Two talking sticks that were displayed for many years on the wall of the Terrace City Council Chambers will finally be sent home soon, after a timely process of discovering their true origins.
According to Mayor Sean Bujtas, back in 2016, then-counsillor Micheal Prevost put a motion on the floor to attempt to repatriate two talking sticks - whose exact origins at the time were unknown. According to the plaque it had at City Hall, Skeena Forest Products Ltd. and Pohle Lumber Co. Ltd donated the talking sticks to the City in 1964, and the sticks originated “from either Kingcome Inlet or Gilford Island-Southern Kwakiutl Tribe.”
"We looked into that and found out that they had come from this area we call Kingcome, But we we never really connected properly with the folks there. We were struggling back and forth and it just kind of fell off the table."
Eventually a newspaper article about the sticks came to the attention of Marianne Nicolson, an artist and cultural researcher. She believed the sticks were perhaps from her home at Kingcome Inlet, the Dzawada'enuxw Nation of the Kwakwaka'wakw peoples.
"And then I had coffee with my friend Lou-ann Neel, and she was telling me she was heading up to Terrace. And after I said, Can you look into this for me? And so when she went up, that's when everything really started to roll. So she she managed to get in to see them and then. Yeah, and then and then we were able to make the contacts and then yeah, everything kind of went, went forward from there. "
Marianne sent a photo of the sticks to her nephew Ryan, who is also a cultural researcher. Ryan was able to locate a photo from their archives - and identify the sticks as the same ones as those pictured.
"He scans through the photos to look for all the things and then he's like, there it is. And it's quite remarkable because it's not very easy to see in the photo, but once you can see it you recognize that is it right there."
This will be the first piece coming back to Kingcome as a result of recent repatriation efforts from Marianne and her community. Marainne says that over the past hundred years, thousands of cultural items, materials and information left the community.
The City of Terrace must now decide exactly how the sticks are getting back. The mayor says it won't be Canada Post.
"How they're going to get to Kingcome, It's yet to be determined. But they they need to be brought there by somebody. So if somebody from Kingcome comes and gets them or if we take them to Kingcome, that has yet to be decided. And but hopefully we'll be doing that sooner rather than later."
Nicolson says when the works return home, they can go back to being used for their real, intended purposes.
"You know, our material wasn't actually meant to be seen in galleries. It's actually meant to be part of ceremony. And so with the revival of our ceremonies and the revival of our cultural ways, you know, we really need our materials to return. So that we can study them and revive those traditions."
