Mnemonic by Theresa Kishkan Read Free Book Online

where Greek and Latin texts jostle the butterfly nets at the ready for species now extirpated or worse, extinct. Euchloe ausonides , the Large Marble, Euphydryas editha taylori , Edith’s Checkerspot, and Callophrys mossii mossii , the nominate subspecies Moss’s Elfin.
    The shoemaker, John Fannin, with his menagerie of stuffed game animals, hungering for a museum.

    A version of Wawadit’la
    The old man we watched carving at Thunderbird Park, a man with a soft voice and younger helpers, whose tools left curls of cedar behind — spicy Thuja plicata , or western red cedar, and the skunkier pungent Chamaecyparis nootkatensis , or yellow cedar — might have been Mungo Martin. The time was right. Mungo Martin and his son-in-law Henry Hunt worked on the Welcome sign posts between 1960 and 1962, the same years I was riding my blue bike through Fairfield and into Beacon Hill Park. The ceremonial big house at Thunderbird Park is a smaller version of Martin’s ancestral property at Tsaxis, or Fort Rupert, a house called Wawadit’la, which belonged to the hereditary chief Nakap’ankam. As the inheritor of that title, it was Mungo Martin’s right to build the house and to display its associated carvings. The house was dedicated in a ceremonial way, with potlatches and dancing, in December 1953.
    While the city buzzed and hummed with the electric wealth of the postwar years, a man, not Lekwungen at all but from Kwakwaka’wakw 6 territory, patiently carved sea lions and grizzly bears in a smaller version of his home on the northern end of Vancouver Island. And in any place, Tsaxis or Victoria, in any era, seventeenth century or mid-twentieth, there would have been children drawn to the smooth movements of his hands, fascinated but not surprised to see the strange animals emerge from the wood.
    This was a man who’d seen too much of his material culture disappear to anthropologists, museum collectors, and missionaries who were keen to remove the vestiges of a spiritual life they couldn’t begin to understand, and yet were not averse to making money from them afterwards. Teams of authorities seized ceremonial items used during potlatches or asked for their surrender as grounds for suspending sentences. Mungo Martin was given the task of recreating many of the poles and canoes and masks that had deteriorated beyond repair. (I think of the young men who carved with him: his son-in-law, his grandsons, others, all of whom learned by watching his hands, felt the weight over theirs as they used adzes, knives, and chisels, learned how to work with an imperfection, how to judge depth and grain.) He was given a small corner of the colonial enterprise on Victoria’s Inner Harbour to build the scaled-down version of Wawadit’la and to bring together elements of the coastal cultures so assiduously removed from the city in its earlier days. (In Victoria itself, the Lekwungen village site at Songhees was relocated, the waterways and wetlands once used for travel filled in or directed underground through culverts, the language discouraged, the spiritual practices vilified.)
    Those degrees of separation . . . When I was a young teenager, and my family lived at Royal Oak, I often rode my Anglo-Arab gelding down our street to a series of trails on Colquitz Creek. There was a house tucked back off the road, a sort of colonial-style bungalow; two more of a similar design occupied the front part of the lot nearer the street. At the end of the driveway leading back to that house, I’d sometimes see an elderly man out for a walk with his daughter and wife. They were the Footners. I remember the man telling me I had a fine animal.
    Once I was helping my mother go from door to door in our neighbourhood on behalf of the March of Dimes, and the Footners invited us in while they found a contribution for our collection. It was an interesting house with photographs and chintz curtains, I remember, and sat in its