inches in diameter, on the banks of Gold Creek. We bucked these trunks into 12 and 14-inch lengths and split each in half lengthways to produce the blanks from which one of the hook’s arms would be carved. For the other arm, Pop had a couple chunks of yellow cedar (Alaska cedar which he split with a froe to produce the blanks.
Pop and my friend, Jerry, bucking alder into suitable lengths for making hooks.
George Dalton Sr. inspects split-in-half alder sections
Pop did not have the artistic talent of the great Tlingit carvers, either past or present, but that didn’t stop him from setting up a stump workbench in the house and going to work. Using a jackknife, file, and piece of heated metal, he fashioned the hooks and carved and burned the designs into them. Once started, he got hold of the idea that he could readily sell extra hooks in my small gallery in Juneau, thus “scratching up” subsistence money when commercial fishing season was closed. With this in mind, he went into full production. The designs carved into the alder arm would face downward when the hook was deployed so that the halibut could see them. They were not merely decorative nor did they suggest prey, as is the case in a modern fishing lure. Their purpose was symbolic and/or spiritual. As Pop put it, “To bring a luck.” Pop’s favorite designs included two heroic figures of Tlingit legend, Dukt Ootl, the “Strong Man” (born with puny physique, he rolled in embers to toughen himself, turning black in the process but eventually enabling himself to wrestle with and triumph over sea lions that competed with his people for fish), and Saakw saa ti, the “Hat Owner”. Other designs were of a shark and halibut, based on a story from Amalga Harbor, Alaska. Other designs included a killer whale fin, a series of mysterious circles, and one called Raven Backbone, Yeil du dikei.
Daltons making halibut hooks in my Juneau Gallery. Mom Dalton is splitting spruce roots.
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