The shíshálh’s recovery of five ancient ancestors from a burial site near Salmon Inlet may well be the most exciting heritage story unveiled as part of Canada’s 150th celebrations – a tremendous birthday gift to the nation, from the nation.
The exhibit showcasing the forensically advanced, three-dimensional facial reconstructions will be the first of its kind on the continent and will debut on July 1 as part of the Canadian Museum of History’s new Canadian History Hall in Gatineau, Que. A version of the module is also scheduled to open on Canada Day at Tems Swiya Museum in Sechelt.
In archeological terms, the 4,000-year-old burial site was “bead-rich” to an unprecedented degree. Nothing like it has been found from Alaska to California. While bead-rich ancient sites had been unearthed in the Salish Sea Region prior to the shíshálh find (in Tsawwassen and Cowichan Bay, in particular), nothing compares to it in scale. As project director Terence Clark said in 2012 when Coast Reporter’s Christine Wood first reported the find, “This ancient shíshálh chief, he was very, very important in the greater scheme of the Northwest Coast.”
In a blog post that same year, archeologist David Bilton described how, in the summer of 2010, he was part of the team that “uncovered an adult male buried with 350,000 beads which had obviously been strung and likely woven into a blanket or a robe and wrapped around him, dating to c4000 BP. Most of these beads were ground stone, some were shell.”
The following summer, Bilton wrote, a larger crew returned to the site and found another burial – “this time, an adult female with around 20,000 stone and shell beads – mostly from necklaces – and four purposefully broken stemmed projectile points at her feet.”
For academics, the discovery has shed important new light on the development of chiefly status in the Salish Sea Region. For the shíshálh, it’s much more personal, as evidenced by Chief Warren Paull’s account of getting “choked up” on first seeing the faces and former chief Calvin Craigan’s description of the project as “a blessing for us.”
At the time of the excavations, then-chief Garry Feschuk praised the archeologists for passing on skills to young band members and sparking an interest in some of them to pursue the work of documenting their people’s history for future generations. There was something unmistakably chiefly about the shíshálh’s willingness to allow outsiders to come to their territory and disturb their most sacred sites.
That spirit of respectful collaboration, based on recognition of mutual benefits and aims, makes this project all the more fitting as Canada celebrates a milestone.
