Returning my dad's ashes to the Skeena River was a homecoming for both of us
It was the first time I had visited Ts’msyen territory, and I felt his presence throughout
This First Person column is written by Pamela Post, a Vancouver journalist. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.
The morning air was warm, a bit muggy. On my skin, I could feel the soft bites of the new young mosquitoes in the forest. A gentle thunder was rumbling in the distance. I walked through the forest in a procession, holding my father's ashes in a red, painted cedar box. We were walking towards the sacred and mighty body of water the Ts'msyen people are named for — Ksyen — the Skeena River.
Don Roberts, the chief of Kitsumkalum — my family's traditional village — and his wife, community leader Arlene Roberts, were walking arm in arm in front of me in full regalia. Their button blanket robes were swishing against the forest floor as they walked. The chief is from my dad's Gispudwada (Killer Whale) clan. His carved cedar hat rose into the dramatic peak of the dorsal fin of an orca.
A group of other Ts'msyen community members, some related to my dad and me through clan or family ties, and new friends were there to bear witness. Some sang, others drummed or played a rattle. Their presence encircled me like a gwishalaayt (Chilkat robe). It was dreamlike, otherworldly. Supernatural. Ama̱p'as (beautiful).
Especially because the day before, I had yet to meet half of the people walking with me.
Visiting my dad's Ts'msyen territory for the first time from my home in Vancouver, I had just hoped someone would point me to the Skeena River, where I could return his ashes, quietly, alone. But that's not the Ts'msyen way.
This moving, achingly beautiful ceremony sprung up around me organically. Ceremony is hardwired in the Indigenous soul. There was no need for clerical bureaucracy, orders of service printed-up, deliberation of what songs or homilies to deliver or the other sometimes stultifying aspects of religiosity that can turn the sacred into the mundane.
We moved through the forest in a dance of the present moment. The only sounds were birdsong, gentle rumbles of thunder, the heartbeat of a drum and songs sung in the ancient language of Sm'algyax, my grandmother's language.
Hagwil yaan is a Ts'msyen phrase I have come to know well. It's said when someone dies or, as the Ts'msyen say, walks into the forest. It means to walk gently, softly, slowly.
Stories my father told me
Nagwaadu (my father) was more the age of a grandfather to me. John Post was close to 60 when I was still in elementary school. He lived an epic, almost cinematic life and died just before he turned 92.
My dad survived heartbreaking trauma and violence as a little boy, endured ubiquitous racism, watched two of his four siblings die young from infectious diseases brought by Europeans that wiped out so many Indigenous peoples, and fought in the Second World War for a country that engaged in what is now acknowledged as a cultural genocide against his people. He took the pain of his life and tried to use it for good, speaking out for Indigenous rights. He moved to Vancouver, married my German-Canadian mother, and was a loving father to me and my sister. He was proudly Ts'msyen his whole life.
His stories were like time travel. I grew up hearing his tales of the mighty Skeena River, the awe-inspiring and life-saving runs of the little fish called oolichan; of his tiny warrior mother, Mary, who spoke her Ts'msyen language of Sm'algyax fluently, but surreptitiously, only when there were no k'amsiwah (white people) around; of the evangelical missionary who made him and some other Ts'msyen kids throw a totem pole into the Skeena River after Sunday School one day in order to "drown the devil" in his people.
In my child's eye, growing up in Vancouver, a city many kilometres to the south of our Ts'msyen territory, the Skeena river took on mythical and spiritual proportions like the mighty Ganges.
A double homecoming
By the time I finally made my long overdue pilgrimage to the Ksyen, it was 2018, I was middle aged and bringing my dad's ashes with me. My first happy shock was that the river was every bit as massive and awe-inspiring as I'd imagined it as a child.
Though I inherited my German mother's fair features, I have my Ts'msyen father's goot (heart) and spiritual nature. Like him, I struggled with institutional forms of western religion that too often seemed to come from the head and not the heart, especially in ritual.
As I held the last vestiges of him in the red box that day in the forest, not wanting to let him go, I saw flashes of his epic life play in my mind's eye like a movie. I wept for the pain in his life, the beauty of his strong, gentle spirit and how I wished he had lived to see Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Land Back movement and the cultural and language resurgence exemplified in the button blankets and cedar hats of this ceremony in his honour.
When we got to the river, the group surrounded me in a little semi-circle to witness. A soft rain started to fall. The chief spoke words of comfort and teaching to me, giving me strength to walk into the river and let my dad go home. He pointed out all the Ts'msyen sites along the river's journey to the ocean that my dad would visit as he made his way to the ancestors.
I released my dad's ashes into the muddy swirling waters of the river, surrounded by a loving community, held by the ancient beauty of the Ts'msyen culture. It was the most sacred farewell, or as we say in Sm'algyax, ndm al gyik niidzn (I will see you again).
Chief Don embraced me when I came out of the river that day.
He said, "You have brought your father back home to be with the ancestors, and you were a lost daughter who has come home."
LISTEN | Just over 130 years ago, 800 Ts'ymsen people left Metlakatla B.C., to start a "New" Metlakatla in Alaska. IDEAS contributor Pamela Post followed her own family history, and shares how it was shaped by those events.
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